SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA’S ENVIRONMENT At the Crossroads : Resources: <i> A TOLL ON THE TREASURES OF THE LAND</i> : Forests and wilderness relieve pressure, but crowds have an impact. : Great Demands on Open Space

Quiz: Which city has more open space per person, Los Angeles or New York?

If you guessed Los Angeles, you’re wrong. There are more opportunities to be alone with nature in New York City. Just try going to Castaic Lake north of Los Angeles on a summer weekend. The man-made reservoir with the scrawny trees and brown, murky water off Interstate 5’s Grapevine attracts hundreds of thousands of people each summer. Cars back up bumper to bumper for hours under the beating, hot sun to get a parking space or launch a boat. Relaxing? Maybe not, but as the superintendent of the Los Angeles County-run recreation area likes to say, “It’s the only game in town.”

When state parks were doled out in California, the southern half of the state was shortchanged. The towering redwoods of the north proved too tempting to park-makers; chaparral didn’t make the cut. Besides, it was argued, Southern California didn’t need as many parks because it had beaches. Without the beach, the situation would have been dismal indeed for Los Angeles County. The rest of Southern California is now striving to avoid its mistakes. In Ventura County, which still has a relatively high number of parks, officials are developing a long-range plan to ensure the county keeps its green edge. “We have learned a lesson from L.A.,” says Ron Blakemore, Ventura’s manager for park planning and development. “We’re not going to develop our land haphazardly.”

Outside urban settings, vast acres of forests and wilderness relieve some of the pressures, but the crowds are taking their toll. Visitors have caused so much damage in the San Bernardino National Forest that officials are considering closing parts of it to the public. The desert still offers opportunities for solitude, albeit fleeting. A clash of committed, competing interests are squabbling over this last frontier, and it already is showing signs of wear. Garbage companies want to dump their trash in its valleys, off-road drivers want to charge up its dunes, miners want to dig up its ores and environmentalists want to preserve more of its rugged beauty. The battle is far from being resolved.

Little Space Left

For Los Angeles, it may already be too late. The city has only three acres of open space for every 1,000 residents, less than one-third the national guideline of the Virginia-based National Recreation and Park Assn., a nonprofit membership group that promotes parks and recreational opportunities. New York City has 3.3 acres for every 1,000 residents, slightly more than Los Angeles, according to the group, whose counts include all publicly owned recreational facilities. Exasperated Los Angeles park planners are considering the possibility of turning schoolyards into community playgrounds on weekends. “We may end up building batteries of tennis courts on top of buildings and parking structures,” predicts Ted Heyl, a Los Angeles park planner.

Until the 1940s, city planners seemed to operate under the delusion that the population would remain a manageable 1 million. By the 1960s, a new generation of park planners realized that most of the open space had been gobbled up. They seized on what remained: man-made flood basins, some of them crisscrossed by freeways. Playground equipment and baseball diamonds were added, and more trees and shrubs planted. In just 10 years, four basins were transformed into sizable parks. But these did not add enough to meet the needs of the city’s 3 million residents.

Even the mammoth 4,218-acre Griffith Park, which draws more than 10 million visitors a year, is overrun by crowds on weekends. Picnic spots at some county parks must be reserved weeks or even months in advance, and park planners blame the dearth of open space for graffiti and crime in parks. Some are controlled by gangs. Park funds raised under a recent statewide bond measure are buying more playground equipment and flower beds, but land purchases are primarily limited to small plots that can be turned into neighborhood playing fields. “We’re scrounging for any land we can get,” says Alonzo Carmichael, a city park planner.

Only 20 years ago, the idea of open space as an environmental issue would have been unthinkable in the rest of Southern California. Half of Orange County was still undeveloped. Travelers on Interstate 5 south of Santa Ana could drive for miles and see only strawberry fields or rolling hills. But by the mid- to late-1970s, most of the county’s flatlands were already built over. Strapped by money after the 1978 passage of tax-slashing Proposition 13, Orange County park officials began looking for ways to save what was left. They decided to use their muscle with developers. In exchange for project approvals, the developers had to deed an average of 50% of the land proposed for development to the county for parks or other recreational uses. Only this year, the county wrangled 114 acres of marshland in Upper Newport Bay from the Irvine Co., one of the county’s biggest developers, under one such exchange. Worth at least $114 million, the property would have been beyond the county’s pocketbook.

But for all Orange County’s efforts, some of its parks do not offer what one would call a wilderness experience. At O’Neill Regional Park, campers gaze from their campfires into the living rooms of nearby homeowners. Betty Wilkins, 48, began camping at the park northeast of Mission Viejo in 1984, three years before the housing on the ridge was built. “Monday through Friday, we never get a chance to relax and talk as a family,” says the Garden Grove computer programmer who was lounging in a beach chair at the campground. “It’s go, go, go. But out here, it’s different. It may not be Bora Bora, but it’s a start.”

Scenic Trails

For those who find such settings too stifling, Southern California offers miles of scenic trails in the Santa Monica Mountains and in four national forests. It is still possible to spend a day in the Santa Monicas without hearing the sounds of the city. “It is a holy feeling, really, “ says Jill Swift, 61, who has hiked the mountains for 20 years. There also is plenty to enjoy in the national forests, even though it may be increasingly difficult to find solitude in some of them. Angeles National Forest, for example, is the second most heavily used forest in the nation, preceded only by Tonto National Forest in Arizona. Parking lots at the more popular trail heads are often jammed on weekends. “If you decide to go camping during the summer, forget it,” says Lori Turner, 30, a Sherman Oaks nurse and veteran camper. “That’s when it’s really crowded. Most places require reservations, and the campsites are often so close you can hear other campers talking.”

The desert remains a final haven for many Southern Californians. Overlooked for years because of its harsh temperatures and seemingly drab landscape, the desert is attracting a growing cadre of admirers struck by its stark, jagged mountains, steep canyons and surprisingly lush oases. Unfortunately, the desert is too fragile to absorb much spillover from the rest of the region. Extreme temperatures and scarce rainfall make it slow to heal, and the thousands who are seeking refuge there are leaving behind an indelible mark.

Off-road vehicles are scarring much of the landscape. “The damage is really visible from the air,” says Elden Hughes, a member of a desert protection group. “You can see miles and miles of scars where motorcycles have spun tight circles. After a while, what you get is a plain that is only creosote (brush) because all the other plants have been killed.”

A site known as Kelso Dunes was closed to off-road vehicles in 1974. Located south of Baker, the dunes are now alive with a variety of desert creatures. Tortoises, snakes and beetles slither in and out of the soil. Dense thatches of green and gold grass are scattered amid clusters of willow trees abloom with lavender and white flowers. In the springtime, the dunes are adorned with wildflowers, startling carpets of color that attract photographers from around the word.

Off-road vehicles are still permitted at Dumont Dunes, about 120 miles away. There, the creatures are dead. Constant churning dried out the top inches of the sand, making it impossible for the reptiles and bugs to burrow for moisture and protection. They perished from exhaustion while burrowing or from exposure. Grasses and wildflowers won’t grow there anymore.

Much of the desert also is being lost to development spreading east from Los Angeles. The cities of Victorville, Apple Valley and Hesperia, for example, have sprouted into sprawling communities just in the past five years. The same is occurring to the north in Palmdale, Lancaster and even once-sleepy Rosamond. Aside from the loss of Joshua trees and other native plants, the housing tracts have brought thousands of homeowners within easy striking distance of once-remote desert territory.

Legislative Battle

To protect the desert, conservationists are backing a congressional bill that would create three national parks in an area stretching 240 miles from Inyo County south to the Mexican border. Although opposition from miners, ranchers and others may doom that bill, a much weaker compromise that would result in at least partial protection of hundreds of thousands of acres may still be enacted. Elsewhere in Southern California, planners are becoming highly sensitive to the need for open space and, as in Orange County, they are exacting unprecedented concessions from developers. Builders, too, are showing more willingness to compromise. But concessions and compromises are not enough to stop the development of vast tracts of Southern California lands, and increasingly vitriolic battles are being fought over them.

In southwest Riverside County, a company that wants to build nearly 4,000 homes around a nature preserve on the Santa Rosa Plateau has pledged to include 19 modest parks and to paint the houses in “earth tones” to match the basalt rock. The developer suggests wildlife can use a proposed golf course at night to travel back and forth to nearby mountain ranges; the corridors now used by mountain lions, bobcats and mule deer would be cut off by homes and roads. “We’ll put water along the golf course to draw the animals along,” said David Dillon, a director for Ranpac Communities, the developer. “You’d be surprised how well it works.”

Not surprisingly, these concessions have failed to mollify hikers, bird-watchers and picnickers drawn to the plateau by its beauty and isolation from the dusty, rapidly urbanizing valley below. Several groups have formed to fight the plans; one preservation group has hired a consultant to try find money and negotiate with the developer to buy the site. “That could be the ninth hole right over there,” says conservationist Beverly Burns, 36, standing knee-deep in golden prairie grass and pointing to a spring near a stand of majestic oaks. “And up there could be the 7-Eleven. This country has gone development crazy.”

TURNING POINTS

* 1990--The House is expected to consider legislation by Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica) that would protect the desert through the creation of three national parks and the designation of 81 desert wilderness areas from Bishop to the Mexican border.

* 1990--Congress will hold hearings on legislation to protect the Sespe Creek, the last free-flowing river in Southern California. One of the bills would prevent dams on 27.5 miles of the river. Another would protect all 55 miles from development.

* 2000--Orange County, which now has 19,323 acres of publicly owned open space, will have raised that to 30,481 under a program that requires developers to donate lands to the public as mitigation for construction projects.

REPORT CARD

Average score: 5

Three views on our progress, rated on a one to 10 scale

* Joseph Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy: “The L.A. metropolitan area prior to the year 2000 will be the largest metropolitan area in the country, exceeding New York. And if you look around Los Angeles and the sprawling development that is going on--the bulldozers every single second here in the Santa Monicas--you can see we are not preparing for (open space in) the 21st Century adequately.” Score: 3

* Marie Brashear, executive director of the California Desert Coalition: “We have enormous amounts of protected open space within national forests, within Bureau of Land Management lands, within state parks, within conservancies. And we have counties that have taken a forward role in their general plans to provide for more open space.” Score: 7

* Marcia Hobbs, commissioner of the state’s Department of Parks and Recreation: “There is considerable open space land in the eastern part of Southern California, but I don’t consider those lands to be accessible to the general population because they are removed from urban centers. My concern primarily as a Los Angeles resident is what I consider to be a terrible lack of open space for urban residents that’s easily accessible and can be used on a regular basis.” Score: 5

VOICES

“Well, it’s the increasing urbanization that’s coming out into the desert--a great mass of people just threatening to overwhelm a lot of the environmental and recreational areas. It’s disturbing . . . All (the future) depends on what we do right now. I think the desert’s sort of at a crossroads.”

--Edward Patrovsky, a park ranger with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management

“My father and brother showed me this spot. I usually catch a few fish a day, small ones. For bait, I mix hot water with cornmeal. It works pretty well when the fish are hungry. I fry them up real good, add a little lemon, a little salt; they are delicious.

--Ricardo Hernandez, a 17-year-old day laborer fishing for dinner beneath the Pomona Freeway on the garbage-strewn banks of the San Gabriel River.