Biologist’s Life Has Been a Study in Candor, Concern : Environment: Karlin Marsh knows about the political realities of land-use. But that hasn’t stifled her voice on some issues.

Back when she wrote a series of textbooks for the then-new course of environmental studies for Orange County’s public schools, biologist Karlin Marsh included a few chapters on community activism.

Fifteen years later, she says, those chapters seem a little naive.

“I’ve learned a lot in the intervening years,” Marsh, 52, said wryly. “I’ve learned a lot about science and I’ve learned a lot about politics.”

For Marsh, a self-described “farm girl,” those lessons have come from more than a dozen years of work in the environmental trenches, working as a consultant to some of the county’s major developers and, more recently, to public agencies.

Marsh’s down-home bluntness occasionally has thrust her into the center of controversy.

Last month, for example, Marsh and two other biologists warned in a report that a proposed 2,500-home development on the edge of O’Neill Regional Park would jeopardize one of Southern California’s richest natural habitats unless it were moved several hundred feet farther from the park.

County land planners commissioned the report at a cost of $8,000 but never formally presented it to the Planning Commission. A few weeks after the report became public, the commission, upon the recommendation of its staff, approved the proposed Las Flores Planned Community by a 5-0 vote.

Commissioners cited the county’s overriding need for more affordable housing and the Santa Margarita Co.’s pledge that 60% of the homes would sell for less than $250,000, the average cost of a new house in the county. Santa Margarita Co. executives had dismissed Marsh’s report, noting that she had previously gone on record against the project.

Marsh, a widely respected biologist who has worked as a consultant since the late 1970s, previously declined comment on the Las Flores project. But she discussed herreport and the county’s response during an interview Monday.

Marsh, softly graying and given to folksy metaphors, said she was “disappointed for the critters” in O’Neill Regional Park but was not surprised by the commission’s approval of the project.

“It takes a whole lot more energy and time and--sometimes--money to make a difference in this county than I ever conceived of in the mid-’70s,” Marsh said. “It’s not easy for Joe Blow on Elm Street to make a difference anymore or even for very well organized environmental groups to make a difference. . . .

“I think Las Flores was a good example. Here you had some of the best field biologists in the area saying, ‘Hey, there (are) problems here that need to be considered.’ ”

The project still needs to be approved by the Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to take up the proposal at its Dec. 5 meeting.

Marsh, who says she practices what she preaches, works out of her home, made of natural wood siding and set down into the hillside at the end of an unmarked dirt road in Silverado Canyon. Her office, at the top of her three-story home, rests above a canopy of oak trees.

A creek with tiny rainbow trout gurgles about 100 feet from the house. From her window, she’s far more likely to spot a chickadee than a fellow human. Her husband, Gordon Marsh, curator of UC Irvine’s Museum of Systematic Biology, shares her love of nature and is likely to be seen roaming the grounds of their home in the late afternoon, sometimes in search of insects, which he collects.

Her two children from a previous marriage, a son and a daughter, are grown and live in Louisiana.

Marsh is a transplant from West Virginia, the daughter of an engineer who raised his family on a sheep farm because his wife was uncomfortable with crowds.

Marsh graduated from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., and did some postgraduate work at the University of Pittsburgh. She came to California from West Virginia with her former husband, who was transferred here in the late 1960s. She worked as a nature guide in Orange County parks and as an environmental education teacher in the county’s public school system until the mid-1970s, when the first stirring of the environmental movement began.

Nathaniel Lamm, the school system’s administrator of environmental education, recalled the public’s heightened interest in teaching youngsters about the environment, but he noted the county’s dearth of reference materials. Lamm turned to Marsh, whom he had met several years earlier while she was working for one of the county’s nature conservancies and who seemed a natural for the job.

“We didn’t really have a good reference point. That’s where Karlin came about,” Lamm recalled. “She is one of those rare individuals who can take something very technical and make it understandable. . . . She’s very much in demand.”

Marsh eventually wrote three volumes, reprinted numerous times, that until a few years ago remained the principal reference books for environmental education in the county’s schools at the elementary and junior high school levels.

The first book provides an overview of the county’s biological communities, the second provides a more detailed look at the county’s coastal wetlands and mountain habitats, and the third looks at the effect of development and urbanization on the county’s wildlife, Marsh said.

At the time Marsh was asked to write the reference, she was already bored with teaching and eager for a new challenge.

“You can only give so many nature walks to little snappers,” she quipped. “I figured there must be something more out there.”