COMMENTARY : New Alliances Can Help Save California’s Great Natural Assets : Environment: A partnership between the Irvine Co. and the Nature Conservancy may seem strange but it offers hope of preserving the future.

When the California Nature Conservancy and the Irvine Co. recently announced a new partnership, reaction from the community was quite favorable, but at the same time a few eyebrows were raised.

Environmentalists working with a large-scale community developer? The combination strikes some as incongruous, even contradictory.

But while many conservationists and developers have historically found themselves at odds with one another, this new partnership has more to do with the future than with the past. The future requires that we discard old assumptions and discover new approaches if we are to be successful in our work, be it community planning, land management or environmental protection.

You’ve heard the song before, but it bears repeating: We are losing our natural world at an alarming rate. The disappearing tropical rain forests of the Amazon or Malay peninsula are much discussed, but California, too, is in crisis: 98% of our state’s river forests are gone; 99% of our native grasslands and our valley oak woodlands have been wiped out; 95% of our wetlands have disappeared, and with them the plants and animals that have contributed inestimably to California’s reputation as the Golden State, a treasure trove of life and abundance.

If humans were forced to live in 2% of their normal habitat, we’d all be living in closets. It doesn’t take imagination to understand that this loss of nature cannot be sustained without immeasurable harm to our economic life and personal sense of well-being.

While it is readily agreed that change is a fundamental rule of nature, and that extinction is part of that process, it is also true that the current rate of extinction is anywhere from 40 to 400 times the rate of species extinction during the time of the dinosaurs. The hands of the evolutionary clock are spinning wildly primarily because of human activity. More of our native plants and animals have become endangered in the last 200 years than in the last 10 millennia.

As the problems we face become more complex, the solutions fewer and less obvious, we need to involve alliances, teamwork and imaginative effort to effect the changes so desperately needed for the health of our state’s wildlife.

The Nature Conservancy has been doing just that. For 40 years, we’ve been protecting habitat for endangered wildlife and natural communities, and we’ve employed innovative strategies to do it. In the Coachella Valley, for example, the California Nature Conservancy worked with developers and environmentalists to pioneer a mitigation/habitat protection plan that is now being used as a national model to allow human and wildlife habitats to coexist. This willingness to explore new approaches has resulted in remarkable success: to date we have helped to protect more than 15 million acres globally, 5 million nationally, and over half a million of the most ecologically sensitive acres here in California.

We also know that saving pieces of fragmented habitat is not enough. Large animals such as deer and pronghorn antelope need rangeland. Highways bisecting wildlife corridors result in animal isolation, injury and death. Preserving a particular parcel does not necessarily guarantee sufficient water to maintain healthy animal populations; or that the water that is available will be free of pesticides, siltation or fertilizer runoff.

So increasingly, saving land for plants and animals requires thinking big, and taking a look at the larger picture. And thinking big, taking action on so large a scale, requires collaboration of many key players.

The Nature Conservancy’s approach has always been one of negotiation and cooperation, and as a result we’ve had the opportunity to work with an extraordinarily diverse group of people and organizations. Nationwide, we have cooperative agreements with the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Defense, and in California, the U.S. Forest Service. These three partners control a whopping 42% of the land in our state, and almost 60% of the biodiversity.

For the first time in recent memory, a new California governor will have had significant experience with these federal agencies and so has the opportunity to forge unprecedented federal-state partnerships in favor of wildlife.

Southern California has one of the richest and most varied array of species in the continental United States. With 64,000 acres in Orange County, the Irvine Co. is uniquely positioned to protect that natural heritage, and our partnership represents a commitment to do it wisely. When they approached us earlier this year to ask if we would consider developing a natural resource/public access management plan for their lands slated for eventual public ownership, the California Nature Conservancy understood the opportunity the Irvine Co. was presenting to us. The parcels of their land we inventoried are large, contiguous tracts of prime wildlife habitat, an increasingly rare commodity in burgeoning Southern California.

Furthermore, the Irvine Co. was offering evidence of something the Nature Conservancy has been saying for a long time: What’s good for the environment is ultimately good for business communities and society. Development of sustainable land-use policies and protection of wildlife benefit everyone.

Intelligent planning of communities involves not only the creation of sensitively designed buildings, but also protection for those special places we turn to for beauty, peace and a sense of balance. California can no longer afford the polarization of “either/or.” If we work together we can have “all of the above.” At the Nature Conservancy, we think this is not only possible but absolutely essential. Happily, the Irvine Co. agrees.