Sweet and Sour Art of Negotiation : Activism: Cooperation by opposing sides in debate over Jackson Drive extension through Mission Trails Regional Park could reap many benefits.

Despite the frequently rancorous dealings among members of San Diego’s environmental community, developers and elected officials, these three groups accomplished many positive things in 1990 by working together.

Successes included the purchase and preservation of Famosa Slough, diverse and well-attended Earth Day events countywide and the expansion of curbside recycling services, to name just a few. These events demonstrate that environmental and resource management concerns are now a powerful factor in local decision making. Moreover, the importance of these issues in San Diegans’ lives has become an established fact.

Environmentalists are no longer standing on the sidelines, waiting to be invited to participate in creating a game plan for managing growth. They are important players who have valuable ideas to offer.

Unfortunately, they often cast themselves as brakes on the wheels of development, rather than proponents of a style of planned growth that incorporates ecologically balanced designs. When they don’t offer counter-proposals to approved developments, or fail to address specific design flaws, and simply condemn growth per se, the important distinction between pro-environment and anti-growth is blurred.

The challenge is to create alternatives that make environmental and economic sense, rather than to just file lawsuits. By offering realistic alternatives instead of antagonism, conservationists would enlist more support for their long-term goals.

The Jackson Drive extension through Mission Trails Regional Park provides a good case in point. If environmentalists could see this road as having possibilities for applying environmentally sensitive engineering designs to the existing plans, rather than as a public failure or political defeat, they would be able to create some leverage to use in future dealings with the City Council.

Rather than waging a protracted court battle in the hopes of reversing the council’s vote, they could request that elected officials add certain components to the plan to encourage energy conservation, protect air quality and create environmental education programs in the park after the extension is completed. The money they would save on legal expenses could be redirected into more productive and positive endeavors.

For instance, the current plan makes no sense if it encourages more people to drive their cars to work. For both air quality and energy conservation reasons, a “hike-and-bike” path should be built adjacent to, but separate from, the main road. Ideally, such paths will one day be added to the designs of all new roads.

Also, even though planners insist that this extension will reduce congestion on Mission Gorge Road for all drivers, the commuters who car pool ought to be entitled to an even greater benefit. This could be accomplished by incorporating car-pool lanes for rush hour.

Furthermore, environmentalists need to request that funds for developing and maintaining picnic and camping facilities, foot and wheelchair paths and interpretive centers be added to the cost of the road. Since the extension will provide easier access to park areas that are now available to only a hardy few, this is a fair request.

Finally, from a wildlife management perspective, preserving fragments of open space surrounded by development creates a new set of problems for many animals. Travel outside of the immediate area leads to sometimes deadly interactions with humans. In some species, inbreeding can lead to reproductive failure.

Because of this, a series of “wildlife corridors” between open space on either side of the four-lane highway should be provided. Without such a link, the area west of the extension might become an “island” wildlife community, cut off from the larger park area to the east.

These changes in strategy--giving up some parkland in order to develop more environmentally sustainable designs--might accommodate everyone except those who want to preserve all open space for purely conservation reasons. Sadly, the habitats that the conservationists try to save have often already been degraded by nearby development, making them poor choices for wildlife sanctuaries.

While working to preserve open space is the ideal, the reality is that negotiation is a more effective means to get developers, politicians and environmentalists working together rather than against each other. The fact is, when it comes to environmental goals, the three groups are more in agreement than not. We all want clean air, clean water and a resource-full future for our children.

The conservation community has many reasons to take pride in their accomplishments so far in the early months of this “Decade for the Environment.” Likewise, elected officials and developers have begun to demonstrate a new spirit of commitment to preserving the environmental quality of life in San Diego.

What’s important is that all of these people continue to develop strategies based on how everyone will succeed in the future, rather than on how they can get back at each other for past misdeeds, real or imagined.