He’s Keeper of a Pocket of Nature : Torrance Naturalist Battles to Keep Urban Sprawl at Bay and Restore Madrona Marsh

True enough, Walton Wright is a naturalist. But don’t expect to find him examining seedlings on a pristine, High Sierra slope.

As the city of Torrance’s naturalist, Wright is in charge of restoring the Madrona Marsh preserve, a vernal wetland and sandy upland ringed by urban sprawl. That means dealing with decayed oil pipelines, soapy runoff from a local car wash and flurries of windblown trash.

“All around here, we’ve got condos, commercial buildings, streets and noise,” he said on a recent afternoon, surveying the preserve and the development corralling it. “No, this is not pristine.

But if we can restore this land, there isn’t another place in the whole South Bay that will be as valuable as natural open space.”

Wright’s work underscores the challenges of saving natural habitat in Los Angeles County, a region far more hospitable to cars and malls than to native wildlife and plants. Experts consider the effort crucial.

The beneficiaries include a variety of animals that rely on the preserve--among them foxes, snakes, tree frogs and birds such as herons, egrets and ducks. Then there are the hundreds of students and residents who visit the property each month.

In a broader sense, the project comes amid several efforts in Los Angeles County to save remnants of the region’s natural history. The others include plans to restore the Ballona Wetlands near Playa del Rey and coastal sand dunes near Los Angeles International Airport--a project approved two weeks ago by the Los Angeles City Council.

“A major reason for these projects is simply that they’re the right thing to do,” says Malcolm Gordon, a UCLA biology professor. “Culturally and ethically, it’s the right thing to let our children see what this part of the world used to be like.”

Wright, a 52-year-old Orange County resident, started his $40,000-a-year job with the city in February, 1989. He had come to know the land by leading nature walks on it and as a board member in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s of Friends of Madrona Marsh, a South Bay environmental group that led the drive to save the property from development.

Pressed by the group, the city in 1983 obtained the 40-acre tract and earmarked it for preservation in an agreement with the developers of the nearby Park Del Amo housing and office complex.

Wright says his toughest challenge has been persuading Torrance residents--and in some cases city officials--that shielding the land from development was only the first of many difficult and costly steps to ensure survival of the natural habitat.

Since starting his job, for instance, Wright has had to oversee removal of hundreds of tons of debris that has accumulated on the property. The waste has included asphalt, unused oil pipelines and cement from former oil well operations, trash heaps containing bottles, cans, tires and more, and a steady supply of windblown paper and plastic from nearby streets.

He is also negotiating with an oil company that operates wells on a portion of the preserve to bury its oil lines, and is trying to get a car wash across Madrona Avenue to stop sending soapy runoff onto the city land through a culvert.

“A lot of people say, ‘What do you waste your money for? The land was natural when you got it, so leave it alone,’ ” Wright said during a walk through the preserve last week.

Holding up a discarded tire he had found, he added: “Few people know what natural is. And natural isn’t this stuff.”

Another challenge has been establishing an adequate flow of water into the preserve. The land once received runoff from a 665-acre watershed, but after decades of development and the installation of storm drains, virtually all of the rainwater on surrounding land bypasses the property.

Last year, Wright helped spark a Torrance City Council debate by supporting a plan--eventually approved--to pipe in some city drinking water to offset the effects of drought.

Since then, he has arranged to pump water to the marsh from sumps in the area. But this strategy upset city street officials this spring when--after sump water had been pumped onto the land--heavy rains caused water to back up through drainage grates on the nearby Madrona Avenue median.

The city, Wright said, locked the control panel for the sump pump so he wouldn’t be able to use it. Only recently, he says, was he able to get a key.

To prevent such problems in the future, Wright wants the city to raise the height of the Madrona Avenue grates so flooding of the marsh will not affect the roadway.

But securing funds for the work in a tight city budget will involve politicking, he acknowledges. Said Wright, “I’ve got to be able to sell it.”

Ultimately, Wright wants the preserve restored to its state before Spanish settlers brought “exotic” plants into the Los Angeles area centuries ago. He also wants to set up permanent programs to teach students and other visitors about the preserve’s plants and animals.

Achieving these goals will require constructing and staffing a natural history center with a laboratory, library, exhibit hall and meeting room, he says. It will also mean expanding efforts to remove non-native plants from the sandy upland portion of the reserve and replacing them with native varieties such as dune buckwheat and dune poppy, he says.

The city has yet to fund either proposal.

Wright admits such projects will cost considerable time and money. But he expresses confidence that the work will get done, citing the city’s support so far for his efforts, and abundant volunteer work on the preserve by groups such as Friends of Madrona Marsh.

His admirers say that if the preserve reaches its potential, much of the credit should belong to Wright.

“He has been important in making the marsh more visible as a Torrance resource,” said Adrian Stevenson, president of the Friends of Madrona Marsh. “People don’t just see it as a weed lot anymore. They see it as a nature preserve.”