Conservation Radical Rejects Compromise

Nine o’clock on Saturday morning, and Dave Foreman has just finished a back-yard breakfast with a group of Laguna Beach environmentalists. Within an hour, they’ll head up toward an area of Laguna Canyon known as Sycamore Hills and protest the planned six-lane San Joaquin Hills tollway that would crisscross the canyon.

It’s the same place local residents converged by the thousands in 1989 and, as local history would have it, persuaded the Irvine Co. that it shouldn’t try to build the massive Laguna Laurel housing development.

Yes, the canyon is a theater of operations well known to Laguna Beach.

It’s also the kind of arena that Foreman knows well.

If not exactly the Norman Schwarzkopf of environmental wars, let’s just say Foreman has seen his share of skirmishes. Now 45, he’s carried around the tag of environmental radical for at least the last dozen years since he helped found Earth First! making him a hero to some and an environmental nut to others. In 1983, he suffered permanent knee damage after being dragged by a truck as Foreman and other Earth First!ers blockaded a tree-clearing site in Oregon.

The legend was enhanced last year when he pleaded guilty to being part of a conspiracy to sabotage nuclear facilities. But Foreman, who lives in Tucson, got a deferred sentence and, according to the terms, can plead to a misdemeanor in five years. In the meantime, he isn’t in the mood to do much talking about environmental sabotaging these days.

“I’ve never been a fan of radicalism for the sake of radicalism, or revolution for the hell of it,” he says. “I think you do the most reasonable mainstream conservative thing first.”

Heady from previous successes in fighting off changes in Laguna Canyon, local environmentalists say they’re confident that they can stop the tollway. Foreman jovially notes that he’s showing up Saturday only as a “cheerleader” and not to help form strategy.

While conceding that he isn’t intimately familiar with the tollway issue, Foreman has no trouble choosing sides. One of his first stops when arriving in Orange County last week was to go in search of gnatcatchers in the canyon.

“We’ve devastated natural habitat in North America, and particularly in Southern California,” he says. “The way I see this fight over the Laguna greenbelt is (that it’s over) what remains of the soul of Orange County, sort of an ethical test of the people here. Do we have the generosity of spirit to share Orange County with the California gnatcatcher, with the cactus wren?”

With the original Earth First! motto in mind (“No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth”), I ask Foreman whether he has moderated his views.

“We could have compromised 100 years ago,” he says, “but there’s not enough left to compromise now. We’ve got 4% of redwood forest left, and we’re supposed to split the difference on that. There are no grizzly bears left in California, no jaguars, and now we’re supposed to compromise the last habitat for the California gnatcatcher.

“The whole notion of compromise is just absurd. It’s as though we have a pie and the developers have gobbled up seven-eighths of it, and there’s one piece left, and they say, ‘We’ll compromise, you can have the crumbs.’ ”

Foreman says he was impressed with the “political sophistication” of the Laguna Beach environmental leaders, but he hopes they don’t base their anti-tollway argument mainly around the project’s cost or other such tangible factors.

“Those are good arguments, but they aren’t the reason,” he says. “One of the traps conservationists fall into is that they buy into the world view of the developers, that money has to be the arbiter of everything. And I think we need to challenge the American public, challenge the people of Orange County, to have a little greatness of spirit--that we want to save Laguna Canyon because it’s wild, that it’s the place of the California gnatcatcher.

“Then you can use the economic arguments, the technical arguments. But the reason all these folks are fighting is that they love this place and want to keep it the way it is.”

Has he got the same verve he had when he founded Earth First! 12 years ago? “I’m 45 years old,” he says, laughing. “Being over 40 is the best time of your life, but, boy, I tell you, the last three years have not been easy. I got bitten by a brown recluse spider, I got hepatitis, I had the FBI after me. So I’m just trying to climb back into shape. But keeping up the fight is what gives me energy.”

And so the old eco-warrior isn’t going soft? “I’m not a believer that the people process, or negotiations, can solve all problems,” he says. “There are some fundamental different world views, and we just have to fight it out. And by our side not compromising, we are going to end up with a lot more than we would if we compromised.”