Paradise Preserved : Strange bedfellows have united to protect Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. Ecologists call the coalition a prototype for the future.

Don Patton waves at the attendant in the Pismo Dunes entrance station and turns his Jeep Cherokee off Grand Avenue onto the sand.

To the right, under circling gulls and diving brown pelicans, the tide breaks in shallow ruffles in the afternoon sunlight. “We’re at tide extreme, which means we’ll have several hundred people out here tonight clamming,” says Patton.

To the left, a skyline of wide-open sand dunes, anchored by clumps of beach grass and communities of willows, shifts eerily under the skimming winds. “We have two kinds of summer weather here,” Patton observes, “overcast and foggy, or sunny and windy.”

Patton, a large man in a khaki uniform with the California Parks Department seal on his sleeve, is giving his passengers a tour of the Nipomo Dunes complex (officially named the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Preserve).

“This is the only beach in California that vehicles can (legally) drive on,” he notes, heading south on a wide stretch of packed white sand past a line of campers and trailers.

It’s more than that.

The 18-mile stretch along California’s Central Coast whose exotic dune fields, wetlands and tidal marsh began forming 18,000 years ago, has been declared one of the eight Last Great Places in America by the Nature Conservancy.

This honor is the result of an agreement among an unlikely array of forces that own parts of the dunes: two oil companies, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California’s Parks Department Off-Highway Recreational Vehicle Division, the California Coastal Conservancy, the Bureau of Land Management and a handful of broccoli farmers, among others.

The formation of this coalition means two things:

* Protection for the fragile coastal playground, which has been periodically threatened by everything from oil-drilling to dune buggies. Its 3 million-plus annual visitors can continue to enjoy it without endangering the ecosystem that nurtures dozens of rare plants and hundreds of nesting or migrating birds.

* Creation of a new model of environmentalism, bringing unlikely allies to the table. Acting as Nipomo Dunes property manager, the nonprofit Conservancy has united all major landowners to work toward ecological preservation of the area.

Who would have looked at a U.S. missile base or an oil field as the site of a nature preserve 10 years ago?

“We’re regarding Nipomo as a prototype,” says Steve McCormick, regional director of the California Nature Conservancy. “It’s an example of how environmentalists and their historical enemies can work together.”

It also represents a shift in strategy for the Washington-based Nature Conservancy. For 40 years, the Conservancy has worked without confrontation or litigation to preserve more than 5 million acres in 50 states by purchasing and managing them. The strategy has earned the group a reputation as the “quiet environmentalist.”

But today, the Conservancy’s “museum-fortress” approach of fencing in pristine areas, such as a single mountaintop for a single species (the Ring Mountain near San Francisco) is undergoing a change. Instead of fencing in remnants of ecosystems, the conservation biologists at the Nature Conservancy are increasingly studying entire watersheds and migratory corridors.

Nipomo Dunes, with its fragile mosaic of vegetation and wildlife, caught the Conservancy’s attention several years ago says McCormick. Only when Conservancy staffers began negotiating with willing sellers did they realize the dunes encompassed hundreds of thousands of acres of an interactive coastal system. It was not buyable, McCormick says.

The realization sharpened the Conservancy’s growing sense that--with the population growth of California--the goal of preserving the “full quality and essence” of the state’s rich landscape was impractical.

“We clearly don’t have the financial resources to buy up and preserve what’s left of the state,” he says. “So we widened our vision a little bit and realized there were human activities from oil drilling to housing developing that could be designed and carried out compatibly with land preservation.”

Over the past three years the Conservancy negotiated a maze of management contracts and cooperative agreements and reciprocal easements to produce an arrangement that both protects dune life and accommodates human recreation. The plan designates four different beaches in a 15-mile stretch, limited access to vehicular and non-vehicular areas and designated areas for camping, horseback riding, hiking.

For the dune buggies, dirt bikes and four-wheelers that once threatened to destroy the entire area, a clearly marked “sand highway” buckets through several miles of the towering dune hills that are constantly being raised and lowered by the winds. (Among the awesome sand’s buried secrets are the mammoth sets for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 version of “The Ten Commandments.”)

The complex new alliance has not been easy, says McCormick. “We had a lot of immediate criticism from people regarded as hard-core environmentalists who oppose any kind of accommodation of this sort. But the most criticism--and it was pretty intense--was from park users when we proposed a day-use fee for the state lands. We dropped the plan.”

None of the country’s major environmental groups has attacked the new alliance, he says. “I suspect there are people mumbling under their breath, but we haven’t had even a letter of protest.”

Other environmental groups have lauded the Conservancy’s new creativity. Says Fred Krupp, director of the Environmental Defense Fund: “The notion that you can buy everything worthy of protection is an outdated one, so the idea you should work with other partners to protect more than you can purchase outright seems right on target.”

And at the Sierra Club, which works with many like-minded partners, Carl Pope notes that the number of landowners willing to think environmentally has increased substantially over the past decade. “They’re still a minority, though,” he warns. “You have to establish a minimum set of values before you enter into partnership.” As Conservancy staffers help oil companies design roads that protect the Indian paintbrush, giant coreopsis, surf thistle and other dune species on their lands, and help Vandenberg design plans for range management and wildlife management on the sprawling base, they are finding cooperation to be easier than they thought. At Vandenberg, Allan Naydol, chief of natural resources, pronounces the unusual partnership a complete success. “It made headlines back in 1988 when we signed the agreement,” he says. “It was unusual, but it made a lot of sense. Although most people don’t view us as environmentalists, we are as interested in bio-diversity as the Conservancy is.”

With its 100,000 acres of tide pool and woodlands, Vandenberg has welcomed the Conservancy help in monitoring endangered species, conducting botanical surveys and designing wildlife management plans, he says.

“It has been such a successful partnership that the whole Department of Defense has signed an agreement with the Conservancy,” he says.

Ken Wiley, the Conservancy staffer who has been most intimately involved in the project from its beginning, dismisses the good guy-bad guy approach to the new partnership as “hypocritical.” He works with all the partners involved.

“We walked into those places and they listened and were interested,” he says. “They do care about the environment. Sure, Vandenberg test-launches Titans, but they also realize they have something very special here. The base has a history of real quality environmental management that long preceded us.”

“It is a strange coalition,” he acknowledges. “But if we want to do more than little postage stamps, we must get more creative--be more courageous. We have to be able to work with a variety of people, organizations, companies and groups.”

Don Patton, who represents the state parks and recreation department agrees. His responsibility, supervising all aspects of off-road vehicle use, makes him something of a traffic cop. His staff oversees everything from helping beleaguered drivers dig out of sand drifts to putting up wire fences to protect nests of one of the last colonies of the California leased tern.

Patton, who has been at the dunes for 13 years, suggests that the old days of buying up parkland and parceling it out to campers, horseback riders and four-wheel drivers for their separate recreational use are over. Under the Conservancy contract, he now oversees a park whose constituents range “all the way from extreme environmentalists who want to close down everything to people who want access to everything.”

“It’s not perfect, but under the circumstances it works,” he says. “This is probably the premier off-road vehicle area in California. It’s also a beautiful beach for camping, fishing, sunbathing and swimming. On any given day, we might have several thousand people sharing the same place.”

‘We realize we’re in this together,” he adds. “We’re stuck with each other.”