Countywide : Women Plan Battle Against Toll Road

Since December, a dozen or so women from Orange County have been gathering every Sunday evening around the coffee table in a Laguna Beach living room.

With children in tow, they drive from Huntington Beach, Irvine and Newport Beach with a single mission in mind: Stop the San Joaquin Hills tollway.

On Sunday--after weeks of distributing flyers at women’s groups and colleges--the group will protest the toll road by planting buckwheat and coastal sage scrub seeds in areas that have already been graded.

“We’re going to try to transform this place of desolation into a place of regeneration,” said Chris Hegge, who is leading the effort. “We think that the role of women in modern society has to be changed, redefined. It now includes the protection of our natural heritage.”

On a recent Sunday evening, with children playing at their feet or cradled at their chests, the women planned for the event, scheduled to coincide with International Women’s Day. A long colored picture of the corridor--including the area already graded--was unrolled before them on the coffee table, held flat by candlesticks.

Holding firmly to the belief that they can accomplish what so far others have not, they pointed to the success of a previous environmental protest--the march in Laguna Canyon in 1989. That event, the largest environmental rally in Orange County history, attracted 8,000 people and was instrumental in the Irvine Co.’s decision not to build a housing tract in the canyon.

“That was definitely a watershed experience in local environmental politics,” Laguna Beach resident Jeanie Bernstein said. “Things can be stopped.”

The 17.5-mile San Joaquin Hills tollway, planned since the mid-1970s and still mired in environmental litigation, would link the Corona del Mar Freeway to Interstate 5, cutting across Laguna Canyon in the process. County road builders say it is necessary to relieve snarled traffic on nearby freeways.

Hegge said she came up with the idea of a demonstration led by women after studying about eco-feminism and a group of women in India who struggled to save trees for their children.

“That’s the way we see it,” she said, “We’re defending our children’s natural heritage.”

The idea caught on, Hegge said, after she “started calling friends, and friends called friends, and before I knew it, there were 20 women sitting in my living room.” The women also plan to march in the Laguna Beach Patriots Day Parade on Saturday.

Hegge said the core group is small, including about 20 women, but they expect 300 to 1,000 people to attend the demonstration, which will begin at 1 p.m. at a park at the southwest corner of Aliso Creek Road and Glenwood Drive in Aliso Viejo.

One year ago, another toll-road protest drew about 2,000 people to Laguna Canyon.

“When they see that people are taking a stand, we hope it will spark other demonstrations of concern,” said Laguna Beach resident Ginger Osborne. “Maybe women can make a difference. I believe we can.”