SUSPICIOUS SPECIES : Beware! All Around Us Are Potential Enemies of the State
Who says you can’t learn anything from watching the local news? At a press conference a few weeks ago, Gov. Pete Wilson stood by the partially collapsed Cross Creek bridge along Pacific Coast Highway, wringing his hands for the television cameras and gazing mournfully out across the rain-swollen Malibu Lagoon. He may have been previewing policies to come when he manfully blamed the delay in the bridge’s repair on a small fish known as the tidewater goby, a federally listed endangered species with the bad manners to thrive in the brackish waters of the polluted lagoon.
Perhaps the governor was confused by environmentalists’ objections last year to the bulldozing of a sandy berm separating the lagoon from the sea--gobies exposed to salt water quickly become former gobies--although the berm apparently had nothing to do with the collapse of the highway bridge, and few activists objected to the construction of a new bridge.
It is possible that the governor envisioned hundreds of two-inch gobies, fattened on the fish-world equivalent of state welfare rolls, nibbling away at the bridge’s infrastructure because they had been sapped of any motivation to forage for themselves. Or, just maybe, the governor discovered a new source of scapegoats--scapefish, as it were--who vote even less regularly than do undocumented immigrants or the urban poor. As far as I know, there is no GobyPAC to fear.
There is California precedent for goby bashing. Public response to soon-to-be-governor Ronald Reagan’s 1965 statement, “A tree is a tree--how many more do you need to look at?” was apparently so gratifying that he suggested 15 years later that trees and other vegetation were serious sources of air pollution . . . and Reagan became one of the most popular Presidents of the 20th Century.
Allow me to suggest a short list of potential candidates for future gubernatorial wrath:
* The California gnatcatcher, a South Coast-dwelling bird, hostile to new beachside golf-course developments and luxury hotel complexes, for giving bad financial advice to Robert L. Citron and the Orange County Board of Supervisors.
* The California salmon, for its annoying habit of spending most of its life in the ocean while insisting on spawning in the Sacramento delta’s increasingly sparse freshwater supply.
* The Mexican brown pelican, an illegal immigrant since time immemorial, for crossing the border and stealing food from the mouths of the hard-working and far less plentiful California pelican, a species close to extinction.
* The California least tern, an endangered shorebird, for spending most of its time in Central America but returning to Southern California each year to breed.
* The spotted owl, for causing the erosion of timber jobs in northern counties abutting Oregon, which spiraled into high unemployment in the rest of the state, particularly in the aerospace industry and in urban Los Angeles. This, of course, led to a sky-high burglary rate, to an epidemic of teen-age pregnancy and probably to the 1992 riots.
* The California black rail, for stubbornly resisting all attempts at privatization, though this marsh bird is, so far as I know, wholly unsupported by state transportation subsidies.
* The kangaroo rat, for its unpleasant insistence on living in areas of interest to developers. This proclivity of the near-extinct rodent not only has caused property values to plummet statewide but also may have been wholly responsible for the decimation of the state’s construction industry.
If Wilson’s approval rating also rises in the polls, we can expect to hear speeches denouncing these finned and feathered enemies of the Golden State in the weeks and months to come.
