Restoring Vegetation Can’t Be Speeded Up

Your May 9 story “Calabasas Questions Delay in Parkland Improvements” leaves the unjustified implication that the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy is tardy in making park improvements on the Baldwin Co. open space in Calabasas. What is involved is not people-serving “park improvements.” When it comes to making park improvements to serve recreational needs of people, we act boldly and quickly. Witness the park improvements being constructed this very moment at Reseda Ridge in Tarzana.

The Baldwin open space is different. These are not “park improvements” to serve people, but rather restoration of native vegetation on hillsides seriously degraded by years of neglect. The delicate process of restoring this ecosystem cannot be compared to a public works project like rebuilding a fallen bridge. We congratulate politicians when they get a public works project constructed quickly, but habitat restoration is not a matter of concrete and steel, or engineering blueprints and construction worker overtime.

The “public works project” approach to habitat restoration, seemingly advocated by your reporter, would have us employ hundreds of botany graduate students replanting the hills with nursery specimens, and then sit back and see if the force majeure approach works with habitats as well as it does with highways.

Native grasses, herbs and shrubs are not concrete overpasses. Grad students may need the pocket money, but our responsibility is to the ultimate success of the restoration effort, not to pushing the Baldwin Co.’s restoration money out the door as quickly as possible. The beauty of the hills on the south side of the 101 Freeway between Calabasas Parkway and Las Virgenes Road is testimony to the prudence of our “go slow” approach to habitat restoration.

JOSEPH T. EDMISTON

Malibu

Edmiston is executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.