Don’t Lose Sight of the Forest in O.C. Reserve System Talks : Hammer Out Details to Preserve the Legacy of Land

Environmentalists and developers in Orange County have managed to come a long way in their unique effort to agree on setting aside habitat as one of the first efforts designed under the state’s Natural Community Conservation Planning program. They must not quit now that they are wrangling over the details, and while some are openly questioning whether the disagreements can be resolved.

Debates over the environment have in some ways defined visions of the community for years in Orange County. Subtlety and nuance have not always been the hallmarks of the discussion. We have had protesters standing in front of bulldozers in Laguna Canyon living side by side with ideologues who say efforts to preserve what is left of our open space and clean air amount to tyranny.

As the county has built out, the fate of the landscape has raised the level of passion. Along with the antagonism, there have been triumphs such as a successful open space land purchase in the Laguna Beach area. The county also was able to sign an agreement in 1992 with the participation of local developers and the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit conservation organization, to open thousands of acres of land that stretched from Coast Highway through Emerald Canyon to the north and from Laguna Canyon Road to Crystal Cove State Park.

The county now is at another crossroad. A plan to create a 39,000-acre reserve system has been discussed in the corridors of Sacramento and Washington, and among major developers and leading environmentalists. County planners are reviewing proposals, and eventually they will go before the Board of Supervisors. Disputes at this stage center over who will be on an oversight board, and how long the reserve system will be in place. There are issues such as what will become of Coal Canyon as a wildlife corridor.

None of these concerns should be trivialized, but neither should participants in the review process lose sight of the big picture. It is important to keep in mind that the alternative to a new way of setting aside land for species preservation likely will be business as usual. The contentiousness of the past over species-by-species listing has produced few winners.

This is a battle that has been fought on the fine points every step of the way, with scientists opining on such things as whether Southern California’s gnatcatchers are actually one of a kind, or whether, as developers argued several years ago in the fierce battle over numbers, these songbirds were part of the same subspecies as those in Mexico.

Rather than continuing with this unique brand of numbers crunching, it is in everybody’s interest to make what concessions can be made to ensure public confidence in the result. That may mean, just to give one example, that it is not too much to ask to put public members or scientists on the oversight board.

This proposal is a new and different experiment, one with implications for a broader public that is watching to see how things work out in Orange County. The proposal has been a project of the Wilson administration, which for several years has worked with the Nature Conservancy and others to find a better way than constant haggling over parcels of land.

It would be a shame to lose the larger goal in the details. Unfortunately, the last stop in this process is the Board of Supervisors. The public has not been able to have much confidence in the past that the interests of preserving the environment from rampant development would be protected at the Hall of Administration.

That makes it doubly important that the details be worked out satisfactorily in the stages preceding board consideration. Those who are looking out for the public interest in dwindling open space in Southern California are right to insist on preserving the legacy of the land. But all must work diligently to get beyond their differences, and come up with an agreement that the county really can be proud of.