Road Will Take Its Toll on Natural World

Now we all have to live with the so-called transportation corridor, the Southland’s newest, meanest and most arrogant development project.

But how, short of ignoring it, do we live with a road that, like most roads, will kill us?

One recent dewy morning, I joined an El Morro Canyon hike sponsored by the California Native Plant Society. The docent paused, pointing out local species: Sticky Monkeyflower. Laguna Dudlyea. Twiggy reefplant. A red-shouldered hawk. “Listen,” she said, her finger holding the air, her head tilted, “a gnatcatcher.”

Two couples talked to each other between the docent’s lectures as we trudged the dusty trail. They mentioned casually how, driving the new road, they’d cut 15 minutes off their commutes.

What was wrong here? Walking deeper into El Morro Canyon, now two miles from the beach, I anticipated that moment when, after hiking its rim, we’d stand together on the edge of the canyon, peering at the toll road on the other side. I’d watch their faces turn ashen at the sight of the ugly road, its broad cement swath scarring the brown hills.

But the hikers turned back near a stand of live oak minutes from our view of the road, the docent’s talk about threatened species and sensitive ecosystem apparently for naught. My fellow hikers will never see exactly where the toll road is. Not from anywhere but their cars.

It occurs to me that they did not know they themselves were alive in the same cosmos as Monkeyflower, Dudlyea, Twiggy reefplant and hawk. They either lived faraway lives in cars or they were on a short morning hike. It was impossible for them to be in both the natural world and the encroaching industrial one.

The hikers were in denial. Sadly, they imagined their uninterrupted elevated drive on one side of the canyon independent of the air they breathed and the fine dust kicked up hiking on the other. They were lost. We’re all lost unless we see the ramifications in dividing our ecosystem, of isolating ourselves from our responsibility to connect, to see.

This struggle involves locating ourselves more fully in the natural world before we destroy it and ourselves. The immediate answer for Orange County, for Los Angeles County, for California is a moratorium. On building, paving, roads, construction, airports.

This proposal will be celebrated by many as the typically idealistic, fuzzy thinking of radical environmentalists. I argue that skeptics can’t see over the next hill any more than they honestly envision the ultimate effect of a toll road. It is purposefully designed to separate us from a world we should devote ourselves to saving.