Environmentalists Blast Khachigian

Sunday morning has always meant extra time to savor the paper. Now you have chosen to pollute with the vitriolic ramblings of political hack Ken Khachigian. The combination of his reckless rhetoric and his shallow knowledge of the San Joaquin Hills Corridor (May 25) must be addressed.

As a “mouthy activist and enviro-nihilist” I can explain why I felt it important enough for me to lock on to a bulldozer, be charged with trespassing and be locked in the Orange County Jail.

For 10 years those who watched carefully saw the collapse of economic safeguards and environmental guidelines on a city, county, state and federal level. The meetings, hearings, letters to the editor, and lawsuits (yes, Ken, we clogged your courts) didn’t give the project the sunshine that it needed.

This road was built to open the South County for unbridled development. Soon it will be our economic, patriotic duty to approve more sprawling housing tracts to support this private venture that has been wrapped with a financial safety net that will involve the unwitting taxpayers. That’s not my understanding of capitalism.

Khachigian will be glad to know I believe in the domino theory. Every previous environmental compromise has led us to this point. Now looming over South County is a massive international airport, the final piece in the environmental holocaust.

TONI ISEMAN

Laguna Beach

* Khachigian’s piece was the same old self-serving anthropocentric garbage, and shortsighted garbage at that: “pristine beauty of coastal hills”? Wait until Donald Bren gets through with them. To me, a local “eco-moralist,” one ground squirrel is worth 10,000 yuppie carpetbaggers, and it’s tragic to witness the death of California by the hand of greed.

NORMAN FRAHM

Corona del Mar