The Trouble With Fake Frogs

A woman wearing a frog costume gets down on all fours. She hops around. “Rribbit, rribbit,” she says.

No, this isn’t graduation day at kindergarten. The frog is the main character in “FrogWorks,” a piece of agitprop theater making the rounds of schools and shopping malls. If you noticed the similarity between “FrogWorks” and “DreamWorks,” then you might guess what’s coming.

The frog wants us to know that Steven Spielberg is trying to destroy his marshy home. Spielberg, in effect, is committing frog genocide.

“My family will die! We’ll all gonna die! They’re killers!” it says of Spielberg and his partners at DreamWorks, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Sure enough, a character called “SpielKatzenGef” appears and goose-steps around the stage. He and his cohorts laugh maniacally while they announce their plans to build their studio on the Ballona Wetlands next to Marina del Rey.

The frog protests their plan, repeating that he and his family will die. This so enrages SpielKatzenGef

that he loops a rope around the frog’s neck and strangles him to death.

If you’ve missed “FrogWorks,” just ask your kid. He’s probably seen it at school. Or at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. All over town it’s been welcomed as a piece of educational theater.

If not “FrogWorks,” perhaps you’ve seen the picket lines outside Spielberg movies. Or read about the “bombing” of the Internet site for “The Lost World” by those outraged over the frog genocide.

In short, the specter of Spielberg as a killer of frogs has become a low-level, persistent presence in our culture. Sort of like the signs saying, “John 3:16” at every sporting event covered by the networks.

What’s wrong with this picture of mogul-driven amphibian death? Here’s a couple things:

* Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen aren’t killing frogs. They don’t have a dime invested in Playa Capital, the company developing Ballona. Nor do they have any other business relationship with the project.

* The frogs have been saved for some years now. This is one genocide that’s really a hoax.

True enough, DreamWorks may locate its studio in the development at some point in the future. Or may not. Negotiations between the developers and DreamWorks continue, as they have for three years.

In the meantime, the true developers at Ballona--the old site of Hughes Aircraft--continue their work anonymously and unmolested by pickets.

Likewise, the fate of the frogs and the wetlands themselves has long been assured. A legal settlement obtained through the work of other environmental groups requires the builders to preserve and restore about 300 of the 1,000 acres at Ballona. Those 300 acres constitute the vast majority of the wetlands within the property.

In sum, the campaign to “Save Ballona” amounts to a big lie. A big lie that already has managed to cripple some of the restoration at Ballona and conceivably could scuttle it altogether.

Why? Welcome to the twisted world of Los Angeles environmental groups. Where hidden agendas abound and jealousy prevails. Where huge amounts of time and energy are spent back-stabbing and denouncing the success of others.

In this regard we have a sorry history. If you don’t believe me, just check the campaigns to preserve the Santa Monica Mountains, the California condor, the Southern California coast and half a dozen others. In each case the wounds inflicted by environmental groups on each other outnumbered those left by the bad guys.

The reason for the cannibalism remains a mystery. Perhaps it has to do with the paucity of success with environmental causes here. Victory is so rare that environmentalists fight over the spoils like a pack of hyenas stumbling across a single dead rat.

In any case, the ugliness continues to this day, as evidenced by the Ballona activists who seek to erode and discredit the prior environmental victory there. If they conceded the victory, they could not continue the Spielberg-bashing that gets them all the attention and face-time on TV.

Capisce?

“I wouldn’t mind other groups trying to expand on what we’ve done,” says Ruth Lansford, the founder of Friends of Ballona Wetlands and the architect of the preservation deal. “What infuriates me is the lies and the drivel being used. They want to claim that the legal settlement amounts to a sell-out. It’s idiocy.”

Lansford has worked to preserve Ballona for 30 years. At first, virtually no one cared about the wetlands. When the Friends group forced Summa Corp.--then the property owner--to agree to a settlement a couple of decades later, she and her group had a deal that most environmentalists only dream about.

For example: The developer not only must set aside most of the designated wetlands--and one-third of the entire property--as a nature preserve, it must pay millions to restore them and keep them healthy. In perpetuity.

For example: Most of the construction is confined to upland areas that were never wetlands and have been used for decades as industrial sites. And no restoration is begun without the approval of the Friends’ biologists.

The restoration work constitutes a crucial part of the Ballona settlement because much of the marshland has been degraded by long neglect. Some of it, in fact, is dying as marshland because surrounding developments have stopped tidal flows. The restoration would restore the flows.

Surely this result is cause for celebration. But what happened? The restoration center established by the Friends group got trashed last year. Vandals scrawled a message across a mural that read:

“Hey look at this stupid trailer [restoration center]--more litter . . . The Friends of Balloon Wetlands are ruing [sic] this land.”

*

On an identification sign outside the center the word “Friends” was replaced with “Enemies” so the sign read, “Enemies of Ballona Wetlands.”

And now, high irony, the Spielberg-bashers appear to have stopped the restoration work begun by the Friends group, at least temporarily.

Several months ago the coalition of Spielberg-bashers challenged the project’s environmental assessment in court. U.S. District Judge Ronald S.W. Lew agreed on procedural grounds but halted only one part of the work at Ballona: the restoration of the freshwater marshes.

Thus we now have the bulldozers grinding away at Ballona building pads for the office buildings and townhouses to come. It’s a busy scene. The only quiet place is the site of the freshwater marsh where nothing is happening.

The get-Spielberg coalition is composed of many small groups that seem to jockey for position, among them the Wetlands Action Network, the Ballona Wetlands Land Trust and others.

Most visible among the activists is Marcia Hanscom of the Wetlands Action Network, who says she is happy with the court decision. In the end, she says, it serves her group’s goal.

That goal? “We want to save all of Ballona, every bit of it,” she says.

That includes the old factory buildings of Hughes Aircraft, the hangars, the industrial sites, the acres that are even now being carved into pads by the bulldozers.

You can see why Hanscom regards the Friends’ deal as penny ante. Her goal will be achieved, she says, by so harassing Playa Capitol in the courts that the company will become a “willing seller.”

Then her group will go to the government and get the money to buy Ballona. Plus additional sums to remove the factories, clean up the industrial sites, undo the work done by the bulldozers, restore the marshes and turn it all into a nature preserve.

In a letter faxed to me, Hanscom quoted Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, as saying, “We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.”

Hanscom has that part right: Her goal is seemingly impossible. The bill for buying the prime property at Ballona and restoring it to a nature preserve would likely exceed half a billion dollars.

I asked Hanscom why, since she has a detailed knowledge of the true developers at Ballona, her group continuously targets Steven Spielberg, who has no part in the process.

Hanscom conceded that Spielberg’s role is conjectural, along with his partners’. Nonetheless, she says, “We’ve gone after them. When we first tried to raise the issue of Ballona, we got nowhere. Then we went after DreamWorks, and people noticed. Now everybody knows about Ballona.”

I’ll let that comment stand on its own.

In the meantime, the victory won by Friends of Ballona Wetlands remains in place, albeit battered. This victory won’t cost the government a dime. It guarantees that the wetlands will be restored to health and kept healthy for our children. Maligned and forgotten in the attacks on Spielberg, it’s there for the taking.

If you don’t believe, ask a frog at Ballona. A real one.

Rribbit.