Wilderness Not Saved by Policy

* It is true, the county has expanded its system of parks and trails through a kind of extortion called mitigation.

Unfortunately, your article (“Parkland Carved From Development,” Sept. 6) implies mitigation saves wilderness. Mitigation never covers the price of wilderness.

A map with the story shows only one large tract of preserved land; that is Cleveland National Forest. That land is not a result of mitigation but of taxpayer intelligence and forethought. The same is true for parts of Laguna Coast Wilderness Park. The citizens of Laguna Beach taxed themselves to buy some of their beautiful canyons and are still raising money to buy more.

Wilderness cannot exist in small islands. If you look at the “wilderness” parkland that results from mitigation, you will notice small isolated islands. What creatures could possibly survive on those small islands?

So, what is wilderness? Is land devoid of deer and mountain lions wilderness? I work at Rancho Mission Viejo Ecological Reserve, a small island of habitat (1,200 acres) set aside for mitigation. Visitors come on my walks for a wilderness experience, hoping to catch a glimpse of a deer or a mountain lion. But, a male mountain lion requires 150 square miles of wilderness to survive and a female, 80 square miles. Our reserve is only 2 square miles, and our “wilderness” won’t survive without the open land surrounding it.

The important question is not “What price for development?”, but “What price for wilderness?” The community needs to ask itself, “What would we do to save, for our children, animals and plants with thousands of years of history?”

Would we pay as much as we do for cable television, or give as much time to the effort as we do to the TV? And if our answer is “no,” why would we expect a developer to do more?

LAURA COHEN

Mission Viejo