Walking a Fine Line Along Our Coast

What in the world has gotten into Toni Iseman?

How dare she -- a long-standing environmental activist, a Laguna Beach councilwoman and, get this, a Democrat -- defy the environmental movement and support development projects on the picturesque Orange County coastline?

Who got to her? How much are they paying her?

Or is it possible -- just possible, mind you -- that she’s voting her beliefs on the California Coastal Commission and that nobody ever told her she had to vote exactly as her environmental friends want her to?

Iseman’s fall from grace -- some activists want her off the commission -- is but the latest example of what happens in a society run by certainty. It’s the certainty of knowing that you’re right and the other guy is wrong.

And because that is so, you will not compromise. You can’t compromise, because to do so is to renounce a core belief and give in. It is to let “the other side” gain a foothold in the world that must be as you want it to be.

As George W. Bush famously noted, you’re either with us or against us.

In Iseman’s case, she’s really disoriented. She thought she was the environment’s friend. She still does. But in supporting two scaled-down developments on Orange County’s coast, she has been targeted by former allies. Her seat is up for reappointment, and they want her off. She wants to stay on.

In interviews with The Times last week, Iseman’s former backers called her a disappointment; I read between the lines and heard the word “traitor.” In the same article, Iseman defended herself, but I wanted to talk to her more about the line between conviction and compromise.

“I do not believe that I lost my moral compass,” she says. “I don’t think I’m one person in Laguna Beach and another person out of town. Just because I’m on the environmental left on the Laguna Beach City Council, you can’t assume I’ll be on the environmental left on the Coastal Commission. I’m in the enviable position of being a swing vote on the commission.”

She says her votes in favor of the projects reflected a “practical nature” that always existed in her environmentalism. More to the point, she says, the projects pass legal muster and “give back” some things that environmentalists wanted.

In politics, it’s called compromise. But in the parlance of political certitude, it translates to selling out.

The irony, then, is that the politically liberal Iseman is fending off criticism not from the right but from the left. It’s not a fight she wants. “Anything I say that could damage the environmental movement or give ammo to the dark side, I don’t want any part of,” she says.

But neither will she dismiss a trial balloon of mine that the fervor of the most zealous environmental activists resembles that of the oft-maligned religious right. The latter is not a good thing in politics, she says, leaving unsaid that it may not be a good thing in environmental issues, either.

But she insists that she isn’t the one who’s upset. She has met the enemy of the environment, and she knows it isn’t her.

“I have stuck out my neck individually for them when no one was there,” she says of environmental concerns. “I just have an obligation to follow my own belief system of what’s right and wrong. I was there for them [on the commission] when I was the only one that agreed with them.”

The California coast is not a small-potatoes issue; the stakes are high. Passions run high. But the people who weigh in on it have only opinions, not divine powers of certitude.

Newsweek columnist George Will didn’t have Southern California environmentalists on his mind when he wrote for the May 23 issue, but his thoughts travel well to just about any debate: “America is currently awash in an unpleasant surplus of clanging, clashing certitudes. That is why there is a rhetorical bitterness absurdly disproportionate to our real differences. It has been well said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure that you are right.”

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.