Sore Winners

In this environmental quiz, guess who won in each case below: the conservationists or their opponents?

* DDT ban in place, the bald eagle is making a nationwide comeback. But there is one island in California where the bird isn’t doing well, so rehabilitation efforts there might end.

* After a 30-year fight over developing the Dana Point Headlands, the final project has less than one-seventh the number of homes and one-eighth the number of hotel rooms that were originally approved.

* At the Bolsa Chica wetlands near Huntington Beach, the number of homes in a proposed development shrank by more than 90%, and plans for a big marina and commercial development were scrapped.

Despite hard-earned gains on all three fronts, conservationists feel that any scaling back represents loss. Yet environmental decisions are usually matters of balance and degree. How much development versus how much open space? How much public money spent on protecting endangered species versus, say, transportation? If environmentalists insist on a political model -- did we win or lose? -- they almost always lose, at least as they see it.

Some are protesting over bald eagles and Yosemite trails; those are discussed in the editorials below. The most far-ranging recent example, though, involves those who seek the ouster of Coastal Commissioner Toni Iseman because the onetime darling of the anti-developers voted in favor of the downsized Headlands and Bolsa Chica projects.

In these conservationists’ eyes, because they’re not getting everything they wanted, they lost. This is environmentalism at its least attractive, when it gets the ruby slippers but wants your little dog too.

Look what they’ve gained:

In 1980, a plan for 5,700 homes, a 1,300-slip marina and hundreds of acres of commercial buildings on 1,600 acres at the Bolsa Chica wetlands won preliminary approval. None of it was built. Instead, a quarter-century later, the Coastal Commission approved 349 homes and a park on 105 acres on an adjacent mesa, while the wetlands remain an ecological and recreational haven undergoing an ambitious restoration project.

In 1974, Orange County supervisors approved 800 homes, two 400-room hotels and 27 acres of commercial space on the Dana Point Headlands, an oceanfront bluff. That development never happened either; instead, 30 years later, the Coastal Commission approved 125 homes, a 90-room inn and 40,000 square feet of commercial space, as well as five connected parks on 60 acres with trails, and more than 20 acres set aside for a handful of endangered Pacific pocket mice. There remain, however, valid questions about whether the project is replacing an existing seawall or building a new one, which would violate state law.

Iseman is hardly a despoiler of the wilderness. The projects she approved shrank from concrete sprawl to ecologically sensitive developments tempered with a dose of fairness and realism. Conservationists gained -- both times. They just can’t have Toto too.