An Issue Bigger Than a Toll Road

I’m not an expert on regional transportation or the environment. That puts me in the same camp as most of you, I’d bet, but it doesn’t mean we can’t gnash our teeth over the recurring Southern California clash between concrete and trees.

We accept that Orange County developers carved our civilization of 3 million people out of some of the most beautiful topography to be found. We can also lament what we lost by doing so.

I’m not going to rehash that trade-off today. I have a narrower question: Does it matter when one generation sets aside land as a gift to society, only to have the next one take it away?

In broad strokes, that’s what’s happening with the proposed construction of the six-lane Foothill South tollway through a stretch of San Onofre State Beach. It would extend the existing 241 tollway from its Rancho Santa Margarita endpoint to Interstate 5 near San Clemente.

It would relieve traffic. I’m not here to argue that, nor to lobby on whether there might be better routes. I’m only asking whether we have an obligation to honor a compact that set aside land for all to enjoy.

Society changes. Population grows. Highways jam up. Adjustments are needed.

But I’d suggest there’s an ethical question -- not an environmental one -- to be asked about whether parkland is nothing more than currency to be traded when the time is right. The federal government is leasing the San Onofre land to the state, but no one at the time of the agreement said, in essence, “Enjoy this parkland until they build a superhighway through it.”

The land was a gift of nature to future generations.

I’m not a camper, not a hiker, not even much of a beachgoer. So I don’t have a particular ax to grind here. I’m just trying to square the propriety of an Orange County toll agency in 2006 deciding that parkland set aside 35 years ago is now fair game.

That sounds to me like giving your child a savings bond when he or she is 5, but then deciding when he’s 15 that you and your wife need some money to go to Las Vegas. Sure, you can take it, but should you?

Well, Vegas is a lot of fun.

“I think the question you’re asking, very broadly, is ‘Does the present have an obligation to the past?’ ” says D.J. Waldie, author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.”

“Some would say, of course not. Every era reinvents itself, the past can’t be a burden on us, particularly here in Southern California, where we flee from the past as quickly as we can.”

Waldie, whose memoir is about growing up in Los Angeles County, says he rejects that line of thinking. The past, he says, “contains a body of human experience that cannot be dismissed without doing damage to the present. By that I mean when one obliterates the choices made in the past, it’s like enforcing a kind of amnesia. You’re not just paving over a piece of landscape, you’re also cutting out a bit of memory from the community.”

That makes him sound like a vehement opponent of the Foothill project, but Waldie says he isn’t addressing that issue. Nor, he says, does he want to consider the issue as strictly a cost-benefit question of whether a highway is more important than a park.

Rather, he says, “What interests me is, do we abandon a compact made in the past. And if we abandon that compact, what others are we willing to abandon?”

The tollway wouldn’t destroy the state park, but it would alter it forever. Supporters might argue, even reluctantly, that it’s the price we must pay for progress.

So it does come down to whether we’re beholden, even in changing times, to a public gift given long ago.

The tollway agency has cast its vote. It’s left for the rest of us to imagine six lanes of highway running through what once seemed like a pretty cool present.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He 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.