When Many Openly Pine for More Open Space

We’ve just entered my favorite time of year--the rainy season. That’s because there’s nothing like L.A. after a hard winter soak, when the air has been scrubbed clean and the city glistens in a way that I imagine it did long ago, before all these people came and screwed it up.

I say that mostly in jest, of course. I love the collection of humanity that makes up Los Angeles--all 3,976,071 of us. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

Nonetheless, I find myself lost in reverie sometimes, conjuring up what it must have been like 70 or 80 years ago, when the population was but a fraction of what it is now, before the SigAlerts and smog alerts, when parts of L.A. looked like the picture on a citrus packing label.

It’s still possible to find such idyllic places here and there. But, as Jim Robbins laments in his piece on Montana (“Circling the Welcome Wagons,” page 28), it’s getting tougher all the time. “There’s a tipping point past which newcomers become too numerous,” he writes, “paving the way for one of the great paradoxes: They destroy what attracted them.”

Among those flocking to the Rocky Mountain West are Southern Californians, lured in part by relatively cheap housing. One shouldn’t forget, though, that these sorts of influxes--and the tensions they create--are not only inter-state issues.

Within California, a number of smaller communities are trying to preserve a way of life that, they fear, is being endangered by hordes of L.A. or Bay Area refugees ready to encroach on their pastoral paradise.

“We can see it disappearing so rapidly,” says Janet Thew, a member of the planning commission in Loomis, a town of 6,480 between Sacramento and Tahoe, where residents are trying to safeguard woodlands and wetlands.

Similarly, leaders in the San Joaquin Valley are wrestling with how to keep intact big tracts of farmland.

They’re up against a juggernaut. With California’s population expected to reach nearly 55 million by 2050--up from about 37 million now--”there is a certain inevitability” to having a good chunk of the state’s remaining pristine ground gobbled up and urbanized, says William Fulton, president of Solimar Research Group, a firm that advises policymakers on land-use matters.

But, that said, “the zeitgeist” has changed a lot in the last decade, Fulton notes. He’s seen it in Ventura County, which has imposed a series of growth-control measures and cultivated greenbelts between cities; Riverside County, where planners have set aside a “huge amount” of open space; and Kern County, where the question regarding the development of Tejon Ranch hasn’t been whether there will be wildlife protection--but exactly which acres and how many will be made off-limits.

The result, says Fulton, only half-jokingly: “L.A. hasn’t spread quite to Montana--yet.”