8/26/11
In the wake of the retirement of Peter Douglas after 26 years as executive director of the California Coastal Commission, it's hard to improve on the Associated Press report that broke the news: "They might not know his name but the millions of visitors annually lured to California's 1,100 miles of coastline are no doubt familiar with his work."
Meaning Douglas is largely the reason why long stretches of unspoiled coast have stayed that way, despite enormous pressure to render them otherwise.
The notion now being eagerly lobbied by the Pacific Legal Foundation, longtime foe of the Coastal Commission and the Coastal Act, is that his replacement should be chosen with an eye toward the selection of someone more moderate, more pragmatic, more balanced in his approach; specifically, someone more inclined to give additional weight to the wishes of developers so that the scales might be allowed to tip less often toward the mandates of public access and resource protection.
The only thing one need consider about this proposal is its source. It is a roadmap to the realization of an ill-concealed agenda, but it has nothing to do with the reality of California coastal politics.
It assumes the tilt in the playing field between the public and private sectors is the opposite of reality. When it comes to coastal development, regulators and public interest advocates are as outgunned, out-funded, out-lobbied and outmuscled by private interests as routinely as they are in every other arena of our society. That is the reality. The public interest is served only by people who are willing to fight for it.
That's why what the commission needs is another tough, passionate, full-throated advocate who knows coastal law and coastal politics backward and forward and who sees our relationship to the natural world as Aldo Leopold saw it, not as the Irvine Company sees it.
We need someone who knows how Leopold felt one afternoon in New Mexico in 1909, when, in the course of seeking to assure sufficient supplies of deer for hunters, he shot a wolf. He approached her body just in time to see "a fierce green fire dying in her eyes." He came to realize the value of wolves and wildness.
The testament and summation of Aldo Leopold's land ethic is "A Sand County Almanac."
For Peter Douglas, the testament and summation of his land ethic is the California Coastal Act.
The replacement for the commission's first executive director needs to embody those qualities to the maximum extent practicable. If we get anything less than that - which is to say, more moderate and pragmatic than that - we will live to see the end of California's wild coast.
Andrew Christie is the director of the Santa Lucia Chapter of the Sierra Club in San Luis Obispo.
