A Noxious Species: Plastic Greens
Susan Davis
The land war in Southern California reaches back at least to the early 1990s. In those
years, the big developers -- Pardee, Bren Home, McMillan, Standard American, and the
Irvine Land Company were building sprawling new cities on what was left of the delicate
canyons, mesas and wetlands of California's coast. Pushing back, some tiny
environmental groups fought the real estate octopus with legal challenges, protest, and
endangered species listings. Southern Calfifornia was, and remains, a hot spot of
environmental destruction. Enter the California gnatcatcher, denizen of coastal sage
scrub, emblem of scores of threatened and endangered animals and plants. The
developers screamed that the bird could not be allowed to hold up the pace of coastal
decimation. Something had to give. The Endangered Species Act had to go.
The developers' Sacramento and Washington friends told them otherwise: wildlife is
politically popular. It was going to take a village --- a Potemkin Village. For the public,
the impression had to be created that the damaged environment was being protected and
restored, while in the boardrooms, the land developers and lumber companies needed to
remain confident of their expanding profits. A new practice of environmentalism had to
take shape, one that would be guided by "collaboration and cooperation," rather than
confrontation and lawsuit. A new class of guides, enviro-fixers and brokers emerged,
lushly funded by the same corporations that filled Pete Wilson, George Bush and Bill
Clinton's coffers.
With love, from Pete and Bruce
In California, the Potemkin village is called the Natural Communities Conservation
Planning Initiative. Dreamt up by Pete Wilson and Bruce Babbitt, in essence it allows
developers to “take” (destroy) endangered species and their terrain, if they promise to
somehow “mitigate” the destruction. The initiative allows for giant-sized Habitat
Conservation Plans, a kind of exemption for private landholders allowed under section 10
of the Endangered Species Act. In each Southern California county, a board of
governments, planning authorities, developers, and representatives of state and federal
agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service and the State Department of Fish and
Game, is supposed to design a system of linked preserves. These set aside lands are
supposed to provide permanent and viable homelands for threatened birds, plants and
animals. Cagily, Wilson and Babbitt took a page from the book of the best conservation
biologists, who’d long ago understood that large, whole, working environments are
needed for species to recover. The gnatcatcher, the arroyo toad, the quino checkerspot
butterfly, and many more, would all be saved, Bruce Babbitt claimed when he announced
the plan, because developers would do the right thing if they were given the right
incentives and not backed in to a corner by environmental regulations.
They were given incentives. Natural communities planning allows developers to "take"
species by cutting deals, often remarkably crude ones. They can swap or sell land into a
habitat preserve in return for the right to develop on or next to sensitive land. In practice,
the swapped land doesn't have to be of prime quality -- it can be undesirable or left-over.
It need not be the most critical parcel to the endangered species. In some cases, for
example, in Orange County, builders have been able to use lands already owned by the
public as “reserves” against their takings. In others, they have been able to count land
they had already designated as open space as "mitigation." Double-dipping, as we call it.
Developers can build concrete culverts as connecting wildlife corridors, or simply label
an asphalt highway as a path for animals' movements. Most important, special
protections are built in for the land speculators: after a development has been approved,
no further legal environmental limits can be placed it for fifty years in San Diego County
--- longer in the Riverside and Orange County versions of the plan. This "no surprises"
clause means that no matter what happens to a species, a watershed, or in the world of
science, nothing will interfere with the owner's ability to profit from that piece of land.
But nature is one big surprise, and in Southern California's badly depleted, overbuilt
landscapes, natural communities planning is proving to be one big mess.
A place at the table
The Wilson-Babbitt plan offered the building industry and real estate speculators
opportunities to bend environmental regulation on an unprecedented scale because it gave
them an official and recognized "place at the table." Along with carefully selected
moderate environmental organizations, they were "stake holders" as the giant habitat
plans were pieced out. Before, they had wheeled and dealt out of the public eye, in
Washington and smaller Babylons. Now, they told Fish and Wildlife, cities, counties and
environmentalists which land would be preserved and written off as a tax deduction, and
which would be developed. And they got to advertise these wonderful "wildlands"
adjacent to their sprawling new cities. (The Irvine Company's web page provides
particularly nauseating examples.)
Many of Washington's big green organizations were generally enthusiastic. This was no
shocker. As Alexander Cockburn, Ken Silverstein and Jeffrey St. Clair have written, the
national environmental organizations have been marinating in swamps of corporate
money for years. And these biggies -- notably The Nature Conservancy -- played a very
important role in giving habitat planning good cover. Not incidentally, The Nature
Conservancy has an enormous financial interest in the various plans going forward, since
it is active in acquiring and managing much of the swapped habitat, notably in Orange
County. As the wise use movement gurus Ron Arnold and Alan Gottleib point out in
“Trashing the Environment,” The Conservancy is an incredibly wealthy real estate firm in
its own right, profits from its land deals with the government, and often works by devious
means. (Arnold and Gottleib are anti-environmentalist to the point of being nutty, but
they have done solid research on The Nature Conservancy that all environmentalists
should read.)
So there was little public criticism from the influential national organizations. Article
after article celebrating the wonders of working together and an end to the “stalemates” in
California issued from the magazines and fund raising mailings of the big greenies. Not
that all the environmentalists were compliant. Michael Soule, an eminent biologist and
one of the first to argue that species recovery depends on huge, linked habitat preserves,
called the NCCP initiative a science-free fraud. Earth Firsters, a few small Southern
California groups, and property rights activists complained publicly.
Another effect of the Wilson-Babbitt plan was to create a new layer of deal makers,
precisely because the process required often hostile forces to "collaborate" in a weird
harmonization. Small landowners were sometimes recalcitrant, fearing they might be
forced to sell their property into a preserve at below market prices. (If they had any
experience with The Nature Conservancy, they were right to be worried.) Large
landowners wanted the best deal. There were dozens of local conservation groups; some,
like Save Our Forests and Ranchlands and Spirit of the Sage Council, got suspicious
when they took a look at whether the preserves would really let rare and wild places
thrive. Conservation biologists and professional ecologists were hostile because they
knew the plan put horse-trading before science, and as practicing field scientists they
were aware of how tentative and inadequate their own predictions about restoration,
survival, and recovery really are. All these people had to be convinced that the Natural
Communities Conservation Planning initiative was the best hope for the more than eighty
threatened and endangered plants and animals in Southern California. If they could not
be convinced, these folks had to be silenced, marginalized and pushed away from the
negotiating table.
Meantime, U. S. Fish and Wildlife held meetings for its own employees, putting pressure
on them to learn the "new way of doing business," including "thinking about consensus"
around ecosystems rather than listing species. Knowledgeable Fish and Wildlife
scientists and other employees were silenced. Jobs were at stake; for some independent
scientists, contracts were at stake. Some university biologists who objected to the plans
were eased off the review panels.
There was a wicked messenger
So the gates opened for the wicked messengers, the people who would devote themselves
to helping the deals sound good in the press, look good on paper, reflect glory on the
elected officials and contain the grassroots greens. It was most important that these water
carriers and the go-betweens appear not only green but local. U. S. Fish and Wildlife
could not appear to be telling property owners what they could and couldn't do with their
land, and at the same time, it was also important for the political process that the big
developers not seem to be running the show, although that veneer was and remains
impossibly thin. Wilson and Babbitt had prepared the ground for a new, noxious species,
a tangle of fake greenery in the form of conservation “leagues,” "alliances" and
“coalitions”.
I'm sure such green false-fronts exist all over the state, and for that matter, all over the
nation. But because the California initiative, and especially San Diego County's Multiple
Species Conservation Plan variants, are the the biggest test runs around the Endangered
Species Act, the plastic greens have had a particularly pernicious effect here. By calling
themselves the leaders, they have given the endorsement of so-called "local
environmentalists" to pathetic compromises. In some cases they have actively supported
horrendous new projects. They have called out critics as divisive and irrational, and
helped the press label committed grassroots activists extremists. Perhaps worst of all,
they have helped squander a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars on plans that will
probably fail to achieve species recovery.
Though by no means unique, the Endangered Habitats League is the paradigmatic
example of green vinyl in the Southland. The League emerged in 1991 from an Audobon
Society/Natural Resources Defense Council effort to list the California gnatcatcher. After
the listing, and with funding from the World Wildlife Fund and the Audobon Society,
Endangered Habitats went on to be a key representative of environmental groups in the
multi-county NCCP process. But activists who participated in early meetings say it was
never quite clear who had the mandate to elect the League’s director, Dr. Dan Silver,
M.D., to take the reins, nor are they quite sure how he’s kept his leading role brokering
land swaps, purchases, mitigation, and donations in Orange County, Riverside and San
Diego Counties. Silver and the San Diego director, Michael Beck, have close ties to The
Nature Conservancy and to the Big Greens. They receive environmental awards of
doubtful merit, and bestow similar honors on politicians with dicey environmental voting
records, especially in election years. (Actually, most San Diego politicians have terrible
environmental voting records overall.) In San Diego County, where a knock-down, dragout war over back country zoning is being fought as I write, the League is in tight with the
private Building Industry Association, as well as the Mayor's office and the County Board
of Supervisors, notoriously pro-development and ethically challenged public bodies.
Silver, Beck and their friends are carrying water for Southern California's biggest
developers and calling it nature-saving.
The front
Dan Silver claims that The Endangered Habitats League is a grassroots membership
organization. This conflicts sharply with the way it is regularly and approvingly
described in the press, variously as an "environmental coalition," a green "consortium,"
"an alliance" or "representing an alliance of environmental groups." Silver says the
League has about 400 members, mostly individuals, and a few grassroots organizations.
"But we do not represent the organizations." When I point this contradiction out to him,
he says "The press has it wrong." Who is in charge of describing an organization to the
press, if not the director? Can I see his list of member organizations? "Sorry, I'm too
busy. I don't have a secretary."
The League has an office on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, but no office or
phone-book listing in San Diego. Linked to dozens of of enviro webpages, the League
has no website of its own, and offers no detailed public information about the
organization’s makeup, policies or if and how one can join. It has posted some old
newsletters on the web at http//www.exo/~dsilver/. Although Silver says they do, none of
the newsletters I've read announce regular or occasional local meetings. They do
announce an annual meeting. Nor do the newsletters solicit concrete participation, but in
sluggish prose, they say things along the line of "we are making slow but steady progress
and we'll keep you posted." A search of the exhaustive CD-ROM data base for the San
Diego Union-Tribune turned up no public meeting announcements between the League's
founding year, 1991, and 2000. But it did turn up plenty of articles –- scores -- where
either Dr. Silver or Mr. Beck is described as representing "the environmental community"
and saying “It’s a sound plan for the environment” about one land deal or another.
The Endangered Habitats League is a registered 501C(3), that is, a non-profit charitable
organization, and according to the papers and IRS forms it submits to the California
Secretary of State and the State Registry of Charitable Trusts, it has had the same board
of six directors since it incorporated in 1993. These six are reelected every two years.
Beck and Silver are the two salaried and active members, and the treasurer is paid for
doing the books. Donations to the League are fifty per cent tax-deductible.
When I phoned Dan Silver to ask if he could send me a copy of the League's annual
reports, press packets, and old newsletters, he was reluctant, saying they didn't really have
any reports or press packets, but he would try to send me a few recent newsletters. Too
much trouble to dig up that stuff. It's a small office, he explained, no staff, no xerox
machine. I think it is illegal for a 501c(3) to deny a member of the public access to the
annual report. But I didn't push it. I called Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office for
their tax returns.
This is the United States, and anybody who wants to form an organization for any
purpose can form one. You can call your outfit whatever you want. If you want to form a
tax-exempt foundation to expand public understanding of why the little grey men set their
spaceships down in Wyoming and definitely not in New Mexico, you are by law allowed
to. But you have to file papers of incorporation, and you have to report your purpose,
your activities, and in a vague sort of way, how you spend your money.
In their filings
and newsletters, the League states that it is devoted to "community outreach" furthering
the success of the Natural Communities Conservation Planning process. Its main
purpose is "protection for natural habitats through collaborative conflict resolution. "
This means touting and furthering the Wilson Babbitt end run around the Endangered
Species Act. Let’s pause to consider the paradox of that last phrase "collaborative conflict
resolution." In Southern California, the land itself is at the center of intense political
conflict. The prerogatives of the big developers have hit the wall of public sentiment in
favor of the environment. There’s no getting around it. So the question becomes: who
has to collaborate and resolve conflict with whom, and on what terms? You can’t ride
two horses with one behind.
Through a glass darkly
Looking at the League’s 990 forms is intriguing and mystifying.
Despite its grassroots
membership front, Endangered Habitats League tax forms (IRS 990) reveal that after a
slow start in the early 1990s, it has had plenty of money, certainly much more than some
of the tiny organizations battling for the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.
In
1998, the Endangered Habitats League received $183,000 in "contributions" "from public
sources," that is, private donations and foundation grants. Most of this went to salaries
and a lumped category called “program services”. Mr. Beck and Dr. Silver pay
themselves about $26,000 a year each, not much of a salary in pricey Southern California.
The League doesn't give any grants, or scholarships nor pay benefits to anyone. It says it
doesn't share facilities, resources or money or staff with any other organizations. It
doesn’t pay retirement, assess or collect membership dues; it has hired the occasional
consultant, but didn’t in 1998. It spent small amounts on legal fees ($15,000) and on a
grant writer ($6,000). Beck and Silver attend conferences and they talk on the phone a
lot. Their phone bill for 1998 was just under $7,000. Reporter and editor Jeff St. Clair’s
phone bill is about $2,000.00 a year. “They must have a phone fetish,” says Jeff.
Tellingly, the League says it doesn't hire lobbyists. But this obscures the fact that by any
reasonable definition of the term, they are lobbyists --- they fly around to meetings a lot,
probably in Washington and Sacramento; they pop off to visit with Bruce Babbitt
himself; they meet in closed sessions in San Diego with agency officials and elected
officials. And, in their role as Endangered Habitats League leaders, they endorse
candidates for political office. Most recently, they endorsed Ron Roberts, head of the
San Diego Board of Supervisors who is running for mayor. This is illegal for a 501(C)3.
Back to the cash box. In addition to grants of cash and securities, the EHL received more
than $274,000 in donated services, equipment or facilities, pushing their total revenues up
past $450,000 for '98. The League did not report just what this donation consisted of.
Could it be an office? An airplane? Real estate? Cars? They really dont have a xerox
machine? Someone is taking a big, big tax deduction.
The Attorney General does not reveal the names of donors and contributors on the IRS
990. These are blacked out, just like in an FBI file. So now we turn to the Foundation
Center’s data bases on grants and giving. Hefty and repeated grants have come over the
League’s transom in the last five years from the James Irvine Foundation and the Hewlett
Foundation. At minimum, EHL pulled down $50,000 in 1997 from Hewlett, along with
$22,500 from the Homeland Foundation; in 1998, it received $150,000 from Hewlett , to
be spread over three years, and $100,000 from Irvine, to be spread over two years; in
2000, Irvine gave the League another $150,000 to tide them over through 2001. Between
those two major foundations alone, Endangered Habitats League was supported to the
tune of nearly $100,000 per year over the last four years. There are smaller grants from
other foundations and organizations, and doubtless from individual donors. But $100k a
year is a lot of simoleans.
None of the League's newsletters I slogged through announce these enormous grants to
the membership or the public. Why not? Setting that question aside for the moment,
here's another. What’s wrong with using big grants to support an environmental
“membership group”? Can’t big grant money be used to do good things? First off, this
money isn’t clean if you know anything about the politics of the donors. The James
Irvine Foundation derives directly from the Irvine Company's nearly endless Orange
County real estate developments, office building projects, and Real Estate Investment
Trusts (REITS, a form of stock market mutual fund for real estate speculators). The
company took in more than a billion dollars in profits in 1998. Irvine is the company
that benefitted the most from the Orange County NCCP, a plan which The Nature
Conservancy brokered and Endangered Habitats publicly supported (representing the
environmental community, of course). In 1996, to Irvine president Donald Bren's great
satisfaction, the plan went through allowing Irvine to construct high-tech industry parks,
roads, new towns housing tens of thousands of people, and fancy resorts in the middle of
gnatcatcher territory. At the time, Silver told the press that this showed the effectiveness
of the Endangered Species Act! A bit more than a year later, Irvine Foundation money
makes its way to the Endangered Habitats League, doubtless with a note saying "Keep up
the good work. "
The 85.4 million dollars the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation dispensed in 1998
came directly from the computer and electronics fortune. The Hewlett and Packard
families own extensive western cattle ranches, among other wealth; The Hewletts and
their Foundation are notorious for opposing reform of federal timber and grazing
policies, and this reactionary position is unpopular with the most timid of closet enviros.
Here we have at least one reason why the Endangered Habitats League doesn't announce
any of its big grants, at least from Hewlett.
Can you do good things with bad money? As I've already pointed out, the NCCP
initiative for which Endangered Habitats League has labored loyally is not a good thing in
general, in particular, nor in its local variations. Dan Silver disagrees: "It really depends
on whether you think the glass is half empty or half full." The glass may be more than
half empty. Not only do the habitat plans let developers trash the environment, but in
actual fact, there's little money for new land acquisition to make the preserves. To the
extent that the plans do set aside land for endangered species, there is no funding or
provision for monitoring species recovery. What strapped government agency wants to
monitor downward trends after it's been implicated for years in all the glowing p.r.? Nor
is there money for habitat management, in the form of fire or weed removal, for example.
Plant biologist Ellen Bauder says that "the Sweetwater Fish and Wildlife Service Refuge
[part of the San Diego plan] is solid weeds, some of them noxious, a legal status. It
would take many millions of dollars and decades to improve this weed-infested, overgrazed preserve land" so rare plants could recover. There's no money for control of
access, and in many areas, the distinction between open space, where you can ride your
horse, your jeep or your ATV, and a wildlife preserve, which demands minimum impacts,
is non-existent. In fact, this distinction is purposefully blurred in the public's mind when
politicians talk about habitat plans -- they usually talk in terms of the benefits of open
space. There's no control at all of some reserves: The City of San Diego, which passed its
own plan in 1998, has been completely negligent in protecting its own rare vernal pools,
for example. After setting them aside, it’s been issuing developers permits to bulldoze
them! Then, again, there's the "no surprises" clause. So, no, the NCCP as it has worked
out is not a good thing for a so-called grassroots membership group to spend bad money
working toward. Many honest and broke grassroots organizations are fighting the plans
in the courts. Silver won't join, saying "I just don't understand their rationale."
Charity begins and ends at home
The reason he doesn't is probably Irvine and Hewlett and their endless money. Both
foundations are profoundly interested in shaping environmental policy in the West, and
Silver clearly wants to be aboard the policy making train. Irvine, for transparent reasons,
has a special focus on the Southland. Charity begins at home and the foundations watch
out for the interests of the parent companies and kindred corporations, trying to shape
environmental and land use law in ways that will not limit their profits. Lots of things
could put a crimp in corporate real estate's style: stringent local zoning, strict enforcement
of state and federal environmental regulations, sane housing and transportation policies,
intense grassroots activism. But the biggest cramp of all was and maybe still is the
federal Endangered Species Act.
It's useful to read the foundations’ “granting priorities." For example, Irvine’s include
"smart growth and livable communities." Sounds good, but does that mean more Irvines?
The Foundation "works with a network of regional, statewide and national organizations
dedicated to achieving more sustainable use of the land, across all of California's varied
landscapes." In other words, there’s a land use crisis in Southern California which the
Irvine Company helped cause. Having noticed the public outrage at the disaster, the
Irvine Foundation now gives money to groups that will help guide public opinion toward
some superficial controls on California's out of control development, with the hopes of
reining in the citizen initiatives and lawsuits that have driven developers from L.A. to
Tijuana crazy.
Irvine has given millions upon millions to engineer the public understanding of
environmental issues. For example, in 1999, Irvine gave $4,750,000 grants for
“sustainable land use” projects and education. But listen to the sound of public opinion
being sculpted: The Foundation supports "regional leadership" "community visioning
workshops" "community strategy work teams," plans to "strengthen civic capacity"
around environmental issues. They also aim to improve “public understanding by
improving environmental reporting,” "by "engaging leaders in dialogue" and "supporting
coalition building." The overall picture is this: The Irvine Company, through the Irvine
Foundation, is penetrating the public discussion of the environmental crisis at many
different points. Big grants from a real estate company to train journalists who cover the
environment? It should give us the chills.
What about The Hewlett’s Foundation's charitable priorities? Hewlett recognizes that
"natural resource limits are well in sight" in the West. The Foundation "supports
constructive change in environmental policy," and its objective is to “seek out and
support organizations capable of effectively promoting a change to sustainable policies
..…. to enrich the array of policy options to achieve the changes necessary.” A special
goal is to "encourage methods other than litigation and political advocacy for
environmental solutions.” Anyone for collaborative conflict resolution?
Hewlett spreads a lot of money around, even to some good outfits like Island Press. But
finally, Hewlett’s programs focus on groups that have a larger than local focus. They are
not interested in small communities, "single issues" or single watershed projects. They
give grants to groups that work across large regions and bridge ecosystem boundaries.
Sounds good, but it is precisely the long-haul, local environmentalists who know the
most, scientifically and historically, about the crisis of their ecosystem. Wisdom sits in
places. People tied to places tend to care the most and fight the hardest for those places.
They tend to get called uncompromising radicals. But even temperate grassroots greens
won’t get any money from the Hewlett Foundation unless they come into the conflictavoidant “consortium.” That would be the Endangered Habitats League or one of their
hundreds of cousins.
In a second installment , I’ll detail some of the Endangered Habitats League's activities in
San Diego County, and show why they've come into conflict (naughty word) with some
of that area's least daunted environmentalists. And how is natural communities
conservation planning doing in San Diego? And what have Hewlett and Irvine gotten for
their money? (Hints: a) not very well b) something, but not as much as they'd hoped.)
Susan Davis teaches at UC San Diego.