WiLD Blog

This past year has been an interesting one for the planet. While it is still hipper than ever to be green, the three main presidential candidates are busy pandering to voters (Hillary downing shots, McCain repealing gas taxes, and Obama bowling) with scad mention of the environmental crisis. Even our own green guvernator blew his environ credentials big-time by supporting the construction of a private toll road through a beloved California State Park.

But despite how lame most of our elected officials have been on the environment, the new rise of China as the world’s biggest contributor of greenhouse gasses there are a few folks in San Diego and in California who organized to save two state parks in San Diego County over the past year, reminding that the reason we live here is to enjoy the natural environment, not stare at ugly toll roads and power lines.

The Save Trestles Team
February 6, 2008, will go down as one of the greatest days in history of surfing and the California environmental movement. And it came down to this: there is no defensible position when it comes down to proposals that favor destroying our state parks.

Toll roads do not belong in state parks. Period.

And the people who got that were the amazing and passionate defenders of San Onofre State Beach Park involved in the Save Trestles Coalition from throughout San Diego and Orange Counties, California and the United States. If you were part of the organizing coalition www.savetrestles.org (you all know who you were) I salute your passion, dedication, organizing skill and understanding that protecting open space is the most important way of defending our planet and the natural resources that make California worth living in.

And if you attended the Big Wednesday meeting in Del Mar or wrote letters, made phone calls, signed petitions and did whatever it took to stop the TCA (they are still out there trying — lying it up as usual) pat yourself on the back and get back out there and remember the fight is far from over.

A pressing issue that has recently been brought to the attention of city planners is the affects global warming will have on roads, rail and other transportation infrastructure of coastal cities.  For instance, where will San Diego airport be if sea level rises the predicted two feet over the next century?  The relocation plan for the city’s bustling airport will need to be put on the fast track, not only because of the unstable fill it’s built on, but the fact that it will essentially be under water, making it a perfect landing strip for sea planes, but commercial airlines…I think not.  Other airports that will be at risk for tidal inundation are New York’s LaGuardia airport and New Jersey’s Newark airport, some of the most highly trafficked places in our country. 

Presently, more than 60,000 miles of coastal highway in the United States are already subject to intermittent flooding due to rising water levels.  While a sea level increase averaging a foot per fifty years may seem inconsequential, it will exponentially increase the mileage of roads, rails, bridges, and entire cities at risk of flooding.  But man made transportation marvels aren’t the only thing that are at risk of being destroyed by an influx of sea water.  Salt sensitive habitats such as wetlands and fresh water lakes could be irreversibly damaged.  Species which thrive in the fresh or partly brackish water of marshes and other coastal ecosystems could essentially be wiped out, unable to adapt to the increased concentrations of salt. 

Officials at the National Academy of Sciences and the EPA are urging city planners to take into account the threats of global warming.  As the years go by and we begin to experience more fully the effects of rising temperatures and sea level, it is essential that we become a proactive society rather than a reactive one. 

Julie Novak

No, it is not oil. Water, our most precious resource, is also our most frequently overlooked resource.  How many times do you go to the drinking fountain a day, go to the restroom to wash your hands, or even over to the pool for a swim?  Why, in a world where half its people don’t have proper drinking water do the other half swim their 500th yard to fitness without a second thought?  It is our culture, but it is also our responsibility to be educated.  1.1 billion people in this world lack access to clean water.  Most of those people live in Africa and Asia, lands that are inundated with floods and torrential downfalls during monsoon season, but lack the infrastructure to harness, conserve, regulate and distribute water to its thirsty citizens the rest of the year. 

During rainy season in these countries, water comes bitter sweetly, as a blessing and a curse.  Many people in San Diego are familiar with the multitude of beach closures that are the result of high levels of disease causing bacteria in the ocean after rain storms.  Imagine a world where that is the condition of your drinking water, daily…and this water, your water, even though it is polluted and infested with parasites, is still a highly coveted commodity.  It is what you drink, what you give you brothers and sisters, mother and father to drink.  It is high time to be aware of clean water’s growing scarcity.  It is time to shut the faucet off when you’re washing your face, brushing your teeth, washing your car.  Remember that you are responsible for a piece of the pie; you can do your share to use less; you have the ability to educate those around you! Start small, with your best friend, then don’t be shy with the rest!

Julia Novak

My sympathies go out to all the people who have suffered during this time of crisis. My respects go out to all of the amazing firefighters, peace officers, workers, volunteers and public officials who have worked overtime to fight the fires and provide a measure of security for our city.

But homeland security is not just about defeating the enemy at hand. It is about creating a climate of security that foresees and prevents threats. These fires have shown that the biggest threats to our security are from natural disasters and our own flawed model of urban development and dysfunction. It is imperative that we demand leadership for our future and our security that is more than just about endless development and mindless growth. It is about being strategically green, or as Thomas Friedman,

our new green guru, so eloquently argues,

Being green, focusing the nation on greater energy efficiency and conservation, is not some girlie-man issue. It is actually the most tough-minded, geostrategic, pro-growth and patriotic thing we can do. Living green is not for sissies. Sticking with oil, and basically saying that a country that can double the speed of microchips every 18 months is somehow incapable of innovating its way to energy independence - that is for sissies, defeatists and people who are ready to see American values eroded at home and abroad. Living green is not just a “personal virtue,” as Mr. Cheney says. It’s a national security imperative.

Assemblymember Lori Saldana argues that renewable power is good for the planet and good for our security here in San Diego,

One climate change-related issue is critical: we need distributed and locally-generated renewable power for San Diego County’s security, i.e.- solar panels on every public building. Here’s one reason why: My district (the 76th) has no fires, so we are evacuation ground zero - taking in thousands of people from around the county. If power lines to the stadium had burned, we would be in big trouble. Of the 6000+ people at the Q, many are seniors from assisted living, needing various levels of medical care. If there were solar panels around the stadium we could generate power 300 days/year, mostly for the grid.

Another reader, Carrie Schneider, comments that,

Power lines are the putative cause in the largest fire (Witch). A downed power line is a scary source of ignition in a high wind, because the fire is immediately huge. The fire to the south (Harris) affected transmission from a major corridor, causing SDG&E to issue power conservation pleas.

The real issue is how can San Diego learn from this disaster and create an opportunity to establish our city as “America’s finest green city”? One reader, JR argues that,

San Diego may want to revisit the concepts of large parklands running from the mountains to the sea, and looking at Jim Bell’s idea of increased urban density. This may not alleviate the chances of fires, but it may make them less disastrous to so many.

I understand that fires have been around for a long time. But the correlation between climate change, prolonged drought and increased fire seasons is a scientific fact (see Tom Swetnam’s co-authored article). There is no debate on this point.

Our climate has changed, and now we have to respond and radically change the way we do things to prevent more human-caused natural disasters. Friedman, as always, makes this very clear:

We need a president and a Congress with the guts not just to invade Iraq, but to also impose a gasoline tax and inspire conservation at home. That takes a real energy policy with long-term incentives for renewable energy - wind, solar, biofuels - rather than the welfare-for-oil-companies-and-special-interests that masqueraded last year as an energy bill. Enough of this Bush-Cheney nonsense that conservation, energy efficiency and environmentalism are some hobby we can’t afford. I can’t think of anything more cowardly or un-American. Real patriots, real advocates of spreading democracy around the world, live green. Green is the new red, white and blue.

Is San Diego up to the challenge?

– SERGE DEDINA

Originally published in the VOICEOFSANDIEGO.ORG

This week the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert continues her groundbreaking analysis of global climate change with a look at how human related carbon emissions are turning the ocean acidic in “The Darkening Sea: What Carbon emissions are doing to the ocean.” Kolbert’s original work in The New Yorker is spelled out in her book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. The article is an excellent summary of the reams of scientific research that has been published widely. Kolbert’s article should be required reading for anyone who believes that San Diego’s coast will be or has been immune from the impacts of climate change and that a small population of harbor seals represents a significant threat to our coastline.

Some of Kolbert’s observations include the following:

• “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the aid today—three hundred and eight parts per million—is higher than it has been at any point inn the past six hundred and fifty thousand years, and probably much longer.

• “At the current rate of emissions growth, carbon dioxide concentration will top five hundred parts per million—roughly double pre-industrial levels—by the middle of this century.”

• Increases in carbon dioxide levels “will produce an eventual global temperature rise of between three and half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, and that this in turn, will prompt a string of disasters, including fiercer hurricanes…and the inundation of many of the world’s major coastal cities.”

• “Already, humans have pumped enough carbon into the oceans—some hundred and twenty billion tons—to produce a .1 decline in surface pH…a .1 drop represents a rise in acidity of about thirty percent.”

• “Because of the slow pace of deep-ocean circulation and the long life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is impossible to reverse the acidification that has taken place.”

Kolbert, as did Ken Weiss did in his brilliant Alerted Oceans series in the Los Angeles Times, argues that this drop in pH levels will give way to an increase in ocean slime and jellyfish that will occupy ecological niches now filled by, well, fish and the rest of the ocean food chain.

The irony here, is that while Jerry Sanders, Scott Peters and the Stepford Wife public servants at the City’s Recreation Department squander public monies on dredging projects for Children’s Pool, continue to defend the bizarre rope barrier at La Jolla Shores, and oversee San Diego’s wasteful kelp eradication program, Mother Ocean will soon be taking its revenge on San Diego. The years of defending the dumping millions of gallons of sewage into the ocean, failure to clean up Mission Bay, criminal contempt for warnings about the antiquated sewage treatment system, spending millions on sand replenishment projects, and ignoring the corruption of the Bajagua project’s blocking efforts to reduce border pollution, are now coming home to roost.

If a small population of harbor seals freaks out the anti-seal brigade in La Jolla, imagine the response to beaches filled with slime and jelly fish. It is rumored that Jerry Sanders, like President Bush believes that global climate change is a hoax. Sorry, Jerry. Let’s see you finally, for once, take some leadership on the issue that will matter most to the future of San Diego.

Thanks to San Diego Councilperson Donna Frye and our friends at the Sierra Club especially Ellen Shively and John Hartley for continuing to lead the effort to have the City of San Diego protect harbor seals at Children’s Pool. Given the overall threats to marine mammals due to increasing changes in ocean chemistry (becoming more acidic), it is more important than ever to protect these seals. The behavior by anti-seal activists who devote their energy to harassing the seals is unprecedented. Serge

S.D. panel OKs more time for seals

Proposal extends closure of beach
By Bruce Lieberman
SAN DIEGO  UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

November 16, 2006

The harbor seals at Children’s Pool beach in La Jolla could receive an early Christmas present this year – an extra month of private beach access.

A proposal approved by a city committee yesterday would extend the period Children’s Pool is roped off to people from Dec. 15 through May 15. The beach is now closed from Jan. 1 through May 1.

The extra time will help protect pregnant seals and their unborn pups, and young seals still dependent on their mothers, city officials said. The pupping season for harbor seals typically runs Jan. 1 through May 1. Mother seals have sometimes abandoned their pups on a beach after they’ve been disturbed or harassed.

The San Diego City Council must approve the proposal, and the California Coastal Commission will likely review the plan.

Activists who want the beach preserved for the seals supported the proposal, but they said it will mean little if the city doesn’t enforce it. They have long complained that neither city lifeguards or federal officials enforce barriers at the small beach.

“As long as there is no enforcement of your own municipal code, this travesty will continue,” said Ellen Shively, conservation chair of the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club and one of 12 speakers in support of the measure. “Let the seals have their distance.”

A city ordinance unrelated to the barrier states, “it is unlawful to kill, wound, disturb, or maltreat any bird or animal, whether wild or domesticated” unless permitted by the city.

A rope barrier was erected along the western section of the cove in 1999, but in September 2004, it was taken down when the City Council decided to give people and seals equal access.

In 2005, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that enforces the federal Marine Marine Mammal Protection Act, recommended to the city that it replace the rope barrier. City signs urging people not to harass the seals were not effective, and the seals needed to be further protected during pupping season, the agency said.

On April 19, the City Council voted to re-erect the barrier from Jan. 1 through May 1.

“Children’s Pool offers a unique experience,” said San Diego resident John Hartley. “Nowhere else can people get so close to harbor seals and . . . experience nature. It’s a treasure that we should protect.”

We invite you to visit San Diego and experience what is to live in a city that resembles an episode of The Twilight Zone. San Diego is a city that faces an $87.4 million budget deficit in 2007, and spends annually more than eight million dollars to promote tourism and more than 20 million dollars every three years to replenish sand in their beaches. It is also a city that is willing to promote a half-million-dollar project to dredge a 200-foot beach to get rid of federally protected harbor seals. In a city with miles and miles of beaches, this tiny beach is occupied by a colony of about 200 harbor seals. The site, considered by the New York Times as one of the best places to visit in San Diego, attracts more than a million tourists every year who come to enjoy the unique sight of harbor seals giving birth and nursing their young.

Unfortunately, some City Council members are more interested in making happy some time travelers visiting from the 1930s, who don’t realize that the year is 2006, than to do what is good for San Diego. How do I know these individuals have lived in the Twilight Zone for the last few decades? These individuals violate a federal law that has protected marine mammals since 1973; they scream that children do not have places to swim in a city with hundreds of swimming pools; they scream that minorities are not welcomed in a country where segregation laws were abolished in the 1960s; and they scream that sharks are going to eat your children in a city where the only (unconfirmed) shark attacked happened in 1957.

The San Diego City Council members have in their hands the opportunity to stop the madness by protecting year-round harbor seals in Casa Beach, withdrawing the Casa Beach dredging project, and stopping the support for those individuals living in the Twilight Zone.

E-mail San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders and the City Council members and ask them to place year-round the rope that protect the Casa Beach harbor seals, to withdraw the dredging project proposal, and to establish the San Diego Marine Mammal Sanctuary in Casa Beach. Saul