Coal Canyon Address
I gave this short speech at the celebration on 29 November 2000 at which the
key 663-acre parcel of Coal Canyon was dedicated as a portion of Chino Hills
State Park. The Coal Canyon Corridor is one of 2 critical linkages that I had
identified in my studies (Beier 1993, 1995, 1996) as crucial to the survival
of the puma population in the Santa Ana Mountains. The ceremony took place in
Coal Canyon.
Geary closes the deal on the last 32 acres of the Coal Canyon linkage -
Summer 2001 The Chino Hills are in the background.
Let me open with a quote by Michael Soulé, one of the founders of the field
of Conservation Biology. Michael once wrote:
"There are no hopeless cases only expensive cases and people without hope."
We are standing here today because a few people with hope looked at this
expensive case and said, We must preserve this corridor. We CAN preserve this
corridor. WE WILL preserve this corridor. I want to mention 5 of those hopeful
people.
Connie Spenger and Gordon Ruser are the 2 individuals they called themselves
Friends of Tecate Cypress, but in fact they were just 2 people who
single-handedly preserved the upper half of this canyon as The Tecate Cypress
Reserve 10 years ago. For those of you who did not know Gordon Ruser, he was
the most obnoxious, annoying nag you ever hope to meet he was the sort of a
jerk who would call you up at 5AM on a Saturday morning and read you a 3 page
legal document in an abrasive monotone, and then demand your immediate
response. But he had a heart of gold, and when he died a couple years ago,
this canyon lost a great friend. In a strange way, I miss those 5AM phone
calls. Thank you, Connie. God bless you, Gordon.
The main work horses for the last 5 years have been Claire Schlotterbeck and
Geary Hund, and Geary’s boss Rick Rayburn. Claire and Geary in particular
are well the only fair word that comes to mind is heroes. When I teach my
Conservation Biology class, I use Claire and Geary as examples of how
effective 1 or 2 hard-working, dedicated people can be. Conservation
biologists like myself often pretend that our science is oh-so-important,
but deep in our hearts, we know that research doesn’t really conserve land
people conserve land, and this land, this canyon, owes a lot to Claire
Schlotterbeck and Geary Hund. I am truly honored to have known and worked
with them.
Geary Hund
My job today, however, is to celebrate the biological value of this land, and
to urge some of you to become the next Claire Schlotterbeck and the next
Geary Hund, to become the heroes that preserve the other threatened linkages
in this great state and region.
Claire Schlotterbeck
So let me talk about Coal Canyon its place in the region and the world.
In Conservation Biology, we often speak of hotspots of biodiversity places
where evolution has endowed the landscape with an especially large number of
species, many of which are found nowhere else in the world. Most of the major
hotspots are in the tropics. One recent study showed 19 of the 25 most
important hotspots were in tropical regions. Only 2 of those hotspots lie in
the United States one in Hawaii (our only truly tropical state) and the
other here in the California floristic province of southern California. Not
only is Southern California one of the 25 most important places for
biodiversity on the planet, but it has the dubious distinction of being the
region of the US with the most species and ecosystems at risk of extirpation.
One plant community alone southern California Coastal Sage Scrub contains
over 35 species of plants, 2 insects, 7 reptiles, 4 birds, and 7 mammals that
are either listed or candidates for listing as endangered.
We stand today in the very heart of this region of diversity and danger. From
here you can look towards:
the half million acres of the Santa Ana Mountains to the south
the 40,000 acres of the Chino and Puente Hills to the north
and, this last linkage 500 or so acres connecting the two.
I became familiar with this linkage when I studied mountain lions in these
mountains and hills from 1988 through 1992. During those few years I saw
development after development approved, narrowing the width of this corridor
by about 75%. I documented that even though the part of this corridor near
the freeway is in a condition that can only be described as ugly from a
mountain lion’s perspective, it does function to allow mountain lions to move
between these 2 areas. From my data on population density, survival rates,
and birth rates, I learned that loss of this corridor would guarantee the
extinction of mountain lions from the Chino Hills, and would also endanger
the population in the Santa Anas.
As I talked to others about my findings that mountain lions use and need this
corridor, we all realized that this is much more than a mountain lion corridor.
In the Chino Hills, there are probably 21 vertebrate species with populations
of less than 500 individuals, and at least 3 or 4 species that probably number
fewer than 50 breeding adults. Each of these small populations would be at
enormous risk of extinction if the corridor were lost.
But the linkage is also important for the Santa Ana Mountains. Let me give
you one example: most of the Chino Hills are grasslands, but grasslands are
rare in the Santa Anas Orange County has built houses on all its grasslands
and grassland mammals like black-tailed jackrabbits and American badgers are
now vanishingly rare in the Santa Anas. But both jackrabbits and badgers are
more abundant in the Chino Hills, and this linkage by allowing some
individuals and their genetic material to move from the Chino Hills to the
Santa Anas can keep badgers and jackrabbits in the Santa Anas. Basically for
any sort of plant or animal that does not fly, this is the last linkage in
both directions.
It took some time to get our message across. Besides the obvious economic
obstacles, there was one conceptual issue that made this corridor a hard sell.
That issue was that down near the freeway this looked not so much like a
corridor for animals and plants, but more like a gauntlet or a challenge
course that we dared animals to use. Northbound, an animal encounters sterile
cut and fill slopes on the south side of the freeway, then the 8-lane monster
itself, with a spooky concrete box culvert and a noisy paved vehicle underpass.
Then on the other side, dirt packed hard as pavement, and a choice between
walking through a horse stables or a motorcycle raceway. Then a river, a golf
course, and railroad tracks. When any of us tried to sell this corridor, the
most frequent response was You want to preserve that?
It took a while for people to hear our answer: No, we do not want to preserve
that ugly mess we want to restore it to something beautiful. We want to
restore native vegetation to those cut and fill slopes on the Coal Canyon
side of the freeway, and to the stables and the raceway. We want to rip the
pavement and lighting out of this underpass. Then we want to take Coal Canyon
out of its concrete tomb and put at least half of its flow back into that
underpass. We don’t want to preserve that vehicle underpass we want to
transform it into a waterway and an underpass for animals, plants, and people.
The restoration is really the most exciting part of this project. So often
conservationists in California spend their lives fighting one dismal project
after another, trying to slow the rate at which things get worse. But this
project is different. It is not working AGAINST something bad it is working
FOR something good. Restoring a functional linkage for all plants and animals
in what is now a degraded area is a powerful and positive thing to do. I am
not aware of any other effort to restore a biological corridor with this level
of regional importance to so many species. This effort will set a global
precedent. Conservation-minded citizens and public servants around the world
will soon be able to look at Coal Canyon as an inspiring example of how an
ecological mistake was corrected through thoughtful public action.
But we must not rest on our laurels. Thoughtful managers of public lands,
working with conservation biologists and non-governmental organizations, have
identified many other linkages in need of preservation and restoration in
southern California. The core areas to be connected by these linkages are in
most cases pretty obvious to anyone who looks at a map they are those spots
without roads and cities, and most of the core areas are parks or national
forests or reserves of some sort. Those few large wildlands that are
unprotected certainly ought to be protected immediately, and some core areas
need to be expanded. But we all know that southern California has just about
all of the large wildland core areas that it will ever have. The problem now
is that these core areas are becoming isolated just like the Chino Hills
came within one housing project of being isolated and they will be
biologically impoverished if that isolation occurs.
So saving and restoring the linkages is the next big conservation step. If
you look at a map, the linkages like the core areas - are rather obvious.
But unlike the cores, few of the potential or actual linkages are in parks
or protected status. Conserving and restoring these linkages is the great
conservation challenge facing southern California in the coming decade. In
10 years our options to conserve or restore linkages will be gone in many,
perhaps most, of the cases.
I want to leave you with a single example. This Santa Ana mountain range is
now linked by Coal Canyon to the Chino Hills, and we can think of this as a
united whole. But this newly linked ecosystem is nearly encircled by cities
and towns. Only one other large wild area lies near this new Santa Ana-Chino
Hills ecosystem. It is the Mt Palomar range of hills and mountains, which
comes close to the Santa Ana mountains along Interstate 15 just south of
Temecula and north of Fallbrook. I call this last potential area of
connectivity the Pechanga Corridor because it runs parallel to Pechanga Creek.
This linkage is the very last path into and out of the Santa Anas. If the
Pechanga Corridor is lost, mountain lions will become extinct throughout the
Santa Anas and the Chino Hills.
Fortunately, the Pechanga Corridor is not nearly as degraded as Coal Canyon.
I believe that it is even more important. My most fervent dream is that
someone will leave this celebration today with determination saying to
themselves We must preserve the Pechanga corridor. We CAN preserve this
corridor. WE WILL preserve this corridor.
If you are a person who accepts this challenge, I can promise you several
years of hard work. I can promise you that untold times people will look at
you and say You want to preserve that? But I can also promise you that you
will get to work with some of the best human beings you will ever know. And
I can promise you that you will find the work more refreshing than the years
you may have spent gasping in anguish over maps of new freeways and new gated
communities that would replace the irreplacable. Because now you will be
drawing a new map that is part of a vision for conserving your landscape and
your sense of place. Most important, you will know that there are no hopeless
cases, only expensive cases and people with hope people like yourself. And
that hope makes all the difference.
Celebrations like this are times to affirm our sense of hope, and to renew
our resolve. Like a flower in bud about to burst open, our human energy is in
bud, about to create and restore a new landscape. I would like to close with
a poem by Denise Levertov that expresses that hope:
We have only begun to love the earth.
We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
- so much is in the bud.
How can desire fail?
- we have only begun
to imagine justice and wholeness,
only begun to envision
how it might be to live as siblings
with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.
Surely our human river cannot already be hastening
into the sea of non-being?
Surely our river cannot drag, in its silt, all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet
there is too much broken
that must be mended,
too much hurt we have done
that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our
solitudes into the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.
"...too much broken that must be mended..."
In Dec 2003, CalTrans started to rip the asphalt out of this underpass, destroy the ramps, and
transfer the interchange to California State Parks. This is the first
interchange relinquished for conservation purposes in California's history.
Q: What do you call an interchange that is ripped out to make
a wildlife crossing?
 
A: A good start!
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