Sticky monkey flowers are
found in the Morro Bay area. 

The term coastal dune scrub doesn’t do it justice, this subtle mix of native plants that bind the thin, shelly soils of the Estero Bay watershed in San Luis Obispo County. In the winter the shrubs hunker leafless and gray, while their inhabitants burrow or cocoon or sequester themselves beneath the shelter of duff and mulch. But in spring this landscape erupts with a pent-up passion, and the town of Los Osos is magically encircled by a fairy ring of color. Butterflies light on trailing lichen and blooming dune almond. Willow flycatchers weave nests from the fallen twigs of Morro manzanita and saint’s daisy. Badgers tunnel in the loose substrate, and falcons—peregrine and prairie—circle overhead, assessing the chances for a meal.

It doesn’t look endangered, but it is. Coastal dune scrub is a globally imperiled ecosystem, compromised nearly out of existence by our insatiable hunger for ocean-front real estate. In California we have lost more than 85 percent of this habitat, consumed it in ravenous gulps of urban sprawl in San Diego, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The ragged arc of dune scrub around Los Osos has fared better than most coastal dune scrub elsewhere. Development in this town of 14,000 has been held in check for more than 15 years by a state-imposed building moratorium as citizens struggled with a controversial sewer project. While a booming economy fueled building sprees elsewhere, in this broad coastal valley the spineflower and bird’s beak and bentgrass quietly went through their life cycles. Monarch butterflies wafted in every fall to cluster in fluttering clumps amid the mountainbalm and manzanita. About 40 native species here are classified as either endangered or threatened, including the tidewater goby and the shoulder-banded dune snail, which have joined the Morro kangaroo rat on the federal Endangered Species List.

As the sewer controversy moved closer to resolution, local residents began to appreciate the fragility of the de facto greenbelt around their community. A backlog of building projects was poised to move forward, waiting for the moratorium to be lifted. Six hundred pristine acres of dune scrub in 19 privately owned parcels separate Los Osos from agricultural fields to the south and east, and the city of Morro Bay to the north. Every single one of those acres is zoned for residential development. Subdivided to accommodate full buildout for the town, the fragile habitat could soon be bulldozed for as many as 1,500 new homes. Most people would have called any effort to save the greenbelt through public acquisition a lost cause. Luckily, Los Osos had Marla Morrissey.

Marla Morrissey lives with her seven-year-old son Keane and one-year-old daughter Rayne in a converted barn on a dead-end road at the top of Los Osos, on land that includes an oak forest on sand dunes, with trees she says are up to 400 years old. She makes her living mostly as a property manager. Disarmingly soft-spoken, unfailingly positive and polite, she’s the gentle dynamo behind a remarkable citizens’ initiative to save the Los Osos coastal dunes.

In just two years, the all-volunteer Morro Bay Greenbelt Alliance (MEGA), which she heads, has helped to attract hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from several agencies. MEGA has also helped to put coastal dune scrub on the radar screen of elected officials, government agencies, and the local press, by creating a support network for purchasing the entire greenbelt.

When Morrissey is asked what moves her, she says it’s the thought that species can disappear. “It just makes me sick to think about the loss. I would dream sometimes about the last two kangaroo rats. I don’t know . . . it’s like listening to music; for some reason I hear this. I feel relief that I would not experience if I were listening and not doing anything. I need to see the vision and work hard.”

This story can be read as a recipe for citizens who want to preserve land they love close to home. It started with a modest endeavor. Morrissey thought she would try to landscape her place with endangered species in mind. She talked with people at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with botanist John Chestnut, and with Dave Chipping, conservation chairman of the California Native Plant Society. “I found out there were 40 listed species right in my backyard, and that this habitat was globally imperiled. So my eyes got big at that point,” she said. They agreed to start working toward a larger vision.

“I’ve referred to MEGA many times in other communities as a model organization created to protect a special local landscape,” says one of MEGA’s partners and unabashed admirers, Margaret Eadington of the Trust for Public Land (TPL). “They have done so many things right.”

The first thing MEGA did right was to believe in the importance of the mission and its chances for success. The second was to steer toward the goal, refusing to be distracted. The third was to form a powerful, knowledgeable team. Along with Chipping and Chestnut, it has wildlife photographers Dennis Sheridan and Marlin Harms on board, and Jude Clark-Warnershire, a community activist. All who have worked with the group agree, however, that “Marla is the heart and soul of the project.”

“She never gets sidetracked or considers any outcome other than success,” said Chestnut. “She lives and breathes her greenbelt project, and gets others involved in a very positive way,” adds Carol Arnold, central coast program manager for the Coastal Conservancy.

To be sure, neither MEGA nor its leader sprouted from thin air. The Coastal Conservancy and Ray Belknap, executive director of the San Luis Obispo Land Conservancy, had been working to protect this habitat through landowner conservation agreements. Their approach was based on the reasoning that no agency would have the funds to acquire all the properties needing protection.

In 1995, with the help of $100,000 from the Coastal Conservancy, the Land Conservancy undertook a comprehensive inventory of all the parcels in question, recording ownership, acreage, zoning, current use, and habitat values. Maps revealed a continuous band of undisturbed dune scrub, in a rough horseshoe around the town. The western end includes wetlands adjacent to Montana de Oro State Park and Morro Bay State Park. The northern end terminates at Los Osos Creek as it flows into Morro Bay State Park. The Land Conservancy and Coastal Conservancy prepared a conservation plan that proposed a greenbelt to link the two state parks and provide a permanent wildlife corridor that would also be accessible to the public.

The ground was thus prepared and the seeds planted, so that a citizen force could sprout. Armed with the conservation plan as well as with surveys by the Department of Fish and Game, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the California Native Plant Society, MEGA’s core group got to work. They produced the well-written, beautifully illustrated 15-page Proposal to Protect the Los Osos Coastal Dunes, incorporating data from the conservation plan. In doing so, they realized something interesting:

“There are all these plans and reports and studies just sitting around gathering dust on the shelves,” says Morrissey. “We found that when the community is interested in helping these agencies do what they are charged with doing it really catalyzes the situation.”

U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Kate Symonds has been one of MEGA’s chief advisors from the start. “The truth is, agencies simply can’t implement their goals without the help and cooperation of the community,” says Symonds. For an agency that is often vilified by the press and local governments, Symonds says, it was refreshing to encounter a community that welcomed its presence.

With their attractive Proposal as bait, MEGA went fishing, searching out every state and federal agency with a possible interest in their project, ferreting out funding sources. “It was obvious no one agency could pull this off,” says Morrissey. “We needed matching funds. So we divided it up like a big pie and then asked, ‘Who are the slices?’”

MEGA made overtures to agencies, land trusts, private conservation organizations, and every elected official. Morrissey called them on the phone. She dropped by their offices. She organized tours for them with botanists and entomologists. “There’s so much to see once you improve your observation skills,” she said.

Along the way the MEGA group became more and more aware that bureaucracies like BLM, Fish and Game, State Parks, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife are staffed by human beings who care about conservation. But, as Kate Symonds pointed out, they are also understaffed and underfunded. The prospect of having a dedicated, focused community group to shoulder some of the responsibility for coordination and clerical help proved very inviting. “These public servants are all heroes,” says Morrissey. “They are wonderful. They go out of their way and work overtime for free and spend their weekends on this because they care as much as we do.” Symonds and others offered advice, provided documentation, and wrote letters of support.

It all came together in March 1998, when MEGA held a momentous meeting at which they formally unveiled their greenbelt plan. To this meeting they invited representatives of agencies and organizations that could advance their plan: the Department of Fish and Game and its acquisitions arm, the Wildlife Conservation Board, which had been trying for 15 years to acquire some properties in the area; the Coastal Conservancy, which had helped to acquire other properties in the area as part of its Morro Bay Enhancement Program; the State Parks Department, Caltrans, U.S. Fish and Wild-life Service, National Parks Service, National Estuary Program, Bureau of Land Management, TPL, Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo, the local Natural Resource Conservation District, the County, and aides to Congresswoman Lois Capps, Senator Jack O’Connell, and Assemblyman Tom
Bordonaro. They all came.

“The meeting produced a feeling of cooperation and a sense of urgency and opportunity because of the many new participants,” said Arnold.

“They brought us all together in one room and made us all feel like we were part of a very important and compelling effort that had a lot of momentum and important people helping and we’d be dumb not to be there,” recalled Eadington.

A roundtable discussion followed a slide show of the dunes, exquisitely photographed by Harms and Sheridan, and narrated by Chipping and Chestnut. “The psychology of not being alone and being a part of something bigger was the biggest asset,” said Chipping. “It was like the synergy reached critical mass that day.”

Driven by local citizens’ opposition to development in the greenbelt, agency staff began to explore whether a joint effort to acquire the greenbelt for habitat and open space might be feasible. As though working on a big jigsaw puzzle, they considered the pieces and how they might fit together. As more players stepped forward, the question evolved from “if” to “how” and “when.”

That meeting was the clincher. To MEGA, even now it seems miraculous. “We didn’t set out to create a coalition, we set out to save the land,” reflects Morrissey. But the interagency collaboration they catalyzed has turned out to be the key to effective action.

Political support also began to gel. Aides to O’Connell and Bordonaro began to talk about getting bipartisan support for adding a line item to the budget. Although the funding did not survive the then-governor’s pen, the outlook for the coming year looks more promising.

One of MEGA’s rules is that we never make anyone look bad,” says Chestnut. “We want a love-fest here. We are dealing with some extremely conservative landowners, and if we antagonize them it will go badly. You have to keep people talking to you.”

The same attitude has permeated the group’s internal dynamics, and working relationships have evolved into enduring friendships. “We just don’t fight,” says Chestnut. “We’ve kept the egos out of it. We’ve all observed campaigns that collapsed at the moment of success, and we want to avoid that.”

Morrissey echoes his observations with passion. “To let any of that interfere means species could die. Because we are arguing in a meeting? We can’t afford to do that.”

Yet another secret to MEGA’s success is more surprising. Morrissey solemnly holds up her cordless phone and says: “If I had a computer, none of this would have ever happened. I call people up and talk to them. The phone is a deep organizational secret.” She adds, however, that she has a hidden helper who toils on e-mail: her mother, Betty Morrissey. And then she wants to make sure—giving credit generously is also part of MEGA’s success—that her father, Howard, is acknowledged for having taught her how to run a business or an organization. And then there is Sharon Negri, director of the Mountain Lion Foundation, who inspired her and taught her, and Negri’s husband, Mark DuBois, who started Friends of the River. Nothing springs from the ground full-blown. The experience of others prepares that ground.

MEGA’s efforts have not gone unnoticed by other conservation groups in the county. A community coalition to purchase the 14,000-acre Santa Margarita Ranch some 20 miles inland is following the MEGA model closely and building on many of the relationships that Morrissey’s group has established with resource agencies.

“Conservation groups all benefit and learn from others’ success,” says John Beccia, a Paso Robles kindergarten teacher who is the president of Santa Margarita Area Residents Together (SMART). “In our case, we patterned our conservation document after MEGA’s, and we saw right away the benefit of broad agency buy-in. Every acquisition project has its unique aspects, and you have to tailor your efforts accordingly. But networking and creating good working relationships is always critical.”

“Fifty years from now, people will know how hard all these people worked to save these places,” says Morrissey, the dreamer who dwells in reality. “They are going to stand out as the heroes who saved this place. I have had this thought: I’m taking time away from my children. But then I’ve seen, this project is about the children.”

Sarah Christie is an environmental analyst
with the Environmental Center of San Luis Obispo County.

Dave Chipping leads a plant-identification walk.