Ecosystem Management: Progress or Eyewash? MARC BEYELER AND ELENA EGER rom his home above the mountain hamlet of Julian, nestled in the Peninsular Range Province 50 miles northeast of the San Diego shore, Michael Beck, a county planning commissioner and conservationist, enjoys a 100-mile east-west view on a clear day. In a single sweep of his gaze he can see the Salton Sea, the Anza-Borrego Desert, and the ocean beyond Del Mar and La Jolla. The three-block-long town (population 2,700), dating back to the Gold Rush, is surrounded by state parks and natural forests. Economically, it depends on tourism, and is famous for its apples, fine apple pie, and its snow. Geographically it's in the transition zone between desert and foothills, at the headwaters of the San Dieguito River, which empties into the ocean at Del Mar. For a decade, Beck has watched development creeping eastward from the coast toward the foothills. He had already seen this process once, growing up in Cucamonga, San Bernardino County. The pastoral landscape had been plowed under and paved over, and his native town strangled by "quintessential urban sprawl," he says. In Julian he rediscovered what his childhood landscape had lost: "a healthy natural environment and a strong sense of community." So he moved here 11 years ago. But now, as he once again watches the oncoming destruction, Beck realizes that no matter how hard a community tries to protect its values, it cannot, on its own, stem the tide of regional growth and development.

COPYRIGHT KIM STERRETT

Photo: The Santa Margarita River, last free-flowing river in southern California, meets the ocean at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base.

Beck came to the conclusion that vast landscapes, such as those he sees outside his windows, can only be preserved through large-scale ecosystem management. In 1991 he became a founder of the Endangered Habitats League, which supports bioregional environmental strategies that encompass entire landscapes. The League's members include more than 30 conservation organizations, primarily in the highly urbanized and fragmented five-county region of southern California. Beck is now the League's San Diego County coordinator. What, exactly, is ecosystem management? It is now widely understood that the focus of conservation efforts needs to be expanded. To protect individual species, habitats of sufficient size are required (see Summer 1990 Coast & Ocean for article on wildlife corridors); to protect wetlands, land-use practices in the upper watersheds may have to be improved; to reduce water pollution offshore, numerous watersheds may have to be considered (see Summer 1996 Coast & Ocean). In all such conservation efforts, it is imperative that human beings be considered part of the landscape. Conservation planning has begun to focus on large-scale processes in broadly defined eco- or bioregions, multiple watershed areas, and hydrologic basins. While watershed management is a favorite concept today, close on its heels is ecosystem management. Both concepts reflect a growing consensus about the limits of current regulatory approaches, the opportunities presented by new technologies, especially Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and various advances in environmental science and policy. Because the concept of ecosystem management is evolving, no single definition has yet gained wide acceptance. The Keystone National Policy Dialogue on Ecosystem Management, Final Report, October 1996, sums it up this way: "The idea of an ecosystem management approach is to address large-scale, long-term, complex problems by blending ecological, economic, and social goals, and by acknowledging that people are integral, interacting parts of nature." Ed Grumbine, director of the Sierra Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, writing in the March 1994 issue of Conservation Biology, offers this working definition: "Ecosystem management integrates scientific knowledge of ecological relationships within a complex sociopolitical and values framework toward the general goal of protecting native ecosystem integrity over the long run."

COPYRIGHT KIMBALL/NANESSENCE

Photo: Where the cattle stand in this picture, taken in the early 1980s in what was the Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve, there is now a four-lane parkway, Sorrento Valley Boulevard. "Developers illegally flattened and graded a tributary canyon and mesa above the preserve," says photographer Chuck Kimball. "Lopez Canyon and a historic ranch house disappeared from the face of the earth."

Major ecosystem planning efforts along the California coast include the Natural Communities Conservation Planning (NCCP) program and the California-federal Bay-Delta Program. The NCCP is the largest and most advanced among the California programs, and the Endangered Habitats League is active in shaping it. California Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler launched the NCCP program in 1991 to avert "regulatory gridlock" and "species-by-species" battles. The program has two interdependent goals. The first is to protect habitat so as to benefit many species, not just those already listed as threatened and endangered, and thereby prevent others from declining to the point where they require special protection. The second is to offer some protection to landowners and developers who participate in NCCP programs. The program has attracted nationwide attention. "Integrated habitat conservation of this magnitude and degree has occurred nowhere else in the United States," Wheeler has said. How Realistic Are These Goals? Is the NCCP a pathbreaking conservation program, or a political ploy to circumvent the federal and state Endangered Species Acts? Skeptics say the program could serve as a tool for dismantling environmental legislation without replacing the protection it offers. Joel Reynolds, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a national environmental organization, argued in an October 1995 talk at the California State Bar's annual Environmental Law Institute that current NCCP efforts lack adequate scientific peer review and offer too few opportunities for public participation. He charged that landowners are given overly broad (and possibly illegal) assurances that no changes will be required in the scope and scale of existing measures to protect and preserve habitat, and that NCCP does not insure that plans will be carried out because it does not guarantee necessary funding. Beck agrees there are reasons for wariness but believes that the NCCP approach holds great promise. What shape the program assumes will depend on who plays an active role in the shaping. "We're in favor of the NCCP program, but at the same time we have been strong critics from its day one," he says. "The League's role has been one of stakeholder and constructive critic. Our objective has been to help fashion a legitimate ecosystem reserve if that is possibleout of the mix of land use, politics, economics, and biology." "As a strictly voluntary program without scientific oversight, the early NCCP appeared to promise a political solution but not, from our perspective, an ecological one," Beck continues. As the program has unfolded, moreover, he has found that it is different in each of the five counties involved. "In each case our support, or lack of it, is based on scrutiny of the biological integrity of the plan and feasibility of implementation," he says. Gnatcatcher Listing Opens the Way In 1993, the state's interest in making the NCCP program work was heightened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's proposal to list the California gnatcatcher as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. What's left of this small bird's habitat in southern California, coastal sage scrub, is also the region's prime real estate. Development interests had a great stake in averting prolonged battles about habitat for this or any other species that might become a candidate for federal or state listing. Driven by a fear of costly court fights and delays, different interests welcomed the opportunity to seek broad agreement on a conservation approach that would benefit not only this small bird but multiple species and at the same time remove onerous regulatory requirements.

Photo: California gnatcatcher.

COPYRIGHT JAMES R. GALLAGHER/SEA & SAGE AUDUBON LIBRARY

Now five years old, the NCCP program's local and state projects are concluding the planning stages and taking the first steps toward land acquisition and preservation. These processes are very complex, involving landowners and developers; federal, state, county, and municipal governments; and numerous nongovernmental advocacy and community organizations. If plans requiring significant acquisition and enhancement of habitat lands are realized, they will help to resolve some of the most important land use planning problems in California. The pace and scale of development will be affected within some of the state's fastest-growing areas. Large-scale economic and employment benefits will result as new protection measures replace the time-consuming and costly species-by-species battles that have characterized development in this region for the past decade or more. In addition, many supporters of the NCCP effort believe that these current ecosystem-based plans will achieve better results than single-species efforts, which have failed to significantly protect and preserve species of concern within the past two decades. The program's success will depend in large part on the interest and cooperation of landowners, public and private, who will have the most difficult challenges and most important stewardship functions. Protecting habitat values and restoring degraded habitats is time-consuming, often costly, and a practice for which the scientific techniques are still emerging. How It's Working The five-county area of the NCCP program is divided into regions and subregions. Progress is uneven. Los Angeles County has a small program on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. San Bernardino and Riverside Counties are considering NCCP programs for their regions. Orange County has two subregional programs, and San Diego County has three, at different stages of development. In the northern and southern subregions, multihabitat conservation plans are moving ahead, while in the eastern subregion the program is in its infancy.

COPYRIGHT TED WALTON

Photo: SD&E lineman Alvin White helped to move a nest that a pair of red-tailed hawks had built in a dangerous location. The previous year a fledgling hatched by the same pair here had been electrocuted by touching a power line. The arm of the pole was extended another five feet so the nest could be moved away from the line.

One of the most energetic and substantial participants in the NCCP is the San Diego Gas & Electric Company (SDG&E), one of the county's largest landowners and employers. Its 4,000-square-mile service area contains about 75 percent of California's remaining gnatcatcher habitat. (This small bird also lives in Riverside, Orange, and Los Angeles Counties.) SDG&E was the first to complete a subregional conservation plan for multiple habitat and species protection, and by 1995 had successfully negotiated approval by federal and state regulatory agencies. This freed the company for 55 years from the requirement to obtain a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Department of Fish and Game each time it undertook to expand or repair any part of its energy infrastructure in areas protected by the federal and state Endangered Species Acts. The two agencies will monitor the plan's effectiveness. After 25 years the impacts on habitat will be reviewed, and at that time the mitigation requirements for those impacts can be modified. Separate, case-by-case permits will continue to be required for extraordinary expansions of the system, such as building a generating plant. As part of its conservation plan, SDG&E has purchased two parcels of land--a total of 240 acres--selected from a list provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and California Fish and Game as significant habitat areas, and turned them over to the agencies. This "conservation bank" is intended to mitigate unavoidable habitat damage by company activities during the next 55 years. However, "the most important mitigation measures in SDG&E's permit are the avoidance of impacts whenever possible," explained Don Rose, supervisor of land planning and natural resources for the utility. A newly published employee field guide, Environmentally Sensitive Construction and Maintenance, contains substantial changes in standard practices. For example, materials and crews must enter particularly sensitive areas by helicopter. Each field employee is required to take training in these practices.

COPYRIGHT TED WALTON

Photo: Rick Peterson, Terry Nebel, Tom Duncan, and John Hernandez (left to right) took field trips to learn how to identify sensitive plant and animal species. These three property management representatives and environmental surveyors now help train other SDG&E employees in habitat protection.

In another NCCP effort in San Diego County, the U.S. Department of the Interior is working to establish a 50,000-acre wildlife refuge study area in the Otay-Sweetwater region near the California-Mexico border. The Bureau of Land Management is investigating the possibility of land trades to protect valuable habitat adjacent to this proposed refuge. Efforts are also under way to create a 150,000-acre regional preserve in the northern coastal zone, which, says Michael Beck, is even more fragmented than the southern zone. All this is meant to secure contiguous habitat for the gnatcatcher and about 80 other species, mitigating the damage that will occur as population grows and economic development continues elsewhere in the coastal scrub of San Diego. In theory, both wildlife and development interests will benefit more than if mitigation continued to be required piecemeal. The regulatory process will be streamlined, and the gnatcatcher's prospects of survival will be better within a large protected habitat area than it would be among small preserves scattered throughout the vast urbanized landscape. The NCCP initiative is one of several launched by Resources Secretary Wheeler to move California's fragmented conservation efforts toward synergistic cooperation. In 1991 he established the California Biodiversity Council, composed of representatives of 35 state, federal, and local agencies, which meets to exchange information, explore themes of common interest, and encourage regional efforts to promote biodiversity conservation consistent with economic development. Can California, and its coastal neighbors, protect environmental quality and natural resources in the face of rapid population growth and economic development? The current initiatives in ecosystem and bioregional planning offer some hope. The future will depend on whether they are supported by high-priority attention, funding, and hard work based on a powerful vision. Marc Beyeler and Elena Eger are Coastal Conservancy staff members. They are working with the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation on a pilot project to address land-based sources of marine pollution within the southern California Bight.