Why Elves Break the Law

What drives groups like Earth Liberation Front (ELP) to court life-time prison sentences by blowing up a ski condo development in Vail or Boise Cascade offices in Oregon?

It's simple. The Elves, and many young people who sympathize with them, have come to the conclusion that when nature rapers scorn laws on the books, and government sides with the nature rapers, then desperate times demand desperate measures.

It's not surprising that the Elves are on the march. The Clinton years have seen a terrible hollowing out of the Endangered Species Act (the Vail development invaded protected lynx habitat), and one destructive, so-called "win-win" compromise--i.e., sell-out--after another brokered by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. In fact, the Interior Secretary has engineered the signal feat of uniting the animal rights crowd with Earth First!ers, who were previously somewhat at odds. Many young folk have come to the conclusion that the green rhetoric of politicians like Al Gore is empty, that the fix is always in, that nature-protecting laws passed after years of struggle mean nothing. There are thousands of examples. Here's just one.

Head south from Los Angeles on a Sunday, turn east after Oceanside and head for Ramona or Julian. You'll discover that the heart of San Diego county is mountains: the Agua Tibia, Palomar, Volcan, Cuyamaca, Laguna, and Hotsprings ranges of the Cleveland national forest form a blue wall between the coast and the deep desert. Rising to these peaks, and buffering them from the cities, are the magnificent rolling grasslands and oak covered foothills of what San Diegans call the back country, its pastures carrying not only cattle but live oak and golden eagles and profuse other birdlife. The country looks dry but is surprisingly productive of water. The mountain ranges trap fog and summer, subtropical storms from Mexico that never reach the coast. The Palomar and Cuyamaca ranges receive as much as forty inches a year.

So essential are these lands to the region's watershed, that when Teddy Roosevelt established the Cleveland in 1907, he included them within the original boundaries of the forest. (Woodrow Wilson took them out). Today, San Diego county's swelling cities continue to benefit, getting as much as 15% of their water from reservoirs fed by this land.

Ranching the back country is not a story of plucky little guys. The big spreads are part of multi-million dollar real estate portfolios whose owners are comforted by tax breaks they get for keeping these properties in agricultural uses.

Now comes the camel's nose under the tent. The real estate market in California is so feverish, that the corporate farmers are dying to move these lands out of agricultural designation and onto the open market. This transition (from cattle baronies to real estate baronies) should have been easy, given the great power of the real estate developers but for the efforts of a small group of environmentalists.

About six years ago, the members of Save Our Forests and Ranch Lands were sorting through San Diego county's land use ordinances when they discovered that underneath its agricultural preserve designation, most of the back country had been zoned for urban densities. The actual, present on-the-ground density is about one house per 1,000 acres. Save Our Forests put together a coalition of enviro and community groups and sued the county to protect the back country's agricultural status.

We're not talking ELF firebrands here. We're talking League of Women voters, the astronomers of Mount Palomar, Baykeeper, and assorted herpetologists and botanists. In 1996, superior court judge Judith McConnell found that San Diego county was so far out of line from its own and the state's legal requirements for environmental conservation and protection that she declared the county's general land use plan illegal. McConnell gave tiny Save Our Forests and Ranchlands authority over hundreds of thousands of back country acres.

The county thrashed about for six years, caught between legal requirements and the demands of the big developers fronted by the Farm Bureau. Finally, earlier this year, the county came up with a plan. It proposed to break up the big rangelands into 10-acre parcels, demurely described as "small farms." This pleasing vision of mom-'n-pop truck farms raising mangos, orchids, and macadamia nuts (the Farm Bureau's version) collides with the reality that this part of San Diego county has no ground water suitable for this kind of specialty farming, and little other infrastructure.

The real future under this county's plan would be estate homes and luxury ranchettes linked by new freeways and serviced by off-ramp commerce. In other words, exactly the sort of unsmart growth that everyone from Vice President Al Gore down to the San Diego Association of Governments has been complaining about. San Diego has more endangered species and the highest rate of habitat loss of any county in the U.S.

Not to be defeated, Save Our Forests and their allies brought the new plan to the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency, arguing that this is a plan that's going to cause exactly the problems--purity and safety of the water supply, air pollution, resource degradation, habitat loss--which are the mandate of the EPA.

Nancy Woo, the agency's regional chief agreed. On March 31 she sent a letter to the San Diego county supervisors, also to Mayor Susan Golding, advising them that the plan threatened the quality and quantity of the region's water. Woo also noted that the county's environmental impact report contained a devastating list of "unmitigatable impacts"--a list of damages to air, water, traffic, endangered wildlife, and open space--that the county admitted would be dead losses.

Woo's letter threw the county officials into desperation. It looked as though the work of years had gone for naught. The crucial supervisors meeting, April 5, approached. Then, at the last minute, came an amazing gift from the EPA. Woo sent her first letter on March 31. On Tuesday, the eve of the supes' meeting, without consulting her staff, Woo rushed another letter to the frantic San Diego officials. Lo and behold, Woo said she had misinterpreted the plan, and that her first letter should be disregarded.

In fact, Woo had not misinterpreted any significant part of the plan. But, crucially, in her second letter she did not advise the board to withhold approval pending further study. The supervisors were off the hook and duly reveled in their freedom from regulatory constraint by passing the amendment doubling the back country's density, which could mean that San Diego's back country will disappear into condoland, interspersed with Indian casinos.

Is this fate inevitable? Because the county is still under court supervision, the plan can't go ahead until superior court judge McConnell signs off on it. It's not quite over yet.

So here we have an environmental disaster in the making, one that is an obvious test case for any supposed commitment by government to bar insane squandering of natural resources. We have county government acting as the creature of big developers. We have a weak regulatory agency and only the frail reed of the law of the land, and a few crusading groups like Save Our Forests.

Small wonder Elves figure the fix is in, will always be in, and they reckon that if the lawmakers are lawless, they might as well take the same path.