Last community-based environmental organization walks away from Discovery Center project

And then there were none.

The last community-based environmental organization on the booster committee for the troubled San Gabriel River Discovery Center water museum project voted in July to remove itself from the committee.

The exit of the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society is the latest page in an exodus from the project. In past years, the Discovery Center Authority claimed to have nearly 30 members on the committee. Today the list is down to seven.

The project booster committee is now made up almost exclusively of government agencies and water districts, a fact which reveals the project for what it is: unsustainable pork-barrel spending at a time when the taxpayer and ratepayer can no longer bear it.

The $22 million taxpayer-funded water museum and meeting hall -- deemed "incompatible" with the Whittier Narrows Significant Ecological Area by the county's own habitat experts -- is being pushed by a group of government agencies and water districts. Now, their booster committee consists almost exclusively of other government agencies and water districts.

Remaining members include the watershed council, an interest group dominated by agencies, water districts and utility companies; and another government agency whose chairman supports expanded oil drilling in the nearby Whittier Hills even though the agency was established to protect habitat and wildlife there.

Organizations that have decided to walk away because of their opposition to the project or their concerns about its goals, impacts and viability include the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and the Whittier Narrows Nature Center Associates. Volunteer members of these and other organizations are deeply committed to community, conservation and education -- and they reject the destruction of wildlife habitat and public lands for a building intended primarily as a meeting hall for government officials and water execs.

But the authority seems to be little concerned that the local community, the habitat experts and the conservationists have all rejected the project. With a handful of its fellow agencies still on the booster club, the authority can claim a kind of support. But that support reveals the project for what it is: unsustainable pork-barrel spending at a time when the taxpayer and ratepayer can no longer bear it.

Long absent bird species seen in Whittier Narrows

A recent story in the Whittier Daily News highlighted the apparent return of some sensitive bird species to the Whittier Narrows.

A recent sighting of a yellow-billed cuckoo "has set off biologists and birders around the area and has brought new attention to the Whittier Narrows, and specifically a 4-mile stretch of the Rio Hondo," writes journalist Ben Baeder.

The bird, a relative of the woodpecker, had not been spotted in the San Gabriel Valley since 1952, Baeder writes.

Birders have also spotted larger numbers of other sensitive species in recent years, including the endangered least Bell's vireo (pictured), the yellow-breasted chat and the yellow warbler.

The yellow-billed cuckoo, says the Center for Biological Diversity, "has declined precipitously throughout its range in southern Canada, the United States, and northern Mexico.

"The cause of the cuckoo's demise is the same threat facing most endangered species--habitat loss."

While the Bell's vireo species is declining across its range due to habitat degradation and cowbird parasitism, says the Audubon Society, the least Bell's vireo subspecies "is recovering with aggressive habitat protection and restoration."

The evidence of an apparent turnaround in the Whittier Narrows points to the importance of habitat preservation and restoration--and serves to highlight the threat posed to habitat and wildlife by the proposed San Gabriel River Discovery Center.

Biologist Dan Cooper, who spotted the cuckoo, spoke of the ecological importance of Whittier Narrows, much of which is a county Significant Ecological Area and which forms part of Audubon's Los Angeles Flood Control Basins Important Bird Area.

"Its very much a refuge," Cooper told the newspaper. "It's probably the best chance we have of seeing the cuckoos, turtles and other species that used to be pretty common."

What's environmental education without the environment?

Louis Sahagun recently wrote a brief but great story on a program at Dorsey High School that has kids helping to try bring the cactus wren to the new Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook State Park.

The work they're doing includes restoration of cactus sage brush habitat and construction of artificial nests in an effort to bring back a bird that hasn't been seen in the area for a decade.

Sahagun writes that the work "part of an urban ecology campaign--organized by Dorsey, the Los Angeles Audubon Society and a local business, Earthworks Restoration Inc.--to transform selected inner-city youths into stewards of the environment."

But what really caught my attention were the views expressed by Stacey Vigallon, Los Angeles Audubon's director of interpretation:

"These students depend on the cactus wren for getting hands-on training to become informed citizens with an appreciation for a healthy environment and a green economy," she said. "The bird depends on them for habitat restoration and, in the not-too-distant future, votes on environmental issues crucial to its survival."

This is where Vigallon and others have it right--and the San Gabriel River Discovery Center Authority has it all wrong.

They simply fail to see the value that a living, breathing, intact wildlife sanctuary has for the community, for children and for the future of environmentalism.

"If future generations lack experiences in nature," writes Erica Gies in a recent issue of Land & People, "the motivation to support environmental and conservation programs could falter."

This is not an attack on the discovery center as a concept, but a defense of the Whittier Narrows Natural Area and of an approach that keeps the focus where it belongs: on nature and firsthand experiences of nature.

Sadly, the government agencies and water districts behind the discovery center seem to view the Natural Area as only a wasteland, an empty lot that needs the improvements of man.

But we should take a moment to consider how nature might improve us and how through that lesson all life might benefit.

Biologist Robert Michael Pyle gets the last word on this matter: "What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren?"

Audubon Society's Owens Lake and Los Angeles Flood Control Basins Important Bird Areas

A recent LA Times article reported on a reborn Owens Lake and its almost overnight impact on birds.

The 100-square-mile lake near Sequoia National Park was turned into a salt flat after LA DWP diverted its waters into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. But since 2001, the utility “has flooded portions of the lake bed to control choking dust pollution.”

The result, Louis Sahagun writes, is “one of environmentalism's unintended successes: tens of thousands of migrating waterfowl and shorebirds roosting on a dust-control project.”

“In fall and spring, [the lake] now attracts about 50,000 birds, including roughly 500 snowy plovers, a shorebird listed as a species of special concern. Breeding on sandbars and in thatches of grass are colonies of yellow-headed blackbirds.”

Owens Lake has turned around so dramatically that Audubon California this year “designated Owens Lake one of the 17 most important bird areas in the state and a globally important wetlands in the making.”

In an earlier LATimes.com Greenspace blog post, Sahagun quotes IBA program director Andrea Jones on the goals of the program:

“Our main goal is to get them into the hands of federal and state wildlife agencies, state parks, land trusts and county planners. We created them to make both the public and agencies officially aware of where the largest numbers of birds are located. This information can help prioritize areas for conservation efforts, and raise awareness when it comes to proposed development projects and other activities."

The sad irony is that much closer to home, an important bird area is already in the hands of public agencies—and they’re putting development well ahead of conservation.

Whittier Narrows Natural Area and Recreation Area form part of the Audubon Society’s Los Angeles Flood Control Basins Important Bird Area. But it’s the Natural Area wildlife sanctuary that agencies and water districts have selected as the location for the San Gabriel River Discovery Center, threatening to tear up wildlife habitat and replace it with a massively increased human footprint.

That so poorly developed and environmentally thoughtless a proposal is even on the table doesn’t come as a surprise when one realizes that, as Sahagun points out, “very little of the sprawling Los Angeles Flood Control Basins area, which remains extremely vulnerable to development for soccer fields and golf courses, is even nominally managed for biodiversity.”

But perhaps we shouldn't lose hope. Perhaps the important bird area program serves best as starting point, a place where concerned citizens can begin conversations with agencies and officials and action toward conserving these important habitats and their wildlife.