LA Weekly

I've been following with interest San Diego developer Irving Okovita's lawsuit against environmental activist Sandy Steers, along with Gene Zimmerman, Robin Eliason and her husband Scott of the U.S. Forest Service. Last week's LA Times story on the suit, which invokes RICO against environmental watchdogging, is here, and the Daily Kos has a worthwhile thread on the issue going, too.

Basically, the suit alleges that the Eliasons, Zimmerman and Sandy Steers, a local environmental activist, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to a luxury condominium project Okovita has planned for Fawnskin, the little town on north shore of Big Bear Lake, nearly a critical bald eagle wintering habitat already ravaged by drought and bark beetle infestation. The Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (What do you mean? Aren't they all?) is trying to scare up defense funds as the Justice Department has so far refused to step up.

I can't imagine the won't be dismissed as frivolous when it goes to court next month, but Okovita's approach brings to light some challenges facing environmentalists trying to preserve the Endangered Species Act -- that he can even consider such action indicates something's gone terribly wrong in our collective thinking about habitat preservation, which has been ridiculed by the "Wise Use" people as a showdown between man and beast. Really the whole idea should have been, and always was, to preserve the earth for humans by first paying attention to the well-being of the creatures we share the planet with. We protect endangered snail darters because it ultimately stops us well short of endangering ourselves. We banned DDT because it was weakening the eggshells of bald eagles, only imagining what effect the long-lingering residue of this pesticide would have on us.

A reasonably good article on the history of the ESA is online at Open Spaces magazine.

Speaking of: I was hacking and sneezing over the holidays, I read the entire October 2001 "Oil and Gas Leasing Study" for the Los Padres National Forest. These things amaze me: Pages and pages of impending disasters, vividly detailed and casually dismissed. More on that to come.

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