Our region's lost world is found
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/louv/20050301-9999-...
By Richard Louv
March 1, 2005
Like many San Diegans, I know more about the city of New York or the Rocky Mountains of Colorado than I know about the landscape of Baja California.
The extent of my ignorance became clear one early evening a few years ago, 153 miles south of the border, under the tutelage of Andy Meling. Andy, one
of the elders of the famous Meling Ranch established in the late 1800s by immigrants from Norway and Denmark, looked a lot like Robert Duvall in
"Lonesome Dove." He had taken my teenage son Jason and me high into the Sierra San Pedro Martir ? a sky island, as scientists call the remnant
mountains of a strange archipelago that extends from Southern California into Baja.
We walked through tangled oaks in violet light and peered upward at the white granite Picacho del Diablo, which rises 10,154 feet through pinon, pine
and quaking aspen. Later, I read in Fremontia, a journal of the California Native Plant Society, that this "true mountain island" is a lost world, a
virtual relic of the Pleistocene. Cut off by time and geography, life here is "ethereal ... primeval," the journal reported.
I had no idea that such a lush reality existed in Baja, which I had assumed was the shriveled lower limb of North America. When I told Andy that, he
pushed his cowboy hat back on his head, squinted at me with a hint of disdain, and headed back to his cabin to make skillet stew over a wood fire.
Today, the natural world is better known on both sides of the border, at least by a growing network of environmentalists. This complex partnership of
U.S. and Mexican environmentalists, ranchers, fishers and others, is busy creating a new environmental compact, one that essentially ignores the
political border. Conservation projects in Mexico arguably comprise the fastest growing segment of this region's emerging borderlands-conservation
network, as described in a column last week.
Ironically, in 2004, as the Sierra Club nearly unraveled when anti-immigration activists attempted a coup of that venerable organization, Mexican and
U.S. conservationists were working together to negotiate contracts with landowners to establish a chain of easements on the private properties
surrounding the Guadalupe Wetland, north of Bahia de los Angeles, on the coast of the Gulf of California.
Signed in Ensenada last year, the agreements will legally assure the conservation of a 125-mile coastal corridor 400 miles south of the border. This
achievement followed several years of painstaking work by Pronatura, a Mexican conservation and sustainable development organization; Wildcoast,
headquartered in Imperial Beach; and the International Community Foundation of San Diego. "The ultimate goal is to protect one million acres of land
at Bahia de Los Angeles," says Wildcoast director Serge Dedina, who also helped establish the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, in
1980.
Dedina believes that the growing cross-border environmental partnerships is helping create a new and needed model for 21st century environmentalism,
by paying as much attention to building economic sustainability as to preserving biodiversity ? an approach that Dedina believes will slow human
migration into cities.
For example, Pronatura asked the 70-year-old patriarch what he wanted to do with this land, a stunning white sand beach on the threatened Gulf of
California coast. He said he didn't want to sell it to speculators. He just wanted enough money to retire, and for his kids to have some investment
capital, according to Dedina. As a result, a portion of the contributions that established the conservation easement were placed in a trust fund,
which helped the family members to build a modest ecotourism resort and remain on the land they loved.
Participants in the cross-border conservation movement are too numerous to describe here, but among the chief players working on an array of projects
are Fundacion Internacional de la Comunidad in Tijuana, the Binational Watershed Advisory Council, the San Diego Museum of Natural History and
universities on both sides of the border.
Las Californias Binational Conservation Initiative, in partnership with Pronatura, The Nature Conservancy and the Conservation Biology Institute, is
designing what it calls a "conservation vision" for a 2.5 million-acre area of Southern California and northern Baja. One of the initiative's goals is
a extensive binational park system connecting wilderness, forests and park land.
Last year, the Fundacion La Puerta, based in Tecate, Mexico, established the first conservation easement in that region.
One of the most interesting binational collaborations began several years ago, when California's Condor Recovery Team, led by a longtime researcher
with the San Diego Zoo, released three condors in the Baja's Sierra San Pedro Martir. The researchers hope that the condors will someday fly north to
Ventura, to Sespe Condor Reserve or the wilderness near Big Sur, and join their U.S. relatives.
The last condor seen in the isolated Sierra San Pedro Martir was in the 1930s ? by a young rancher named Andy Meling.
I can imagine him right now, hat set back on his head, squinting into the fading light, watching creatures with nine-foot wingspans circle the lost
world.
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