On Friday the 13th, the Coastal Commission demonstrated why authority to draft and adopt local ordinances resides with locally elected officials. It was painfully evident the coastal commissioners had little comprehension of the details of the 500-page Malibu LCP before them, much less the hundreds of rewrites made right up until the night before. And how could they? Commission staffers have so overzealously expanded their interpretation of the Coastal Act, that commissioners need to review hundreds of permit applications and appeals and read thousands of pages a week. The commissioners also had little incentive, as unelected appointees from Sacramento, to listen to the pleas of over 170 speakers to adopt reasonable revisions to the plan and shockingly few were considered.
But what is more disturbing is that the LCP itself reflects a radically different view of nature and our environment than has ever been delivered in a body of legislation. The Malibu LCP reflects the belief that humans cannot be trusted and must be separated from the plants and animals we love. Instead of establishing incentives to cherish our landscape, morbid regulations were adopted on Friday, especially the requirement that we keep a 200-foot-wide “no-walk” zone in our yards around woodlands and other “habitat” in order “to provide distance and physical barriers to human intrusion” because such areas are “easily degraded by human activity.” (Per LCP).
As someone who grew up spending my entire childhood climbing trees and creating imaginary worlds in rivers and streams, it is unbearable to think that remote aparatchniks are trying to keep me away from the precious wildlands that I love and have fought for both as a member of Treepeople and other environmental organizations. The groves of sycamores that we’ve all planted would not even exist if it weren’t for our ‘human activity,’ and now the state is telling us to stay 200 feet away from them. And how ironic it is that although residents have cherished thousands of oak trees in Malibu over the last hundred years, the commission is applying permit conditions requiring these trees to be surrounded with fences 5 feet outside of their canopies and telling owners that people (including children) and horses are not allowed under them.
I, for one, will not let the state deprive our children of the sublime experience of swinging under a tree, reading a book in a gazebo or building a tree house. They shall not be criminalized for “encroachment” and considered so dangerous that they must pay a fine and a biologist to photograph, measure and analyze each tree annually for a decade and report our transgressions to the city as this LCP requires. And I will not let them mandate that we commit ecocide by killing 90 percent of the plants in California considered “non-native.” Having grown to love the independence and bountiful spirit of my neighbors in Malibu, I know they won’t either.
Anne Hoffman