Environmentalists who brokered a landmark agreement with a developer to set aside 240,000 acres of California wilderness are facing the ire of colleagues within the conservation community who contend that they, as one detractor put it, "sold out to the forces of destruction."
The pact's potential effect on the California condor has prompted the harshest criticism, and has brought personal attacks as well.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday, July 11, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 3 inches; 107 words Type of Material: Correction
Tejon Ranch: An article in Monday's California section about a project in the Tehachapi Mountains incorrectly characterized the views of some environmentalists who helped broker an agreement with the Tejon Ranch Co. to save 240,000 acres from development. The article said that raptor specialist Pete Bloom, who works for the company as its lead condor consultant, and leaders of a coalition of environmental groups hoped the agreement would speed up the permitting process for development on part of the property. Although Bloom said he feels that way, the coalition leaders have neither expressed hope for nor indicated an interest in expediting permits for development on the ranch.
Under the accord unveiled in May after two years of confidential negotiations, Tejon Ranch Co. will preserve 90% of its holdings in the Tehachapi Mountains, about 60 miles north of Los Angeles.
In exchange, a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, Audubon California and Natural Resources Defense Council, will not challenge massive development projects on the remaining 10% of the Tejon property.
Coalition leaders acknowledged that the proposed Tejon Mountain Village's luxury homes, spas and boutique hotels would consume about 8% of the condor habitat on the ranch. But they also said the agreement aims to protect a much larger region -- eight times the size of San Francisco -- that is still very much as 19th century frontiersman Kit Carson experienced it.
Its emerald hills and lush valleys remain unblemished by buildings and utility lines. Gray foxes and bobcats still prowl secluded meadows edged with elderberry bushes and fragrant buckeye trees; great horned owls still roost in the boughs of 11 species of oak. The region's prehistoric scavengers, the condors, are still here too, patrolling the skies above wind-swept ridgelines studded with incense cedars.
"I truly believe that because of this agreement, California condors will one day be as common here as red-tailed hawks are in Orange County," said raptor specialist Pete Bloom, who works for the company as its lead condor consultant. "But people in the condor community aren't getting it. They are my friends, and it disturbs me to be on the other side of them."
Bloom has been studying and trapping birds of prey for more than three decades, earning a high-profile reputation for having helped implement a captive breeding program in the 1980s that is credited with saving the California condor from extinction. On Easter Sunday in 1987 he detonated a cannon net from under a camouflaged pit to capture the last wild California condor.
But Bloom's contractual relationship with Tejon Ranch Co. is drawing scorn from critics, including 11 condor scientists led by his mentor, biologist Noel Snyder.
