Imagine you’re on a group trip.  Maybe it’s a field trip for your college natural history course.  Or maybe you’re with your local birding, botany, entomology or geology club.  The course leader has told you all about some special roadside stops they’ve visited year after year.  They know these places so well that they describe what people might find there, whether it’s teaching budding ornithologists how to identify birds by sight or song, taking aspiring botanists to a place where some species of plants can almost always be found in bloom at a certain time of year, or showing geologists in training a good example of a particular rock feature.  Maybe you’re with people who usually don’t get to go out into nature and the instructor knows of a place where you can all explore the outdoors almost as freely as some wealthy landowners with sprawling ranches or estates can.  But as the van goes around a corner, you don’t see any of the sights the instructor promised the group would see.  “NO TRESPASSING” signs and fences have gone up across the formerly open roadside stops.  And beyond them, heavy machinery and construction crews are busy clearing and flattening the land.  Unbeknownst to you all, a collection of companies and agencies most of you have barely heard of managed to amass more money through government and private funding than you could imagine having in your entire lifetimes.  They used this massive capital and political clout to buy out the land from the previous owners and fast-tracked a massive development project.  Instead of a rewarding field or research trip to the place listed on the syllabus, the reason why some students or group members stayed enrolled in the course, you are all met with disappointment.  When you get home, you go online and look up the location your class or group was hoping to visit.  Search items for a local grassroots organization trying to protect it appear.  But when you click on the links, you see sad messages declaring that their fight is over.  Their main web page is sprinkled with the faces of seemingly ordinary and passionate people, but they weren’t able to gather nearly enough money and resources to continue fighting off the developers in the few short months granted by the initial CEQA injunction they won in court.  And for the instructor, the years of memories and notes from prior researchers attached to a tangible place just lost some of their utility as a potent teaching and engagement tool.  Instead of being connected to a living, breathing place, those old stories, photographs and archived notes are now reminders of an area that no longer exists.      

     Informal green space areas are being increasingly recognized around the world for their value for ecosystem services and as outlets where people can connect with nature in diverse ways, including activities like nature play that some formal parks may struggle to fulfill (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1618866714000971).  Many current, formally protected areas open to recreation are also unequally distributed among different socioeconomic and ethnic groups (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-nature-gap/).  Within natural history and STEM education, immersive field courses have been identified as important for narrowing achievement gaps among traditionally underrepresented groups and boosting overall student success.  However, lack of adequate field course offerings across the board and other logistical gaps are ongoing barriers for many students (https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/72/10/1007/6659782).  In order to support the expansion of nature-based field courses and make them more available to underserved communities, green spaces that don’t have the same protections from developers as parks yet but which are known to support educational and cultural activities have to be effectively defended.   

     For groups who lack the wealth or political connections to go toe-to-toe with builders who can get millions in private and government funding, the ability to use the California Environmental Quality Act to get them to think twice about negative impacts to local communities is invaluable.  According to a 2019 article for the Center for American Progress, California lost over 1 million acres of open space to various types of development from 2001-2017 (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-green-squeeze/).  Now, according to outlets like the SF Chronicle (https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/newsom-ceqa-changes-18108769.php) and CA.gov (https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/05/19/governor-newsom-unveils-new-proposals-to-build-californias-clean-future-faster/), Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing changes to CEQA, which include items like limits on the amount of time CEQA-based lawsuits can delay some types of construction projects.  There is no doubt that California needs some infrastructure improvements, more housing capacity, and clean energy development added in a careful manner.  However, given how much political power some public and private developers already have, less wealthy communities, lower profile interest groups, and less visible sectors of the economy need tools like CEQA to get large-scale developers to provide more time and opportunities for public comment and potentially stop projects with negative impacts.  From ongoing struggles like Save Our Point Molate’s fight against upscale development on sensitive wetlands (https://www.ptmolate.org/), a coalition of environmental groups’ fight to save a 5-mile area where a park was planned from being used for an agribusiness reservoir (www.savedelpuertocanyon.org), Earthjustice’s fight to save open space and farmland near San Jose in the early 2000’s (https://earthjustice.org/press/2000/lawsuits-filed-against-cisco-s-coyote-valley-office-sprawl), and countless other examples, CEQA has played a prominent role.  If the state heeds his advice to “build, build, build faster,” what will happen to open spaces that have very weak protections from development but which various members of the community have nevertheless come to depend on as de-facto infrastructure for nature-based recreational, cultural, educational, and vocational activities?

     If Governor Newsom wants to limit the scope and stopping power of CEQA injunctions on behalf of housing and green energy initiatives, then additional provisions are needed to make the playing field slightly more level for groups fighting to save open space from large-scale developers, like excluding projects that would cover more than 50 acres from benefiting from expedited CEQA review or more restrictions on the amount any single private donor can contribute to such projects.  Make sure large-scale developers have to go through some of the same time consuming negotiations, network building, community discussions, and fundraising that defenders of these open spaces have to do.  

Sign this petition to ask Gov. Newsom: Please don’t take away CEQA’s power to hold big developers accountable.  “Under developed” nature spaces support communities and jobs too.  Either hold back on your proposed limitations to CEQA and your implementation of the Infrastructure Strike Team or add provisions, to the extent permitted by law, to prevent developments larger than 50 acres from qualifying for expedited CEQA review and cap the amount individual private donors can contribute to such projects.