The Last Landscape

7. Defending Open Space

1if7 Defending Open Space Once land is secured, how can it be kept secured? Thanks to new federal and state programs, we are saving open space at a greater rate than ever before. Unfortunately, thanks to other state and federal programs, at an equally growing rate we are losing open space we already saved-to highways, cloverleafs, dams, sewage plants, post offices, commercial parking lots, and public projects of one kind or another. On balance, we are still adding more open space than we are losing, but not by so very much and there is a qualitative loss that can be immeasurable. Most of the additions to open-space acreage have been in the outlying areas; most of the losses have been in the urban areas where open space is most precious and where there is little more to be had at any price. There is every indication that the situation is going to get worse rather than better. So far, the highway men have been doing most of the taking. To a degree, they have had to, and they have often been maligned when, in fact, they had no alternative. Under the Interstate Highway program, it is practically impossible for state highway planners to draw a line from City A to City B without crossing parkland somewhere along the way. In the open country where land costs are relatively low, the planners can sometimes detour around parkland, but they won't detour very much, for if they did, the Bureau of Public Roads would say that the alignment was too costly and would withhold the ninety percent federal-aid funds until the engineers straightened things out. The real problem is in the urban areas. Here the engineers are Defending Open Space 119 positively attracted to parkland and if there is any detouring to be done it is toward the parkland, not away. The attractions are compelling : parklands are not built up and thus require far less demolition ; there are no homeowners in the path to form protest associations and put pressure on the politicians. Best of all, the land is cheap. If it is public land, the highway men sometimes do not have to pay anything for it, and where they do, it is usually scant recompense for the loss of the irreplaceable. There has been little redress. The highway people have money and they have procedure. The key decision that route A-B is the best one may have been made very far down in the echelons of the department, but once made, the decision has juggernaut force. Protest groups will be formed; newspapers will rage. But the highway people are inured to such abuse: They are profeSSionals, usually of high technical competence, and they are fortified by the conviction that their decisions are based on objective data. They know they will clash with bleeding hearts, bird lovers, sentimentalists , and people who want the road to go anywhere except where they live. To the professional, this is an occupational cross, to be borne with patience and fortitude. There will be public hearings, but these come very late in the game and are predictably futile. Members of Citizens for Parks will get up and make impassioned statements about the impending desecration of the last valley in the county. Municipal officials will plead for an alternate route. Experts will testify to the ecological importance of the riverland and marshes. A homeowners group, which is very happy the route will bypass their area, will warmly support the highway department. So it will go long into the night. The highway people, who are in the position of being judge as well as defendant, will dutifully note everything in the record and then go ahead and do exactly as they had planned all the time. There are very few cases of a highway department's voluntarily reversing itself because it was persuaded by the logic of those who wanted another alignment. Sometimes they do change their plans, but it takes an extraordinary amount of hell-raising to make them do it. San Francisco is a case in point. Over widespread local protest, the state highway department built an elevated freeway that ruined the view of the 120 The Last Landscape old Ferry Building and, in the opinion of many people, a good bit else of the city besides. San Francisco lost that one, but the people were so mad that when...