Besides, remember how powerful and well funded the TCA/241 Toll Road people were? They had gobs of studies, loads of ridiculous arguments, many short-sighted city official supporters… and they lost big time in front of the Coastal Commission. And they lost because people stood up to give nature an almost irresistable voice in the proceedings. I know because I was lucky enough to be there on that exciting and hopeful day!

Here is some of what happened when nature-powered-by-people won!

To people in the year 2050; Look what we left you

If you were around the area a number of years ago, you’ll remember a grand stretch of open hills descending to the ocean between Laguna and Corona Del Mar. Now its just another big money enclave.

With my family, I remember standing at night on the bluffs of Victoria/Hamilton St overlooking the vast darkness of the Santa Ana river plain. Except for the lights of the Huntington Beach power plant and a few street lights, it was black and quiet.

There were so many evenings when I would walk home from seeing a movie at the old Mesa theater at the early hours of 9-10pm, crossing Newport Blvd without having to look because there was almost no traffic.

In 7th grade, I took a few bike trips out to oneil park, then down laguna canyon road to PCH and back home. The most vivid part of the trip was near Culver and Barranca streets in what is now Irvine, riding quietly through an early Sunday morning through miles of orange groves. I passed many small farm houses and almost no cars, hands freezing on the handlebar grips.

But always it was our wonderful slice of ocean that kept me here. So I ended up as an avid wave rider spending countless hours bodysurfing at the 17th Point south of the pier and at the 50th St jetty. Probably 250 days a year spent in the water for so many years.

The experiences with nature locally led me to reach out further, exploring the enormous spaces of the west. The rich red rock of southern Utah, the wide and lonely valleys of central Nevada, the beautiful light and shadows of the east side of the Sierras, the distant curving horizons of the ocean from high on the ridges of Big Sur, the soft shade and ferns among giant time machines, called Redwoods.

Those places are magic. They taught me the intense value of the natural world, as they teach all who listen.

Banning Ranch may be the place that kids growing up here in the year 2050 use to watch nature up close – to experience it every day, to see its constant changes, its phases, feel solitude amidst the constant din of cars and traffic.

I have watched so many of our local, semi-wild areas disappear over the last 30 years. Most of these areas stood out as places that should have been left alone. Places like the Newport Coast, the Castaways at the east end of 17th, the area surrounding Oneil Park, the orange groves of Irvine, and on and on. As I travel around So Cal now, the Santa Monica Mountains, Cleveland’s Saddleback peak, and the mountains east of San Diego are just about the only open lands left. Yet houses crawl incessantly up their flanks as well.

Yet at this late date with so little left, consideration for future generations still struggles to prevail over what we take for housing and commercial use.

Where does it end? Which government official says enough? When do we say enough and strike the kind of balance that leaves future generations with a few remnants of what once was?

Banning Ranch should be one of those remnants.

Kevin Nelson

The lonely reaches of northern Death Valley

If banning is covered with oil wells, where did our pictures come from?  Made up in photoshop I suppose?