Climate Strategy Site Threatened By Climate-Driven Fire

In one of those little ironies of history, the place where critical early strategizing was done for Californias first proposed climate change program is now threatened by a massive fire driven by climate change.

I was about to write about Californias new normal, as Governor Jerry Brown puts it, of year-round fires in the context of climate summitry and Browns keynote address at the One Planet Summit in Paris when I noticed something very alarming in reports out of Santa Barbara County.

Laurel Springs Ranch turned up today in an evacuation zone.

Laurel Springs Ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara was the site of several meetings I attended with Tom Hayden and others in the late 1980s to strategize about a climate change program for California. Now the massive Thomas Fire, on the verge of becoming the largest fire in Californias history, driven in large measure by the worlds changing climate, is bearing down on Laurel Springs and its environs in the loose-knit Painted Cave community. It was placed in an evacuation zone this morning.

The Thomas Fire, named for Thomas Aquinas College, near which the blaze began early this month, is 40 percent contained. But with permanent drought/near-drought conditions and lots of dry trees and other growth along with chronic high winds, the fire keeps on growing despite progress by the firefighters.

Id already spent a great deal of time at Laurel Springs Ranch, purchased by Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden in 1977, before venturing there for a number of lengthy talks with Hayden and often others about what would become the first major effort to create a California program to fight climate change as a beacon for the rest of the world.

That became the Big Green initiative of 1990, an omnibus environmental measure that contained the first major program proposal in America to cut greenhouse gas emissions. At first a very popular measure, the initiative ultimately was drowned in a wave of corporate spending against it, largely driven by the agriculture industrys objections to provisions unrelated to climate change, i.e., very strict controls on pesticides.

In the midst of 16 years of moderately conservative to very conservative California Republican governors, the famed anti-Vietnam War and New Left leader Hayden, then a state legislator, gathered together most of the environmental movement to put together an omnibus initiative on a variety of issues. That was good for coalition building, and at first increased the measures appeals in polls done for Hayden. But the omnibus approach also increased the likelihood that some very well-heeled special interest not easy to demonize, finding its oxen gored, would search for clever ways to bring the whole contraption tumbling down. Which is what happened.

Still, it was visionary and most it has since been enacted, at least in California, now probably the fifth largest economy in the world. Hayden, working with a broad swathe of leading greens, was Big Greens principal author. I came up with the name, in private and in my column in the Sacramento News & Review and other papers.

While most of the world might not care about forest management or which pesticides are allowed in California, just imagine that Big Green was enacted.

California would have had its pioneering climate change program not in 2006 but in 1990, with associated energy and transportation policies flowing from that.

Big Green was 12 years before Governor Gray Davis enacted the first renewable energy requirement and the first law limiting tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases; 16 years before Arnold Schwarzenegger (who had assured me four years earlier he would do much more as governor if he had the chance and came through with flying colors) pulled together Californias pioneering overall climate program; 20 years before original visionary Governor Jerry Brown returned to accelerate it all even further.

The world would be in much better shape with Big Greens 16-year head start on Californias pioneering role in climate change. Nevertheless, Big Green did elevate climate change to the forefront of California environmental thinking, where it stayed until Davis agreed to move forward in another set of discussions.

Now Laurel Springs, the inspirational launching pad for Big Green and other hopeful ventures, successful and otherwise during the heyday of Hayden and Fondas Campaign for Economic Democracy, site of many intriguing meetings involving grassroots activists and various famous figures, is under threat from the very thing whose solution it inspired.

The 160-acre ranch has changed hands a couple of times since the days in which it served as a childrens camp and retreat for CED and Fonda and Hayden. That is the result of Hayden and Fondas divorce after nearly two decades together. Though I was aware of misgivings in the marriage, I was surprised and not exactly approving when Hayden chose to leave it, though very supportive of him as a friend.

Fonda, notably, was extremely supportive when Hayden developed serious heart problems early in the 2000s. She joined forces with Barbara Williams, with whom Hayden shared an evidently warm and fulfilling union, to organize a big Hayden memorial at UCLA early this year.

The spirit of what they had done together lived on for Fonda and Hayden, as her lengthy comments here make clear.

As did the spirit of Big Green, though one winces to think of what should have been much sooner for this very troubled world.

And as will the spirit of Laurel Springs, even if the rather magical ranch should burn to the ground.

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