Isn’t it All Protected?

This article originally appeared in our newsletter, Landmarks, Summer 2007
Scroll down to see the map.

Generally the response we get to our work is a positive one. Protecting land in Santa Cruz County is pretty apple pie and motherhood. But fairly often we hear another view, not one against protecting land, but one which is basically built around the idea that our county is already protected. “People see all this undeveloped land,” says Executive Director Terry Corwin, “and they think it’s protected.”

Certainly, there is a lot of undeveloped land in our county. Only 11% of the County is developed or built up (the grey areas on the map below), according to the California Department of Conservation. That’s a big contrast from the Bay Area counties, which are more than twice as built up. You see and feel this contrast as you come over the hill on Highway 17, as mile after mile of suburbs give way to mile after mile of forests. It is why many of us live here and what most of us love about our county.

But is Santa Cruz County truly protected just because it is still less developed than the Bay Area?
The map above shows in green the lands that are permanently protected. The big state parks (totaling 43,000 acres) and other protected land make up 22% of Santa Cruz County. As the chart on page 2 shows, this is about average for the eight Bay Area counties to our north and well below the land protection leaders. Over half of Marin County is permanently protected, as is 38% of San Mateo County.

Of course, just because most of our county isn’t permanently protected doesn’t mean it is wide open for development – which is another reason people think we are safe from Bay Area style development. Santa Cruz County has some of the strongest growth control laws and regulations in the state and a long history of fierce resistance to specific developments.

What drives the Land Trust’s work is the fact that these protections are not permanent in the way that park land or Land Trust protections are. They are built on rulings and regulations made by elected officials and elections can change things. The idea that we need to permanently protect land is fundamentally based on the belief that our county cannot forever resist, through political means alone, the immense development pressures all around us. The protections we have now provide us with an opportunity, a window, in which to act before land protection becomes vastly more expensive and contentious.

Strawberry grower and Driscoll’s CEO Miles Reiter has seen what happens when you wait until the last minute to protect land: “It is pretty hard to resist developing once the pressure gets strong. You need to act before it is threatened. Once the threat is at the door, it’s too late.”

That is why the Land Trust is working to permanently protect what many people think is already protected. Our county’s past success has given us this opportunity to forever protect what we love. With your help, we will seize this opportunity. •