Joy, oh, Joy.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

I spent a morning with Grant recently in Belize City. Her voice has a throaty roughness to it, softened by the Belizean Creole lilt. She founded Programme for Belize, a private nonprofit conservation organization that during her 12-year tenure acquired 300,000 acres of forest land — 4 percent of the country.

Impressive as that was, the organization operated in a country the size of Massachusetts with an annual budget of just $2.5 million. The Nature Conservancy, by contrast, is a $250 million-a-year organization, and Grant was brought on as program director for one-third of its global operations: the U.S. mid-Atlantic and southern states, the Carribean, and Central America. “I had to think about that,” she said, “moving onto the world stage.”

To show me her roots, Grant drove me around Belize City. She steered with unflappable precision through its crammed streets: cars parked along either side, narrow or nonexistent sidewalks, bicycles, pushcarts, pedestrians, vendors selling bananas on the sidewalk. We passed the unpaved alley where the house in which she was born once stood (it burned down a few years ago) and the drugstore around the corner where her father worked 60 to 70 hours per week as a pharmacist.

As a child, Grant conducted much of the family’s banking and shopping, because she always negotiated the best deals. We passed her old high school, where in her senior year she was selected as “head girl” based on her grades and leadership. Her parents had the highest expectations for their three daughters, within the constraints of the world as they knew it: “Since we had only girls, my father would say, ‘I want you to be the best secretary Belize has ever seen,’” Grant told me.

After high school, Grant worked for a year for Barclay’s Bank, then went to Alberta, Canada — “a cold shock” — where she earned a bachelors degree in commerce and a masters in business administration. From there, she went to Barbados for eight years, where she worked for the Caribbean Development Bank. She approved loans for development projects in 13 Caribbean countries, but back then, she says, no one ever considered the environmental impact of a project. “For an Antigua fisheries project, we considered how many people can you employ, will they be able to pay the loan back. Whether the amount of fish you were taking was sustainable never entered into the equation.”

Grant next went to work for the Belize Embassy in Washington, D.C., where one day some people from the Massachusetts Audubon Society made a presentation to the prime minister of Belize about a proposal to buy 110,000 acres of land in Belize and turn it over to a local entity for conservation. It was Grant who kept asking questions, and the next day, she recalls, Massachusetts Audubon called her and said, “‘You caught onto this concept. We have money for a salary for three months. Would you like to start an organization to protect this land in perpetuity?’”

Sustainable logging on land
owned by Programme for Belize.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

At the time, Grant knew nothing about environmental issues. She was intrigued, however, by the idea of creating something from scratch, something that would last, as she put it, “beyond me.” She returned to Belize in 1989, assembled a board for her new organization, and got herself out into the “bush,” where she learned about birds, snakes, and red-eyed tree frogs. With help from a number of U.S. scientists and funders, including the Nature Conservancy, she aggressively acquired additional land and embarked on projects that she hoped would use a portion of the land to produce local income and jobs in an environmentally friendly manner.

Back then, the idea of sustainable development was not yet well-known, let alone well accepted, Grant says. One of her projects involved logging mahogany by cutting a limited number of trees and removing them carefully from the forest to limit damage to the surrounding ecosystem. She won two different sustainability certifications for the operation, but in the end, could barely sell the logs at all, and certainly not for any premium. She also pursued ecotourism, building cabanas and dormitories that now house visitors and school groups.

You Gotta Belize

At the Nature Conservancy, Grant is the only member of the seven-person top management team who was born outside the U.S. She sees part of her role as getting her fellow managers out “in the mud.” She took the organization’s information systems manager into the jungle in Guatemala, by helicopter, foot, boat, and car, then by boat to Belize. Now, she says, he understands why people in the field can’t be online monitoring their email all day. She took the human resources manager to Costa Rica, where they released turtle hatchlings and went into the forest to learn about the local trees. “It’s crucial,” she said, “if we are to be a global organization that the leadership understand what global means.”

The ecotourism project run by
Programme for Belize has created
jobs for locals.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

“Certain things I would take for granted that everybody knows, they don’t know,” she said. For example, in the U.S., the Nature Conservancy has long followed the model of owning land to protect it — but in developing countries, this model often doesn’t work. “I know that if you try to set large tracts of land aside in the developing world, you have to get buy-in of the local people. You cannot police it,” Grant said. Rather than recreate its original model everywhere, Grant says, the Nature Conservancy must work with local partners to develop conservation methods that involve the community. “People,” she said, “are the key to everything we do.”

Dan Campbell, the director of the Nature Conservancy’s program in Belize, worked with Grant for years when she ran Programme for Belize. He sees her entry into the Nature Conservancy’s top management as a reflection of a larger change in the organization, from simply buying land and setting it aside to a more varied approach that encourages greater involvement of local community members such as fishers, ranchers, and indigenous people. This change, he says, is occurring in the U.S. as well, although it has been driven by the organization’s international work. In this sense, he says, the tail is wagging the dog, because just 20 percent of the Nature Conservancy’s work is international. “We have an organization that sometimes tries to reduce things to models that don’t fit the culture of the nations where we work,” Campbell says. “Joy can hold up a mirror and say, ‘This doesn’t work.’”

Grant is leading the charge on a new project: development of a greater Caribbean basin marine program that would stretch from Cuba to Venezuela. The program will require the cooperation of at least 20 countries; in many of those, the Nature Conservancy doesn’t yet have a presence. “I am taking a huge risk,” Grant told me. When I asked her if she’d consulted with groups in all these countries first, she seemed surprised. No, she had simply seen the need and launched herself into the project. Now, though, she is spending a lot of time involving local people in planning the program. That, Dan Campbell told me, is vintage Joy Grant: someone willing to launch into something new, but rooted in cautious, methodical implementation.

On the wall in Grant’s part-time office in Belize hangs a line drawing of a tropical tree draped with vines. Young sprouts erupt from its trunk, but a thick buttress holds it solidly in place. “I think I know that tree,” Grant told me. “It’s a mahogany.” I couldn’t help but see a resemblance.

The fence at Border Field State Park.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

Such is the daily — and nightly — cat-and-mouse game that goes on here at Border Field State Park, the southwestern-most point in the continental United States. A grassy picnic area overlooks an empty stretch of U.S. beach, where Pacific breakers roll in and seagulls rest on one leg, biding their time until the tide changes. On one side of the fence sits a giant circular bullring and the fast-growing city of Tijuana. On the other side, like a bulwark against the sprawling city of San Diego, lies a stretch of undeveloped land rare in Southern California. It includes mesas and canyons, a river valley, a coastal estuary, and a national wildlife refuge.

I came to this stretch of land with Greg Abbott, an ecologist with Border Field State Park. Abbott retains the laidback demeanor of the Southern California lifeguard he once was. In the 1970s, he worked on the beach at Border Field, back before the water was found to be polluted by sewage drifting north from Tijuana. He would jog down the beach to help out the Mexican lifeguards with rescues, since they had no equipment — not even fins.

These days, Abbott has turned his attention to trying to save the land. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which oversees the Border Patrol, plans to construct a massive border fortification beginning at Border Field State Park and stretching inland for three miles. It will add one or two more fences and a high-speed, all-weather patrol road. Abbott is one of a large number of people who think this is a serious mistake.

New World Border

Border Field State Park was part of a larger tract of land set aside for permanent conservation in 1997, through a deal between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the state of California, the county, and the city of San Diego. More than 90 percent of California’s coastal wetlands have been lost, making those that survive here particularly ecologically valuable. This area is also home to rare, threatened, and endangered plants and animals, and has been designated a National Estuarine Research Reserve. Millions of dollars have already been poured into protecting and restoring this area, and millions more are in the pipeline.

Greg Abbott.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

In his truck, Abbott took me on a tour to show me why he and many others oppose the construction of the so-called “Triple Border Fence” project here. The existing fence runs from the ocean 14 miles inland. It was constructed in 1992 to stem the nightly tide of immigrants and drug smugglers that swept across the border. This was a popular place to cross: A dash down some scrubby hillsides and through an overgrown marsh offered easy access on the U.S. side to highways and public transportation. By contrast, crossing further inland requires a three-day walk across mountains that freeze in winter and deserts that reach 120 degrees in the summer.

Beginning in 1996, the INS added new equipment and hundreds of new agents here, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came up with its design for the triple border fence. Farther inland, where the land is less hilly, 11 miles of the project have already been completed. The last three miles to the coast, however, resemble a world-class roller coaster of high mesas and steep canyons. Building the project here will require massive — and expensive — earth moving.

Abbott and I stopped first on Lichty Mesa, just inland from Border Field. San Diego’s long dry season was coming to an end, and the plants appeared brittle, gray, and mostly dead. This was an illusion: These plants are natives and know how to bide their time. “This whole hillside will be flowers in the winter,” Abbott said. The mesa is home to somewhere between 50 and 100 species, and because it has never been plowed, it contains a seed bank of now-rare native plants. “It doesn’t look like a jewel, but it is,” Abbott said. The Triple Border Fence project would bury Lichty Mesa.

Smuggler’s Gulch.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

We followed the same dirt roads and switchbacks that border agents patrol in their white SUVs: down Yogurt Canyon, up Bunker Hill, down Goat Canyon, up to Spooner’s Mesa. There we stopped and peered down the precipitous 310-foot drop into Smuggler’s Gulch. To build a fairly level, 90 foot-wide, high-speed patrol road that spans the half-mile from this mesa to the next, the Army Corps plans to cut the tops off the two mesas and dump millions of cubic yards of fill into Smuggler’s Gulch.

“To destroy Lichty Mesa is criminal,” Abbott said. “To fill this in is insane.”

Abbott’s boss, Park Superintendent Mike Wells, predicts the massive cut-and-fill work would quickly and uncontrollably erode because bare soils in this region simply wash away in winter rains. Silt would pour into the coastal marsh below, where a multi-million dollar project is underway to remove and prevent silt build-up.

Instead of the Triple Border Fence project, Abbott would like to see improvements to the primary fence and more use of technology, such as the lights, motion detectors, night-vision scopes, and infrared video cameras that are already in place. He calls the triple border fence “the brute force solution.”

Duncan Do-Nots

Opposition to the Triple Border Fence project is close to unanimous. Critics include two federal agencies as well as state, county, and local governments, the area’s two congressional representatives, and numerous environmental, human rights, and archeological organizations. By contrast, the driving force behind the project is one man: Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chair of the powerful House Armed Services Committee, whose district does not even include the 14-mile stretch of border where the project is being built.

An INS agent patrols at Border Field State Park.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

Critics of the project ask whether spending millions of dollars on one three-mile stretch of fence along a 2,000 mile border is the best use of national-security dollars. Last year, apprehensions here accounted for just 1 percent of the total border apprehensions. It’s true that the crackdown around San Diego has succeeded in dramatically reducing the number of crossings here. However, as migrants simply shifted where they cross, apprehensions elsewhere along the border have shot up — as have the number of migrant deaths.

“All this has achieved is moving the migrant foot traffic into ever more remote and dangerous places,” says Claudia Smith of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. “This is a political strategy of getting the migrants out of the public eye. It has achieved it at an enormous cost of life.” In contrast, she says, there is no political will to crack down on employers that depend on these migrants, even though it is estimated that more than 50 percent of agricultural workers in the U.S. are undocumented. Of those apprehended in the San Diego sector, 99 percent are Mexicans; most of the rest come from Central or South America. “These are economic refugees,” says Cindy Stankowski, director of the San Diego Archeological Center, which opposes the fence project because the entire area is a treasure trove of unexcavated Native American archeological sites, some dating back 9,000 years. “The people coming over are coming across to pick our tomatoes and strawberries.”

Law and Border

The Border Patrol has generally supported the Triple Border Fence project, so I drove the same stretch of border with one of their spokespeople, Raleigh Leonard. Before becoming a supervisor a year and a half ago, Leonard worked for 12 years as an agent. He chose to work the midnight shift, when most of the action takes place. As we drove out to Border Field State Park, we passed the overgrown marsh where dirt roads crisscross each other, and Leonard explained the art of tracking.

Raleigh Leonard, on patrol.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

“This is the typical Border Patrol agent,” he said, demonstrating the pose as he drove slowly along, his head hanging out the window, watching for tracks. When an agent finds a track, he radios to another, who looks for a similar print on the next road over. If there is none, they do a “pinch,” closing in on the person who is hidden in the vegetation between the roads.

As an agent, Leonard saw himself simply doing his duty: apprehending people and returning them to their country of origin. It wasn’t until he became a supervisor that something else occurred to him: “Man, this is bigger than just jumping over a fence and running for it.” The turning point came one day as he watched a group of young agents who had apprehended six or seven people take down their information.

“I was looking at these people, their faces, and trying to understand what would motivate them to take this risk,” Leonard said. Who were they? What had made them risk the danger of the border crossing and the chance of being robbed, raped, or beaten by those who prey on crossers? Gradually, Leonard came to understand the irresistible draw of a job in the U.S. He realized that, in these people’s shoes, he would probably do the same thing.

Driving up Spooner’s Mesa, Leonard pointed out the Border Patrol’s stadium lights, some on fixed poles, some on mobile trucks. On top of the mesa, he described the seismic detectors that can determine what is passing — a vehicle, an animal, a person. He pointed to a golden eagle perched high atop a pole. Beside the eagle was the Border Patrol’s newest tool: an infrared video camera that surveys the area 24 hours a day. It is remotely controlled and transmits to a monitor at a patrol station. “We’d like more of these, they’ve been so effective for us,” Leonard said.

I asked him what the key was to stopping illegal immigration, and he answered emphatically: more employer sanctions and other kinds of interior enforcement. I asked if this might be a better use of money than the fence. He paused and replied, “No comment.”

Boundary Issues

Four miles inland, we passed the congested San Ysidro port of entry, site of 150,000 daily crossings into the U.S. Beyond the crowds of people, bicycles, and cars, we turned onto a patrol road, so Leonard could show me a stretch of the project that has accomplished its goal. Here, parallel to the primary fence there is a new steel mesh fence, angled at the top; the land has been leveled, and a border-patrol vehicle whizzed past on the new paved road. Leonard gestured toward it and said emphatically, “This area is under control.”

Colonia Libertad.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

Then he pointed across the border and said, “That’s Colonia Libertad, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tijuana.” Small concrete homes clung to steep, eroded hillsides with no road access, just paths. I guessed there was no electricity, no running water. Leonard said, “There’s your motivation for not staying in your country — right there.”

Those opposed to the completion of the Triple Border Fence project have spent years meeting and corresponding with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Border Patrol. They have repeatedly detailed the problems and suggested alternatives, but to no avail. Hunter remains adamant about seeing the project through to completion. Responding to the environmental concerns, his press secretary said, “You have to balance environmental regulations with protecting your people.”

The day I stood at Border Field State Park with Raleigh Leonard, he pointed out toward the ocean, where a pod of dolphins stippled the water. Among the few other people in the park was a married couple who had come to reminisce: Twenty years ago, as children, both came here frequently to play — he from the U.S. side, she from Mexico. As the area is being restored for wildlife, it’s also being restored for people: a new road to the park, a bike trail to the beach, a place for the area’s burgeoning population to get out and enjoy nature. There is clearly more to guard here than the border.

See turtle.

Photo: www.jeffreybrown.com.

To be an endangered sea turtle 220 miles to the south in Magdalena Bay is to be less fortunate. In the coastal town of San Carlos, many local residents still regularly eat sea turtle, even though it has been illegal to catch or eat them in Mexico since 1990. Of the seven fishing coops in town, three are starting to work on protecting turtles — but any turtle they save, a member of another coop might catch. People come from all over Mexico to fish the rich waters of Magdalena Bay, which has been called Baja’s Chesapeake. Outsiders poach many things, among them turtles.

The problem for any turtle in Baja is this: Protection is the exception rather than the rule.

Five species of sea turtle, all endangered, come to the rich waters off the Baja Peninsula, which stretches like an 1,000-mile-long finger south of the state of California. On one side lies the Pacific Ocean, on the other, the Gulf of California. Here in Baja, turtles end up on barbecues and in soup. Weddings, holidays, family get-togethers, even political rallies call for turtle. The blood and oil of cahuama is believed to bring health. Turtle meat won’t appear on restaurant menus — but customers in the know can discreetly ask for it.

Ysidro Arce with the shell
of an eaten turtle.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

Ysidro Arce, a fisher in Punta Abreojos and a member of the coop that strictly enforces the ban on catching turtles, says, “Eating sea turtle is an old, bad custom. When we see a big turtle, we only think about eating it, like beef. We don’t think about liberation.”

Arce is a burly man, with thick black eyebrows and dark eyes that sparkle when he smiles. He is part of a group of Punta Abreojos fishers who have developed a different kind of passion for turtles: protecting them. One day each month, the group sets nets at a monitoring site and weighs, measures, and tags the turtles caught. They bring along children, who pat the turtles, name them, and help set them loose. In the local school, the principal and teachers have taken up the cause, and children now lecture their fathers: If you catch turtles, they will not be around when I grow up. Thanks to the efforts of Arce and his colleagues, few people eat turtle any more in this village of 800.

A Shell of a Problem

The Punta Abreojos group is one of six monitoring teams that, for the last year, have set nets for a monthly turtle survey at different sites around the peninsula. Together, the groups are part of the Grupo Tortuguero de Las Californias (the Sea Turtle Conservation Network of the Californias), which was founded by Wallace J. Nichols, a U.S. sea turtle researcher. Nichols came to Baja in 1991 to study the genetics and migration patterns of sea turtles. Over time, he noticed that large numbers of turtles were being eaten, including a substantial number of his study animals.

Sea Turtle Conservation Network members
tag a turtle.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

Nichols set himself a goal: On every trip he would ask 100 people how often they ate turtle. Many said their families ate between four and 10 turtles per year. He also went to village dumps and counted carapaces by the hundreds. Finally, he commissioned a formal survey. The estimate of the number of turtles eaten annually on the Baja Peninsula alone: 30,000. At that rate, Nichols says, whatever interesting facts he might learn by studying the turtles wasn’t going to matter.

Nichols now carries his message about ending sea-turtle consumption to Baja’s small towns and remote fishing camps. There he recruits converts to this work from among the people who know turtles best: local fishers.

The idea for the Sea Turtle Conservation Network came to Nichols through the relationships he developed with fishers who helped him with his research. “I was talking to all these guys and telling them stories about the other guys. And I thought, they’d like each other, and they’d feed off each other and encourage each other. It’s not really enough for this gringo biologist to roll in every once in a while and tell stories.” After drumming up $1,300 in grant money, Nichols organized the network’s first meeting. “I called and faxed and drove and saw everybody and said, ‘Here’s the date, here’s the place, I’m going to rent a block of hotel rooms, pay for your gas, I hope you can be there.’ Fifty people came. We set the ground rules: Okay, everybody has a vote, everybody has a voice, this is a round table, open discussion, we have an agenda, a heavy emphasis on talking to each other and continuing conversations outside of the meeting. For a lot of the guys, it was the first time they’d ever been invited to a meeting outside of their fishing coops.”

From Sea to Shining Sea Turtle

That first meeting of the Sea Turtle Conservation Network was held in 1999. Recently, in the village of San Carlos, the teams held a two-day gathering to report on the results of their first year of monitoring and to talk about problems: fishers who catch turtles while fishing for other sea creatures, active turtle poachers, and the lack of government enforcement against poaching in general.

Nichols opened the meeting by welcoming the participants and projecting onto the wall a map of Baja and the entire Pacific Ocean. “Baja has a global importance for sea turtles,” he told the team members. He pointed to Japan, where loggerhead turtles hatch before crossing the Pacific to feed on the pelagic crabs that turn the waters off Baja red. The turtles return to Japan to nest on the same beach where they hatched — but in the past 12 years, the number of returning turtles has declined by half.

Nichols then pointed to Michoacan on the Mexican mainland, site of the nesting beaches for East Pacific green turtles, the kind most commonly eaten in Baja. The juveniles come to Baja’s coastal waters to browse on sea grass and algae. They take up to 30 years to reach sexual maturity, and may eventually reach 300-400 pounds; they then return every other year to Michoacan to reproduce. For the last two decades, researchers have protected the nesting beaches from poachers, who used to dig up most of the eggs to sell them in the cities. Nevertheless, the number of returning turtles has continued to fall, from 25,000 in 1970 to fewer than 500 in 1990. The number finally increased in the last two years, but Nichols believes there is a good reason it has not rebounded faster: Too many turtles are eaten, many before they have reproduced even once.

How does your turtle grow?

Photo: Deborah Knight.

Among the meeting’s attendees was Miguel Lizarraga, a fisher from San Carlos, the town in Magdalena Bay where life is tough on turtles. Lizarraga stopped eating turtle two years ago when he signed the Sea Turtle Conservation Network pledge. He has become an ardent supporter of the cause, but acknowledges that at times the magnitude of the challenge can be overwhelming. Of the 400 members in his own coop, he estimates that 250 still eat turtle. After he took an agent from PROFEPA, one of two government entities in charge of protecting turtles, out on an enforcement run using his own boat and gas, the head of another coop threatened and punched Lizarraga. Like many members in the Sea Turtle Conservation Network, he fears physical retaliation if he were to report known turtle poachers in his area — especially since some of the poachers associate with drug smugglers in coastal waters, supplying them with food and fuel.

“The government needs to help us,” Lizarraga says.

Twice, Lizarraga has made the long trip to the city of La Paz, where the nearest PROFEPA office is located, only to be told that if he didn’t have proof of illegal activity, nothing could be done. Even those agents who do try to enforce the law face a tough task: There are just 13 agents assigned to the entire southern half of the peninsula — about a thousand miles of sparsely populated coastline. When soldiers drove past during the conference, heading out to the point where fishing boats land, Lizarraga commented bitterly, “Probably they will be given money and not see anything.”

Fisher Ranulfo Mayoral with the
shell of an eaten turtle.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

Some members of the Sea Turtle Conservation Network hope that one of the benefits of protecting turtles will be that tourists will someday pay to see them. That is the dream of fisher Ranulfo Mayoral, who makes money in the winter by taking tourists out to see the gray whales that come to remote San Ignacio Lagoon. Mayoral’s face lights up as he describes his childhood, when the lagoon was filled with so many large turtles that fishers who brought their catch to the shore would throw the smaller ones back. He and his friends would grab hold of the turtles and see whose could swim the fastest. Now, many of the turtles caught are small and have never reproduced.

One such turtle had been caught and brought to the meeting in San Carlos. Its large black eyes viewed the onlookers with a 50-million-year-old aura of distrust. Experienced team members demonstrated how to measure the turtle and snap identification tags onto its hind flippers. It was not yet of reproductive age, so they could not determine its sex, but they named it Maria anyway; most fishers name the turtles they tag after their daughters or girlfriends. One man hefted her into a net to be weighed, struggling to manage her — all 53 pounds, as it turned out — while her powerful front flippers flailed the air. Later, they took Maria out in a boat and lowered her into the water. With two mighty strokes, she vanished.

Miguel Lizarraga with Maria.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

Will Maria make it? Perhaps. Nichols believes that a tipping point may have been reached. As he drove out of town before dawn the morning after the meeting, he encountered something he had never seen before: Soldiers and fisheries inspectors at a roadblock, stopping traffic to ask, “Any shrimp? Any turtles?”

A few weeks later, a high level PROFEPA official from Mexico City met with representatives from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Sea Turtle Conservation Network. The PROFEPA official made a commitment to actively investigate turtle poachers and acknowledged that some turtle meat even makes it across the border into southwestern U.S. cities.

Meanwhile, Nichols sees the get-tough attitude of the Punta Abreojos fishers spreading through all six of the turtle monitoring teams. These local people, Nichols says, have a far richer relationship to marine life than he could ever have. They live with it and depend on it. “My dream,” he says, “is that someday there will be a network of sea turtle refuges around Baja, and the communities will make it happen.”

Can these condos be saved?

The move comes, Fast said, in response to the recent designation of 4.1 million acres as critical habitat for the threatened California red-legged frog.

“Give a red-legged frog an inch and he’ll take a mile,” Fast said. “It’s the most destructive kind of amphibian sprawl.” Endangered species like the red-legged frog need to learn to share the earth with humans, according to Fast. “They’re mating in our water, claiming ponds that with a little bulldozing could become high-priced lots,” he said. “These creatures used to hop over this land in the millions and if we don’t impose some growth limits on them, that’s just what we’ll have again. And don’t get me started on the kangaroo rat. I bet a lot of them just hop across the border without any documents.”

Leading a tour to a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Fast waved his hand around to illustrate how well condos do here given half a chance. The bluff used to be nothing but coastal sage scrub. “Now you could not get more natural habitat for a condo than this bluff,” he explained. “Condos thrive in this kind of coastal environment. They slide down the cliffs now and then and you lose a few, but that’s nature for you. Condos are adapted to that kind of threat. They evolved with it.”

Prime condo habitat.

Back in his office, Fast pointed to a map his organization has drawn up detailing the best natural condo habitat in the state. The science behind his program, he said, has been proven to work. “We breed condos in captivity and take them out and let them go. We give them a little transitional support — wells, sewer lines, a couple of highways, and a mall or two. We’ve found it to be more successful if we give them an initial golf course.”

Countering arguments that taxpayers are essentially subsidizing condo reintroduction efforts, Fast commented, “It’s expensive bringing back the condo, but remember, extinction is forever. Think of the money that goes to supporting nothing built on land for those stupid frogs — nothing!”

Fast is optimistic that it’s a new day in Washington, D.C., and that the listing of the California condo as an endangered species will sail through. “We expect this enlightened administration to take a hard line against endangered species creep, where every useless creature wants in. Pocket mice? Give me a break.” There was no comparison, Fast said, between the value of a mouse — with or without a pocket — and a 3,000-square-foot condominium with mountain or ocean views. His organization believes large areas of California should be considered critical habitat for the condo. “What are we going to tell our grandchildren if we allow scrubby coastal cliffs to remain that way?” he asked. “The time to act is now, before it’s too late.”

Enviros Are Hopping Mad

National environmental groups condemned the Condo Restoration Fund, but said they had not yet decided on an appropriate response.

Meanwhile, outside the fund’s headquarters, members of a group calling itself the “Spirit of the Frog Society” demonstrated by painting their legs red and hopping around. One demonstrator described the group as a recent metamorphosis of an earlier group known as “Totally Against Development by People of Land Everywhere,” or TADPOLE.

Captive-bred condos try to make it in the wild.

The Condo Restoration Fund has received a large grant from the Billdem and Sellem Foundation and expects private contributions from builders to pour in.

“If this captive breeding program succeeds,” Fast said, “we’d like to use our scientific expertise to develop a similar program for office parks.” Office parks, he said, are a critical part of a diverse landscape without which the natural balance is lost and highways, airports, and even shopping malls could be at risk.

Fast dismissed criticism from one national environmental group that his organization is focusing on the California condo simply because it is a charismatic species that tugs at people’s heartstrings, given its associations with the concept of home.

“We consider the California condo a kind of umbrella species,” he said. “Restore the condo, and you’ll see all kinds of other valuable species — McDonald’s, Home Depots, Gaps — protected as well. Our vision is to protect and restore the California condo to its rightful place in the landscape.”