Santa Monica mountains
Even if urban and natural ecosystems can coexist next to each other, natural ecosystems will be lost if they are simply cleared away by urban expansion. The recent history of the Santa Monica mountains, a natural area of 900 square kilometres at the western edge of Los Angeles, illustrates how social institutions can control urban expansion over natural ecosystems. The Santa Monica mountains have a scattering of houses on a landscape mosaic that features chaparral on the hillsides with oak woodland ecosystems and temporary streams in the canyon bottoms. By the 1950s it was technically and economically feasible to level the granite hills in this area for residential development using earth-moving equipment originally developed during World War II for constructing airplane landing strips on mountainous Pacific islands. Mountains near cities often have a high priority for public ownership and protection because they are the city’s source of water, but Los Angeles brings its water from rivers hundreds of miles away. In the mid-1960s more than 98 per cent of the land in the Santa Monica mountains was in private ownership, much of it in large parcels owned by land holding companies that intended to level it to construct thousands of houses. The rapid growth of Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s was extending high-density residential subdivisions into the mountains at a rate that threatened to cover much of the land with houses within a few decades.
The expansion of high-density housing into the Santa Monica mountains was controlled because of citizen initiatives that stimulated local, state and national governments to take decisive action to protect the natural landscape in the area. Starting in late 1960s, a highly organized, aggressive and persistent coalition of citizens groups in the western part of Los Angeles adjacent to the mountains, homeowners associations in the mountains themselves and environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club lobbied all levels of government for protection of the mountains. Energetic support from a few particularly sympathetic representatives in the Los Angeles city council, the California state legislature, and the United States Congress led to action at all three levels of government by the end of the 1970s. Through negotiation and land condemnation, the state acquired 45 square kilometres of privately owned, undeveloped land adjacent to areas where residential developments at the edge of Los Angeles were expanding rapidly into the mountains. In 1974 this newly acquired land became Topanga State Park, in which residential and commercial development and highway construction were completely prohibited. In 1978 the United States government’s National Park Service established the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area to promote protection of nature throughout the mountains. In 1979 the state of California submitted a Comprehensive Plan for all of the Santa Monica mountains to the United States government. The state legislature created the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to implement the Comprehensive Plan, and all city and county governments in the area, while not legally bound to follow the plan, agreed to follow it in principle.
The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the National Park Service were both charged with land acquisition, protection of nature on land they acquired, development and maintenance of recreational facilities such as hiking trails, and representation of the Comprehensive Plan at local government hearings regarding development of privately owned lands. The two levels of government have pursued their overlapping missions with somewhat different institutional strengths, priorities and management styles - the overlap and differences enabling them to accomplish together what neither could have accomplished alone. About 40 per cent of the land in the Santa Monica mountains is now under national or state ownership, and an additional 15 per cent is targeted for eventual acquisition. However, the total area with natural vegetation is diminishing gradually as the privately owned land is developed for residential housing or other remunerative purposes such as vineyards. Active involvement to promote compatible use of private lands has been a priority for the state and national agencies because private land use can have such far-reaching effects on the ecological health of nearby land under government protection. The process of influencing private land use has been overwhelmingly complex, with results at times successful and at others disappointing. Even if much of the privately owned land is eventually used for urban or agricultural development, the long-term commitment of state and national governments, local residents, recreational users and environmentalists to protecting the land ensures that the region’s landscape will retain a substantial representation of natural ecosystems for generations to come.