The SF Chronicle
February 7, 2003
 
Two sides to every argument

By Mark Simon

The tenor of debate over environmental issues has prompted an e-mail from the redoubtable Lennie Roberts, the legislative advocate for the Committee for Green Foothills for more than 20 years and the Peninsula's leading environmentalist.

Specifically, Roberts was responding to last week's column about the elephants that were brought in last fall by the Cozzolino family as part of its pumpkin farm tourism attraction.

The Cozzolinos want to bring the elephants back this fall, and they are seeking a permit from San Mateo County.

Half Moon Bay officials wrote a letter opposing the permit, from which I offered some details. I characterized the letter this way:

". . . the letter touches every kind of environmental base, and with the kind of practiced hand you'd expect from Half Moon Bay, where every argument is about the future of the planet."

In the same column, I also wrote, "On the Coastside, these days, calm and reasoned discussion that gives credit to both sides of an issue is as endangered as an Asian elephant."

All of that prompted Roberts to write, "You are being too hard on Half Moon Bay. "This debate is about whether the elephants and other Cozzolino circus-like attractions are an allowable use in the agricultural district (they are not). You trivialize the legitimate concerns that arise over land use by characterizing Half Moon Bay's environmental concerns as nothing short of planetary import. Most (but of course not all) of the Half Moon Bay clashes do centeron whether something is in compliance with the city's Local Coastal Program. You need to give people credit for using something other than raw emotion over there.

" 'Calm and reasoned' discussion with credit to both sides is hardly the norm in the various debates over land use elsewhere in this county. I am so tired of people trivializing environmental concerns when their project du jour is being considered. Yes, many times opponents will seize upon some ridiculous argument in their passion to stop the bulldozers. But by far the worst offenders of civil discourse are on the side of environmental destruction, not protection."

She's right, of course. But Roberts also is one of the most reasonable people with whom to argue. At a minimum, she doesn't immediately assume that a disagreement is based entirely on a profit-driven desire to rape the land.

The latter is a continuing theme: Few people involved in the land-use debates on the Coastside, particularly the current crowd in command of much of the area's political machinery, seem willing to acknowledge that the other side also may have the best interests of the community at heart.

Too many of the debates seem posed as all-or-nothing matters, in which participants see themselves as all right and the other side as evil.