By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer
IDYLLWILD ---- The strategy room for launching some of the region's biggest confrontations between preservation and development is a cabin in an idyllic mountain setting where a half-dozen environmentalists work with mixed-breed dogs at their feet.
"In some ways, it's an emergency room," said Brendan Cummings, one of four attorneys who works in the Center for Biological Diversity's Southern California headquarters in Idyllwild.
Attorney Brendan Cummings
"There is so much development, there is so much habitat fragmentation, there are so many imperiled species that we have got to do something or else we are going to lose Southern California as a functioning ecosystem," Cummings said in an interview Monday.
Based in Tucson, Ariz., the Center for Biological Diversity is one of the most influential environmental groups in the country. The organization has sued federal agencies dozens of times to force the government to enforce provisions of the Endangered Species Act.
From its modest beginnings in New Mexico in the late 1980s, the group has expanded to the point of opening several offices in cities across the West.
In September 2001, the group opened a strategic base in Southern California for launching its legal assaults. It chose the Southwest Riverside County mountain resort town of Idyllwild, at the foot of picturesque 8,828-foot Tahquitz Peak.
The forest community offered a central location for efforts to protect endangered species in the mountains and inland valleys, as well as along the coast and out in the desert. It was a lot more inspiring than downtown Riverside.
"Idyllwild was the nicest place we could find with daily Fed-Ex delivery, high-speed Internet lines and enough infrastructure to run a law office out of," said Cummings, who sports a long pony tail and wears John Lennon-like spectacles.
Cummings is joined by staff attorneys Julie Teel, Kassie Siegel and Kyle Kreischer, biologist Monica Bond and a couple interns.
Not everyone put out the welcome mat.
"The fact that they have set up a very large office in Riverside County is a bad omen," said Borre Winckel, spokesman for the Riverside County chapter of the Building Industry Association of Southern California.
Winckel said the region can expect huge battles over efforts to open new areas of western Riverside County to development and to construct a new freeway linking Riverside and Orange counties, in the hope of taking pressure off congested Highway 91.
"They excel in exploiting the legal system," he said. "And they do so by exploiting the weaknesses in the Endangered Species Act."
Winckel suggested that the federal law's authors meant to save only iconic species such as the bald eagle and grizzly bear. Center for Biological Diversity members interpret the law to mean that every species of plant, critter and insect should be saved.
It should come as no surprise then that the group sharply opposes awarding a guarantee saying that, because western Riverside County's 153,000-acre habitat conservation plan was approved by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service last month, nothing more will be required of the area.
The coalition of builders, landowners and community leaders who wrote the plan is seeking a guarantee that no more land will be asked of the region, even if an overlooked, imperiled species is discovered later and may go extinct without more habitat.
The use of "no surprise" guarantees, a central feature of many habitat conservation plans, is being challenged in court by another environmental group with the center's support.
"'No surprises' says, 'We don't care if a species is about to go extinct,'" Siegel said.
When the Center for Biological Diversity goes to court, it wins about 90 percent of the time, and thus has won the grudging respect from adversaries. Cummings was humble about the success.
"We win our cases not because we're good lawyers," he said. "We win our cases because the federal agencies who review these (development) projects routinely ignore the law."
"Which isn't to say we're not good lawyers," Teel added.
Teel said the lawyers and other staff members are also good friends.
They go on five-mile hikes together in the ponderosa-pine forest around Idyllwild almost daily, before walking over to the stone cabin.
They work long days, sometimes 18 hours, in an office that is decorated by a giant relief map of Southern California, photos of rare spotted owls and a chart depicting "wildlife of the San Bernardino Mountains" and equipped with a personal computer and laptop. They take breaks on a soft couch that 11-month-old Josey, a female Labrador retriever mix, claims as her personal napping spot.
Young and idealistic, they are unapologetic for their aggressive efforts to protect the environment.
"Society's not going to look back one day and regret anything that has been preserved," Siegel said.
Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (909) 676-4315, Ext. 2616, or ddowney@californian.com.
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/07/13..._0420_37_44.txt
