San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Plan

With 4200 square miles of inland deserts, high mountains, and coastal mesas, San Diego is the most biologically diverse county in the US. And with 3,000,000 residents, it has the sixth largest population. Breakneck development has destroyed nearly 90 percent of wildlife habitat between the coast and the mountains. As a result, San Diego has nearly 200 plant and animal species that are at risk of extinction.

In 1997, after five years of negotiations between developers, environmentalists, and public officials, San Diego established the country's first Multiple Species Conservation Plan. The plan called for preservation of 172,000 interconnected acres of chaparral and coastal sage scrub in Southwestern San Diego County, about 6% of the county's total area. The resulting preserve would be managed to protect 85 threatened plant and animal species. In exchange, hundreds of thousands of acres of contested land would be freed up for development.

The plan was praised as a win-win solution to a long and bitter fight between developers and environmentalists. It became a model for hundreds of similar efforts across the US. But the results have been mixed at best.

Supporters say the plan is a realistic compromise that protects more habitat than would have been possible otherwise. Critics argue that it amounts to little more than a giveaway to big developers. They point out that politics and money, not science, determined which areas would be slated for preservation and which for development. And they argue that the plan is riddled with loopholes for developers, while it bars the county from conserving new acreage or imposing new rules for 50 years.

Since the plan was adopted, the city and county have bought some 30,000 acres of formerly private land and have started monitoring threatened species. Meanwhile, hundreds of new developments have broken ground. And thousands of acres of high-dollar acreage near the coast, where some of the rarest species live, have been bladed for million-dollar tract homes. Instead of stopping development in its tracks and protecting the county's last remaining stands of high-quality habitat, the plan gave developers the go ahead to bulldoze all but a tattered shred.