Malibu septic tanks need to go, author says
DOWNTOWN — Coming together on Earth Day to plant trees, pick up trash and smile on one another may feel good, but it’s hardly going to solve the planet’s problems.
That’s the message a local journalist and two scientists will deliver at a meeting in downtown Santa Monica tonight that aims to expose the dangers of living, working and playing near nature.
“I think it’s lovely to see all the various Earth Day events that go on,” said Suzanne Goode, a California State Parks biologist who lives in the Santa Monica Mountains. “But just that one little day of activity — while creating a great event — doesn’t really do what needs to be done about changing our lives and our fundamental society, and the type of planning that we do.”
Real progress entails educating residents about the rights of property owners, while encouraging owners to take better care of the land — and even offer them incentives, said Penelope Grenoble O’Malley, who will speak at the event. She added residents too often equate their slow-growth beliefs with environmentalism.
O’Malley, a book author, said she moved from West Los Angeles in 1986 to the Point Dume area of Malibu to escape urban sprawl. But O’Malley said she quickly realized rural areas also face serious ecological challenges.
“We need to be creative. Development is going to happen.” — — PENELOPE GRENOBLE O’MALLEY Author
“I learned a lot about the environment that I had no idea about,” said O’Malley, 59, who later moved to live on an acre in the Canejo Valley, where she now lives with her husband. “I went out to Malibu to isolate and get close to nature, and I found out it was a lot harder than I thought... It’s a sense that you just can’t run away and say, ‘I’m tired of being responsible in the city. I’m just going to come out here and lay back and smell the ocean, and whatever’ — you really need to be more diligent.”
O’Malley said what she calls “negative” or “defensive” development in Malibu has caused the wildfires to recur more often, move faster, grow larger and burn hotter. Mudslides and floods are the result, she added, saying the environment takes a beating the entire time.
“We need to be creative,” O’Malley said. “Development is going to happen. We have to learn how to use the development process to protect the environment and to create a model for how people live close to nature... Malibu could still be a model for how to do this.”
O’Malley said Malibu officials could learn from areas like the Santa Rosa plateau in San Diego, where land buyers are given discounts in exchange for limited development plans. She said onerous laws for land owners need to be replaced with “positive” and “creative” environmentalism. And Malibu is just the place to do it, she added, because of its open spaces and its affluent and creative residents.
Dr. Shelley Luce, the science and policy director for Heal the Bay, a local nonprofit organization, will join Goode and O’Malley at the Midnight Special Bookstore on Second Street in downtown Santa Monica at 7:30 p.m. tonight to “expose the destructive flip side of living and recreating close to wild land.” O’Malley also will read from a book she wrote called, “Malibu Diary: Notes from an Urban Refugee.”
O’Malley said there’s a lot to be done in a short amount of time. As an example of creative thinking, she pointed to the situation near the Malibu Lagoon, where locals have retained their septic tanks in lieu of installing a sewer system to limit new construction. The effect, she said, is the septic tanks sometimes leak, and that leads to contaminated ground water and closed beaches.
“In reality, what you could do, is you could put in a self-contained sewage treatment plant,” O’Malley said. “As opposed to having the businesses and people who live in those areas use septic tanks, which eventually leak effluent into the ground water.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 20, 2004. Read the original PDF.