Contents
1. Transcript
1.1. Session 1 (January 4, 2008)
-
Collings
- Today is January 4th, 2008. Jane Collings interviewing Marcia Hanscom at her
home.
-
Collings
- So why don't we just start off with the basics of where you came from, something
about your family? So where and when were you born?
-
Hanscom
- I was born in Altadena, just north of South Pasadena, which is where my family
was living at the time, and where I was mostly raised. We lived in Azusa for
about a year in between there, West Covina. But most of the time growing up I
lived in South Pasadena, and so have been in and around Los Angeles for a long
time.
-
Collings
- Yes. Were your family like native Californians or had they come out from the
Midwest, perhaps?
-
Hanscom
- My father's family is East Coast, Connecticut, Massachusetts based, and
I've, in fact, met very few of his family because of that. My mother's family,
however, is a third-generation Californian, so--she was third-generation, so
they had long ties to the community here.
-
Collings
- Do you have brothers and sisters?
-
Hanscom
- I have two sisters [Nancy, and Janice Hanscom-Echevarria, now Ransom]. They don't
live in the area any longer.
-
Collings
- What kind of community did you grow up in? What kind of community was Altadena at
that time?
-
Hanscom
- South Pasadena is actually where I grew up. Altadena, I was in the hospital, but
that's about it.
-
Collings
- Oh yes.
-
Hanscom
- In South Pasadena it was a very quiet community, sort of a, well, small bedroom
community of Los Angeles, very close to Los Angeles, right on the border, but it
was a very small town, and I rarely ventured out of South Pasadena, except to
visit my grandmother [Patti Dennison] at Redondo Beach, which is where I, I
think, first had my love for the coast sort of nurtured.
-
Collings
- Sure. Yes.
-
Hanscom
- We would go there almost every weekend.
-
Collings
- How nice, yes, and you would go swimming.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, swimming and playing in the sand and looking at all of the little animals
and things in the shoreline area.
-
Collings
- So there were tide pools around there?
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Well, not tide pools, but just in the ocean waves there. No, it's a sandy
beach at Redondo, but it was much different than it is today.
-
Collings
- Yes, I can imagine. Yes, that must have been really nice. So what kinds of things
did your parents do?
-
Hanscom
- My father was a janitor at the post office in South Pasadena. He had been in
World War II, had been an almost twenty-year navy veteran--
-
Collings
- Oh, my gosh.
-
Hanscom
- --and because of the trauma he experienced--
-
Collings
- Oh, dear.
-
Hanscom
- --during the war, when he came back, he worked in government jobs, and so the
post office was where he was working most of the time while I was growing up. My
mother also was a government employee. She worked for the Internal Revenue
Service and then the Social Security Administration.
-
Collings
- What were their political views?
-
Hanscom
- Well, that's interesting you ask, because I just had a discussion with my mother
about that over the holidays, and she informed me that she's a staunch
conservative Republican now. I was a little surprised. She was a Democrat when I
was growing up, and my father was a Republican, so they had interesting
conversations. But I don't think it was really the political parties that
influenced me as much as was their attitude toward how one would go about
getting things done. Like when my father did not receive his paycheck or his
Veterans Administration check or something was awry, he would be immediately on
the phone to the senator or to the White House [Collings laughs] or, you know,
he just believed in going to the top, which is something that I think I learned
from him.
-
Collings
- Oh, that's interesting. Yes. Well, he probably felt like, you know, having served
in the military all those years, that he was entitled.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, well, and it worked, and I watched that process, and so went, "Hmm, start at
the top. Why go through all this bureaucracy?"
-
Collings
- Oh, that's really interesting. Yes. What kinds of things do your sisters do?
-
Hanscom
- Well, one of my sisters is living up in Marysville, and I believe--I'm not in
great touch with my sisters these days, but I believe she is doing some kind of
clerical work for a real estate agent or something like that, something for
housing mortgages; I'm not really clear on that. My other sister is--she's kind
of lost, shall we say.
-
Collings
- Yes. So what were your parents sort of talking with you about when you were
growing up about, you know, possible jobs in the future and so forth?
-
Hanscom
- You know, I don't know that they really encouraged me to go in any particular
way, but my mother was very much a strong believer that I could do anything I
wanted, and I got a lot of confidence instilled in me from her, I believe. I was
the oldest, and she just always considered that I could do anything. So there
was no question that anything is possible.
-
Collings
- What kinds of subjects did you enjoy when you were in high school?
-
Hanscom
- Well, I hated English. It turned out that now I consider myself a very good
writer, but I didn't like it then. I'm not sure why. I pretty much was
into--well, Spanish. I took all the Spanish classes so that I became fluent in
Spanish. I had excellent teachers in that area. I also really was pretty much
just making sure I was in the top of my class so that I could get into college.
That was a big deal. My mother had gone to college but never finished. My father
didn't go to college. so it was a really important thing. In fact, our community
was very much college prep all the way.
-
Collings
- What college were you trying to get into?
-
Hanscom
- At that time I could have gotten into other colleges, and if I had it to do over,
I might. But I was very, very entrenched in the church community that my mother
had brought us up in, and so I focused my sights on this small religious college
in Indiana, Winona Lake, Indiana, and decided I was going there and put
everything else aside. A number of circumstances, once I got there, changed
things, and I ended up coming back and going to Pasadena City College and Long
Beach City College and then finally getting my degree at Cal State Long Beach.
So it wasn't really a path I would have chosen, but it ended up being the best
thing, I think.
-
Collings
- Yes. Well, that was kind of a long way to go to head off for college.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, it was, but the church that I was brought up in, I was really brought up in
a very fundamental Christian church.
-
Collings
- What is the name of the church? Let me just take your glasses off your mic there,
because it might [unclear].
-
Hanscom
- Grace College. Grace Brethren Church is the church, but the college was Grace
College.
-
Collings
- This was your mother's church or your father's church?
-
Hanscom
- My mother's church, which she still is entrenched in.
-
Collings
- Just how much of the like church activity would you be involved in?
-
Hanscom
- Well, I played the organ for the church Sunday mornings; sometimes the piano as
well. Sang in the choir. I was very involved. Every Sunday morning and Sunday
night, Wednesday night. It was really a big part of our lives growing up. My
leaving the nest really shifted that for me, and I started questioning a lot of
the dogma and doctrine.
-
Collings
- Did the church do, you know, like things for perhaps needy people or organizing
any kind of help?
-
Hanscom
- Not so much for the community as much as there were a lot of missionary things to
other countries that we were associated with. But not as much as like some
churches are here that I see that I would be more interested in today that do
get more involved in our own communities. That might be part of what led me to
questioning things so much.
-
Collings
- Yes. So when you did go off to college, what were you thinking that you might
major in?
-
Hanscom
- Well, originally--I changed my major a number of times. Music was going to be it
first. Then I realized how much extra--for a music major you almost have to put
in twice as many hours as any other major. It's unbelievable. I finally decided
that maybe I would look at something else, so I went to sociology, and then was
sort of convinced that that was maybe too big of a picture, and I wanted to
maybe help people on a more personal level. So then I decided to major in
psychology, and then finally changed to speech communication, communication
theory, partly because I ended up with a couple of really interesting professors
who became mentors to me, one in particular, Roger van Hook at Long Beach City
College.
-
Collings
- Now, when did you start thinking that your vocation would be for helping
people?
-
Hanscom
- Well, I mean, I guess that was something that probably was instilled in me in the
church.
-
Collings
- So you were at the college in Indiana for just a couple of years and decided to
leave, it sounds like.
-
Hanscom
- Well, no, actually, a summer, and it was decided for me. That was another reason
that I ended up leaving the church, I believe. I went with a friend. The two of
us were going to go to college there together. She was really excited about it.
I was really excited about it. One of the grants did not come through that I was
anticipating getting; I had a number of scholarships. Unfortunately, that meant
that I wouldn't be able to go that semester. So I said, "Well, I'll just
work."
-
Hanscom
- My parents lived in South Pasadena, which was a pretty substantial community, but
they were not wealthy, and they only had enough to live there so we could go to
good schools. But it was just right at the level, apparently, where the grant
didn't apply. It was a strange thing.
-
Hanscom
- So I was all prepared to work and maybe go the next semester or even the next
year, and just work for a year, saving money. I had worked through the summer
there already. The college officials told me I was not allowed to do that. They
called me and my friend into the dean's office and had us all pray about it, and
at the end of the prayer their decision was to give me this ticket that was
going to send me home.
-
Hanscom
- I said, "Well, I don't want to go home. I'll just live off campus and work."
-
Hanscom
- They said, "No, you can't do that."
-
Collings
- You mean they didn't allow students to live off campus?
-
Hanscom
- Well, I wasn't even going to be a student at that point, so it was strange to me,
but it was a very controlling church, shall we say. I didn't understand it at
all, and, of course, being an eighteen-year-old who had just become an adult,
because in California that year they had decided eighteen-year-olds were adults
and not twenty-one any longer, that made me even more defiant. But it didn't
matter. They didn't really care. They had the ticket, and they were driving me
the next morning to Chicago O'Hare Airport, they said. So I came home.
-
Collings
- Wow. Wow.
-
Hanscom
- That pretty much did it for me with that church.
-
Collings
- I see. Was your mother upset when you left the church?
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Yes. I ended up getting married a few years later at that church, but other
than that, I didn't really go back.
-
Collings
- Were you concerned about making a living as a music major?
-
Hanscom
- Hadn't thought about it. I was too young to think about that yet, although that
might have influenced my decision to change the major. I don't really
recall.
-
Collings
- Yes, okay. So up until now your only real association with the sea has been these
wonderful weekends at the beach, and your exposure to, shall we say, organizing
has been your father's strategies--
-
Hanscom
- Right.
-
Collings
- --of redressing wrongs.
-
Hanscom
- I would say. My mother has obviously a very strong sense of principles as well,
and I think I probably got that from her. Even though we might not agree on what
those principles might be today, she definitely instilled in me the importance
of standing up for what you believe is right, and she still supports what I'm
doing because of that.
-
Collings
- Great. That's wonderful. Okay, so you come back out here. You land at LAX.
[Laughter] You've been put on a plane in Chicago O'Hare, and what happens
next?
-
Hanscom
- Well, like I said, it was so close to the school year by that time I had no
choice but to go to Pasadena City College at that point. I couldn't get into
anywhere else. I hadn't really even applied anywhere else, even though I had
thought about it before, and so that was where I was stuck.
-
Hanscom
- So I went there, and I actually found I liked it and liked the diversity of
things, which was very different than in South Pasadena, where we didn't have as
much diversity of people or interests. So I went there. Got a little sidetracked
a couple of years into it by getting married, a marriage that lasted only a
couple of years. But that took me to Long Beach, and then I ended up going to
Long Beach City College for a while. My college career ended up being a ten-year
college degree, just because of all the various other things happening in life
and not knowing really what I wanted to do in terms of a major, changing from
here to there.
-
Collings
- I think I've gotten a little lost in terms of the timeline here. So what year
would it have been that you started at Pasadena City College?
-
Hanscom
- 1972 was the year I graduated from high school. 1975 was when I went back to
school at Long Beach City College.
-
Collings
- And what were your views on the women's movement at that time?
-
Hanscom
- I'm not sure I was really aware of it, but I don't ever recall being opposed to
it, and at some point in my life was extremely supportive, became supportive. I
don't know exactly when that was. But I'm not sure that I was really aware of it
that much when I was eighteen.
-
Collings
- Yes, okay. Then you said that you got married shortly thereafter. Were you
planning at that time that you would have children and perhaps be a full-time
mom and so forth?
-
Hanscom
- I think I sort of hoped that. I was twenty at the time I got married, almost
twenty-one. I was sure I would become an old maid if I did not get married.
[Laughter] So I did, and it wasn't a good choice, so it didn't last too long.
But, yes, I think I thought that, although I always also thought that I would
work doing something; I wasn't sure.
-
Collings
- But it wasn't like a single-minded focus on a career at that point.
-
Hanscom
- No, no. No, I mean, when I was thinking of going to Grace College, I really
thought I would end up being a minister's wife or a missionary.
-
Collings
- Oh, you did.
-
Hanscom
- So that was a very different thing at that time.
-
Collings
- You were thinking that.
-
Hanscom
- Yes.
-
Collings
- A missionary or a missionary's wife.
-
Collings
- Or a minister's wife.
-
Collings
- A missionary or a minister's wife, okay.
-
Hanscom
- I can't believe I really thought that, but I did. [Laughs]
-
Collings
- Where were you thinking you might be a missionary?
-
Hanscom
- I don't know. You know, somewhere far away. That's where they always lived.
[Laughter]
-
Collings
- Right, okay. Well, that sounds like a really big shift in your thinking then. I
mean, this is really huge.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Well, yes, and thankfully. That's partly why I'm not real close with my
sisters any longer, because they're still in that different frame of
reference.
-
Collings
- Yes. But, I mean, to go from all of this, you know, sort of support for thinking
that, as you said, that you would be a minister's wife or you might be a
missionary, to just kind of like heading off to Pasadena City College and not
really knowing what's coming next.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, it was very, very much a time of questioning, which often it is at that time
of age for young people, I think.
-
Collings
- And society-wide as well.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, and I had it given to me at a point where I wasn't expecting that. I really
thought I had this whole pathway in front of me. I worked at a place called Taco
Treat, which was a place where a lot of the high school kids worked in South
Pasadena, growing up. I went back to work there while I was going to the
college, and met some interesting people, including someone who had just gotten
back from the Vietnam War. I think that hearing a lot of his stories impacted me
quite a bit. I got to know a number of people who were in a very different place
than the people I'd grown up with. So I started really kind of looking out into
the world a little bit more about what else was out there.
-
Collings
- Yes. And what kinds of things was this co-worker saying about his experiences in
Vietnam?
-
Hanscom
- Well, he was obviously very shell-shocked and very disillusioned with a lot of
things, and, you know, yet was a very, very nice, gentle spirit. That, of
course, made me think a lot about my own father's experience, which had impacted
us growing up quite a bit.
-
Collings
- In what way?
-
Hanscom
- Well, he wasn't really there for us emotionally a lot, and in fact, a couple of
times had been hospitalized for what they called a nervous condition.
-
Collings
- But now, it was probably--
-
Hanscom
- Clearly, we know it was post-traumatic stress, and they didn't call it that
then.
-
Collings
- Right. Right.
-
Hanscom
- All they did then was give people drugs to not really deal with--I don't know if
you ever can effectively deal with that sort of trauma.
-
Collings
- I don't, either.
-
Hanscom
- But I don't think the answer is a medicine cabinet full of drugs.
-
Collings
- Yes. What were his views on the Vietnam War?
-
Hanscom
- My dad's views?
-
Collings
- Yes.
-
Hanscom
- I don't think he ever said. He didn't communicate a lot--
-
Collings
- Oh, I see.
-
Hanscom
- --other than when he wanted his check.
-
Collings
- Other than when he wanted his check. [Laughter]
-
Hanscom
- When he had a goal in mind, he went for it, but otherwise he kept a lot of that
to himself. He probably talked to me about it more than others, but he was very
traumatized by the war. But he never said much at all about Vietnam.
-
Collings
- Did he watch television news?
-
Hanscom
- Oh yes. Yes.
-
Collings
- Of the war.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. But he just never expressed himself much about it.
-
Collings
- Okay. All right. So now it's sounding like you have this kind of almost like a
group of informal mentors at the restaurant where you were working.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, a little bit, and a bunch of us would go to San Francisco once in a while
and just hang out. I was sort of exploring what else was out there besides South
Pasadena.
-
Collings
- Yes. Were you living at home at that time?
-
Hanscom
- For the first six months, yes, but then I moved out quickly.
-
Collings
- And you were able to support yourself, working in the restaurant.
-
Hanscom
- Yes.
-
Collings
- Those were the days, huh? [Laughs]
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Right. Right. Yes. You can't do that much anymore, huh?
-
Collings
- Yes. Okay. Then how did you meet your husband?
-
Hanscom
- The person I married back then?
-
Collings
- Your husband at that time, yes.
-
Hanscom
- I met him at a very good friend's wedding.
-
Collings
- What did he do?
-
Hanscom
- He worked for Channel 2 news. He was like a--I don't know, somebody who helped
put on the news.
-
Collings
- Oh yes. That sounds like it would be interesting.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, yes.
-
Collings
- Okay. But you did continue college once you got married.
-
Hanscom
- I actually stopped for a while. I did stop for a while, maybe about six months,
and then I kind of went off and on for a couple of years. I just took a couple
of classes here and there.
-
Collings
- Did you continue working?
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Yes, my next job, I worked at Huntington Memorial Hospital for a while, and
then when I moved to Long Beach, I worked at a hospital in Rossmoor. I worked in
the dietary department, helping people fill out their menus and that sort of
thing.
-
Collings
- Yes, okay. When did you first then become involved with the activities with the
coast?
-
Hanscom
- Well, it actually was quite a ways after that, because I sort of--when I got my
degree, I finally started working in the communications field. I had a number of
jobs in public relations; headed up the alumni association at Cal State Long
Beach, and then had my own business for about eight years. So it was later in
life that I came to this, really.
-
Collings
- So you developed a lot of those kind of skills then in your professional--
-
Hanscom
- Right. Right. Yes, a lot of my professional skills have been--when I decided to
get involved with environmental protection work, I sort of realized there was a
need for people with skills like that, and I thought, "Boy, how come things are
not so professional here in the nonprofit world?" I was surprised. It's gotten
better, much better, but when I started volunteering for the Sierra Club, they
didn't even have a flyer that was professionally done. It was very surprising
how "by the seat of your pants" people were, and this was just in the early
nineties, not that long ago.
-
Hanscom
- So how I got involved is lots of things were happening in my life that were sort
of making me think about what I was doing, even though I was on a very fast
track in a fast-track world.
-
Collings
- This was with your position with the alumni organization?
-
Hanscom
- No, this was after that and after working for the Chamber of Commerce and then
after starting my own business. I had my own business for eight years. It was a
public relations special event marketing business, so I had a lot of teams,
Olympic teams that we represented, and bicycle and triathlon events. We would
bring sponsors into them and do a lot of that.
-
Collings
- Now, just to backtrack, how did you go from sort of not knowing really what you
wanted to do and so forth, into this very organizationally--you know, a lot of
organizational skills and working with people? That sounds like another big
change.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Like I said, I had a really good mentor in the communications department at
Long Beach City College, Roger van Hook. Then I had several other mentors that,
you know, inspired me to go on. My first job, I had been working as a tour guide
for the Queen Mary while I was finishing my degree, and became a union shop
steward--
-
Collings
- Oh, you did.
-
Hanscom
- --and was speaking up for the tour guides as a Teamster, in fact. During that
time we had a new management come in, and they very smartly thought, "Let's
offer her a management job." [Laughs] I thought that was a good idea, but I
didn't realize they were just trying to get me out of the union.
-
Collings
- So was that your first sort of activist role then, do you think, when you were
the shop steward?
-
Hanscom
- No, not my first, but my first in a--well, right after college, when I was still
going to Pasadena City College and working at the restaurant, I also was working
part-time as a teacher's aide, and I would say that was my first activist
experience, because the other aide I was working with there, she and I both
realized that the school lunches were a big problem, that they were just giving
them--
-
Collings
- Junk.
-
Hanscom
- --junk food, really, and we did some investigation with some support from some of
the parents and students, that found out that they were actually giving things
that the federal government had said they weren't supposed to even be giving any
longer. We opened a whole can of worms and organized people to go to the school
district board. So that was really my first activist role, I think.
-
Hanscom
- Then the next probably was--I'm trying to think what we were talking about.
-
Collings
- I just sort of said when you were a shop steward, was that your first activist
role.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, as a shop steward, yes, I would say, definitely. I had just been hired when
we were voting on whether or not we would be represented by the Teamsters. It
wasn't long before I was really very involved with the Teamsters. Then, so what
the Wrather Corporation that came in to manage the Queen Mary operation, they
said, "Well, you know, we could use an employee communications manager. Maybe
you could do that for us, and then you'd still be doing the work you're
interested in." I liked that idea, and so I did that for a couple of years until
they laid off about half of the staff, including me and my whole department.
[Laughter] So that was also a real interesting education.
-
Collings
- In what way?
-
Hanscom
- Well, because I felt like I was really used.
-
Collings
- Yes.
-
Collings
- You shouldn't play with the cord there, sorry.
-
Hanscom
- Oh, sorry.
-
Collings
- In what way?
-
Hanscom
- Because, I mean, here they had told me that what we were doing--well, first of
all, they had told me that our department would not be touched, because
obviously we were very important to the functioning of the employees there, and
in the first round of layoffs, that was the way it was. But then we got all very
short notice, you know, that we were all going to be laid off in the next round.
They also had just given me this Manager of the Year award a month before, and
none of it seemed to mean much at that point. I lived with three roommates, and
all of us were laid off at the same time.
-
Hanscom
- Right after that, though, is when I applied for the Cal State Long Beach job
and--
-
Collings
- Yes, the alumni relations.
-
Hanscom
- --and became the alumni director there. Then after that I went to work for the
Long Beach Chamber of Commerce, which might not seem like a traditional ally of
the work I do now, but that's partly why I have the views I do, I think, in the
work I do, because I did work there for several years, and I understand, I
think, how people who are in a chamber of commerce sort of effort, how they
think and how we can sometimes find common ground with them.
-
Collings
- Okay, yes. What about--did you meet--
-
Hanscom
- Then I went to work [at the Chamber of Commerce] and [then] started my own
business after that.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. And did you meet people that you sort of were able to use those
relationships later on?
-
Hanscom
- Not so much, because I haven't really done a lot of work--
-
Collings
- There, yes.
-
Hanscom
- --in that same location. Interestingly, one of the people who had been on my
marketing committee ended up working with Surfrider Foundation, and so we ended
up working together. We both found our way to the environmental activist
communities separately and have worked together since. That was kind of
interesting.
-
Collings
- Yes. So tell me about the business that you ran then.
-
Hanscom
- Well, it was a sports marketing and special event public relations business. We
did public relations for a number of different kinds of companies, but the real
interest of our company was to work on events that had some kind of--almost
always they were nonprofit or sports related efforts of some sort.
-
Collings
- Were you interested in sports at that time?
-
Hanscom
- Hadn't started that way, but the reason I got involved in that was I had
volunteered for the 1984 Olympics and worked in the press area there--
-
Collings
- Yes. That must have been fun.
-
Hanscom
- --both two years before and during that 1984 competition. Worked with the
sailing, yachting venue and the volleyball venue, so got very involved with
them, and that sort of spurred on my interest.
-
Collings
- Yes, and I suppose that by this time you were thinking that you might like to run
your own business.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Yes. Well, a lot of things changed at the Chamber of Commerce, and it was
just a good time to kind of be launched off there. One of the things I did there
was help put on a Pacific Rim Expo, which brought in a lot of interests from
Alaska that worked in tandem with Long Beach, and so I made some contacts there
that sort of were interested in the kinds of services I could provide in a
private company.
-
Collings
- Yes. Well, that's great. But you no longer have this business.
-
Hanscom
- No. No, about eight years into it, I, like I said, was--I think like most people
have sort of times in their life when they reevaluate what they're doing and
have all kinds of circumstances converge, which was what was happening with me.
My father passed away. A very important relationship ended. I was just kind of
in a place where I was looking deeper within myself as to what am I doing and
why. But I wasn't at all thinking about closing my business. That was really
like a part of me.
-
Hanscom
- But it was during that time that I picked up Al Gore's book, Earth in the
Balance, and started reading it, and halfway through it I was just very
convinced I had to do something. I wasn't sure what, but I just knew I had to do
something. His writing and what he said in that book was so compelling that
there was such a huge problem that needed more than anybody was thinking or
doing at that time. This was 1991.
-
Hanscom
- So by the time I finished the book, I started actually looking for potential jobs
in the environment, not realizing that, unlike the rest of the for-profit world,
where your skills can transfer from one thing to another. Not so much in the
nonprofit world. You really have to kind of come up through the ranks, and I
didn't know that at the time. Although that may be a little different now,
because some of the big nonprofits are hiring from outside more. But they didn't
at the time. But nonetheless I started sending off resumes and thinking that was
what I was going to do.
-
Hanscom
- Then finally I started volunteering for the Sierra Club when I realized that the
Bolsa Chica Wetlands near where I was living in Huntington Beach at that time,
that they were at risk, and decided that I needed to at least volunteer. So that
got me on my track toward wetlands.
-
Collings
- Now, what made you pick up the Al Gore book in the first place?
-
Hanscom
- That's a good question. I'm not really sure. I've always been an avid reader, so
it could just be that I was in a bookstore one day and saw it. I can't tell you.
That's a very good question. I did have, as one of our clients--interestingly,
but I didn't put it together at that time--one of our clients was the Sierra
Club who was working on something related to the Ballona Wetlands, and they had
some kind of event they put on, Wetlands Preservation '90, and we were brought
in to help bring in some of the sponsors for the event. So I learned a little
bit about wetlands through that. We had had a number of clients who did
environmental things, so I was kind of interested and obviously always had a
love for the ocean and the coast, and so had a little inclination towards
that.
-
Hanscom
- But I'm not really sure why I picked up the book, so good question. I think he
was running for vice president at that time, perhaps. Maybe that was why.
-
Collings
- You might have, yes.
-
Hanscom
- I was always interested somewhat in politics.
-
Collings
- Yes. Well, yes, and he certainly went on to become vice president, as we know.
[Laughter]
-
Hanscom
- Yes, he did, and people are now paying much more attention to him than they did
back then on these issues.
-
Collings
- Yes. Yes, that's right. Okay, so did you sell your business, or what did you do
with it?
-
Hanscom
- No, I just decided to close it finally.
-
Collings
- Just disbanded it.
-
Hanscom
- Yes.
-
Collings
- You were sending off these resumes, and you became a volunteer with the Sierra
Club. But did you need to support yourself at that time?
-
Hanscom
- Yes, I finally--well, I worked part-time in a real estate office, of all things,
to just pay the bills and keep things going. But then I got a part-time offer
for a job at the Campaign to Save California Wetlands, and so I worked part-time
for them at a much lower price than anything I had ever thought I would work
for. I mean, it wasn't like what I was sending out my resumes for.
-
Hanscom
- But by then I had made a lot of other changes and realized I didn't need as much
as I used to think I did when I had my business and all these trappings around
me. It was not as important to have a really fancy car and all the things I
thought I needed.
-
Collings
- So prior to that you had had, as you say, a really fancy--
-
Hanscom
- A nice car, yes, yes, I mean, and I traveled a lot. I just decided I didn't need
all those things. So I worked part-time for the Campaign to Save California
Wetlands, and then also had a friend who had founded Surfrider, and they said
they needed someone part-time, so I worked part-time for both of those groups
for a while before I had this opportunity to start the Wetlands Action
Network.
-
Collings
- So it sounds like you were willing to take this much lower salary in order to
gain the experience.
-
Hanscom
- And to do the work. It was important work that needed to be done whether it was
being paid a lot or not.
-
Collings
- So you started having strong feelings in that area.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. I became the chair very quickly of the Sierra Club's Bolsa Chica Task Force
and got to understand a lot more why--I mean, I rode my bicycle by the wetlands
and always thought it was beautiful, but didn't really understand why they were
important. The more I learned about them, the more committed I became to being a
champion for these important ecosystems that seemed to be pretty much dismissed.
You know, everybody was talking about the rain forests then, and that was like
the big thing, but nobody was really paying much attention to wetlands. In fact,
a lot of--
-
Collings
- Right. That's right, and especially around here. You hear about it more in the
southern parts of the country and Florida.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, or even the East Coast. There's an international designation for wetlands
called Ramsar wetlands of international importance, and it relates to an
international treaty the United States is in. It's called a convention, but it's
like a treaty that we're involved with, with a number of other countries around
the world. The first few and only Ramsar designation of wetlands of
international importance for a number of years were in the eastern and southern
part of the country. There was nothing on the West Coast at all. Now we finally
have a few wetlands that are designated such here. But no one was really paying
much attention to them.
-
Collings
- So at what point did you decide that you would begin the Wetlands Action
Network?
-
Hanscom
- Well, in 1995, the end of '94, I had a discussion with Andrew Beath at the Earth
Trust Foundation up in Malibu. I had told him that I was looking at starting a
wetlands group that would be more focused on education and helping to outreach
to help people understand how important these places were. He said, "Well, I
like the idea." At that time I was thinking about doing it up in Northern
California, because I just thought there was more interest and concern about the
environment there. I didn't really think people in L.A. cared that much. He
said, "Well, I'd like you to do it here, though, and we'll support you by giving
you an office, and I can hire you part-time for the Earth Trust Foundation to do
some work for us, and then you can get it started here."
-
Hanscom
- So he kind of gave us a home and an incubation spot to be in, and I liked the
area where they were up in Big Rock and Malibu. It was a little bit away from
the city and the busyness here, and I thought, "Well, maybe." So that's what
kept me here, and the efforts at the Ballona Wetlands have, which drew me in
pretty quickly, about less than a year after that. That's really what's kept me
here, because I was proven wrong. People in Los Angeles do care very much, and
it's been surprising to me how much interest there has been in this place once
people knew a little bit about it.
-
Collings
- Did you have particular experiences which made you think that there wasn't much
interest in Southern California for environmental issues?
-
Hanscom
- Just what I'd read and seen; it seemed like people who were as committed and
interested in the environment and environmental protection as I felt, all seemed
to be based up in Northern California. A lot of the environmental groups were
based up there. A lot of the environmental groups that were here, the few that
were here, seemed to be focused on a few things and didn't seem to really want
to get their hands into things in a deep way. I've actually seen the
environmental community here in L.A. change significantly during the time that
the Ballona movement happened, and some other things sort of converged at the
same time.
-
Collings
- So you started off the Wetlands Action Network with one office and yourself. How
did you grow the organization?
-
Hanscom
- Well, I was actually engaged in Ballona by a person named Bruce Robertson. He is
a private detective who started a group called the Ballona Valley Preservation
League. He was just starting to start that group. He came up to our office and
had also talked to Earth Trust and to us about him starting this group. Then he
said, "You know, Marcia, I want to show you some maps about what is really
happening there and how important this place is."
-
Hanscom
- So I went and looked at them and was astonished to see the plans for what might
happen. He really pulled me into the movement here. I was going to focus much
more on wetlands in general all up and down the coast, and he helped me see
how--
-
Collings
- Which is why the name is more general.
-
Hanscom
- Right. Right. But Ballona became a big part of our focus. We still continued to
work on other wetlands, but Ballona became probably 60 to 80 percent of our work
for a good eight-year period, in part because I could see that the few groups
that were doing anything on it really needed some professional help and needed
some expertise in getting the word out. They were getting no articles in the
newspaper, virtually; nothing that was really outreaching to the greater
community, which was why these maps were such a surprise to me.
-
Hanscom
- Then after Bruce asked me to get involved, we decided to start a coalition, and
we started this coalition with six groups, the Sierra Club; his group, Wetlands
Action Network; and three others. [Interruption and off-tape conversation.]
-
Collings
- Why don't you go ahead and repeat the names of those groups. There was Sierra
Club--
-
Hanscom
- Okay, so we started the coalition with 6 groups, the Sierra Club; Ballona Valley
Preservation League; Wetlands Action Network; Ballona Wetlands Land Trust, which
was a very small fledgling community group. There were two others--oh, Earth
Trust Foundation; and there was one other [Save Ballona Wetlands], and it's
escaping me at the moment. But these 6 groups ended up [being part of a
coalition with] 126 groups by the time we were finished, and that was never our
intention. We were really only going to be just this coalition of 6 groups who
were going to fight for this place.
-
Hanscom
- But then when we decided to start trying to bring more people in, that became a
big part of our outreach. Then a few months into this coalition effort,
DreamWorks decided to get involved, and Steven Spielberg was going to build a
movie studio at Ballona. And I thought, you know, we are going to focus more
effort here than we were because I saw it as an opportunity that unbeknownst to
Spielberg and his colleagues, this could be a really good opportunity to help
educate the public about the importance of wetlands. I know that wasn't his
intention in coming in here, but I could see, from my own professional
experience, that that was going to be something--you know, his involvement would
help us to really get the word out, and it did. It did.
-
Collings
- Just by fighting against him and using his name, that would get press.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. I mean, there are a lot of people who think that once you're up against a
powerful influence, you can't get media exposure, but that's not my experience,
especially when you have someone that high of a profile. If it had just been
David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, maybe not so much, but Spielberg is known
everywhere. I can tell you, there were hundreds of journalists that we had that
we have toured the wetlands with from all over the world, not just here; in
fact, more from away from here to begin with, and then finally, you know, some
of the L.A. journalists started getting involved.
-
Hanscom
- But the television cameras were just everywhere. We did get very creative and
colorful in some of the things we did to help create images for them, but I've
got tapes and tapes and tapes of television news clips that helped us to get the
word out about how important this place was, and I think that, in large part,
did help influence them to finally leave four years later, which was a good
decision for them. I'm told that DreamWorks did much better with their films
after they left.
-
Collings
- Oh, really. Why would that be?
-
Hanscom
- I don't know.
-
Collings
- Oh, well, okay. Just luck, huh?
-
Hanscom
- Some of their people told us that, so I said, "Good." I mean, we did protest at
their premieres and had children writing letters to Spielberg and did a lot of
things that I'm sure did not cut into their profits greatly, but did not help
their public image, either.
-
Collings
- Right. Right. So it was actually quite fortuitous that they tried to build a
facility here.
-
Hanscom
- In a way. You know, some of our detractors would say, "Oh, they're just using
that to get their names in the paper." Well, no, we had a motive in mind. It
wasn't to get our names in the paper. It was really to--
-
Collings
- To publicize.
-
Hanscom
- --educate people and publicize to people, and did we use that fact? Yes, we did,
because it was--my good friend Paul Watson with Sea Shepherd Society always
says, "It has to sizzle," in order to get the media attention, and he's right
about that.
-
Collings
- So you were saying that when you first came into the environmental area, you were
sort of surprised at how unsavvy people were about using the media.
-
Hanscom
- About using the media and also in terms of marketing and professional
communications, whether it was brochures or newsletters. Of course, part of that
has gotten better because of computers getting better and easier to access, but
I was rather astonished at the materials that you just had to deal with. There
wasn't much there that you could communicate with people. So that was something
that I think has gotten better.
-
Collings
- Yes. So what are some of the ways that you contributed to the Sierra Club's
efforts in that?
-
Hanscom
- Well, that was one of my first efforts was to put together a professional
newsletter for our Bolsa Chica Task Force that looked like we knew what we were
doing and could be believed. That's a lot of it, is how image and how someone
sees you is a lot of whether they will listen to you.
-
Collings
- Yes. Did you find much resistance to this idea that you need to package the
message effectively?
-
Hanscom
- No. I just think that there was a culture of not ever having thought of that, or,
"Oh, wow, you can do that? Great." But, you know, I mean, it was welcomed; it
just wasn't part of the culture or part of what was even considered.
-
Collings
- Yes. Okay, so you went sort of loggerheads against the Playa Vista development,
you know, pretty soon into the Wetlands Action Network organization as well. Of
course, we'll talk about that in more detail, but just, you know, sort of
working backward, how do you feel about the building that has taken place up to
this point?
-
Hanscom
- Well, I wish none of it had. We fought very hard to protect the entire 1,087
acres out there. We ended up with 620 acres in public ownership at this point,
which is almost two-thirds more than what the developers had promised to the
Friends of the Ballona Wetlands. So we did make some major progress. We also got
the land put into public ownership, whereas the land Playa Vista was promising
to the Friends, it was always a question whether it would be still owned by them
or sort of an easement. There were a lot of little things that we undid in the
deal by getting the state to acquire this land, and it includes a large chunk of
the Ballona Creek channel out here, including 83 acres of the creek itself that
was owned by Playa Vista, which means the State of California now has a stake in
our creek here, which is really good.
-
Hanscom
- So I'm not happy that we didn't get it all, but if we hadn't gone for it all, we
never would have gotten what we did. There still are several hundred acres at
play in the Phase 2 area. Unfortunately, Playa Vista started building right at
Jefferson and Lincoln, so it looks like a big wall right there, and a lot of
people don't know that there's still some land back behind that toward the
freeway that is still in question. The Ballona Wetlands Land Trust and Surfrider
Foundation are still fighting for that and have won a big court decision
recently, and so it's possible, at least, the public might get another hundred
acres, two hundred acres, somewhere in there.
-
Hanscom
- But Playa Vista itself is not at all what it was promoted to be.
-
Collings
- Which was very environmentally friendly.
-
Hanscom
- Oh yes. When I got involved in this, a lot of the environmental groups thought it
was a great deal, because they were convinced by the people who were the
developers at the time that this would be the most environmentally conscious
development ever, that everyone would work and live there and never leave and
have to use a car, and all of these things that we knew weren't probably likely,
and in fact, not only shown to be not true, but even the things they did
promise, like having all native plants, there's not one native plant on the
site, not even a native sycamore tree anywhere, willows, nothing like that. All
of the recycling, very, very advanced recycling facilities they said they would
have there, they don't have. So a lot of it was sort of a bait and switch.
-
Collings
- Right. I mean, one of the main things that they were promoting was that it would
be a mixed-use facility, and as you said, that people would not have to commute
long distances to their job.
-
Hanscom
- Right, and they started blaming the people fighting Phase 2 on the fact that,
"Well, if you fight us on that, we won't have our commercial space for the
people who live here." That was not even true; most of what they said the entire
time I've been involved with them has been not true. But in Phase 1 they had
four million feet of commercial space approved. They could have already had
plenty of commercial, shopping center or whatever, for the residents that live
there now, and they haven't been able to attract that.
-
Hanscom
- Some of it is the market. Some of it is the dangers on the site itself. There are
some very serious problems with that location. It's in a high-risk liquefaction
zone. It's got methane in very large amounts underneath the surface. The people
who live there and work there have to pay double the taxes. They have to pay a
Mello-Roos [Act] assessment in order to pay for all of the things the developer
normally would pay for but they got this special financing mechanism in so that
they wouldn't have to. So there are a lot of problems with anyone being there,
and many who have invested there have actually resold the places and left.
-
Collings
- Interesting.
-
Hanscom
- It's a good question how many people actually live there right now. It's not
filled up; that's for sure.
-
Collings
- Yes, I know it's not filled up, but I was going to ask you if you were aware of
the actual occupancy rate.
-
Hanscom
- No. At night, you know, we'd look at the lights to see if we could figure it out,
how many people are really there. But there's a lot of empty units,
definitely.
-
Collings
- Yes. Has the organization had any contact with the people who live there, in
terms of letting people know about the wetlands?
-
Hanscom
- The Wetlands Action Network still does monthly nature walks, and then when my
partner [Roy van de Hoek] and I moved down here to Playa del Rey, he and I
started a new organization called the Ballona Institute, which specifically does
restoration here at the wetlands and also in the lagoon areas that the city
owns, and we do educational tours. Ballona Institute did some van tours last
year for seniors, because it's sort of a hard place to really get around to all
of the area and see, and they were very successful. We had a number of people
come who lived in Playa Vista, so we've gotten to know some of the folks over
there. We also do some bicycle nature rides up and down the creek, and we've had
a couple of people from Playa Vista come on those. The people we've met who live
there are really nice people, and some of them have some very serious concerns
about what's going on there as well, so it's kind of interesting.
-
Collings
- Okay, because I was just wondering whether the supposed environmentally friendly
situation of Playa Vista had attracted a certain type of person.
-
Hanscom
- Well, it's hard to say, because we don't know--
-
Collings
- Whether it's true or not.
-
Hanscom
- We don't know everybody that's there. But the people that we know who are there
came for very different reasons. Some of them got good deals because they knew
someone who knew the developer. I wouldn't say that environmentalists were
attracted to live there at all. [Laughter] I would say that it's really pretty
clear to most people that it's not the environmental--
-
Collings
- Whatever it's advertised to be, yes.
-
Hanscom
- --whatever they thought it was. Yes. But I do think they're luring people in with
lots of different things. The developer has actually subcontracted out to
separate builders now, and so one of the builders was offering like all these
free furniture things. They're offering different things than you would normally
get to move into a condo, so lots of incentives happening.
-
Collings
- Okay. Let's see. Okay, so we were just talking about how, in this very media-rich
environment, it becomes evident that it's so important to be able to use those
tools to promote any kind of message, whether it's an advertising or an
environmental message, and you had a comment.
-
Hanscom
- Well, yes. That's part of what's kept me here in Los Angeles, as much as I
haven't always--I have sort of a love-hate relationship with L.A. As I've gotten
to know it better from a geographic standpoint and a biological standpoint,
living with a biologist-- [Interruption]
-
Hanscom
- Living with a biologist-geographer, I've gotten to understand really what Los
Angeles is better, so that part I've started to really love and learn more
about. But I also really just hate the congestion and the number of people and
the buildings. I'd like to be a in a place like I was when I lived in the Santa
Monica Mountains, a little closer to nature. This isn't too bad right here by
the wetlands.
-
Collings
- No, it's very nice. It's lovely.
-
Hanscom
- That allows me to stay, too. But part of my motivation in staying here has been
that there is such a large media presence here, and so therefore if you know how
to use that and communicate through that to the public, you can reach a lot more
people, and we certainly need to reach a lot more people.
-
Collings
- Yes. So it sounds like sort of one of the main purposes of your organization at
this point is precisely to utilize your communication skills and to get the
message about the wetlands out to the public.
-
Hanscom
- Right. Right, and in fact, that's part of what our purpose was in starting this
Ballona Institute, and we just now have gotten some space for a library archive,
and we also have a small nature store we're going to be opening, where the
public can actually come and find out more, just like we have, of the treasures
that we really have right here in L.A., even amongst this big urban
environment.
-
Collings
- How are you going to publicize the Ballona Institute?
-
Hanscom
- Well, we've been doing it so far through our tours, through our bicycle tours and
our van tours, but we'll also be putting out announcements. We're probably going
to be having monthly programs where we'll have someone talk about different bird
species or plants of interest. We have a number of endangered species right here
in Los Angeles. A lot of people wouldn't even--you know, they've written off
L.A. I find even when I go to the Coastal Commission or the Fish and Game
Commission, "Oh, Los Angeles." That's not as big a deal as the Monterey coast or
somewhere else--
-
Collings
- Oh yes, it's so beautiful up there.
-
Hanscom
- --where we have all these things, yet we have an endangered bird that nests right
out here on our beach that comes all the way from Guatemala every year; the
California Least Tern comes here, and it's one of the largest Least Tern
preserves anywhere on the coast, right here in Los Angeles. We have a couple of
other rare and endangered birds and rare plants that survive out here, some rare
lizard species, and those are important. They're not just important because they
were here lots longer than we've been here, but they're important for the many,
many people who do live here to have access to. Some of the people in Los
Angeles, especially in the inner city areas, will never even get to the Monterey
coast or maybe not even the Los Angeles coast. But to have a place where they
can kind of find out a little bit more about nature and about the importance of
nature and our connection to it, how vital it is, really, for the continuance of
our earth as we know it, then that's what we hope to do here.
-
Collings
- Now, do you look for opportunities to get these issues into the paper, you know,
such as the Spielberg thing?
-
Hanscom
- Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
-
Collings
- What are some other--
-
Hanscom
- Well, like one of the things we're going to be doing this year is, because the
purchase of the wetlands was done during a very--what's the word?--a very
harrowing time of a recall of our governor [Gray Davis], we never had any public
event at all to celebrate the fact that we've acquired the wetlands. A lot of
people don't even know that they've been acquired. The Fish and Game Department,
who owns a lot of it, hasn't been very good at putting signage up. So we've
talked with the [California] Resources Agency at the state, and they said,
"Well, you know, our budget is tight, but if you guys can figure out how to pay
for it, we'll come down and help make such an announcement."
-
Hanscom
- So this next year we decided to take them up on it. We've been working for the
last couple of years on a book called "Celebrate Ballona!" that will have
photographs and poetry and other images of the wetlands that we will be giving
out at three different events. We're going to have a big family picnic. We're
going to have an artistic event with readings and music in the evening. And then
we're going to have a big dinner honoring some of the journalists who stuck
their necks out to help get the word out. At each of those events that book will
be given out to people so that they can see what you kind of have to get close
to, to really know is out there. I mean, we've got some beautiful photographs of
wildflowers and butterflies and some of the species that are out there that no
one knows, whishing by on Lincoln Boulevard, even exist.
-
Hanscom
- So this year we're going to be doing a lot of our outreach focus, focused on
those events.
-
Collings
- So I guess that begs the question of funding and fundraising, because all of this
costs money.
-
Hanscom
- Right. Well, the book is actually a fundraiser in disguise, and we are working
with a very good design firm, who has donated their services to us. They
actually did guerilla posters during our campaign that would pop up once in a
while and be sent out to various people. They're a very, very, very fine design
firm, and they've helped us design this book so that it will be beautiful and no
one will ever know that it's a fundraiser book. But at the bottom of each
photograph there will be a place where someone can have their name if they pay
for that page. So that's how we're raising the money to make the events happen
and--
-
Collings
- Yes. Oh, that's great.
-
Hanscom
- --get the book published.
-
Collings
- Yes. And do you consult for other environmental groups at all in this area?
-
Hanscom
- I've got enough work just with my own efforts to keep this going. But I have a
number of advisors and supporters who are helping with this. I'm not doing this
all on my own; I'm just kind of a spearhead.
-
Collings
- Right, the tip of the spear, as they say.
-
Hanscom
- Yes.
-
Collings
- Okay. Okay. Well, we'll talk more about this then.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Okay, great.
-
Collings
- Great. [End of interview]
1.2. Session 2 (May 23, 2008)
-
Collings
- This is Jane Collings interviewing Marcia Hanscom at the Shallow Water Nature
Store of the Ballona Institute, May 23rd, 2008.
-
Collings
- Good morning, Marcia.
-
Hanscom
- Good morning.
-
Collings
- So we were just talking about how we were going to get into sketching out the
history of the Wetlands Action Network, and you said that you were going to
describe how the Wetlands Action Network was one of several groups that were in
a consortium.
-
Hanscom
- Well, Wetlands Action Network was formed in 1995, the summer of 1995, and we were
founded first as a project of the Earth Trust Foundation in Malibu. Andrew
Beath, the founder of that group, liked the work that I was proposing we would
do with Wetlands Action Network, which originally was going to be primarily more
education oriented, public education oriented, about the importance of wetlands,
because it just seemed that people didn't understand how important they were or
why. So we formed Wetlands Action Network up in Malibu, and about a year and a
half to two years after that we sort of fledged from the nest and became our own
501(c)(3), nonprofit organization.
-
Hanscom
- But in the midst of that, about six months after we started Wetlands Action
Network, a man named Bruce Robertson came to us. He had just started the Ballona
Valley Preservation League, and he showed me the maps of what was going to
happen at the Ballona Wetlands here on the Los Angeles coast.
-
Collings
- The Playa Vista project.
-
Hanscom
- Right. The maps of the proposed Playa Vista project and how much of the Ballona
Wetlands would be destroyed if Playa Vista were built as proposed. It was so
dramatic and shocking to me that I said, "Well, I think I need to get involved
in some way." So we talked further and talked with a couple of other groups that
we knew were concerned. There were six organizations that started a new
coalition in the fall of 1995, and that coalition we decided to call citizens to
Save All of Ballona.
-
Collings
- Now, these groups existed before anybody had even heard of the Playa Vista
project.
-
Hanscom
- Some did; some didn't. The Playa Vista project was actually first proposed in the
1970s, the mid-seventies, by the Summa Corporation. So the Sierra Club was
around, and they were one of the first of the six groups in our coalition, but
most of the other groups I don't think were around at that time. Certainly the
Ballona Valley Preservation League that had just started, and the Wetlands
Action Network that had just started, were not around when the first proposal
came out.
-
Hanscom
- A lot of people actually thought that things had been settled after that first
proposal, and they had been settled by one group, Friends of Ballona Wetlands.
In 1990 they finally, after ten years of negotiations with the developers, they
settled a Coastal Commission lawsuit they had brought against the project, and
they agreed to something that many people thought was going to be better, but
when we looked at the maps and the density that actually had been added to the
project, while some more land was going to be saved, it was going to be double
the size of the project. We just didn't feel that the area could handle that. We
also felt that it wasn't a good trade-off to really allow that much building on
any of this coastal marshland.
-
Collings
- So when you say to save all of Ballona, that means that you, whereas Friends of
the Ballona Wetlands was allowing work east of Lincoln [Boulevard]--
-
Hanscom
- Not just east of Lincoln. They actually had a proposal that allowed building
west of Lincoln Boulevard as well.
-
Collings
- Or, excuse me, east of Lincoln.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Now there is only building east of Lincoln, but their settlement allowed
quite a bit of development west of Lincoln Boulevard, and some in Area C, which
is the area north of Ballona Creek but east of Lincoln, which we've now
preserved. So the Friends' deal was better than Audubon's [Audubon Society's]
deal, which started in the seventies. They were going to be allowed to save
about 70 acres. Then the developers came in with the Friends and made a deal
that would save about 240. We saved over 600 acres as a result of the work that
we built upon the Friends' history.
-
Hanscom
- It was a challenge, because the Friends' deal was painted as this environmentally
sound development when it really wasn't. They actually were forced into being at
opposition to other environmental groups because the terms of their settlement
required them to write letters to the editor against us, to stand up at hearings
against us, to show up at television interviews against us. They were actually
required to do that as part of their settlement, which was very unfortunate,
because it caused a split that, to this day, we're attempting to heal.
-
Collings
- So you were painting it before I sort of got you off track, you were painting the
groups that were involved.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. So there were six groups that started this coalition. Wetlands Action
Network and Ballona Valley Preservation League and Sierra Club were like the
three that really were pushing and sort of the leaders of that coalition, which
by the end of our work when the 600 acres were acquired by the State of
California--which, by the way, the 240 acres that the Friends had been
originally promised had never been actually set aside; it was all "if the entire
development got built," then they might get this saved, and it wasn't even going
to be public land. It was going to be a private conservancy. We really felt
strongly that the land needed to be in state or federal ownership for the
highest and best protection. So we now have 600 acres in public ownership.
-
Hanscom
- But at the time it was very challenging, because most people thought this was
going to be a great development, and we had a lot of work to do. A few months
after we started our coalition, DreamWorks came into the picture, which we did
not anticipate, and all of a sudden they were going to be a one-third
development partner on this project. They were a very popular company that
everybody loved, that contributed a lot of money to the Democratic Party and, of
course, most of the politicians in this area were Democrats, and so it was a big
challenge.
-
Hanscom
- But I felt that it was actually an opportunity, and it sort of moved Wetlands
Action Network away from the primary mission of education into more litigation
and advocacy and activism support, which was partly because I sort of like
looked at the whole picture, and having a public relations background, I
realized that it was something--that Steven Spielberg, while not his intention,
he could be to wetlands as Sting was to the rain forests. You know, he could
help us, not knowingly or perhaps desiring to, he could help us catapult the
issue into something that could really be understood, especially here in Los
Angeles, the media capital of the world.
-
Hanscom
- So we decided to make the Ballona Wetlands a major part of our focus. Even though
Wetlands Action Network did work on some other wetlands issues on the coast, the
Ballona Wetlands became probably 60 to 70 percent of our work for a number of
years. It was because we saw this opportunity to educate the public, and indeed,
we did. It was interesting. While the Los Angeles environmental community and
political community was sold on Playa Vista at the time, it took about [eight
to] ten years to really turn that political wheel around to where it is today,
where it's not seen as this environmental project, even with it being
smaller.
-
Hanscom
- What was interesting was that because of Steven Spielberg's involvement--and to
some degree, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, but more Spielberg being the
main one that's so well known worldwide--we had the opportunity to take
journalists from all over the world through these wetlands and to help them see
why even in such a very urban, dense area like Los Angeles, why a small coastal
wetland here is still functioning and so important for not just the ecology, the
Pacific flyway, the fishing off of--the whole fisheries in Santa Monica Bay, but
also for the public that desperately needs some open space and wild area
nearby.
-
Collings
- Yes. Well, just in doing some research for this interview, it was certainly
heavily covered in Variety.
-
Hanscom
- It was. It was.
-
Collings
- And I don't think you'd find many wetlands issues covered in Variety.
-
Hanscom
- That's right. That's right. Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter were pretty much
following this. For the four years that DreamWorks was involved, they covered it
better than the Los Angeles Times, which was interesting, I thought.
-
Collings
- Yes. So do you think that Spielberg and Geffen and Katzenberg ever had a sense of
what your position was? I mean, finally they withdrew the deal, and it was said
at the time that it was because they were having some funding issues. Did you
ever get any sense that there was another matter?
-
Hanscom
- Well, it's hard for me to believe that some of the wealthiest men in Hollywood
had funding issues. However, that said, you know, maybe every project pencils
out or doesn't, and maybe it didn't for them eventually. They were planning on
being developers here, not just building their movie studio, and part of it was
the development would help fund the studio. A lot of people didn't know that,
and that was part of our big objection. They weren't just going to be tenants,
but they were actually driving the development, and especially with their
incredible clout. You know, it's hard to know. I would like to think that maybe
they came to their senses a bit, but there were clues early on that they really
didn't have, initially, at least, the consciousness to understand what was going
on.
-
Hanscom
- One of our early protests, when DreamWorks was having a big opening at the
wetlands, a big announcement that they were going to be part of this team, and
they had these huge tents out there near the Spruce Goose hangar beneath Loyola
[Marymount University]. It was raining, and just everybody in Hollywood was
going to be there, and political people and journalists from all over. We had a
group of maybe thirty or forty activists out in the rain with our protest signs
covered in plastic so you could still see them, and we had several people
dressed as frogs, because one of the things we knew about the area where they
were going to put their studio was it was this incredible frog chorus area that
you could go up on the bluffs at Loyola and hear every night.
-
Hanscom
- We just didn't want to see that go away, and so shouted that there were wetlands
there, even though Playa Vista pretended there were not. "Oh, it's just an old
Howard Hughes airfield," they would say, but we knew there were wetlands,
delineated wetlands by the Army Corps of Engineers, even. That's why they had to
have a permit to destroy them. So we were there, and all the limos had to go
past our protest site, because it was right at the street where they had to go
in. Steven Spielberg said something to the crowd that was caught on all the
television stations. He said, "I want to welcome every frog in Los Angeles to
please come to Playa Vista. When the wetlands are complete, you'll have a home
here, too."
-
Hanscom
- So he knew early on we had a concern, but that statement was so uninformed about
what the whole situation, is that they were going to make a home for the frogs;
that the frogs were already there; you know, it was very odd. The frogs
obviously got to them, though, and it was a theme throughout our campaign,
because there was subsequently a year or two later there was a [President] Bill
[William J.] Clinton fundraiser at Ron [Ronald Burkle]--can't think of his name;
Green Acres is his estate. He's the owner of Yucaipa, Ralph's Markets. Ron
somebody; I'll think of it. Anyway, at his home--he's a big Democratic Party
fundraiser--there were some protesters there.
-
Hanscom
- Someone yelled out to him, "David Geffen, save the Ballona Wetlands," as he got
out of his car.
-
Hanscom
- And he yelled back very angrily, "If you want to save the frogs, go protest at
the French restaurants."
-
Hanscom
- So again, it just didn't seem like they understood completely. At one point we
met with Jeffrey Katzenberg as a result of Jerry Rubin having done a hunger
strike, and we were actually told that it wasn't allowed to be thought of that
it was because of the hunger strike, but it was. We actually offered him a
proposal. We said, "You know, you could build on the part that was already paved
by Howard Hughes, and we would be okay with that, if you would just then help us
with your political clout to get the funding to acquire the rest of the land.
Wouldn't you rather have a wildlife preserve around you than this massive
city?"
-
Hanscom
- Because it seemed to us, from stories we'd heard, that that was one of the
things, the charming things, that Spielberg felt about this area was how open
and beautiful it was. They put him up on a scissor lift and he looked out. That
was all going to be gone with Playa Vista built around him. But he would have
none of it, and he continued to say, Mr. Katzenberg on camera, that there were
no wetlands anywhere near where they were. First he would say the wetlands are
blocks away from us. Then he would say they were miles away from us.
-
Hanscom
- We kept saying, "Well, good. Just keep getting further from them, and maybe that
will do it." So there were stories. When we had a documentary filmmaker--
-
Collings
- Sheila Laffey?
-
Hanscom
- Sheila Laffey was one of the documentary makers, and when she did her screening,
her first screening, the premiere was held at the Museum of Tolerance. They had
a really nice auditorium there. There were several people who thought they saw
Spielberg slip in and out of that screening, which he's known to do for film
screenings, interestingly. And he has a good personal connection with that
museum, so it's possible. Sheila also actually ran into him a month or two
before they pulled out at a restaurant and talked to him and urged him to look
at her film. So there are people who think that maybe.
-
Hanscom
- We had thousands, literally thousands, of schoolchildren writing letters to him.
We were at all of their film premieres, both Spielberg's himself as well as
other DreamWorks films. We had a lot of presence that they knew we were out
there. They certainly had the opportunity to hear the message. I actually think
that one of the--it was probably a number of things that helped him decide.
-
Hanscom
- About two months before they pulled out, there was a hearing at the Regional
Water Board about the contamination on the site. There's a huge plume of water
on top of the groundwater--a plume of toxic contaminants on top of the
groundwater that had been formed because of all the pollutants that had been
dumped, solvents and things, over the years at the Hughes Aircraft site before
there were environmental laws. Those had to all be cleaned up, and they weren't
cleaned up yet.
-
Hanscom
- When DreamWorks actually had--just the spring before the summer they pulled out,
they had actually finally purchased the parcels of property they were going to
do their studio on, but they had an out that they could get out within six
months if they found anything. Well, they did their own due diligence during
that time, and it seemed from the Water Board hearing that they realized how
contaminated things were; that it was much worse than Playa Vista had told them,
perhaps. Their lawyers were arguing with the state lawyers that they were
indemnified; they weren't really responsible. The state lawyers were saying,
"No, you are if you're a landowner now. That's the law in California."
-
Hanscom
- It was only a couple of months after that that they pulled out. You know, my
guess is that they knew they were going to be living there. They were going to
have the daycare center for their employees. It wasn't going to be just like a
developer who comes in and leaves. So they probably had a higher standard of
what they were willing to live with, influencing their decision.
-
Hanscom
- It wasn't talked about much, but I'm sure that the public relations of the entire
thing couldn't have been something they liked, either. I mean, their reputation
when we started was sterling. It was very difficult to convince people that
Steven Spielberg or any of these guys would be doing anything bad
environmentally. By the time they left, they had more of a tarnished reputation
than they would have liked, I'm sure.
-
Collings
- Now, you said, "We were there at their premieres and openings." You were there
with some kind of protest.
-
Hanscom
- Protesting, yes, outside with signs. We kind of brought the art of protest back
to Los Angeles, I think. There were not a lot of environmental groups doing
protest with signs. It was more, you know, in the courts or in the hearing rooms
where environmental groups did things in L.A. at that time. But we brought sort
of performance art into the protest arena for environmental issues, and it's
still there today. I mean, there are a lot of people who call us up and ask if
they can borrow our frog or our turtle costumes that were made with some of the
artists that were involved with our movement.
-
Collings
- Who were the artists that were involved?
-
Hanscom
- Well, the 18th Street Arts Complex [18th Street Arts Center] in Santa Monica got
involved. Jan Williamson, who's the executive director there, who's an artist
herself, was very involved with helping make all the giant puppets that were
part of our movement. We did these Earth Water Air Los Angeles, EWALA, walks
where we every Earth Day had a walk going from Ahmanson Ranch, which was one of
the headwaters of the Los Angeles River, following the river route to Ballona,
where it used to historically come out. So there were a number of people
involved with that.
-
Hanscom
- Susan Suntree, who is a performance artist, she helped put together EWALA, and
she also put together a group of actors who started a troupe that Wetlands
Action Network supported, called FrogWorks. That was sort of a foil to
DreamWorks. FrogWorks did political street theater that was performed at Third
Street Promenade on the Venice boardwalk.
-
Collings
- Was Cheri Gaulke part of that? Because I know that she has a piece called
FrogWorks.
-
Hanscom
- I don't know Cheri Gaulke. No, and I'm interested in hearing about that, and I
know Susan would be, too. But there were a number of other really courageous
actors that got involved with that, because they knew it was like sort of a big
thing to go up against DreamWorks. But to the very end, they were doing their
performance art in schools and all over the place.
-
Collings
- So do you think that--can I pause for a second?
-
Hanscom
- Sure. [Tape recorder turned off.]
-
Collings
- Okay. So we're back on now. I wanted to ask you, do you think that the artist
groups that you were working with would have gotten involved if there hadn't
been that target of DreamWorks?
-
Hanscom
- Hmm. That's interesting. Possibly not. At the same time, it wasn't easy for
anyone to get involved because of DreamWorks. DreamWorks was sort of a
double-edged sword. People were terrified to get involved with our movement
because of them. We had actors who would come to us who were involved who pulled
out, who were counseled by other actors, "You've got to get out." You know, the
whole "You will never work in this town again" was really going around. Tom
Hayden, who was our only political ally originally, was threatened by Jeffrey
Katzenberg with he would never have Hollywood support again.
-
Hanscom
- So it was very challenging for people to get involved. At the same time, for
people of courage who also felt strongly about the principle and understood the
creative opportunity, that was there. So there were a lot of people, detractors,
who would say, "Oh, she just wants her name in the paper, and she's getting her
name in the paper because of Steven Spielberg." Well, that wasn't why I was
doing it, nor most of the people working with us. It was an opportunity to get
the issue heard, and we did take advantage of that, and I would not apologize
for it.
-
Hanscom
- I think that it was a great education, and there are journalists today on
television news who talk about the Ballona Wetlands or Ballona Creek in a way
that they didn't understand it before. The very first television journalist who
heard about our protest said, "We want to come down there. We understand you're
against this DreamWorks thing."
-
Hanscom
- "Okay."
-
Hanscom
- ”So what do we have to do? Do we need to get a boat? Where do we go?"
-
Hanscom
- You know, no one really understood Ballona Creek or the Ballona Wetlands. The
natural areas in Los Angeles, many of them are hidden beneath all the concrete
and freeways. Now things are not as much of a mystery because of that, and so I
think it was a good thing, both in Los Angeles and in a far broader reason.
There was one television news story by Tom Brokaw that was on the national
nightly news, and it ran during the presidential primary that year. It was done
so well that United Airlines used it on all their cross-country flights during
that entire next summer, and we would hear about people hearing about it from
way far away. We would occasionally get a check from someone in New York or--it
was interesting how the story was able to be told on a broader basis, sometimes
more outside of L.A. than here in L.A.
-
Collings
- And that was because of the DreamWorks connection.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, absolutely. So I think they did something for wetlands as a whole, on a
larger basis for the planet.
-
Collings
- As far as the entertainment people who got involved but felt that it was risky,
would there have been opportunities for them to have like protested Playa Vista
as distinct from DreamWorks?
-
Hanscom
- It was all wrapped up together by then, so, I mean, one of the actors was
involved with our coalition before DreamWorks got involved, and the day we were
out there protesting in the rain, I got a call from him, and he said, "David
Geffen just called me and said my name's on the list of the coalition. Tell me
again what I signed on to." So I read him the sentence of what we all agreed to,
our mission was. He said, "Well, that doesn't sound so bad." [Laughter]
-
Hanscom
- I said, "I agree."
-
Hanscom
- He said, "Well, let me talk to him again," and he did, and he called back, and he
said, "I just can't do it." His career was not--
-
Collings
- Do you know who? Do you mind--
-
Hanscom
- Yes. It was Ed Begley [Jr.]. At that time, his career wasn't doing as much as it
ended up doing later, so he really felt like he needed to, and I understood
that. It was his livelihood. This thing that Hollywood went through once before
when people were blacklisted continued to be brought up. We had another actor
who got involved who, you know, was told he couldn't. Now, since then,
interestingly--
-
Collings
- Who was that?
-
Hanscom
- That was Jamie Cromwell, who later got an Academy Award. But then there was like
Martin Sheen, who didn't care. This was before he was on West Wing, and he said,
"Well, I may have a problem in this town now after this," and he did a protest
where he came and locked down the doors of Playa Vista with a number of
grandmothers and a priest. The police came, and he didn't get arrested, because
they didn't want to arrest him and make a bigger deal, but, you know, he ended
up going on to having a great career even after that.
-
Hanscom
- So I think there was this fear that DreamWorks controlled everything in
Hollywood, which wasn't true, but they were pretty influential and still are.
But their studio lost a lot of cachet through this whole thing, I think. But it
was an interesting thing, where people were--Hollywood was more willing to give
money to rain forest projects elsewhere than to do something here in L.A. It was
riskier.
-
Collings
- Now, did you have a sense that there was any pressure on DreamWorks itself from
other quarters to quash these protests, or was this--
-
Hanscom
- I think it was their own self-interest. I don't think there was any--I mean, they
were the ones controlling the--although, you know, I mean, Playa Vista itself,
the company--which has sort of changed hands; it was Maguire Thomas [Partners]
at the time, and then during this whole DreamWorks thing, [Robert] Maguire lost
his whole financial backing and had a lot of problems. Jeffrey Katzenberg
actually helped bring in new owners, essentially Morgan Stanley and Goldman
Sachs, who were even more daunting at times. But they were part of the
DreamWorks team, and that's who runs this now.
-
Hanscom
- So Playa Vista all along has said, "Oh, those wacky environmentalists, they don't
know what they're talking about." And there's still that talk over at Playa
Vista, even though much of what we have said proved to be true, and even though
we ended up coming together on acquiring a big chunk of land out there, they're
still bad-mouthing us. That's part of their thing, and maybe because it was in
DreamWorks' best interests, they believed it.
-
Collings
- But Playa Vista itself was supposed to be environmentally friendly, so are they
able to bad-mouth environmentalists?
-
Hanscom
- Well, that's just been a "greenwashing," in my view.
-
Collings
- Greenwashing. [Laughs]
-
Hanscom
- Yes. It really was. I mean, you can have low-flow toilets, but if you're putting
those in the wrong place, in a high-risk liquefaction zone, in a flood plain of
a historical river, in a place where there's higher methane deposits than
anywhere else in the country--I mean, there are serious contamination problems.
It was the wrong place to put this. It doesn't matter, you know, how much
recycled paper you use at a project like that. And yes, they have some
environmental bells and whistles, but it's a really environmentally damaging
project.
-
Hanscom
- It's right in the worst possible location on the west side for traffic. There are
very few north-south connector streets there because of the geography of the
bluffs, and so it's already a jammed area on the 405 Freeway and Lincoln
Boulevard, and here they were going to add 28 percent more traffic to the 405
Freeway, and 86 percent traffic more on Lincoln Boulevard. It was just absurd to
put a project like that here.
-
Hanscom
- Many people would say we're a bit overbuilt already, and maybe we don't need more
development in Los Angeles. That's the question I'd like to hear more people
asking, is how can we grow, having more and more and more people, more and more
and more development, more and more and more traffic? It just doesn't seen
sustainable.
-
Collings
- Well, one of the things that we hear as sort of the watchword is mixed use to
keep people working and living in the same place, and Playa Vista
advertises--
-
Hanscom
- Allegedly.
-
Collings
- --itself as a mixed-use development. But you don't see that as being--
-
Hanscom
- Well, there are so many flaws with that proposition, to begin with. First of all,
you can't force people to live and work in the same area. If you have a great
job in Tarzana and you live in Santa Monica, do you give up your house or your
job? You know, it's just not likely, and even with DreamWorks having the
proposal to move in, there were a lot of people who said, "Well, that doesn't
mean our graphic artists are going to move from Burbank." And, in fact, they
ended up staying there with their animation area and probably would have stayed
there even if DreamWorks ended up finally with their studio here, because their
people wanted to live close to where they were working. But did they want to
move and lose their entire investment by coming over here? That's one problem
with that.
-
Hanscom
- There's also a problem with the fact that Playa Vista itself has not come through
with that promise. In their first phase alone, they were given entitlements to
between three and four million square feet of commercial space, and they can't
get much commercial interest in even being there. Maybe the office community is
saturated. Maybe--I don't know what it is. But it's taken them seven or eight
years to get a couple of little teeny retail outlets in the development. It's
mostly residential. And now that the housing market is going down, who knows
what that means? But it's not been the promise that they said.
-
Collings
- Which was to bring a lot of--living and working--
-
Hanscom
- Have everybody live and work in the same place and never leave. Well, that's the
other fallacy. Even if you live and work in the same area, you know, I live down
the street from this little store, and this is mixed use to me. But that doesn't
mean I don't ever get in my car and go somewhere else.
-
Collings
- Yes, of course.
-
Hanscom
- So, I mean, that was the promise that that would happen.
-
Collings
- Now, the Playa Vista development was important for the city as a way of bringing
more businesses into the area and boosting city revenues in that way. Of course,
it was being built in this sensitive spot. Have you been in touch with any other
groups around the country that have been facing a similar situation, where it's
so important from a financial, city-planning point of view to do a
development?
-
Hanscom
- I think it always is. Unfortunately, because it's a big problem, our cities and
counties in this country are dependent on revenues from the tax base, the
development base. Often they want retail now, big retail, like big box stores or
car dealerships, because they get even more than they get from--well, it
depends, really.
-
Hanscom
- I have a good friend who's the mayor of Huntington Beach, and she's always saying
to me, "We've got to find a new way for cities to thrive than to be dependent on
new development," because it's like an addiction cycle. Once this development is
built, then the roads and the lights and all the things that this other
developer built over here are falling apart, and we need to fix those, so we
need more money to do that, so we've got to approve another development over
here. You know, it's just a cycle that never ends, and the city services are not
catching up, which is why we have a city budget problem right now, and why we
have sidewalks and street problems that are--you know, so there's a bigger
problem that needs to be fixed.
-
Hanscom
- Sacramento or Washington [D.C.], I'm not sure who's getting their hands around
it, but I have heard our new assembly speaker, Karen Bass, talk a little about
that, so--promising, maybe. But we have to do something to have revenues not
dependent on new development.
-
Collings
- Right. Yes. So let's talk a little bit about some of the protest activities,
because so many of them sound very creative and interesting. I mean, on the one
hand, you have Jerry Rubin and the hunger strike, and on the other hand, you
have some of the performances at Third Street. Were these protests something
that was sort of coordinated through the Wetlands Action Network, or was it more
ad hoc than that?
-
Hanscom
- Well, a little of both. Wetlands Action Network, we decided early on we really
supported the creative expression as part of what we were doing. We felt that,
and I felt especially--I had been involved with protecting the Bolsa Chica
Wetlands in Huntington Beach when I lived there, and I felt that we needed
something other than just angry protest; that we needed to have creativity and
positive sort of energy going out, and that was needed for the fact that we
probably had a long haul of a campaign, for one thing.
-
Hanscom
- Otherwise, people get just burned out, you know, reading Environmental Impact
Reports and writing comments and going to hearings and not being able to speak
more than two or three minutes, and sometimes not even that. There's a lot of
frustration in the whole process of opposing a project or trying to even approve
a project. There's a lot of frustration and burnout that happens in
activism.
-
Hanscom
- I felt that the creative energy could help keep people fresher and also provide
a--you know, the two things that the news media pay attention to are--well,
there's three things, I guess--sex, violence, and creative. If something's
really different and creative and beautiful, it might end up on the front page
of the L.A. Times. The other things, sex and violence, always do, but those
weren't two of the things that we were interested in focusing on for this
project. [Collings laughs.] Some people do, you know. My friend Paul Watson,
who's with Sea Shepherd, he brings out Brigitte Bardot. He always says, "Sex
sells," so he gets the sexy actress out there to help with the harp seals or
what have you.
-
Hanscom
- But for us it was creativity. We decided to use that as our thing that would
bring attention. And interestingly, a lot of these things sort of evolved. We
had this group early on in our coalition we called the Carpe Diem group; you
know, "seize the day." We would just get together every week and kick around
some ideas, and people would have different ideas.
-
Hanscom
- When Jerry Rubin wanted to do his hunger strike, for instance, that was not
something coordinated, not something a lot of us even supported originally. We
went along because he was someone important in our coalition we wanted to
support, and we felt he couldn't be just hanging out there on his own,
especially--you know, I really thought that they would let him starve to death
before they would give him a meeting, knowing what Hollywood was like. But he
was committed to doing it, and a lot of it was people really caring about each
other in the coalition and realizing we needed to support each other.
-
Collings
- Yes. So how did you go about making contact with the different artists and actors
and other people that were involved in these creative efforts?
-
Hanscom
- The first couple of years, the first few years, I guess, we had regular meetings
of our coalition. We started with the 6 groups, as I mentioned. We ended up with
126 groups by the time our coalition ended. We never expected to have that many,
but our first meeting of the 6 groups, we said, "You know, we ought to see if we
can get some more," because we were up against this huge thing of--we had to get
some support in to show that we had any credibility at all. So we worked hard at
getting more people. We probably had, within the first few months, 30 to 40
groups in the coalition, and then it grew slowly after that over time.
-
Hanscom
- But we would have meetings of those groups. Up at the Earth Trust House in
Malibu, every week we would have a potluck meeting. Everybody would come, and we
would talk about what was happening and who was doing what. It was sort of an
information sharing, and that was sort of a focal point that drew people in.
-
Collings
- So how many people are we talking about at this point in time?
-
Hanscom
- We would have meetings of anywhere from twenty to forty or fifty people coming
together.
-
Collings
- Representatives of these--
-
Hanscom
- Of various groups, yes.
-
Collings
- --now 126 groups. Okay.
-
Hanscom
- We had to do fundraising to help support lawsuits that we were starting up, and
so we'd get together and think of ideas. One of our first fundraisers was a
performance by an actor who was involved with Greenpeace. He said, "You know,
I'd like to offer this." Christopher Childs is his name, and he did a one-man
show of Henry David Thoreau, and it was a really great thing. We did this
outdoor performance up in the Santa Monica Mountains. That drew people in. All
of the things we did sort of drew people in. We were just starting, really, to
use the Internet as an organizing tool.
-
Collings
- It was early.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, it wasn't really much yet, but we did send out e-mails that got out around a
little bit. I think it was the summer of '96 we did a full-page ad in the L.A.
Times, a double-page spread in Daily Variety, with an open letter to DreamWorks
that an anonymous donor came to us and said, "I'd like to help you get the
message to DreamWorks."
-
Hanscom
- That really laid out everything. So did they get the message? They had the
opportunity. Interestingly, we had a little thing where people could respond in
the ad, and we got none from Daily Variety; none at all came back. But from the
L.A. Times we had a lot of response from people who wanted to get involved. It
showed me the fear in Hollywood. Nobody wanted to touch that. They were all
interested and intrigued, but hands off.
-
Collings
- It just makes you wonder what could have happened if you had managed to turn the
DreamWorks group around to your point of view.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. Well, you know, there were people who told us, "David Geffen is so stubborn
that when he wants something, there's no way he's going to leave this." So we
were just relieved when they finally left, because, I mean, our ideal, of
course, would be that they would have come on board the idea of having a state
or national park around them. That would have been great. But there were, of
course, some in our group who didn't even want them to be there at all. To them,
all of Ballona meant everybody out.
-
Hanscom
- But that would have been a compromise we could have lived with on sixty or
seventy acres of the thousand acres, and now we have more than that with Playa
Vista. But when they pulled out completely--I think it was a Daily Variety
reporter who called me and told me--I was stunned, and we had a very big party
that night, because once they pulled out, then the political forces shifted, and
it was only a month or two later than Antonio Villaraigosa, as speaker of the
assembly, put the $25 million into Proposition 12 that allowed us to get a
willing seller to emerge at Playa Vista. That would not have happened otherwise.
I mean, there were a lot of Democrats who totally supported Playa Vista that
were not happy that happened, but when it did happen--he couldn't have done it
at all if DreamWorks had still been involved. It just wouldn't have
happened.
-
Collings
- So what kind of discussion was there within [slight interruption due to technical
difficulties] happy to have them there with a kind of a state park surrounding
them. Was that a problem?
-
Hanscom
- A little bit. I mean, our objective was to save all of the Ballona Wetlands and
surrounding undeveloped open space. That was our mission. It was only when we
had this opportunity to meet with Katzenberg as a result of Jerry's hunger
strike that this issue even came up, because then we had to define what was
undeveloped open space. Some people thought, like I did, that it meant we could
offer this compromise; if they were to just keep their footprint on the already
paved area, that's not undeveloped, in my view. But some people felt the entire
tract that Playa Vista owned, including that sixty-five acres or so, needed to
be preserved, and that concrete needed to be taken out.
-
Hanscom
- So it was a matter of definition. There were a couple of groups that pulled out
of the coalition after that who were not happy with us. But we had agreement
before we went into this meeting that that was what we were going to ask for. We
had a meeting with all the coalition groups. They didn't accept it, anyway,
so--
-
Collings
- Right. Well, I guess that raises the--when you talk about how some of the groups
pulled out of the coalition because they opposed your--
-
Collings
- And it was only a couple of groups, but they were not happy.
-
Collings
- Which groups were those?
-
Hanscom
- Spirit of the Sage Council and--it was another group that she worked with, and I
can't remember the name of it. It was an obscure group, one that I didn't know
really well.
-
Collings
- Yes. So how were your relations with Friends of the Ballona Wetlands at this
time?
-
Hanscom
- Well, Friends of the Ballona Wetlands was like Playa Vista's public relations arm
to us. We were always having to meet them with journalists, not wanting to. It
took a--
-
Collings
- Why did you have to meet them with journalists?
-
Hanscom
- Well, because they had that requirement. We would show up at a radio station, and
there they would be, or a television station, there they would be. It wasn't all
the time, but when there were things planned and they got wind of it, Playa
Vista got wind of it, or if the journalists called Playa Vista to get their
side, they would always send them to Ruth Lansford at the Friends of the Ballona
Wetlands, which was really unfortunate. After we had sufficiently staked our
claim on one side of the issue, and after DreamWorks left and all, we finally
said that we would not show up at these things anymore. We just started telling
journalists we would not show up if the Friends were there. Playa Vista needed
to be there.
-
Hanscom
- Because we didn't like the fact that it was constantly looking like it was just a
struggle between environmental groups. But they had that as part of their
settlement, so--and it was very contentious and very much of a problem. Even
though publicly I would regularly say that if it weren't for the Friends and the
work they did, we're just building on it, they weren't allowed to acknowledge
our presence that way.
-
Collings
- Because, I mean, this article here, "Eco groups at odds over DreamWorks
development," Daily Variety, August 20th, 1997, it's exactly as you say. It
paints it as two groups that are at odds with each other, where you have the
Friends of the Ballona Wetlands saying that if DreamWorks come in, they will
restore sections of the wetlands, which will then be a home to some endangered
species which currently do not live there. Then you have--well, actually, you're
quoted here. [Laughs] [Reads] "'There are nineteen threatened and endangered
species that we'll be talking about,' Hansom said. 'These species require the
Ballona Wetlands for their home.'"
-
Collings
- Then Ruth Lansford says, "Should the project go forward, current plans call for
restoring these sections in order that these species can live here, whereas they
currently don't live here now." So I think that that particular article is sort
of in a nutshell what you're referring to.
-
Hanscom
- In a way, and it wasn't accurate, what she said, either. I mean, if we'd only had
200 acres, there were a lot of species that would have--because of what Playa
Vista did and the Friends--quote--"freshwater marsh," their detention basin that
they tout as so wonderful.
-
Hanscom
- What's really sad about the Friends now is that, while Playa Vista sort of had
them captured all this time, Bill Gibson, a reporter at the L.A. Weekly, wrote
an article in 1995 about how--he had done a lot of research on prisoners of war,
and after he spoke with Ruth Lansford, he felt that she had sort of like the
Stockholm syndrome type thing. She had really come to identify with her captors
and was saying things that didn't sound like she used to talk. She used to say
things just like we were saying, and then all of a sudden had to speak the
company line. Now, you know, we had hoped after the purchase had happened that
we might be able to heal this rift; that she wouldn't be bound to speaking for
them as much.
-
Hanscom
- Then we found out that DreamWorks was going to build them a new facility over on
their site, a new office facility and an outdoor classroom, and they were
spending millions of dollars on this thing for them so that they would continue
to support Playa Vista in Phase 2. So we haven't done that, and now what's even
worse is that Playa Vista's really taken over the Friends completely. Ruth is
retiring. She's been, I think--I think, from things I've heard, that it was not
totally of her own desire that she's retiring.
-
Hanscom
- There are new people on the board. The new president is the president of Psomas
Corporation, which is Playa Vista's biggest consultant; designed all the roads
and everything. Their new vice president is Catherine Tyrrell, who was Playa
Vista’s vice president for many years, who lives there now. So Playa Vista has
completely taken over the Friends. There's no one on their board, with the
exception of Bob [Robert] Shanman, who has any history with the organization.
There are a couple of people, some Audubon people, who are on the board now,
who, I think, are in the right place. But the majority of the board is Playa
Vista controlled. I was hoping that it was going to be going the other way, and
unfortunately, Playa Vista must feel they really need that cover or
something.
-
Hanscom
- We went to their recent annual meeting and were rather surprised. Ruth wasn't
even there. There was supposed to be a turnover from one to the other, and she
didn't even show up. So, anyway, she and I have a lot more in common than not, I
think, at the base levels, in what we'd like to see for restoration out there.
So maybe it's better that she's not tied at all to Playa Vista. I don't
know.
-
Collings
- So what is the role of the Wetlands Action Network now that the Playa
Vista--DreamWorks is out, Playa Vista is built?
-
Hanscom
- Well, Playa Vista isn't completely built, thankfully. Half of it's still under
question right now, and there are a number of groups, some of which were in our
coalition--Surfrider Foundation, the City of Santa Monica, the Gabrielino
Shoshone Nation, Ballona Wetlands Land Trust, they're all still--they just won
an appeals court decision that stopped Phase 2, so I'm not sure what's going to
happen with Phase 2, which is on the other side of the buildings. Interestingly,
built tiers [phonetic] to kind of go back; put their line is in the sand.
-
Hanscom
- But Wetlands Action Network is sort of doing some wetlands issues outside of this
area now, primarily, and after the acquisition happened, our coalition kind of
dissolved. That was sort of our last thing as a coalition, to really support the
purchase. There were a few groups that didn't support it and thought we
shouldn't be giving Playa Vista any money, even though we felt there was a
really huge opportunity, very important window that might not come again, to get
this bigger chunk of land preserved.
-
Hanscom
- So after the purchase happened, we are kind of really focused more on the
education and restoration. There's still some work to do to preserve some
additional areas besides what Playa Vista owns. Like there's a privately owned
parcel at Del Rey Lagoon here. There's a part of the bluff face that is near the
wetlands. There's a confluence of land where Centinela Creek and Ballona Creek
come together that is at risk. So we're educating people about those things. We
have a committee under the Ballona Institute called the Committee to Complete
the Park. The whole idea is to get these additional acreages into the park area
and to bring State Parks in to be the eventual manager of this site, because
right now the Ballona Wetlands are owned by a couple of different state
agencies, and it's not all being coordinated to the best possible use.
-
Collings
- So what would be the relationship between that and the Ecological Reserve?
-
Hanscom
- Well, the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve is currently managed by the
California Department of Fish and Game. They actually have a new person here
now, who's finally paying some attention, which is good, but we think that the
State Parks Department has even a higher mandate for protection, and maybe they
will come in and work with the Fish and Game Department, which is mostly a
regulator to make sure the endangered species are protected and all. But State
Parks has a broader public mandate to help educate. They have interpreters, and
we think in an area like Los Angeles we need that; that we can't just have a
couple of trails. We really need to have guided tours, and we really need to
have some honoring and respect of the historical areas, too, here.
-
Hanscom
- We have an old Red Car trolley line, for instance, that goes right through the
middle of the Ballona Wetlands that would be interesting to bring back as an
interpretive thing; to not just show people there used to be a Red Car here, but
actually get some people on it instead of on the highway. It could go between
Playa del Rey and Marina del Rey. There's a lot of Native American burial sites
here. State Parks is also really concerned about historical native sites, and
they would put displays together that would be appropriate.
-
Hanscom
- So we really want to complete the park, which--whenever there's a public
purchase, there's a lot more work to be done. In fact, it's just as much work,
it seems, as going up against a development. You've got all the agencies to
figure out now, and who's really going to be in charge, and what's the best way
to do it. So that's kind of why we have this outpost here of Ballona Institute.
We lead nature walks. Wetlands Action Network had done that for some time, and
they still do the first Sunday of the month tour, but then Ballona Institute has
added in we're training docents here, getting more people involved.
-
Hanscom
- So it's sort of an expansion of the work. Also, we have a library archive that
we're opening up. One of our directors is a biologist who is a scientist and
activist, which is a little unusual, and he has done a lot of research on the
historical--what used to be here, the flora and fauna and landscape. We want to
make that information available to the public.
-
Collings
- One of the slogans for the institute, we were talking about it, "Research,
renovation, education, and artistic expression." Why is it important to have
artistic expression as part of the work of the Ballona Institute?
-
Hanscom
- That comes out of the work that Wetlands Action Network and the coalition did
with Ballona here. A number of people who helped start the Ballona Institute
were involved with the artistic expression that happened during the Ballona
campaign. We just felt that that needs to be a continued part of any work at
Ballona, because from that book there that this incredible photographer who
came--
-
Collings
- Wild Birds of the American Wetlands.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. There's an artist [Rosalie Winard] who does infrared photography, and she
came here. We just think that artistic expression is something that can reach an
audience that maybe isn't as reachable with the dry scientific data. The
scientists that we have involved with Ballona Institute also agree with that.
They think that artistic expression is really an important part of activism and
educating the public.
-
Collings
- Okay. And did Ed Begley, Jr., come back to the Ballona struggle?
-
Hanscom
- He did, as did Jamie Cromwell. Both of them have appeared at some of Sheila
Laffey's film screenings and have both expressed their guilt over not being
involved earlier and really honoring some of the activists that did get
involved. Ed even came out when the state controller, Kathleen Connell, helped
us to secure the first 73 acres of the 600 acres. It was really the first part
of the land that really was solidly in public hands, before the rest of the
purchase happened. She refused to extend the option one more time to Playa
Vista. They were far in arrears on their taxes and a number of obligations they
had to make, and she said, "You know, you have till next week."
-
Hanscom
- They didn't come through, and so she said, "We're reclaiming this land." So she
and Ed came out with us to a really great event, where we took down the "Private
Property" signs and pulled down the fence and cleaned up the property, all kinds
of stuff that had been dumped for years that Playa Vista had let happen. Ed was
just great there. He said, "You know, I wish I'd been involved more, but, you
know, I'm here now, and you guys are all great that you stuck with it. You did
more than I ever thought you could," and he's one of our continued supporters,
so that's good.
-
Collings
- Was there ever any involvement of the community of Playa del Rey?
-
Hanscom
- Absolutely. When Wetlands Action Network was up in Malibu, we always had a big
base of support here in Playa del Rey and Westchester, Marina del Rey, Mar
Vista. The surrounding communities here have always been concerned about the
wetlands, and continue to be. I'm really glad to live here now. I've lived here
about four years now, and a lot of the people who come on our nature tours are
from the area. We get people from outside of the area as well, but the people
here have become more educated and really care about it. I've gone to a couple
of open houses here where the real estate brokers, they realize the wetlands
actually is something that helps increase the investment value of the homes near
here. One of them said to me, "You've got to go up on the roof and look out over
the bird paradise." [Laughter]
-
Hanscom
- I thought, "Well, that's a nice marketing term." You know, people don't know
necessarily what a wetland is, but a bird paradise, that sounds good.
-
Collings
- Yes.
-
Hanscom
- That's what she uses to sell her homes. [End of interview]
1.3. Session 3 (June 5, 2008)
-
Collings
- Today is June 5th, 2008, Jane Collings interviewing Marcia Hanscom at her
office.
-
Collings
- Marcia, I thought one of the things that we could talk about today was just get a
little bit more into some of the stories behind organizing your community
effort.
-
Hanscom
- Okay.
-
Collings
- I wanted to just start off with just sort of a general question and ask you, what
is the most important thing to keep in mind when organizing a community?
-
Hanscom
- Well, for me, I've learned that it's crucial to not really be attached to the
outcome. That might sound counterintuitive, because we have a goal in mind in
any campaign of what we want, but the more attached to the outcome one is, the
more devastating it can be when something doesn't go your way. So I think for me
it's been about learning to speak up for nature and to put that in the context
of, "Well, I might not convince this person or this elected official or this
commission or city council, but every time we do speak for nature, we're
shifting consciousness a bit and changing a little bit of the community's
perspective and educating,” which is really what happened over an eight-year
period in the Ballona Wetlands campaign. It was a real shift in the whole
political discussion, and that only happened by taking it a little bit at a time
and realizing that this is a long-term prospect.
-
Collings
- So, yes, because that sort of leads into another thing that I wanted to ask you
about, was like how much of this campaign would you say was really specifically
about the Ballona Wetlands, and how much of it was about raising consciousness
on this issue generally? Because I notice that a lot of the signs that
protesters were carrying, for example, would point to the fact that 95 percent
of wetlands in the United States were gone. So there seemed to be like this sort
of like dual focus. Would that be correct?
-
Hanscom
- Well, it's hard to unconnect them, because if you've destroyed so much of a
certain habitat and you don't have much left, then every little bit is necessary
to protect. I think that was the underlying thinking behind why people would
utilize that argument of how much we don't have left. At the same time, it is
about the larger perspective, too. We don't have much open space. We don't have
much nature in the city.
-
Hanscom
- I guess that to me is maybe why so many people in Los Angeles did resonate with
this issue and got engaged, because there's sort of like a line in the sand
we've crossed, I think, especially in very dense urban environments, where we
need that connection with nature for our own survival, I believe. I think that
people who are--you know, when people get out of the city and find themselves in
nature, it's such a stark contrast to those who already live in a rural area and
nearby nature, and that to me shows how much we need it. I think we've gotten so
far away from it in the cities that people really resonate toward the fact that
we don't have as much in our cities, and we need to really keep that
perspective.
-
Hanscom
- So, I mean, I think it's connected. I don't think it's really two messages. I
think it's really connected.
-
Collings
- One of the things that Dorothy Green said about organizing Heal the Bay was that
she found it to be so easy to get people involved because people had what
appeared to be some sort of really deep connection to the ocean and just
couldn't stand the idea of a sick bay. This was, you know, part of the rationale
behind the name, Heal the Bay. You're pointing to something similar.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, I think so. There's a rather new movement out, based on a book called Last
Child in the Woods, about nature deficit disorder, they call it.
-
Collings
- Yes, I've heard that. Yes.
-
Hanscom
- And I think that's what people are starting to realize, that children need places
to just go play in the wild; that we all do. And that especially if--there was a
real pivotal moment for me in the campaign, early on, when I decided to stay,
and that I was going to really stay in L.A. and Ballona would be a key issue for
me, because I really had thought when I started Wetlands Action Network that I
would probably move to Northern California or somewhere where it seemed to me
there were more people on the same page as I was in terms of wanting to spend a
lot of energy protecting nature.
-
Hanscom
- Then I went to a Solstice ceremony in the Santa Monica Mountains that I was
invited to. We were all divided up into different groups, and I was in a group
where there was a woman sitting next to me who was from Inglewood, and she
started crying. I said, "What's wrong? Are you okay?"
-
Hanscom
- She said, "It's just so beautiful here. This is the first time I've ever been in
nature."
-
Collings
- Wow.
-
Hanscom
- She was obviously so moved, and it moved me to the point where I thought, "Well,
Inglewood is really close to the Ballona Wetlands, and right now it's a private
area. If it were public and people knew about it, she wouldn't have maybe had to
go her whole life--she was in her mid-forties, and she had never been surrounded
by nature. That's a crime." So I felt like we had to do more to protect nature
in the city. There are places that are still remnants of our natural history
here that we need to do everything we can to preserve.
-
Collings
- Right. Well, that sort of leads me to asking you about the communities that you
drew on for this protest movement, for this activist movement. Where did the
people come from, geographically, who participated the most?
-
Hanscom
- Well, hmm. They were really all over. We were up against such a political machine
that Playa Vista had that it was very difficult for us to get people involved
originally, and so we went everywhere we could, everywhere there was a crowd of
people. I can remember when we first started FrogWorks, which was a political
street theater group that had a great sort of skit that they would put on. We
would go to the Third Street promenade in Santa Monica. We would go to the
Venice boardwalk. We would go to schools or anyone who would have us. Bruce
Robertson with the Ballona Valley Preservation League started a speakers bureau.
He just had students calling different organizations to get a spot to go make a
speech and talk about it. It was really anyplace and anywhere we could get.
-
Hanscom
- Originally we were a pretty ragtag group, I have to say; you know, people like
the Gray Panthers and--you know. We were having a difficult time getting
traction with the large environmental groups, in part because many of them had
funding from Hollywood and didn't want to go up against DreamWorks; were afraid
of the fact that they had gotten involved, or maybe wary, I should say. So we
really started out with as many small organizations as possible and built from
there. We did have some large organizations, like Sierra Club and Surfrider
Foundation, California Public Interest Research Group, CALPIRG. They were with
us pretty early on. But it was really a regionwide effort, and we even had
organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity, that was based out of
Arizona, that we got involved. We got others involved that weren't maybe as
tightly connected to the Los Angeles political arena.
-
Collings
- So can you point to any particular groups that wouldn't back you because of the
donations that they were receiving from the Hollywood establishment?
-
Hanscom
- Well, I don't know if they would admit that that was why, but it was pretty
clear, especially when we met with Jeffrey Katzenberg, and many of them were
around the table, invited by him to try and make us look a little more
marginalized, shall we say. NRDC was one, National Resources Defense Council;
Heal the Bay, and Heal the Bay was--you know, Mark Gold would say to me, "Well,
it's not because David Geffen gives us money." But perhaps for them it was more
that Playa Vista was very smart in hiring a lot of consultants who were on Heal
the Bay's board. So there were those two, in particular, stayed on the fence for
a very long time.
-
Hanscom
- Originally, Ruth Galanter, our city councilperson, would say that they were
supportive, and the more we pushed, the more they would back off of that and
say, "Well, we're not really supportive of Playa Vista, but we're going to wait
until Phase 2 to see how things go." Both of those organizations ultimately
ended up helping us with the legislation we needed to get the purchase to
happen, but it didn't happen till the very end, really, and they never did join
our coalition. So it was a challenge politically for them.
-
Hanscom
- At the same time, I think that what we did not only provided a model but allowed
Heal the Bay, for the very first time that I know of, to get involved with a
land-use issue. They would say, with Playa Vista, the reason they couldn't get
involved was--
-
Collings
- Because it was land use.
-
Hanscom
- --it was a land-use issue. People like Surfrider Foundation and Santa Monica
Baykeeper would say, "But wait a minute. The watershed is connected to the bay,
and how can they say that?" And, in fact, eventually, about a year and a half to
two years before we got the purchase to happen, Heal the Bay, modeling after
what we did, put together a coalition to work to save Ahmanson Ranch.
-
Collings
- Right. I was just going to say that, yes.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, and some of the organizers told us, they came to our town hall meetings and
said, "We're going to do the same kind of thing. This is good, what you're
doing." So Ahmanson Ranch was much further from the bay than Playa Vista.
-
Collings
- Right. But they had the idea that it was the headwaters.
-
Hanscom
- Right. Right. Well, it seems to me you want to get everything in the watershed
protected, and especially the things that are so close. I mean, Ballona Wetlands
are really part of the bay. They've got the estuary that connects with the bay,
twice a day, with the tides coming in and out. So, you know, it was interesting.
But I felt good that what we did helped make some space for them to do that,
because Ahmanson was a very important place to preserve as well, and they were
really floundering without a lot of political support originally, also.
-
Collings
- So do you think that they particularly wouldn't get involved because of the
donations, or do you think that they just weren't there organizationally at that
point?
-
Hanscom
- I think it was because of their board members who were consultants for Playa
Vista. I think Mark Gold was caught in the middle of it. And I think that
Dorothy Green, who was very close to Ruth Lansford--they were kind of organizing
their respective organizations at the same time in their careers, and I think
that Dorothy respected Ruth and didn't want to get in the way of her
settlement.
-
Hanscom
- I think a lot of people thought, really did think, that it was the best
environmental settlement possible; that there was no more--you know, there was
sort of a political reality people had. "We can't get more than that." And, in
fact, there hadn't been a parks bond measure in many years that had passed.
There was a Republican administration in Sacramento that wasn't interested in
helping preserve more land. So we really had to work to convince people that we
could make our own political reality, and that we could shift things, which we
did, but some people didn't believe it till it happened.
-
Hanscom
- Heal the Bay graciously, in their newsletter, after the purchase happened,
conceded that it was a really good thing, and like I said, they did help with
the legislation in the background. And they graciously honored both the efforts
of Ruth Lansford and her group and what we did here.
-
Collings
- So how were you operating, you know, with or sort of around or in spite of or
what have you, with Friends of the Ballona Wetlands? I mean, here you had two
groups on the ground with different aims, essentially.
-
Hanscom
- Well, yes, we had a lot of groups, actually, on the ground with different aims
than the Friends. The Friends were pretty much, along with Audubon, who had made
an earlier deal, had pretty much had a certain thing they had to do, and they
were required, according to their settlement agreement, not only to support the
development and support the deal, but they also were required to--and they will
say, "Well, we didn't have to support it," but there were clauses in the
agreement that said they did. So if they had not, I think they would have been
taken to court.
-
Hanscom
- They also had clauses that said if a letter to the editor was written by anyone
opposing their position, that they were required to write in opposition to that.
They were required to speak out in opposition to anyone speaking out against
Playa Vista. So they had a settlement agreement that a lot of us felt was very
reactionary, you know, something that an environmental group ought not to have
signed. Now, we weren't there when they signed it or didn't know what happened
during that whole ten years of negotiations they went through, and they thought
it was the best deal they could get at the time.
-
Hanscom
- But it was very difficult, because Playa Vista really pushed them into almost a
war with us. It was very ugly at times, very disconcerting. I mean, it was
terrible to wake up on a Sunday morning and see a really horrible opinion piece
in the Los Angeles Times being targeted toward me personally.
-
Collings
- Oh, gosh.
-
Hanscom
- It wasn't a fun thing. I had to really steel myself to keep focused on speaking
up for nature and for a new possibility of a greater amount of land that we
could acquire, and not get sucked into that was very challenging at times.
-
Collings
- So, you mean, you're really in sort of a unique situation here in the Los Angeles
area, in that, on the one hand, you have the Hollywood community operating as
both antagonist and protagonist. You've got, obviously, DreamWorks as a huge
obstacle, but on the other hand, you've got people such as Martin Sheen or Ed
Begley, Jr., and probably others, stepping forward and attracting a lot of media
attention.
-
Hanscom
- Well, it was a long time in coming before any of them would speak out. Ed Begley
didn't really speak out until we had--even though he was originally in our
coalition, he asked to be taken out almost immediately--
-
Collings
- Right.
-
Hanscom
- --when DreamWorks got involved, as he got pressured to do so. He really got back
involved again once Kathleen Connell, the state controller, helped us to acquire
and secure the first seventy acres at Ballona.
-
Collings
- And this was after DreamWorks had backed out.
-
Hanscom
- It was well after DreamWorks backed out. Now, Martin Sheen did speak out
beforehand. He and Ed Asner both did, but it took a lot of effort to get them to
do that. We had spoken with many other Hollywood people, thinking that they
would get involved with us. Some said they would and a week later would call
back and say, "No, we can't."
-
Collings
- And this was even after DreamWorks had backed out?
-
Hanscom
- No, this was while DreamWorks was involved. The first person that really said
they would and stuck with it was Ed Asner, who ended up doing the narration for
Sheila Laffey's film, The Last Stand. When we met with him in his office,
Michael Tobias, who's a very well known documentary filmmaker, and Sheila Laffey
and I met with him, and he said, "You know, this is not easy, even for someone
like me who's been around a long time. These guys are very powerful people in
Hollywood, and if I do this, I know what I may be bringing on me." So it was not
without a great amount of courage that he did step forward and agree to
help.
-
Hanscom
- Then Martin Sheen, his involvement was quite some time after that. DreamWorks was
still involved, but it was toward the end of their involvement. Valerie
Sklarevsky, who organized the action with him--she is a good friend of his and
has been arrested with him for civil disobedience things many times. She had
spoken with him for some time, and he really, I think, kind of burst the
illusion, perhaps, that it wasn't--the illusion that "you will never work in
this town again." It didn't happen with him, because this was before West Wing
even when he did this. Then he went on to a greater career than he had had, I
think, in the past, with his success with West Wing. So it showed that it didn't
necessarily mean--his speaking out was not necessarily a bad thing.
-
Hanscom
- However, Playa Vista was very smart. They did not allow him to be arrested as
they had others for doing similar things.
-
Collings
- Oh, how did they manage that?
-
Hanscom
- Well, shall we say they have a lot of political clout. I mean, I guess it's up to
the person charging someone whether they're going to press charges, and they
basically pleaded with the police not to press charges. You know, they came; the
police came, but they didn't do anything to him, mostly because Playa Vista
didn't want that on the front pages of the L.A. Times or on the television news.
Maybe a small clip might have gone on, but it would have been much bigger if he
had actually been arrested, which he was willing to risk that. I mean, he's
someone who knows how to do civil disobedience actions and what the consequences
are, that you may have to stay in jail a few nights.
-
Hanscom
- So anyway, it was interesting he was the first one doing a civil disobedience
action that did not get--
-
Collings
- What was his particular civil disobedience action?
-
Hanscom
- Well, he came with three women, Mary Wright, who is an artist; Valerie
Sklarevsky; and Michelle Sypert, an attorney. The four of them did a walk and a
protest to Playa Vista's building, and they took a big chain and locked the
doors. [Collings laughs.] All on camera, and they just sat there. They pounded
on the door, and they asked for the president of Playa Vista to come out, and he
didn't. You know, they just sort of tried to ignore it. So, you know, finally
the police came and unlocked the door.
-
Collings
- Now, were his companions arrested?
-
Hanscom
- No.
-
Collings
- No. Okay. All right. So you said that you had gone to a number of people in the
Hollywood community. Why did you do that?
-
Hanscom
- Well, because we were trying to get some awareness of what our concern was, and
we knew that there were a number of people in Hollywood who did have strong
conviction about the environment, and we thought that might help us to get the
word out, because the entire message that was out there was, "Oh, DreamWorks is
coming in. This is a great thing. They're going to restore the wetlands." I
mean, that was their story, that they were going to help the environment, not
that they were paving over the wetlands. So we felt we had to do something to
try and change that message.
-
Hanscom
- Ultimately, our litigation and lawsuits were the one thing that the press would
cover that showed that there was a challenge out there, and that things might
not be as the story line said.
-
Collings
- Yes, the news coverage was very much, as you say, about how progressive this
development was and what a great economic benefit it would be. Then, of course,
this is coming on the heels of the downturn of the aerospace industry--
-
Hanscom
- Right.
-
Collings
- --and was pitched very much as a way to revive the L.A. area economy and make it
a kind of a--you know, almost a Silicon Valley type environment.
-
Hanscom
- Right. When the announcement was first made, everyone from IBM to Bank of
America, UCLA, USC, everybody was going to be involved in this development. It
was unbelievable. Within six months, almost all of them dropped out as they saw
how unsolid the whole development really was. It was really a house of cards
that has slowly crumpled here and there.
-
Collings
- Yes. Yes. Well, I think one of the things that was interesting in the
documentary, Last Stand, is how there's some effort there to sort of pitch the
fishing industry as an alternate economic engine. I'm just wondering, I mean,
did your coalition like reach out to that industry, or was it really more kind
of a conservation campaign?
-
Hanscom
- Well, it was both. We had been involved with a coalition called Campaign to Save
California Wetlands, which was groups of wetland friends and protectors up and
down the state who are trying to get a stronger Clean Water Act in Washington
[D.C.] that would protect wetlands further than the Clean Water Act currently
does. We had been involved with putting out a report where we had worked with a
number of fishing industry folks, explaining how a wetland is really like a
nursery to the small fish. As they go out into the bay, they come into the
wetlands for growing up. Sometimes a juvenile halibut will be there for several
years before it's big enough to go out to sea.
-
Hanscom
- So the fishing economic part of this was always something we were aware of, but
we also were attempting to explain something that I think has become more
acknowledged since the disaster at Katrina, with the Katrina hurricane in
Louisiana, and that is that wetlands offer a number of different benefits for
our greater society that people don't think about. Certainly the one that maybe
most people do understand is that it's home to rare and endangered species. In
fact, in California more than 55 percent of our rare and endangered species are
dependent on wetlands for some part of their life cycle.
-
Hanscom
- But there is also the flood protection, the storm protection that wetlands serve,
and besides fishing, there is also a very, very big economic value to wetlands
as a wildlife viewing and ecotourism component. The US Fish and Wildlife Service
just put out a CD about that that talks about all of the economic benefits that
come to a region. Bird watchers alone spend millions of dollars just going from
one place to another to look for birds they haven't seen in their lives. It's an
amazing amount of money that can come if you really market the area
correctly.
-
Hanscom
- That's one of the things we've been talking with the county about. In the Marina,
the Marina del Rey immediately adjacent to the Ballona Wetlands, which people
don't realize was once part of the Ballona Wetlands and was paved over and dug
out so that the marina could be built, but there is still a significant amount
of wildlife in the water and in the trees near the water that connect with the
wetlands. The great blue herons, the snowy egrets, the black crown night herons,
all nest in the marina, and they come and feed, find their nest sticks, and
those sorts of things in the wetland areas. But they actually nest and have
their babies and their young in the marina. If the marina and both the city and
the county would focus more on marketing that tremendous thing, they could fill
up the hotel rooms more and get more revenue from that. It's unfortunate that
nature for nature's sake isn't as valued as I think it ought to be, but for
those who need a dollar value, I think that wetlands also provide that for the
community.
-
Collings
- So, I mean, it's sounding like the campaign itself was a conservation effort. The
public face of the campaign had to do with promoting the importance of
maintaining this natural area for its own sake, and that sort of ancillary to
that and almost like after that, you also have these other--I don't
know--arguments, I suppose, that have to do with sustaining the fishing industry
and sustaining ecotourism.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, I think that's the case, and that's because the decision makers are of all
stripes, so it means some are more concerned about the economic values and some
are more concerned about--you know, really understand the intrinsic value of
nature.
-
Collings
- Yes. Now, you did have, toward the end, some support from Maxine Waters and also
Steve Cooley. How did they become involved? I mean, I'm sorry--Steve Westly. How
did they become involved and what did they bring to this campaign?
-
Hanscom
- Well, Maxine Waters got involved because of the Native American graves that were
being desecrated.
-
Collings
- At which point was that taking place?
-
Hanscom
- Well, this was after the 600 acres of land was purchased that Maxine Waters got
involved. She had heard from constituents that there was this concern from the
Native Americans, and she came out to look at it. Some of the residents here
convinced her to come out to take a look at the site for herself. She was just
shocked when she saw that there were hundreds of burials being taken out of the
ground for Playa Vista's development, and there's still a very big concern about
that, about how those burials and grave goods have been treated, how the Native
Americans have been treated in the whole process. It's one of the largest
gravesites that's ever been uncovered, and it was just--we had a lot of
religious leaders actually come out for a news conference at the site, because
it was still rather unbelievable that it was allowed to continue.
-
Hanscom
- It's one of the biggest concerns of our current city councilman, Bill Rosendahl,
who is working hard to try and get some relief for the native people and to find
out where all of these--they've shipped different bones to different study
places. I mean, it's just totally not honoring especially the fact that the
native people, this is part of their religion. It's part of who they are, to
respect their ancestors, much more so than we do in our culture even. So it's
kind of a double kick in the face to them, and Bill Rosendahl is trying really
hard to get some relief for that.
-
Hanscom
- Steve Westly got involved as the state controller, in part because his
predecessor, Kathleen Connell, actually did an amazing thing. There's a
complexity about this land that's very challenging, but part of it is what is
known as Area C, which is the land north of Ballona Creek and east of Lincoln
Boulevard. That particular parcel of land was slated for development by Playa
Vista, always has been, but when Gray Davis was controller a number of years
ago, he actually took that land and set it aside for a little while, because
Howard Hughes and his heirs had not been able to pay the inheritance tax debt,
not only on this land but on a number of other real estate areas that he owned
prior to his death.
-
Hanscom
- So there was this tax debt to the State of California, and Gray Davis took this
land, put it under the controller's office, and then, seemingly to us, it was
sort of odd, because still Playa Vista had the right to get it back as long as
they paid these payments. It didn't quite make sense to us, because then they
weren't having to pay property tax on it, either, all this time. So we've never
liked that deal once we found out it [the land] really wasn't even owned by
Playa Vista. It took us a number of years to find that out.
-
Hanscom
- Once we found out it was really on the state books, we appealed to Kathleen
Connell, and when she decided to run for the mayor of Los Angeles, she asked a
number of environmental leaders what we wanted with that. So once she understood
it, she basically told Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, who by then owned Playa
Vista, "You've either got to come up with all your back taxes, or the monies
that you agreed to pay, and do it by January, or I'm taking the land back, and
you won't have the option anymore to purchase it." They thought she would just
extend the option as controllers had in the past, including her. They thought it
was a bluff, and they didn't, for some reason, want to put more money in, and so
that was the first part of Ballona that actually was preserved.
-
Hanscom
- So she came out and proclaimed that this is now the people's land. There's no
option to purchase it back any longer. Playa Vista's lawyers sort of argued with
that a little bit, and by the time Steve Westly became the controller, he was in
a position to actually make the transition of taking Area C and transferring it
to the California Department of Fish and Game, which is what he did.
-
Hanscom
- So it was great. It was sort of the two controllers in a row helping out the
people and making something that no one thought was possible. I mean, everybody,
even the people who were trying to save more west of Lincoln, never thought we
would get that parcel of land. And it's very important, because there are two
rare plant populations there that are found nowhere else in Ballona, and one of
those plants, the southern tar plant, is on the verge of extinction in Southern
California. So it's a very important parcel of land to have preserved.
-
Collings
- Now, why did she decide to play hardball with them at that point?
-
Hanscom
- Well, that's a good question. She had a history with Playa Vista that went back,
it turned out. Her prior husband, I believe, worked for Kaufman and Broad. Maybe
he was Kaufman; I'm not sure. But he had something to do with that parcel of
land, and originally Kaufman and Broad had wanted that when Playa Vista got to
have the option from Gray Davis. So it could have been something between Gray
Davis and Kathleen Connell. There was known political tension between the two of
them for many years, so it might have been part of that. But I do really believe
she wanted to help the environmental community, too. I mean, she was running for
mayor again, and we utilized that opportunity.
-
Hanscom
- When an elected official is running for office, their ears seem to be a lot more
open, and hers were. She came out on a tour. She fell in love with the great
blue heron. She just thought that was the most magnificent thing she'd ever
seen. Her two sons were verging on teenage years; a little bit younger than
that, but they both were--one of them, in particular, was very interested in
nature. So she asked our biologist if he would take them on a tour and help them
with a class project. She kind of really got interested in Ballona on a personal
level, and that's unusual for a politician, so we took advantage of that and
encouraged it.
-
Collings
- Yes, maybe one of her sons--maybe her son was the one that talked her into
it.
-
Hanscom
- It's certainly possible. I know that Arnold Schwarzenegger gives credit to his
children for getting the condor on the California quarter, so I think that
sometimes--you know, that's why we focus a lot on educating children here, too,
because the next generation is very vital to our future as a planet.
-
Collings
- We were just talking before we started the tape recorder, or whatever we call
this now, about sort of what a unique community this is. There are no
convenience stores. There are no chain stores. It's an eclectic community of a
sort. What kind of involvement did the local community here have in the struggle
to save the Ballona Wetlands?
-
Hanscom
- Well, if I had known this community better myself, I might have moved here
earlier. Playa del Rey is a very interesting community, and I'm really glad to
live here now, having lived here for about three and a half years now. I see it
as just a gem. It's really a little beach town that kind of never has gotten
into the strip mall chain mentality, and in fact, the community here is really
clearly wanting to hang onto that. I mean, there are things that need to be done
here to clean up the community here and there, but people want to maintain this
character, this beach community character.
-
Hanscom
- And it's interesting, because like I've gone to a couple of open houses here
where the real estate brokers really understand the unique thing that Ballona
Wetlands offers to the people who live in the area. One of them said to me when
I went, "Oh, go up on the roof, and make sure you look out. You'll see there's a
bird paradise over there." A bird paradise; that's a really interesting way of
putting it.
-
Collings
- She didn't know who you were.
-
Hanscom
- No, she didn't know who we were at all. That was how she marketed and saw the
wetlands, it's a bird paradise. Obviously, the views that a lot of people have
are--people constructed their homes so that they can have a view of the area,
and it's good for their housing values, I think. The apartment building I live
in, the outside marquee has a couple of herons painted on it. People really get
that this is a nice gem of nature here, and that's part of why they like living
here. It's part of why people like driving through the area. It's not the same
as getting on the freeway.
-
Collings
- Right. But did people here from this community get involved?
-
Hanscom
- Some did. Some did. I think that a lot more would today, only because we've now
been going on ten years of doing nature tours and nature walks every month, and
a lot of the members of the community here have gone on those and learned more
about how important this place is and why. So if we'd had that back in 1995, I
think even more people from here would have gotten involved. But we certainly
had members of the community involved. Playa del Rey and Westchester both had
significant support.
-
Hanscom
- But we also had support from people in Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, people
who drove through here, Mar Vista, they all saw this as a gem. It's so different
than the rest of the West Side.
-
Collings
- Yes. Well, we know that Mayor Riordan and the city council at that time supported
Playa Vista because of what it would do in terms of tax base; Ruth Galanter. But
were there any neighborhood associations around here who supported Playa Vista
because of what it might bring to the community?
-
Hanscom
- Well, there really weren't any neighborhood councils or associations at that
time. When the Neighborhood Council for Westchester-Playa Vista
was--Westchester-Playa del Rey was being formed, there were actually a lot of
people from this area concerned that they didn't want Playa Vista to take over
that, and so there was a big slate of people planning to run for it. There were
so many people that showed up, because they were concerned and didn't want Playa
Vista to be running things, the election didn't end up happening. Playa Vista
and its supporters, including the gas company, which was where this meeting was
held, closed down the meeting and said, "We don't have enough ballots."
-
Hanscom
- It's because they saw that it was a real organized community here, wanting to
make sure they had a say, and Playa Vista's Phase 2 hadn't been approved yet. So
Playa Vista took their own little organizing and went back to the drawing board,
and a couple of years later they managed to take over the election. They
basically bused in all of their temporary employees and offered them dinner and
drinks. It's well known in the city that our Neighborhood Council here is owned
and operated by Playa Vista and doesn't really reflect the community.
-
Hanscom
- By the same token, there are some community members who do support Playa Vista,
and mostly because of their own self-interest. Playa Vista has spent a lot of
money giving money and giving time to various organizations in the community in
an effort to buy their support, and they have done that to some extent, but the
overwhelming majority of people in this area do not support Playa Vista.
-
Collings
- So the Neighborhood Council, I mean, why was it formed around that time? Was it
formed in response to Playa Vista, or was it just a coincidence?
-
Hanscom
- No, it just happened to be that this was when all the neighborhood councils were
being formed in the city, and when that happened, like I said, the people who
were opposed to Playa Vista, which I do believe is the majority of both Playa
del Rey and Westchester, they all formed a coalition and said, "We're going to
make sure that we take back our community."
-
Hanscom
- There was a shift in politics, and Bill Rosendahl, when he ran for city council,
opposing Playa Vista and supporting the community was one of his biggest
platforms. In spite of a significant amount of money Playa Vista put in,
including Rob [Robert] Maguire and Steve Soboroff putting lots of their own
individual money in at the end to try and defeat him, he won by quite a
margin.
-
Collings
- Based on that issue, do you think?
-
Hanscom
- I think that was a big part of it. I do. I was asked, as a Sierra Club leader,
because Sierra Club had endorsed Bill Rosendahl, I was asked to do one of those
phone call things the very last day, all the Democrats in the district, and you
know, people knew I was a leader in that.
-
Hanscom
- Interestingly, the Republicans were given Richard Riordan to make the calls to.
[Laughs] So there are some Republicans in the district, too, but I think we have
an overwhelming Democratic majority in this area.
-
Collings
- So, I mean, is it fair to say that in the beginning you utilized these kind of
interesting protests, FrogWorks and the like, to raise awareness, and then the
actual action, effective action against Playa Vista, came through the lawsuit
and through the support of people like Bill Rosendahl, who came on board as
perhaps some of these local middle-class and upper middle-class community
members came around to this position as well?
-
Hanscom
- Well, first of all, Bill Rosendahl, while he completely supports our position,
the purchase happened before he got in office. So it was others who really
pushed that, although he is really helping us to try and secure what we have and
to expand the park, to some degree. And he's also trying to stand up for what's
right at Playa Vista with what's still at play, because there are about 150
acres still in question there.
-
Hanscom
- But, yes, I guess the way I would say what you summed up rather well, is that our
movement grew up politically. In the beginning we had no choice but to--you
know, people were saying, "Well, why would you have people lock down to the
bulldozers in protest?"
-
Collings
- You're talking about Celia Alario.
-
Hanscom
- Celia Alario.
-
Collings
- Talk about that in a little bit, but go ahead.
-
Hanscom
- Yes. I mean, that was all we had. First of all, we had nothing to sue over that
we knew of, originally, initially. We knew that Phase 1 had already been
approved. Of course, then when DreamWorks came in, Phase 1 got approved again,
so we did file a lawsuit there over that. We didn't have any political support
except for from Tom Hayden, who was probably the only elected official in the
area who had read the entire Environmental Impact Report, and when he read it,
he said, "This is not acceptable."
-
Hanscom
- But most people were just taking the "greenwashing," the story line that, "Well,
DreamWorks, why would they get involved with something bad?" And, of course, you
know, "The Friends of the Ballona Wetlands have signed off, so it must be good,
because they've fought for a long time." It was very difficult to do much of
anything against that story line. So we just did the basic solid grassroots
organizing that we could, petitions. We had people standing out on Culver and
Jefferson, passing out flyers to the traffic that was going by, saying, "Help
us." We were sort of desperate at that point.
-
Hanscom
- It took a number of years to get to a point where we could approach the political
establishment, and it really took DreamWorks getting out before we had much
traction there. I mean, it wasn't for not trying, but we just couldn't get
anywhere while DreamWorks was there. They had too much influence with the
Democratic Party because of their fundraising.
-
Collings
- Yes. So what are some of the other ways that you did the grassroots community
organizing? I mean, passing out flyers, raising awareness with the theater
troupe, FrogWorks.
-
Hanscom
- Letter-writing campaigns, petitions. We did a very big petition to the Army Corps
of Engineers, which Polly Pearlman, who was one of our great activists--she has
passed away since--she and I went to Washington and delivered a stack several
feet high of petitions to the head of the Army Corps of Engineers at the
Pentagon, who we knew actually had sympathy toward protecting wetlands. We knew
that his department had approved the first phase of Playa Vista, and we thought
there were flaws in that. We thought that he might be able to help us. He did
come out and look at the site.
-
Hanscom
- We just appealed to every possible place we could. A lot of letter writing,
letters to the editor. Basic information sharing, going out and doing the
speaking circuit. Bruce Robertson, his visuals that he put together, that was
what convinced me to get involved, and then we convinced a lot of other people,
too. When he did these big maps and showed exactly what was being protected, it
was not what everybody was saying. It was not what everybody was saying in terms
of what the impact would be. Once you see it on a map, and you see 30,000 new
people coming in, and 28 percent increase in traffic on the 405 Freeway, 86
percent increase in traffic on Lincoln Boulevard, not too many people thought we
could handle that.
-
Hanscom
- But you had to pull those numbers and information out of the materials that were
there to educate people. Then we started getting scientists involved, too. Dr.
Joy [B.] Zedler and Wayne Ferren, two of the top wetlands scientists in the
West, we got them to write declarations for our lawsuits. We were able to find
some rather curious things that had happened with consultants that Playa Vista
had hired in the past and were able to get some of those scientists to explain
what happened. That helped us win our federal lawsuit, where the judge basically
said the Army Corps of Engineers had covered up some things and not done the
review the way it ought to have been, and they didn't listen to the experts.
-
Hanscom
- So there was that going on, and at the same time there were a lot of activists
who were just so concerned once the bulldozers started. The bulldozers were in
starts and stops, starts and stops, depending on the financial problems that
Playa Vista was having at the time. So there were probably a dozen to fifteen,
people total who at one time or another went in and locked themselves down to
bulldozers, Celia Alario being the first one when the bulldozing first
started.
-
Hanscom
- She was just devastated, because she had done a lot of the analyzing of the
Environmental Impact Report, and she knew what was there. And all of a sudden,
they were bulldozing in an area that no one knew anything about them having any
permits in. She said, "This can't be. We've got to stop it." So she went out and
decided to try and stop it in a way that might actually bring some attention to
the area.
-
Collings
- So what exactly did she do?
-
Hanscom
- Well, she went out, apparently, early one morning and locked herself at the neck
with a bicycle chain to a bulldozer, so that by the time the bulldozer operator
got there later that morning, he wouldn't be able to start it up. She had
someone filming it, and she had someone watching from afar who had a key, I
understand, in case there was some kind of emergency. But she was prepared to be
there all day, and she was there for hours before the fire department came and
kind of decided they had to unlock her somehow. It's not an easy thing to do, I
don't think. But she had had training in civil disobedience, working to try and
save redwoods up in the redwood forest, and so she knew what she was doing and
was well prepared going into it.
-
Collings
- This was covered by the local media.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, that's why she had someone filming it. I'm told that whoever it was that was
filming it, I guess, got copies down to the television stations right away, so
it ended up on the news. And it just happened to be--we had been working with
NBC news on a broadcast that Tom Brokaw was going to be doing that night. It was
the day of the primary for the presidential election in--let's see; 1996, it
would have been, so it was like the second term of Bill [William J.] Clinton. So
it ended up not only on our local news, but it ended up on the national NBC news
with Brokaw making a mention of it with his piece.
-
Collings
- You said that there were a number of other people who also chained themselves to
bulldozers.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, there were--I don't know--a month later or so, there were a few, like three
together that did, and then Valerie Sklarevsky, Martin Sheen's friend, she came
in once. She didn't lock herself to a bulldozer, but she got up in this really
beautiful white dress with a whole basket of flowers and sat on this bulldozer.
I guess they didn't know what to do with her. [Laughs] I wasn't at any of these
actions, so, you know, I only saw photographs or images of them later, because
our organization, Wetlands Action Network, was involved with litigation and
trying to make sure that Playa Vista upheld the law, and we didn't feel we could
be involved with any of those.
-
Hanscom
- But there were other groups in our coalition that did. Jerry Rubin once did a
sit-in on Playa Vista. It was on Gandhi's birthday, I believe. He ended up
defending himself in court, you know, dressed as Gandhi, and tried to get a
message across, and ended up doing some community service as a result. I don't
think anyone stayed in jail more than a night, but some of them did.
-
Collings
- He also did a hunger strike.
-
Hanscom
- He did. Jerry did a hunger strike, I think before that; it was while DreamWorks
was still involved. From the very first time Jerry Rubin and his Alliance for
Survival got involved with our coalition, his whole thing was, "Well, we need to
get a meeting with these guys." He was always about talking with the other side
and trying to come to some reasoning with the other side.
-
Hanscom
- I and many others said, "There's no way you're going to get a meeting with these
guys. This is Hollywood. You know, it's just not possible, even if you're in the
industry."
-
Hanscom
- He said, "Well, we're going to," and he just kept on until finally he decided he
needed to do a hunger strike to get that meeting, and we finally did get a
meeting with Jeffrey Katzenberg. Although we were told we were not allowed to
say that it was because of the hunger strike, that really is what made it
happen.
-
Collings
- What was the outcome of that meeting?
-
Hanscom
- Well, it was a carefully orchestrated meeting. We were only allowed to have three
representatives from our coalition. Bruce Robertson and Jerry Rubin and I went.
And I was not allowed to represent the Sierra Club, they said. They wanted it to
look like it was just a really little--
-
Collings
- Just a meeting of local concerned people, yes.
-
Hanscom
- Right. Although they ended up having about sixteen other people there from other
environmental groups. NRDC was represented, Heal the Bay, the Friends of Ballona
Wetlands, Audubon, Coalition for Clean Air, all groups that had not gotten
involved with us, the League of Conservation Voters, and all groups that to some
degree had supported the Friends in the past. Ruth Lansford sat to Jeffrey
Katzenberg's right.
-
Hanscom
- It was really interesting, because we had been to the Universal Studio lot before
to meet with someone on DreamWorks' staff to try and talk with them, through
another supporter. So we had gone there before. But when this meeting happened,
they were like--fear was taking over. They met us at the gate, and they were
going to drive us in. "You're not allowed to drive here." It was like they
thought we were going to do something terrible, you know, because Jerry had done
this hunger strike. It was very strange.
-
Hanscom
- But we got there, and everybody was waiting. They had already had their little
pre-meeting, apparently. But we had met. Our whole coalition met the night
before and really decided how we were going to deal with this. Based on how they
were setting all these rules for our coming, we thought they were likely to try
and marginalize us and all. So we decided we were going to have a press
conference right afterwards outside, and so we did, and there were groups
protesting, saying, you know, "Why weren't we allowed to be there?"
-
Hanscom
- We supported that, saying, "Yes, Greenpeace shouldn't have been locked out, and
CALPIRG and Sierra Club." It was not right that they chose all these people who
were, you know, kind of supportive of their position. They were, I think, all
groups who had gotten some kind of donations or support from them in the
past.
-
Hanscom
- But we had this really interesting, interesting meeting. Each of us got to say
something, and the pitch we had was, "Why don't you, DreamWorks, just keep your
studio on the area that was already paved, the Howard Hughes lot? We would be
fine with that. And help us preserve the rest of it."
-
Hanscom
- Katzenberg didn't have an answer for that. He said, "Next," you know. I mean, he
just would not answer that.
-
Hanscom
- We thought that was a good solution. But that was when we realized that they were
really committed to not just having a movie studio, but to being developers.
They were one-third developers in this project, and they were going to use the
money they were going to make to help finance their studio. So in their minds,
they couldn't get out, even though they were three of the wealthiest men in
Hollywood. I mean, people say they got out because of money, but it's hard to
believe that. So they could have, if they really wanted that. They just thought
that they had enough political clout from everything they've done that they
could get what they wanted.
-
Hanscom
- So, anyway, we ended up telling--there was an attempt at one point. One of the--I
can't remember who it was; I think maybe the president of Heal the Bay at the
time. Mark Gold wasn't there. One of them said, "Well, we think we would like to
make an agreement that no one's going to speak about anything that happens at
this meeting."
-
Hanscom
- We said, "No, that's not going to happen. Sorry." I mean, for what? What purpose?
It's not like we're, you know, making any progress. [Laughter] They had this
great big fruit display, and you know, it was all very orchestrated to some
outcome that they wanted. But we ended up getting our message out.
-
Hanscom
- It was great, because the Hollywood trade publications did cover this, and they,
at least the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, were always really interested
in what was going to happen with this whole deal. So that helped us.
-
Collings
- So what do you think was the tipping point then, finally?
-
Hanscom
- I think it was an avalanche of lots of things at once. There was an article in
the Wall Street Journal about a year before they got out, where it was really
clear that Rob Maguire, who was the president of Playa Vista at one time, and
Jeffrey Katzenberg had a very big personality conflict. They both wanted to be
in charge, and there was a lot of power struggle going on, I think. So that was
underlying a lot of things. But we were actually very surprised when they pulled
out, in many ways, because people told us, "David Geffen never backs off of
something he wants," and it was really clear Steven Spielberg really wanted to
do this.
-
Collings
- Yes, and he had invited all the frogs in Los Angeles.
-
Hanscom
- Right. [Laughs] He had invited all the frogs in Los Angeles to come to Playa
Vista. They would have a home.
-
Hanscom
- But I think that that was part of it. He got thousands and thousands of letters
from schoolchildren, photos, drawings. We had a lot of outreach to the schools,
I mean, just because people who got involved happened to be teachers and said,
"What can I do?" So there was a lot of pressure there.
-
Hanscom
- We went to all of their premieres, both Spielberg's himself, because he had his
own films besides DreamWorks. We had protests at all of their big premieres. We
were in their face wherever we could be. There were the films that Sheila and
Bruce put out. There were people who thought they saw Steven Spielberg at the
premiere of Sheila's film.
-
Collings
- Really.
-
Hanscom
- It was held at the Museum of Tolerance, which he has a very close relationship
with. After the lights went down, there were people who thought he came in,
slipped in and slipped out. He's known for doing that sort of thing with films
he's involved with in premieres, so that's possible. Sheila actually ran into
him maybe a month before they pulled out, and made sure he had a copy of the
film.
-
Hanscom
- There was a front-page article in the L.A. Weekly with a caricature of Spielberg
on top of a bulldozer running over E.T. [Collings laughs.] It was titled
"DreamJerks." So, I mean, there were a lot of things starting to come down on
them at once that I think may have snowballed.
-
Hanscom
- But I think ultimately there were things that we had information about that not
everybody did, about the contamination on the site. I think DreamWorks didn't
have that information. I don't think Playa Vista shared it all with them until
they purchased the land, and it was in, I think, March or April of 1999 that
they actually finally purchased their part of the land that they were going to
build on. Then they did their own due diligence reports, and I think they saw
the amount of contamination there.
-
Hanscom
- The Hughes site was an aircraft site, where they dumped solvents and all kinds of
things when there were no environmental laws. So there was a big toxic plume
floating on top of the groundwater, floating into the soils. You know, these
were not just any developers who usually would leave after they sell their
places. DreamWorks was going to live there. They were going to have a daycare
center on the site, and I think they really saw that they might have some
liability themselves, and that maybe this wasn't where they were destined to
be.
-
Hanscom
- So, there was a Regional Water Board hearing that not too many people knew about
that we went to, and their lawyer was arguing. This was after they'd purchased
the land but before they got out. They were arguing with the state lawyer about,
"But we were told by Playa Vista that we're not liable, that they are taking all
liability."
-
Hanscom
- The state lawyer was saying, "Well, that's not the law in California. If you own
it, you're going to be liable, too."
-
Hanscom
- So I think they, you know, just finally realized it was maybe not as good of an
environmental site as they had been led to believe. I think that was a big part
of it, because within a couple of months they were gone.
-
Collings
- Yes, and you had a big party.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, we did. We did. One of the--I can't remember if it was the Hollywood
Reporter or Daily Variety; it was one of those reporters that called me, though,
and said, "Did you hear?"
-
Hanscom
- "Hear what?" I mean, I was always ready for some shoe to drop. But that was not
something we had expected, so we were very, very relieved, because while a lot
of people thought we were happy they were involved, that that was helping us get
our names in the paper and things like that, having them involved was a real
double-edged sword. Yes, it helped us get our message out, but it really was
politically just impossible to gain any traction until they left.
-
Collings
- Yes. I see that we're at eleven now.
-
Hanscom
- Oh, okay. Yes, we are.
-
Collings
- That's your time.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, I've got to open the store.
-
Collings
- All right. Okay.
-
Hanscom
- But come back. [End of interview]
1.4. Session 4 (June 12, 2008)
-
Collings
- Today is June 12th, 2008, Jane Collings interviewing Marcia Hanscom in her
office.
-
Hanscom
- And I'm going to make sure my cell phone is turned off, too.
-
Collings
- Okay. So I just wanted to start out today with asking you about a few of the
things that I noticed in reading some of the news coverage of the struggle. One
of the things that really stood out to me was a characterization of Friends of
the Ballona Wetlands as being more kind of mainstream, more "rational"--quote,
unquote--and the coalition and Wetlands Action Network as being more of a
--quote, unquote--"fringe element." Bruce Robertson, in his open letter to those
interested in the Ballona Wetlands from his Ballona Valley Preservation League
[Newsletter] quotes Ruth Lansford as saying--quote, unquote--"We realized that
there was a real world out there," and that that's why they went ahead with this
settlement, which you considered to be less than enough.
-
Collings
- In another article Michael Montgomery, a DreamWorks executive, is characterized
as calling, in particular, Citizens United to Save All of Ballona "a new voice
that's thoroughly outside the mainstream." Would you say that there was this
kind of cultural clash throughout?
-
Hanscom
- I think that that was a perception that Playa Vista and its supporters wanted to
create, and that's exactly why, when, for instance, we had the meeting with
Jeffrey Katzenberg, why I was not allowed to represent the Sierra Club under
their rules. The Sierra Club, which is considered a mainstream environmental
organization in most people's books, was one of the original six groups in our
coalition and had been opposed to Playa Vista for some time. The Surfrider
Foundation was involved, also another large environmental group, national based.
So I think that that was Playa Vista's intention, to try and create a perception
of that, and in fact, there were times when they sent around letters and press
statements suggesting that the Sierra Club was on their side, which was not the
case. But that was a perception they wanted to create.
-
Hanscom
- In terms of Ruth's statement about the real world, I think that when her
settlement was finalized, that was their perception, that that was the most they
could do. They had a governor that wasn't really interested in parks bonds.
There were a couple of parks bond measures that had actually been defeated. So
people didn't really see a clear path to a solution for doing more than what
they had gotten.
-
Hanscom
- Well, we refused to give in to that idea, and we thought that there was hope for
something else. We weren't sure how; we just knew that there were other
situations. Point Reyes National Seashore was one of our examples that gave us
hope for something else, where they had actually come in and bulldozed the area,
put in streetlights, put in model homes, put in roads, and now you would never
know any of that was there, because [President] John [F.] Kennedy signed it into
being a national seashore, something that was not even a designation that had
happened before.
-
Hanscom
- So we knew things that could happen if enough citizens got together and had their
voices heard. We felt that that was really what had been lacking here, that the
Friends of Ballona Wetlands and Audubon had sort of negotiated their settlements
in a vacuum without a lot of other groups around. Even the groups who Playa
Vista had sort of sitting on the fence, like NRDC and Heal the Bay, who weren't
positively advocating for them but also weren't opposing it, they didn't really
know the details of the settlement, and once some of them found out, like Santa
Monica Baykeeper, once we actually were able to show them the level of problems
with this development, they then decided that they needed to oppose it as
well.
-
Hanscom
- So to us it was an education and organizing thing that really needed to be done
so that the citizens of Los Angeles could have a say in really what was going to
happen here, instead of just negotiating with a few individuals that, however
well-intentioned, weren't able to get as much as what happens when you bring
many people together.
-
Collings
- So how do you think that the Bolsa Chica accomplishment played into what you were
doing at--
-
Hanscom
- Well, Bolsa Chica was a big part of it, because, just like Point Reyes National
Seashore, Bolsa Chica had a similar development deal that the Amigos de Bolsa
Chica had made. I came here, back to living in Los Angeles County after living
in Orange County, I lived near the Bolsa Chica. So that was part of my frame of
reference that I knew what we had been able to do there. The Bolsa Chica Land
Trust and Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, and Huntington Beach Tomorrow, all
came together and said, "We want to do something different, and we think this
deal isn't good enough." They questioned that status quo, a deal that was made
about the same time as the Friends made their deal here.
-
Hanscom
- In Orange County, we didn't even have any real hope at all. I mean, all of our
legislators there were not just supportive of the deal, but they were
Republicans who weren't real interested in public land protection. But we found
one thing that was a pressure point that the citizens could really speak to, and
that was when Bill [William J.] Clinton got into office and he had Bruce Babbitt
as his Interior Secretary. Literally thousands of people wrote letters and cards
to both of them asking for help. The American Land Conservancy came in, and
Harriet [Burgess]--oh, I can't remember her last name, but she's a very good
friend of Bruce Babbitt; she was the founder of American Land Conservancy.
-
Hanscom
- She helped us to get his office engaged in the issue, and we were able to
purchase a thousand acres of wetlands there that nobody thought could be
protected unless it was tied to a deal to develop thousands of homes partly in
the wetlands, partly on the mesa. Nobody was willing to give that up, so now the
end result of Bolsa Chica is some 300 homes are being built on the Bolsa Chica
mesa at the very back. It's still not good for the entire ecology of the area,
but it's far better than what the Amigos had originally gotten.
-
Hanscom
- So, yes, that was an example that actually helped to encourage the Ballona
Wetlands Land Trust to get formed here. It encouraged a lot of people to see
that there were other options. Port mitigation money helped fund that
acquisition in Bolsa Chica, and also some money from the Exxon Valdez spill.
Those were kind of unique solutions that people hadn't thought of before. "Well,
how could oil spill fine money go to something like this?" And they connected it
because the federal government connected it, because they said, "This is a
Pacific flyway, and a lot of the birds that were impacted there come to Bolsa
Chica," and the port had a need to pay for some of the destruction they had
done.
-
Hanscom
- So there were some unique things that were thought of, and that just told us all
here there are new ways of looking at solutions. We just have to put the
pressure on to the point where the elected officials want to find those
solutions.
-
Collings
- Right. Right, some creative thinking.
-
Hanscom
- Yes.
-
Collings
- Once the parkland was established, how does your organization now--and I know
that Friends of the Ballona Wetlands also organizes tours and does things for
visitors. Do the two groups sort of coordinate in any way, or are they entirely
separate?
-
Hanscom
- There's still a bit of tension there, for a couple of reasons. One, the Friends
were sort of given carte blanche entryway into Ballona by Playa Vista for many
years, so they felt like it was their land. In fact, if the state had not
purchased the land through the scenario we worked on, Playa Vista's deal with
them would not have made it public land. It was going to give them a
conservation easement, and they would have been the decision makers as to who
had access to the land. We didn't think that was a fair thing. We thought the
public in general needed to own the land, and we thought that a public resource
agency needed to manage it so that the best interests of the ecosystem, not
necessarily the best interests of Playa Vista and their supporters, would be
really ruling things.
-
Hanscom
- So things shifted a lot when the purchase happened, but the Friends also managed
to get in the deal that they would continue to have their access with a monthly
agreement that could be terminated with thirty days' notice. Well, after the
purchase happened, somehow Playa Vista helped them get a longer deal, and they
now have till the end of this year to sort of still feel like they're in charge
of a certain part of the wetlands where they've been doing their restoration
work for a long time. They have a trailer out there, a big container, actually,
that's like an office building, that we don't think should be there, and Fish
and Game Department doesn't think should be there. That's going to be moved at
the end of this year, and things will be on a more equal footing.
-
Hanscom
- However, when the purchase happened, we were all of a sudden allowed to request
access, like any group would be, and if we met the requirements, which we have,
we have a letter that says we can take tours on certain days and do certain
activities there. The Sierra Club, Sierra Stewards, has a similar access. The
Ballona Wetlands Land Trust has some access for their restoration work. So now
there are a lot of different groups who have access, and the Fish and Game
Department, who manages the Ecological Reserve, is kind of the referee to
determine, making sure that people aren't there at the same time.
-
Hanscom
- There have definitely been some conflicts, where because the Friends haven't
liked sharing that, it seemed to us, we ended up in a big legal challenge where
the city attorney, actually, tried to--which, this isn't city land, so it was
odd that he took jurisdiction. But he went after my partner, Roy van de Hoek,
for removing nonnative plants out there, which is what he was supposed to be
doing. It took us getting a very high profile attorney, Tom [Thomas Arthur]
Mesereau, to defend him before they dropped it and realized that this was part
of this sort of underlying struggle that was still going on that Playa Vista was
actually fueling, partly because Roy is a scientist who has testified on our
behalf in litigation against Playa Vista in the past. There's still a lot of bad
blood, shall we say.
-
Hanscom
- However, I'm told things are turning the page. I think that after we went through
that and after they saw that we weren't just going to back down and go run into
a corner, I think that they decided maybe they do need to play fair.
-
Collings
- Now, how would the city attorney even know that plants were being removed from a
wilderness area? It just doesn't seem like the usual beat of the city
attorney.
-
Hanscom
- It doesn't. I think he thought he was doing something on the side of the
environment by doing this, at least according to his press release. Maybe he
thought he needed the press. He was running for attorney general at the time. Or
maybe he had just been defeated for that and felt he needed press. But he put
out a press release saying he was going after this scofflaw who was hurting the
Ballona Wetlands. Everybody who knew Roy said, "What the heck is this? I mean,
where is that coming from?"
-
Hanscom
- Well, we have mutual acquaintances with people related to the Friends, and we got
our hands on some e-mail traffic that was very interesting, that one of the
people involved basically sent a message to a bunch of people, and they were
mostly leaders of the Friends of Ballona Wetlands, saying, "Thank you for
helping us get this guy. There's going to be an article in the paper tomorrow."
And there was more, but it was clear that the Friends and Playa Vista, some of
Playa Vista's people, were involved with it. Rocky Delgadillo has had a good,
strong relationship with Playa Vista for a long time.
-
Collings
- Now, you mentioned that one of the reasons that he was pursuing this had to do
with his political career. Of course, you have this perspective because, as
you've mentioned earlier, you have a background in public relations, so you
understand how symbolic a lot of this public posturing can be. Are there other
instances where you feel that your public relations background was really
brought to bear in this struggle?
-
Hanscom
- Well, I think that Bruce Robertson and I were deemed to be, by the coalition
early on, that we were asked to be the spokespersons by the coalition and to
deal with media. Bruce didn't have a background in that. He's a private
detective in his real work. But he was willing to learn, and so we worked
together on all of the press. There was a lot to do, especially when DreamWorks
got involved, and I think that my background was vital to helping craft the
messages we wanted to get out and helping activists, who don't really understand
how to deal with journalists sometimes, how to really put our story forward,
because we were up against this very, very well oiled and very well funded
public relations machine, not only of Playa Vista, but of DreamWorks, too.
Together, they knew how to deal with the news media and were experts on it every
day.
-
Hanscom
- I think that we did kind of go toe to toe with them at times, and were pretty
amazed that we were able to do this. There are a lot of people who give up on
the fact that we have a lot of corporations running the news media these days,
and do we really have journalism intact is a big question. I would say that from
my experience with this, given that we were up against such big odds, we were
able to get our story across, because I think the journalists who are really
doing the work do have a journalistic ethic that they feel very strongly about.
Maybe sometimes they do get edited out, and I'm sure that that sort of thing
happened.
-
Hanscom
- In fact, once we had a very, very good investigative journalist, Mark Hertsgaard.
He wrote the book On Bended Knee about the change in journalism during the
[Ronald W.] Reagan administration. He's a very fine journalist who many people
respect in the journalism field. He was asked by the New York Times Magazine to
come out to do a story on this whole issue. He was put up here in Playa del Rey.
They paid his expenses; had him here for a couple weeks, I think.
-
Hanscom
- After he turned the story in, basically it got edited out because of Steven
Spielberg's influence with the New York Times Magazine, is my understanding.
Mark worked very hard to get this story to continue to be published, and it was,
interestingly, published all over Europe in many other languages before it
finally got published in English It finally did get published in Mother Jones
magazine, of all places. So he was committed to getting it published, but it
wasn't nearly where it was supposed to be published originally.
-
Hanscom
- So they did have a lot of influence with the media. However, especially with the
television news, I think it was interesting that we were able, maybe because of
the way television news has become entertainment these days, and they would like
to see the colorful things that we kind of created, that we were able to
get--
-
Collings
- Yes, like the FrogWorks.
-
Hanscom
- Like the frogs. The frog costumes, the turtle costumes, and then the Earth Water
Air Los Angeles, EWALA. We had these giant, colorful puppets that walked through
Los Angeles. Just walking in Los Angeles was a unique idea in itself, let alone
with these colorful puppets that would stop traffic. So there were things like
that that helped us. My understanding of the media, I think, helped to figure
out that we couldn't just put out a press release and hope somebody would listen
to it.
-
Collings
- Yes. Can you point to--perhaps you can't, but can you point to any time when
maybe, you know, people within the coalition wanted to do a certain thing, but
you understood, from a public relations standpoint, that you should do that
thing differently or do a different thing?
-
Hanscom
- Well, I think there were oftentimes when people thought, "Well, let's just send
out a notice to the press and they'll all show up." We were often having to
counsel everybody that, you know, they just don't show up. There's a million
things going on in the city, and you have to have some kind of a hook, something
that is going to be different. I mean, we were always looking for celebrities
because of that. That was one of our challenges. So if we couldn't get
celebrities; we weren't interested in doing violence; so the other thing is
creativity, and that's what we really focused on was the creative.
-
Collings
- Was there ever a time when you felt you had to kind of, you know, cool people
down to not do something that you thought would not play well in the media?
-
Hanscom
- Well, not that I can remember. I mean, we had such a diverse coalition, and some
groups wanted to do things. The people who did civil disobedience were not
things I had any control over at all. People just went and did those things on
their own. So, you know, that was up to them how they were going to deal with
press on those things.
-
Hanscom
- A lot of people probably think we were more coordinated than we were as a
coalition. I think that was really the strength of our coalition in many ways.
We had a lot of diversity and a lot of diverse tactics going on at different
times. While we did get together regularly to update each other and to
coordinate some strategies, a lot of things were done that people just did on
their own. So there was a hunger strike by someone else later on after Jerry
Rubin did his, by someone I didn't know, and a lot of the groups got behind him
and stood on the corner with him while he was doing that, and he got a lot of
press.
-
Hanscom
- So, like I said, it wasn't as coordinated as some would have liked to have made
it, and I think that one of the reasons why Playa Vista would highlight me as a
target sometimes is that that was easier to do. That's part of a strategy often
that developers do, that they go in and, "Okay, let's find somebody to be the
villain in this and make it look like it's just this person." Well, it wasn't
just me by any means. There were lots of people. I was definitely a leader in
the effort and still am a leader in advocating for Ballona, but there are
others.
-
Collings
- Okay. Have you ever offered your public relations expertise to other
environmental activist groups in the Southern California region?
-
Collings
- Well, when people have asked here and there, I've given them advice here and
there, but not on any regular basis. Other than through the Sierra Club, which
I've been an activist in for a long time and even served on the national Sierra
Club board of directors, so I offer my expertise in that organization from time
to time.
-
Collings
- Okay. I was just wondering, maybe groups like the Wilmington group [Coalition for
a Safe Environment], for example, or anything like that.
-
Hanscom
- Well, if they ask, I give them advice, but I haven't been doing that on a regular
basis.
-
Collings
- Okay. I was just wondering. So have you ever run into or heard of an obstacle as
overwhelming as the DreamWorks obstacle in the environmental struggles you've
been involved in or had firsthand experience?
-
Hanscom
- Oh, I think there are lots of them all over the place. when I was on the Sierra
Club board, I met activists around the country who were working on different
things that were. I mean, like for instance--and this is one that was before I
was on the Sierra Club board, someone who actually contacted me because of what
we were up against with Spielberg--Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft,
who got a little bit involved on the fringes of Playa Vista for a while, we
heard from activists who were working to try and prevent a massive development
he wanted to do on an island up off of the state of Washington coast.
-
Hanscom
- We heard from people--George Lucas, the story is that he and Steven Spielberg had
a wager as to who would get their development done first, because Lucas
apparently had something up in Northern California, where he also had a lot of
folks up in arms at the scope of a project he was trying to develop. So, I mean,
there are other powerful-influence people all over the country, and the world,
for that matter, who are not doing things in alignment with the protection of
the earth that I think--
-
Collings
- Well, no, this just seems like a particularly thorny problem, because not only
are they politically connected and powerful, but they also have enormous
leverage over the media.
-
Hanscom
- Right. Right. Well, I would say that I guess this was pretty big, in retrospect.
[Laughter] I mean, we just had a goal in mind, so we didn't really put that out
in front of us, I guess. But, yes. I mean, when people have power and money,
though, it does matter. As a citizen group, you can feel very daunted, no matter
what. I guess maybe that our success here is a story that could be encouraging
to others to know; if you could do it here, you could do it other places.
-
Collings
- Yes. Now, Ted Danson is regarded as being a prominent pro-ecological voice, but
not in this struggle.
-
Hanscom
- Right. [Laughs] I'm chuckling because I recall very well going up the elevators
to DreamWorks Universal office at the time when Jerry Rubin, while he was on his
hunger strike, and Jerry led a bunch of us up to their offices to do a sit-in
one afternoon. The doors to the elevator parted, and there's a big photograph of
Ted Danson and his wife, Mary Steenbergen, and I'm thinking, "Boy, that was
interesting how they did that," because we watched how DreamWorks sort of gave
them a sitcom, just like that, as soon as they got involved and knew that they
kind of needed him and maybe didn't want to have his voice on the other side.
All of a sudden they had a sitcom, and it was a sitcom that was allowed to stay
on the air for a lot longer than usual sitcoms that are not doing well, and it
was not doing well.
-
Collings
- What was the name of that?
-
Hanscom
- I think it was called Ink, I-n-k. It stayed on for a couple of years, and
everybody said, "It's terrible. It's not getting ratings." But they just kept it
going, and we thought, "Hmm, that's kind of interesting." I mean, you know, I
don't know if there was anything implicit or explicit in it, but it seemed to us
an interesting coincidence. At the time Ted ran American Oceans Campaign; it's
now called something else. I can't remember what they've changed the name to.
But at the time it was very prominent here in L.A. They mostly do things in
[Washington] D.C. now. I don't think they even have an office here. If they do,
they're not very involved in the rest--
-
Collings
- But he was doing public service announcements at one point for ecological
causes.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, well, at that time they were putting out reports about how important
estuaries and wetlands were. I was working with them in Washington on trying to
strengthen the Clean Water Act. so it would have been a group that would have
been a natural to be involved. We tried to get Ted to come out on a tour with
us. Playa Vista prevented that; it was really clear.
-
Hanscom
- You know, the only time we ever got any help from them was one of their staff
people was sympathetic, and she was very conflicted and very concerned about why
they couldn't get involved. She called one day when she heard that Playa Vista
was having a ground-breaking. We said, "A ground-breaking for what?"
-
Hanscom
- She said, "I don't know, but I think you'd better get out there."
-
Hanscom
- So we went out to the site, and it turned out that Playa Vista was doing
their--quote--"ground-breaking for the freshwater marsh," which was really a
detention basin for the runoff from their project, and which was the subject of
our litigation all the way to the [U.S.] Supreme Court, because they really
destroyed a salt marsh to put it in. They had gotten bulldozers out there to do
the first stuff, and it was in an area that they didn't even have a coastal
permit for yet.
-
Hanscom
- So there we were, and NBC just happened to have their film crew here that week
for Tom Brokaw's piece, and so they captured them on film, which helped save a
snake that was just getting ready to get chopped up by this machine. So we were
able to get some media coverage for something we didn't know was happening, but
they had the media covering their--quote--"ground-breaking" and making it look
like it was wonderful. They had Ruth Lansford from the Friends there with Playa
Vista and the city councilperson all moving the dirt. Great. It was very
distressing.
-
Hanscom
- But we were so out of the loop of what they were doing, and so we did get a
little heads-up on that. That was as much as Ted Danson contributed. At some
point he did do an opinion piece, saying how this was actually a good
development for the wetlands. We never ended up able to actually talk with him
in person about it. DreamWorks did a very good job of keeping him away from
us.
-
Collings
- While we're on the subject of people, is it worth looking at this chart, which
was published in Variety, I believe, proposing--
-
Hanscom
- Outside magazine.
-
Collings
- --Outside magazine--proposing a sort of a cast of characters for a film on this
subject?
-
Hanscom
- Okay.
-
Collings
- Okay. I mean, we've talked about some of those people, obviously, but others, I'm
not sure why they come up, like Julia Dreyfuss.
-
Hanscom
- Oh, well, I think what they were trying to say--I don't think Julia Dreyfuss was
involved at all. It's just they were suggesting that that's who would be cast as
me if we had a film.
-
Collings
- I see. Okay, okay. All right.
-
Hanscom
- Jeff Bridges would play Steven Spielberg.
-
Collings
- I see. Okay.
-
Hanscom
- Lloyd Bridges would play Rob Maguire. Interesting that he does look a little like
him. Keanu Reeves would play David Geffen, and Jonathan Frakes from Star Trek
would play Bruce Robertson. I don't know why they--you know, it was a cute way
of them showing that, "Oh, this is not your normal environmental thing. We've
actually got a film situation going on it.”
-
Collings
- Right. Yes, sort of an Erin Brockovich--
-
Hanscom
- Right.
-
Collings
- --kind of, in the making, yes.
-
Hanscom
- I guess. And we don't even know why or who did that, you know. But the bottom
line was the press we had gotten out there to date had helped people see, "Wow,
this is somebody we thought was a good kind of public citizen, Steven Spielberg.
What's he doing, doing this?" It caught a lot of people by surprise. In the
beginning people said to us, "Oh, he wouldn't do that. He's a good guy," and a
couple of years later, people are going, "Why is he doing this?" People really
did get that maybe his image out there wasn't what reality was, and I think that
may have played into their decision, ultimately.
-
Collings
- And this was entirely an image that came from his role as a film producer and
director.
-
Hanscom
- Right.
-
Collings
- He did not have an environmental record.
-
Hanscom
- As far as we know. We couldn't find any evidence of him even, you know, giving
money to environmental groups. He did give a lot of money to politicians, but we
couldn't see that. Now, you know, someone might make a statement that because he
gave to Democrats, that meant he was for the environment. But that didn't seem
to always play out, as far as we could see.
-
Collings
- Okay. I just wanted to ask you, in the film The Last Stand, there's a reference
to a divestment campaign.
-
Hanscom
- Oh, right.
-
Collings
- Asking people to divest from their investments is a sort of different level of
activity than the street theater and whatnot, so I'm wondering how successful
that campaign was and how you got the word out.
-
Hanscom
- Well, we actually sort of combined the two. One of our supporters actually paid
for FrogWorks, the political street theater, to go to New York City, to Wall
Street, to perform and to ask people there to consider cutting up their Discover
credit cards and not supporting Morgan Stanley, which at the time--well, and
still to this day--Morgan Stanley is who controls Playa Vista [and owns Discover]. They didn't [own it]
when
DreamWorks got involved, but Jeffrey Katzenberg at some point with his struggles
with Rob Maguire saw that this was sort of a financial house of cards, and he
ended up putting a new financing team together of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs,
Oak Tree Capital, and Union Labor Life Insurance Company, and this conglomerate
real estate investment trust is what is Playa Capital or Playa Vista today.
-
Hanscom
- So when DreamWorks left the picture, we had to focus on who the real developers
were after they left, because they were developers until they left, and then it
was left in the hands of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley being
the real one that called the shots, and so that's who we went after. We decided
to do a protest at the Morgan Stanley office in Malibu. We got quite a bit of
press over that in local Malibu papers. Then we did a small protest at the Santa
Monica office of Morgan Stanley, and then it was suggested that we take this to
Wall Street.
-
Hanscom
- How many people took their money out of Morgan Stanley, I don't know. I do know
some did, and some that had some significant money who supported our efforts
told us that. We saw some people cut up their credit cards, and they'd do it on
camera for us. So, you know, we made some kind of an impact, but is it a lot?
Probably it was not the thing that tipped them over the edge, since they're such
a large, large corporation, but I don't think they liked it, and that's probably
why it was suggested to us that we go to Wall Street, because we were told by
some inside people that that pressure was causing some concern there.
-
Collings
- Some people inside Morgan Stanley?
-
Hanscom
- Yes.
-
Collings
- Okay. What are the things that you might say went wrong along the way?
-
Hanscom
- What went wrong along the way? Well, first of all, you can never control
volunteers, so activism is an interesting thing. It's not like where you have
employees and you can say, "You're fired," or you've got to have a certain
amount of accountability. So that was always a challenge, and because of the
nature of volunteer work, a lot of people sometimes come to a cause with
whatever psychological issues they might have, and so people are in it for
different reasons. You know, they might be mad at their father, so they're going
to take it out on Rob Maguire or Steven Spielberg. Or who knows? I mean, there
are a lot of different reasons people come in.
-
Hanscom
- So keeping everybody together working for a common cause is a challenge. We had a
coalition that lasted probably longer than most coalitions do. Coalition work is
very challenging because of that, because every group in a coalition has its own
mission and its own leadership structure that makes decisions, and getting them
all to agree on one--I think the thing we did the best was in the very beginning
we had one statement, one sentence, that everybody agreed to, and that was what
we kept focused on. Whenever we would stray from that, that's where we would get
in trouble.
-
Collings
- What was that one sentence?
-
Hanscom
- It was, "Citizens United to Save All of Ballona is committed to protecting,
restoring, and acquiring for the public all of the Ballona Wetlands ecosystem
and surrounding open space--surrounding undeveloped open space," period. That
was really important to stick to that, because whenever we got onto other
things, not everybody agreed. So the way we solved some of those tensions at
times was we said, "Look, we're only going to come together for information
sharing, not for decision making. We're not like a congress, where all the
groups are going to vote or anything like that. We're just coming together to
share what we're doing and to find ways where some groups can work together for
certain things." So four or five groups might work on one thing; another six
groups would work on something else; and sometimes we would all show up together
at something.
-
Hanscom
- But usually for public hearings and those sorts of things, we were all right
there together, but for other things, the more creative efforts, I think we had
different groups worked on different things, depending on the personalities that
got along together. So that was a challenge at times, though, because
everybody's personalities, you know, you don't necessarily choose who is going
to show up and how to--you know, you either work with them or you just say,
"Well, I don't want to work with that person." There was a lot of that, so
keeping it together was a challenge.
-
Hanscom
- What other things? I think the question is if we would have known it would have
taken as long as it would have, would we have all signed up for it; I don't
know. But I know people like Bruce, for instance, he didn't expect to be in it
that long, and after the purchase happened, he really went back to his private
detective work. Ballona Valley Preservation League still does some things with
their film, but very little else. It was a long effort, and not everybody was
signed up for the long haul.
-
Collings
- Do you think that his background as a private detective was helpful?
-
Hanscom
- Oh, it was very helpful, absolutely. He was able to document things for our
lawyers in a way that most activists wouldn't have known how to do, I mean,
because he's used to putting together exhibits for court things, and he knew
when he took photographs that he'd have to have them in the context of what was
there, not just close up. He just did an amazing amount of work of documenting
things that the developers were doing illegally that was invaluable. His
instincts, because of his work, I think, were really helpful.
-
Hanscom
- And of course, the documentary film he did, no one was really taking much in the
way of photos of what was out there at the time. Now we've got a number of
people who are, but there really wasn't much in the way of documentation of what
was happening on the site in terms of the wildlife. He brought that all to life,
and because he's used to just sitting still and watching for long periods of
time, he'd just go out there for hours on his days off and get wildlife that no
one even knew was out there. So that was also a really, really beneficial
thing.
-
Collings
- Yes. Can you think of anybody else who brought unique skills to the effort?
-
Hanscom
- A couple of people; Roy van de Hoek, my partner, for one. When he got involved,
we had already had our coalition going for several years. It started in 1995,
and he came along in 1999. He had actually worked for the Friends of the Ballona
Wetlands, and Bruce and some others had told me I ought to meet him. He seemed
like a really good guy.
-
Hanscom
- I said, "No, he's working for the Friends. I can't imagine he's somebody that's
really going to work with us," because there was so much venom spit at us from
that direction at times. But it turned out he actually left the Friends, in part
because he would not remove a bumper sticker from his car that he had gotten
that said, "Save All of Ballona." Ruth Lansford demanded he take it off, and he
didn't; interesting story in itself.
-
Hanscom
- But we met at the premiere for Sheila's [Sheila Laffey's] film, The Last Stand,
and Roy, until Roy got involved with us, we really didn't have any ongoing
scientific assistance. We had some scientists that helped us on declarations,
some very prominent scientists. They weren't from this area, and so they would
come and look at something and do their best analysis from observing on-site,
and from some of the studying they've done. But Roy is the first one who really
knew the landscape intimately and understood it.
-
Hanscom
- To this day, he's really the Ballona naturalist who knows what's going on out
there the most, and that changed really quite a bit the direction of our
litigation. He was able to help us with our endangered species lawsuit, which,
you know, we had--I sort of wonder how we did it with such little information
about the real science of the place for so long. So he's definitely been a key
to changing the focus to the wildlife, because we now know so much more about it
with him here.
-
Hanscom
- Then Susan Suntree, I would say, is also a key person who brought a unique
perspective and gifts to us. She's the one who helped conceive of the idea of
FrogWorks to begin with. She's a teacher at East L.A. College, an English
teacher. She has a background in political street theater from Northern
California. She said, "Hey, how come they don't do that here?"
-
Hanscom
- "I don't know." I didn't even know what she was talking about.
-
Hanscom
- She put together this group of actors and kept them going for years. She also
helped. She and Jan Williamson, from 18th Street Arts Complex, really created
the whole EWALA puppet conception, of having all of the colorful, creative,
artistic expression has been something that Susan and Jan both brought to the
effort, and Susan still holds that place.
-
Collings
- What about legal expertise?
-
Hanscom
- Well, legal expertise, we had to go out and find, and it was not easy, because
most of the public interest lawyers in Los Angeles at the time either were
conflicted out of this situation because they had represented somebody related
to Ballona for years before, or either the Friends, or they had some kind of
relationship like Jan Chatten Brown, who's a great public interest
lawyer. Her husband worked on Playa Vista for the city attorney's office. There
were all these different conflicts here.
-
Hanscom
- Where there weren't conflicts, there were people who wouldn't touch it. It was
just too politically challenging. So we had to find people elsewhere, and through
other networks, we mostly ended up with lawyers that were in San Diego,
interestingly, or San Francisco, in some cases. I coordinated most of the legal
efforts for a long time. Now the Ballona Wetlands Land Trust and Surfrider are
continuing with the legal challenge on Phase 2, but for most of the time I had
to do that, and it was not easy. But we did bring in the Center for Biological
Diversity at one point, and they are really, really great at legal issues relate
to the Endangered Species Act. So it was nice to have that support from
them.
-
Collings
- So what's happening going forward?
-
Hanscom
- What's happening going forward? Well, there are lots of things on the horizon.
This year we're going to be doing a series celebrations related to Ballona, some
public celebrations, a big family picnic, an arts event, and a gala dinner to
honor the mayor, who, when he was assembly speaker, put the money aside to help
acquire the land. We're going to be honoring a lot of the journalists who stuck
their necks out. Mostly they were columnists and some investigative reporters
who have interesting stories to tell, and who I think ought to be honored for
really reporting on an interesting story but in a very pressurized
situation.
-
Hanscom
- We're going to be putting out a book called "Celebrate Ballona!" that a number of us
are compiling, with photographs of flora and fauna. That will be given out at
all of these events. There is no book on Ballona, amazingly. Even with all of
the years of struggle over it, no one's ever written about what's really here.
So this book is mostly going to be a coffee table type book that will help
people fall in love with the place, we hope.
-
Collings
- Yes, that's a great idea.
-
Hanscom
- Yes, mostly images, but I'm also working on a book about the story of the
struggle and the coalition activism, because I think there are so many stories
that are instructive and interesting and you couldn't have made up in a million
years, and how the activism relates to the wetlands themselves and what's here.
I think that's what is important to tell.
-
Hanscom
- Let's see. What else is up? Well, there's still a question over about a hundred
acres of land that Playa Vista has, what's going to happen with that Phase 2
site. There's still a question about a number of other parcels of land that sort
of surround Ballona, so we at Ballona Institute have formed a committee called
Committee to Complete the Park. The idea is to try and acquire the other parcels
of land as much as possible that are functioning currently as some support to
the Ecological Reserve, and also to help bring State Parks in to cooperatively
manage the land with Fish and Game.
-
Hanscom
- We think State Parks needs to be here because of their commitment to the
integrity of the resources, plus they have really great skills in
interpretation. You know, the public needs to be able to love this land, but
from a distance, and how we do that is a big question. So getting the right
managers in here is really important. We have a great guy from Fish and Game
now, but we think he could probably use some support from State Parks.
-
Hanscom
- Working with the city on the lagoons that are part of the Ballona system, and the
city Parks Department still needs a lot of education about how to manage an
ecological area. So we're working on that. We have the Shallow Water Nature
Store that is sort of an outreach, outpost, here, where people can come find out
about things related to Ballona, and we're opening up an archive, library
archive area that will have historical information about Ballona. People can
come, either scientists or students or just the general public who might be
interested. So there's a lot going on here.
-
Collings
- So with regard to the Committee to Complete the Park, I take it that you don't
see a need for any of the, you know, street theater and what have you to raise
awareness at this--
-
Hanscom
- Well, we haven't discounted that. Everybody's sort of been given a little rest,
reprieve; but part of why we're doing these celebration events, besides wanting
to honor all the many, many people that worked on this, and also to help raise
awareness of the fact that there was an accomplishment. But we also want to let
people know that the purchase didn't end everything; that there are more things
to do. We know that there will be public hearings needed. Some of these empty
parcels are at huge risk of being developed. We may need to bring FrogWorks out
again to get involved. We may need other kinds of things. We're definitely going
to need people coming together to protect the area.
-
Hanscom
- One other big thing that's on the horizon that led to this is
the--quote--"restoration" that the State of California and the federal
government are now talking about doing together, what they're going to do to
restore the land. Well, that is a big problem right now, and it may be a huge,
huge source of contention in the future, because what we have observed is that
everywhere the Coastal Conservancy has come in to try and manage these coastal
wetland restoration projects, there have been big problems, because they're not
using biology and ecology to drive the process. Instead they're hiring
engineers.
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Hanscom
- A lot of people don't know this, and so engineers, they come in and go, "Let's
put a few bulldozers out there and move things around." We have some big
concerns about that. Maybe because we fought for so long and so hard to keep the
bulldozers out of Ballona, we don't want government agencies now to bring them
back. Even though there may be things that need to be done to help heal the
land, we want to see it done with citizen action, with communities coming
together, going out there and removing nonnatives, shovels. Hand shovels are
fine, but not big bulldozers that are going to really change and alter not only
the soil structure and the water--that's usually their intention of doing
that--but they're also disturbing an equilibrium that's happened for forty years
now.
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Hanscom
- This land has been completely altered. It's not any longer a sinuous river or the
Los Angeles River coming into this area. It's not any longer--I mean, we've got
concrete sides on Ballona Creek. But there are thousands of birds that come and
utilize that creek, even with the concrete channel, every year. There are some
of the tidal channels that do still have that sinuosity that is really important
to an ecological area. You can't create that with machines.
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Hanscom
- So the whole restoration planning of this is going to need a lot of people's
attention. It's going to be maybe even more of a challenge than what we dealt
with with DreamWorks, because most people--I don't know most people--a lot of
people suspect that, "Oh, it's the government. They're not going to do something
bad. The Coastal Conservancy, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Coastal
Commission, if they are going to approve something, it must be good."
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Hanscom
- But restoration of wetlands is still a very new science, and we're very
concerned, given what we've watched happen at Bolsa Chica and some other places,
that it's not really being as--although Leopold put forward--he had a very
famous statement about "It's kind of like when you take apart a watch. If you're
going to tinker with something,"--he called it intelligent tinkering--“you must
do it intelligently, and that means that you don't throw away any of the parts
when you take it apart. You've got to make sure everything is still there."
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Hanscom
- And we don't even know what's out there yet. We haven't even done solid surveys
to know what's out there. The Times just reported about an entomologist who was
with the Natural History Museum, who just passed away. He had found over a
hundred species of ants alone, native ants, a hundred different species. You
know, if you come in and just scoop everything up and move it away, you lose
that. So there's a lot to do.
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Collings
- Yes, it sounds like it. What other kinds of environmental issues have members of
the coalition gone on to? I mean, you mentioned Bruce Robertson, for example,
going back to his career. But have there been other issues?
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Hanscom
- Well, Sheila Laffey, who is the producer of The Last Stand, she got involved--she
was only going to do a thirty-second public service spot for us, and she ended
up following the story and being so engrossed by it that she worked on this for
years with her film, and then several updates that she did. She just recently
put out a film about the Los Angeles farm that had been--
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Collings
- The South Central Farm, yes.
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Hanscom
- The South Central Farm. So she's been working with them and put out a film on
that particular activism.
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Hanscom
- CALPIRG has actually spun off a new organization called Environment California.
CALPIRG was with us since almost the beginning, the California Public Interest
Research Group. Environment California is now focusing specifically on
environmental issues. CALPIRG still exists, but they've got this other arm now
that's really solidly on environment, and they've been working on solar roofs,
getting solar roofs on everyone; a million solar roofs, I think, is their
project.
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Hanscom
- Obviously groups like the Sierra Club and Surfrider all have their ongoing issues
they've been--
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Collings
- But in terms of individuals who may have made a mark.
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Hanscom
- Yes. Well, Susan Suntree is working with us on this book that we're doing and on
the events we're working on.
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Hanscom
- I think that this campaign took a lot of energy out of people, and so I think
people really needed a rest.
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Collings
- Exhausted, yes.
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Hanscom
- Yes, and while the Ballona Wetlands Land Trust and Surfrider continued on Phase
2, it just hasn't had the oomph and energy behind it. It was a long, exhausting
campaign, and now I think after four years of the land being in public
ownership, I think people are kind of interested. We've had a lot of people stop
by the store and say, "Well, what's happening? Is there anything for me to get
involved in now?"
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Hanscom
- That's why we think it's time now for these events to happen and to kind of
reinvigorate people and let them know that there are other things. I mean, all
of those things I just mentioned can't be just paid attention to by two or three
people. We really need to have an engaged, interested community.
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Collings
- Right. Now, how do you fundraise for something in order to do something like the
gala?
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Hanscom
- Well, what we're doing is this book we're doing is going to--I'm wondering if I
have a copy of the--well, I'll show you when we finish here.
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Collings
- Okay.
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Hanscom
- But the book is actually going to be a book that people can sponsor pages in, so
a really beautiful image of a king snake or a gorgeous pink aster flower or what
have you, at the bottom there will be a very tastefully done name of someone who
sponsored that page. We have a design firm called "Looking" in El
Segundo, who is donating all of their services to make this a beautiful
book.
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Collings
- Wonderful.
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Hanscom
- They've made it so that it doesn't look like it's advertising or sponsorship.
You'll barely notice it, but people who want to help support it can have some
recognition in it.
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Collings
- Okay. Well, great. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you'd like
to bring up?
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Hanscom
- I don't think so. I don't think so. Just that it does--you know, here in Los
Angeles we have so much of a challenge at times to just deal with all the
traffic and the people, and it seems like--yet, yet one of the main reasons
people come here is because we have a really nice environment, the weather and
the coastline, and I think that what we have attempted to do and what I hope
will be the legacy of this campaign is that people are starting to see what's
underneath all the concrete. People are starting to understand that we live in
watersheds and that even on smoggy days you might not see the mountains, there
really is a landscape here that is a beautiful, wonderful place and that needs
to be treasured and respected.
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Collings
- Yes. Okay.