On Advocating for Beauty
David Myers
President
The Wildlands Conservancy
The Wildlands Conservancy (TWC) uses an almost forgotten word within our core tenets for managing our preserves: "Imparadise!" To "imparadise the earth" is "to make into paradise," "to enrapture," or "to transport into another state." Although this may sound like Don Quixote tilting his lance at windmills, it’s really about people like yourself employing their minds and muscles to beautify the world around them.
One of the first steps TWC employs after acquiring a new preserve is to remove all the offenses to the eye, restoring the landscape back to its natural Beauty. At Whitewater Preserve this meant removing 22 dilapidated buildings, more than 50 tons of concrete, a spiderweb of dozens of power lines, and replacing the dying elm trees with native cottonwoods, sycamores, alders, and flowering ash.
The greatest offense to Beauty ever foisted on our Oak Glen Preserve was when Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) proposed bulldozing the crowns off the ridges and peaks that are the scenic backdrop of this historic community. This was proposed to facilitate the placement of 200 foot tall 500kv steel towers connected by roads bulldozed on steep wilderness hillsides scaring the earth with major landform modification. (Back when telephone books were commonplace, the cover photograph would often be the flowering apple orchards of Oak Glen with their backdrop of 8,000-foot snow-capped peaks scoring the azure horizon.)
As a tribute to their appreciation of Beauty, Oak Glen Preserve visitors signed and sent more than 50,000 postcards and emails protesting the transmission line project proposed by the mayor of Los Angeles. It was one of the few occasions that the LADWP was defeated outside the courthouse, in the court of public opinion. Crowds gathered to celebrate when LADWP sent a spokesperson to our Oak Glen Preserve to apologize for the proposal. We had fought so hard to save these magnificent peaks that many attendees wept.
At our preserves we have built about a dozen free-standing restroom buildings—all out of native stone to be absorbed into the landscape’s spirit of place. At Jenner Headlands Preserve there was an ugly scar from a small rock quarry, a blight on the landscape, easily seen from Pacific Coast Highway. We effaced this blemish by filling it in with three-foot boulders that faced a restroom building with a living roof of grass and native vegetation. Through the years we have learned to give steel signs and rail fencing an aged look with muriatic acid and antique new wood with iron sulfate. This is to give our facilities an aged appearance that evokes the timelessness of nature.
We are all advocates for Beauty, whether through experiencing, protecting, or inspiring. Whether it’s picking up a piece of trash, growing flowers and gardening, painting our homes or painting pictures, pointing out to a friend a full moon or a tangerine sunset, or volunteering for one of TWC’s preserve restoration projects. But we can all do more. We must do more to “imparadise the earth.”