Since the hodads who rule San Diego rarely emerge from their palazzos to mingle with the common folk who live and work here, I thought I’d remind them that our oceans are in trouble. And because the hodads never remove their wing-tips and Jimmy Choos (Donna, of course is way exempt from this group of hodads – since she and her husband Skip are superstar global surf icons – which is why she gets it and Minnesota hodads like Scott Peters can’t even begin to get it) to touch sand and salt water on the miles of San Diego coastline, I suggest they at least take some time to investigate why things aren’t looking so great for Planet Blue
Ken Weiss of The Los Angles Times, recently wrote an excellent in-depth series, Altered Oceans, that examines why treating our backyard wilderness like a garbage dump has resulted in record algae blooms, marine mammal die-offs and even the increasing acidity of the oceans.
Unfortunately, evidence of our imperiled oceans won’t do much to change the contempt hodads have for the only place that makes San Diego, well, San Diego.
I mean does anyone really live here, or move here because the Lakeside Rodeo rocks? San Diego’s coastline is the one common denominator that makes us not Phoenix.
For San Diego hodads, the ocean is just another garbage dump. Hence the Point Loma outfall, with only primary treatment of our sewage (stating that dumping this stuff in the ocean has no impact is like saying that car exhaust doesn’t cause smog), miles and miles of outdated sewage pipes and crazy and corrupt schemes like the Bajagua project that have no relationship to reality.
San Diego can’t even clean up the city’s most popular beaches – hence continual advisories and closures at Tourmaline and Mission Bay, and covering up the non-stop sewage dumping that fouls Imperial Beach and Coronado (the irony of Bob Filner, the world’s ultimate hodad, whose inland empire doesn’t even touch the coast, dictating solutions to the border sewage crisis, is not lost on south county surfers).
Of course, the solution for agencies such as SANDAG and the Army Corps of Engineers to our coastal crisis is to spend millions and millions of dollars pumping sand on to our beaches.
The logic, of course, is that somehow beach sand is disconnected from the foul state of local waters. Sand dumping projects are the equivalent of building public parks designed to wash away during the first winter rains. These projects are the culmination of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers making up for countless worthless breakwater and jetty projects and its criminal inability to protect New Orleans.
San Diego’s contempt for the ocean all comes together at Casa Beach, where Peters and the incompetent and negligent San Diego City Recreation Department have conspired to waste taxpayer’s money by dredging the tiny beach (get it? – let’s spend money to make beaches smaller – and will the sand then be dumped to protect La Jolla Shores?) to eliminate a small population of harbor seals (you know-because marine mammals should only exist at Sea World).
In the meantime, unprofessional and out-of-control San Diego Lifeguards do everything in their power to rid the beach of seals to make the sand safe for the burgeoning La Jolla colony of D&G wearing hodads.
Historically for ocean-minded San Diegan’s, the lined up cobblestone waves of Trestles and the untouched coastline of Baja were our closest escapes from stinky local waters. But Trestles is the site of a proposed toll-road (or revenge of the O.C.) and developers and multi-nationals like Sempra can’t wait to make Baja look, well, like San Diego.
Score two for the hodads.