I wrote this as an Opinion piece for the Half Moon Bay Review. You can see the complete article on their site.

You’ve seen the movie a hundred times. In Frank Capra’s "It’s a Wonderful Life," George Bailey discovers what his community would have been like if he had never lived.

In this alternate universe, his wonderful town of Bedford Falls becomes the dreadful Pottersville, managed for the profit and glory of mean old Mr. Potter. When the movie was made in 1946, Bedford Falls represented a way of life that was about to disappear from communities across America in the postwar sprawl of malls, freeways, strip centers and vast housing developments.

More than a half-century later, the Coastside can go either way. We can build a Bedford Falls. Or we can build a Pottersville.

In Bedford Falls, there is a real downtown with thriving businesses that serve the community. In Pottersville, the residents have abandoned downtown to the riff-raff and out-of-towners. Locals do all their shopping at malls over the hill, or at the strip malls that are popping up on the edge of town.

In Bedford Falls, there are community parks in the center of town that everyone can enjoy. In Pottersville, there are few real public parks because no politician wants his opponents to get credit for building them. Whether you get to enjoy a park there depends on where you live. There are some nice parks attached to the better developments.

In Bedford Falls, kids can wander in the woods and fields and streams. They can hike, bike and ride horses in the hills.

In Pottersville, all the open space is private property, protected by fences with "No Trespassing" signs nailed to them. In some places, there are even guards to keep track of who’s trying to walk across the land.

In Bedford Falls, people can still see hawks and frogs and snakes in the fields. In Pottersville, there are no fields left, but people can see statues of these animals in front of the local strip mall and faded pictures of them in a display case at the library.

In Bedford Falls, kids go surfing. In Pottersville, they hang out at the Surf Village Shopping Center.

In Bedford Falls, kids attend school in the same building as their parents did, but it has been lovingly restored. Pottersville is on its fourth school. Each new school board starts construction on a new one a little further out of town, because the old schools are dilapidated and weren’t as great as had been promised, even on the day they opened.

In Bedford Falls, people meet each other at restaurants downtown. In Pottersville, they get they lunch at the drive-through. And the person who takes their order is talking into a headset in India.

In Bedford Falls, the newspaper stands up for the little guy and it covers the issues fairly. In Pottersville, the newspaper rewards Mr. Potter’s cronies and embarrasses his enemies.

In Bedford Falls, political campaigns are about the issues and the debate is lively and open. In Pottersville, campaign signs disappear from lawns in the middle of the night - or the middle of the day - and the campaigns are mean and nasty.

In Bedford Falls, you can get where you need to go by walking. In Pottersville, you need a car to get around. The only people who walk are those who can’t afford a car and they’re constantly threatened by traffic.

In Bedford Falls, the community makes its own entertainment, with parades, cook-offs, fireworks and festivals that are well-run and raise money for good causes. In Pottersville, everyone goes out of town to the megaplex for entertainment. Or they sit at home and watch TV. Or they just work late.

Take another look at your community. Bedford Falls is all around you.

The Coastside is an old-fashioned Frank Capra town where the way of life is threatened by the sprawl that’s just over the hill. One reason sprawl is so awful is that it happens incrementally, one stupid project at a time, with no thought to how it all fits together.

In "It’s a Wonderful Life," one man made a difference between Bedford Falls and Pottersville. That’s a little unrealistic. Here on the Coastside, we’re all going to have to work together to make the difference.

April 2006 will be the tenth anniversary of the plane crash that killed seven-year-old pilot Jessica Dubroff of Pescadero.  The crash took place during a storm, there were reports the plane was overloaded, and that the flight instructor, not the pilot, Jessica, was at the controls when the crash occurred.  As nearly 9 years have passed, many have forgotten the story of this bubbly young girl who always seemed to have a smile and who may not have consciously known she was following the footsteps of Amelia Earhart.  But unlike Amelia, who was never found again, Jessica is forever in our hearts.

I’d like to hear reactions from other Coastsider readers. Click "Read more" to see the rest of the letter.

A couple of times a year, the Lit Club at Farallone View holds a garage sale to buy books for kids in the school.  It’s pretty big, as events in Montara go. It’s a great place to get kids’ books and toys, in addition to the usual garage sale items. It’s also a good cause if you want to donatae items that have been displaced by Christmas gifts.

The sale will be Saturday, Jan. 8, from 9:00am to 2:00pm at Farallone View.  You can leave your donations at the school on the preceding Friday between 3pm and 8pm. For more information email [email protected]

Twenty-five Sheriff’s Office SWAT team members entered a home on Corona in the El Granada Mobile Home Park and arrested six people inside, last Friday at 3pm.

While on patrol, Deputies had developed information regarding a series of thefts and burglaries that had occurred both locally and in Pacifica. This information led them to the home in El Granada to serve a “high risk search warrant”. The Sheriff’s Office Detectives followed up with the search and recovered stolen property, and drugs.

The San Mateo Daily Journal has more detail on the arrests.

Click "Read more" to see the recent report of other activities from the Coastside Sheriff’s substation.

In 1993, a couple of Stanford juniors at the university’s Hopkins Marine Center in Monterey began a survey in the chilly waters of Monterey Bay. Digging around the in the rocks, they found the boundary markers for a survey of the Bay’s marine life by a 1930’s Stanford Ph.D. candidate named Willis Hewatt, who meticulously counted every anemone, whelk, snail, sea star, barnacle, limpet, and other animal along the 108 yards in between.

When Hewatt first looked at the tidepools, there were no tube snails or sunburst anemones at all, although both were prevalent further south. When Gilman and Sagarin did the same, they found hundreds of the southern anemones, and as many as 229 tube snails crowded into 1 square yard. In all, ten of eleven species previously identified as southerners increased significantly. Six of eight northern species decreased significantly. Those changes showed up regardless of what the animals ate, how they reproduced, or where they sat in the taxonomic hierarchy. Meanwhile, daily temperature records showed waters there had warmed about 1.8°F since Hewatt squatted in the surf

What they found was some of the earliest and most dramatic evidence of the changes in the ecosystem that have already taken place as a result of global warming.

This is taken from Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change a new book that is is excerpted in Tidepool, an online publication for "Rain Forest Coast" from South East Alaska down to Northern California.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Friday proposed that Half Moon Bay (between Kelly Street and Dunes Beach) be designated critical habitat for the Western Snowy Plover, along with 34 other areas from Washington to Southern California.

The FWS last proposed critical habitat for the plover in 1999. That declaration was challenged in court by the Coos County Board of County Commissioners. As a result of that lawsuit, the FWS was required to revise is designation, with great attention to the economic impact.

The Service will receive public comment on this proposed designation for 60 days, until February 15, 2005.  The Service must make a final decision on critical habitat by September 20, 2005.

According to the FWS the Half Moon Bay habitat stretches for about 1.25 mi along Half Moon Bay State Beach, and is entirely within California State Parks land.

It includes sandy beach above and below the high tide line for nesting and foraging, and surfcast debris to attract small invertebrates.  Small numbers of breeding birds have been found at the location in the past three surveys, including four breeding birds in the most recent survey,  conducted in 2003.  The unit also supports a sizeable winter flock, which was 65 birds in 2004. We expect the unit to eventually support ten breeding birds in the unit under proper management,  which makes it a potentially significant contributor to plover conservation.  Potential threats in the area that may require special management include disturbance by humans and pets, and nest predators.

The press release from the FWS is not enthusiastic about the usefulness of critical habitat designation as a way to protect threatened species. The release says that critical habitat doesn’t really afford any further protection than is already granted to threatened species under the Endangered Species Act:

In 30 years of implementing the Endangered Species Act, the Service has found that the designation of critical habitat provides little additional protection to most listed species, while preventing the Service from using scarce conservation resources for activities with greater conservation benefits.

It goes on to say that it prefers "voluntary cooperative partnerships, not regulatory measures such as critical habitat" to promote the recovery of listed species.

Biologists estimate that no more than 2,600 snowy plovers breed along the Pacific Coast of the United States with an equal number breeding on the west coast of Baja California. The largest number of breeding birds occurs south of San Francisco Bay to southern Baja. The species’ decline has been attributed to loss of nesting habitat, human disturbance, encroachment of European beach grass on nesting grounds, and predation.

There are two other ongoing activities that could affect the plover’s protected status. 

First, FWS is reviewing the species protected status as a result of petitions based on an unpublished 2001 master’s thesis in which the researcher failed to find significant genetic differentiation between Pacific Coast plovers and interior plovers.

Second, the conservative Pacific Legal Foudation has launched a lawsuit challenging the critical habitat designations for 48 listed species of California plants and animals, including the Western Snowy Plover. The heart of the PLF challenge, as well as the earlier Coos Bay challenge is whether the FWS has sufficiently or accurately reflected the economic impact of its critical habitat designations.

Three restaurants open on Christmas Day, according to the Chamber of Commerce:

• Mezza Luna - (650) 728-8108
• Moss Beach Distillery - (650) 728-5595
• Navio at The Ritz-Carlton - (650) 712-7050

Make your reservations early.

Thursday October 29th, 1953, a British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines DC6 crashed into the coastal hills near Kings Mountain while on the last leg of a trans-Pacific flight, as a result of a fatal navigational error.  This event remains the worst aviation crash in San Mateo County and took 19 lives, 11 passengers and 8 crew.

Jim Warren posted a link a wonderful Web site dedicated to telling the story of the crash and memorializing the passengers and crew.

Don Baldwin writes, "Don’t know how many people saw sunrise Wednesday, but it was awesome in Princeton." And he enclosed this picture. Wow.