Tomales Bay State Park Closure - One Upset Birder

January 22, 2008 on 2:12 am | In Daily Local Birder |

What is the matter with our state government? What moral creed sees sense in taking money away from people who are attempting to protect wild lands, and handing it over to people who are going to build a new death row facility? Take away the very thing - being in nature - that helps people to be both peaceful and sane, and put efforts into devising a torture chamber to murder them when they’ve gone insane? What kind of government calls that good?

Governor Schwarzenegger is planning to close our beautiful, sacred Tomales Bay State Park in Marin County along with 42 other desperately-needed and exuberantly cherished state parks throughout California. In addition to closing 43 parks, the governor intends to cut back on spending for education, health care, children, the poor, the blind and handicapped. The governor states he is doing this in order to balance California’s budget.

However, these proposed cuts of $13 million would only address 1/10 of 1% of Our Deficit

That’s right. Closing all of these wonderful parks would not even take us 1% in the direction of being back in the black.

And think of what will have been lost…

What’s So Great About Tomales Bay State Park

For birders, the answer is easy. Heart’s Desire Beach alone is incomparable birding habitat. Among the species we have so loved observing there are:

Osprey
Purple Finch
Swainson’s Thrush
Wilson’s Warbler
Common Loons
Numerous Grebes
Numerous Gulls
Red-shoulded Hawk
Downy Woodpecker
…and many others

We’ve seen gophers, foxes and deer here, too!

The sheltered cove is simply wonderful habitat for birds and wild animals. And, human beings - the animals who are perhaps the most in danger of losing their wildness, their connection with the earth, because men of business make decisions that we need more ways to kill people than to preserve their lives through abundant exposure to the very things that make being alive worth it.

When you stand on Heart’s Desire Beach with an osprey wheeling over your head, gentle tide at your feet, perhaps a rainbow arching toward the green, green land around you, you are glad to be human.

When you realize you are living amongst people who voted for a man who would take all of that away from you in order to murder poor crazy inmates more efficiently…you wish you could be a bird, or really, any other animal on the planet.

Tomales Bay State Park is also the setting of Indian Beach, Pebble Beach and both Shell Beaches - an area totaling some 2,000 acres of habitat that was once home to the Miwok peoples. If the Miwoks would have thought it nonsense that the government could own the land, I have no doubt they would have found it intolerable that the land could be locked away from the people.

The Pt Reyes Light has a good and revealing article on their website about this threat to our park. It holds out some hope that this proposal is merely intended to alarm people - that some kind of compromise will inevitably be reached. I, for one, am insulted that such an idea would ever even be considered or mentioned by any office holder. Our parks are our treasures. They have done a great deal more for us than any governor ever has.