12/01/04

LC041201

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

While most of Southern California has lost touch with its
agricultural roots, one area is determined to protect its
farmland.

Steve Bennett>> If you want to develop, you have to come to the
citizens and get all of the citizens to vote in favor of this
urban sprawl project.

Val>> And then, the earthquake climate that has nothing to do
with weather. Has living in fear of temblors left Southern
Californians psychologically scarred?

All that and more straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Are we destined to become a metropolis of concrete, wall
to wall malls, subdivisions, freeways and factories? Well, in
our special series on surviving sprawl, we look at the
alternatives and take you to a county that has moved
aggressively to save its open space. But as Saul Gonzalez
learned in Ventura County, even limits have their limits.

Saul Gonzalez>> The Los Angeles of today is a metropolis, a
place synonymous with congestion and sprawl, yet only a couple
of generations ago, Los Angeles County was an agricultural
breadbasket. In fact, up until the 1950's, it was the leading
county in the nation in farm production, growing everything from
oranges to alfalfa.

As Los Angeles's population mushroomed in the last half of the
twentieth century, the groves and fields quickly vanished,
replaced with bumper crops of homes, shopping malls and
freeways. And as development continues today far outside Los
Angeles, so does the decline of Southern California agriculture
and open space. That's especially true in San Bernardino and
Riverside Counties. Here, land where citrus groves and
vineyards once grew is rapidly being replanted with suburban
sprawl.

John Young>> These homes are all under construction. They're
probably about, oh, a good forty-five days from delivery.

Saul Gonzalez>> Inland Empire home developer, John Young, was
born here. He acknowledges that little remains of the rural
landscape he knew as a boy. What was this region like when you
were a kid?

John Young>> Orange grove trees, fields, farms. Almost all the
Inland Empire was known for farming, orange groves, what you
call dry crops that didn't take much water, those types of
things, but mostly a rural farming area.

Saul Gonzalez>> And in your lifetime, it's changed before your
eyes, hasn't it?

John Young>> Oh, yeah. It's changed immensely. The population
has increased, more housing, more shopping, more freeways, more
things that happen when you have growth.

Saul Gonzalez>> In just one recent two-year period, over 36,000
acres of Inland Empire farm and grazing land were lost to
development, an area larger than the city of San Francisco. Yet
as growth consumes more agricultural land in Southern
California, one place has taken a stand to protect its wide open
spaces and farm heritage: Ventura County.

Agriculture is still a multi-billion dollar industry in this
county of over 800,000 people supporting farmers and field
hands, packers and shippers. This farm economy also sustains a
semi-rural way of life here evident in sights that have long
vanished from other parts of Southern California: farmers
preparing their fields for replanting, roadside stands selling
locally grown produce and wide citrus groves separating
communities.

Steve Bennett>> Ventura County is unique in Southern California
because we still have a sense of place.

Saul Gonzalez>> Steve Bennett is chair of the Ventura County
Board of Supervisors and a long-time land use activist. He's
made it his mission to protect Ventura County's rural life from
development.

Steve Bennett>> Every time you leave your city, you travel
through open space and agricultural land before you go to the
next city. Every time. So you have people constantly making
references. If you get that psychological relief from that
sense of relentless urbanization, that is not natural. That's
not the natural state of man. I mean, we didn't grow up in this
sort of urban area where you spend all of your time in.

Saul Gonzalez>> In the 90's, activists concerned about
increased suburban growth in Ventura County and the clout of
developers to get projects approved came together to plot
strategy. Their goal was to radically change the politics of
development in the county.

Steve Bennett>> I was not interested in fighting this project
or that project. Instead, what I was attracted to was saying
how can we actually change the rules of the game? Because it
was my belief that the game was stacked against us. Local
politicians are dominated in most areas by the pro development
industry and those are the people that are paying attention
every day because their livelihoods are based on their
relationships with those city officials that approve development
and all of that stuff.

Saul Gonzalez>> They set the rules of the game.

Steve Bennett>> That's right.

Saul Gonzalez>> The rules of the game were changed when
activists successfully convinced voters to pass a series of
countywide and municipal initiatives known collectively as
S.O.A.R., or Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources. The
S.O.A.R. initiative put strict growth boundaries around Ventura
County communities. If developers wanted to build in rural land
beyond those boundaries, they had to go to the voters for their
approval.

Steve Bennett>> The change we came up with and fortunately the
courts have ruled as constitutional, we said if you want to
develop, you have to come to the citizens and get all of the
citizens to vote in favor of this urban sprawl project. And if
you can't convince the citizens of it, then you can't build the
project.

Saul Gonzalez>> Since the S.O.A.R. initiatives passed in 1998,
supporters say they've shown Ventura County residents that
suburban sprawl isn't inevitable.

Steve Bennett>> The record has been that, if they are smaller
projects that somebody can make a common sense argument for, the
citizens approve it. And if it is a big massive development
where somebody thinks that they can just come in and spend a lot
of money on a campaign and that they'll hoodwink everybody into
it or they'll sort of bribe everybody into it with some vague
promises about what they'll do, those don't pass.

Saul Gonzalez>> However, not everyone in Ventura County rallies
around the S.O.A.R. solution. The biggest critics of this
county's revolution in land use planning comes from people you
might think would embrace efforts to keep real estate rural:
Ventura County's farmers.

Rob Roy>> We believe that, as farmers, it's their inherent
right to use their property in a reasonable way and as they see
fit and it shouldn't be subject to the electorate to decide for
the farmer what they're going to be doing with their property.

Saul Gonzalez>> Rob Roy is President of the Ventura County
Agricultural Association. He argues the S.O.A.R. initiative
prevents farmers in the troubled agricultural economy from
getting their properties rezoned and selling them off to
residential and commercial developers for a large profit. To
Roy, S.O.A.R. means public meddling in private property rights.

Rob Roy>> Because what's happening here is you've got ballot
box zoning. We elect officials to deal with these complex
issues. We've got planning commissions and building commissions
and now what we're doing is allowing the electorate to decide in
every instance whether someone who has private property over
here can rezone their property in order to build something on
their property that they choose to do. Now however you wish to
characterize that, that's certainly up to you.

Steve Bennett>> What we contend is that nobody has a right to
demand their land be rezoned for developers. We live here in a
residential neighborhood. I might be able to say, you know, I
can make a lot of money if I could put a McDonalds right here in
my front yard, but that's not fair to my neighbors who bought
houses in a residential neighborhood. The same thing is true of
farmers. If they buy a farm in the middle of a greenbelt, they
shouldn't say, well, you know, I can make a lot of money by
putting a subdivision here. That's going to impact every other
farmer around there. That's not the farmer's right. The farmer
can make that as a request, but that's not their right.

Saul Gonzalez>> The developed community, both in and outside of
Ventura County, argues that efforts to curb growth like S.O.A.R.
cripple its ability to meet mushrooming housing demands.

John Young>> In the state of California, we think we need
250,000 units built per year and we're building about 200,000
right now. So what does that do? You keep adding that up for a
year, in ten years that's 500,000 homes that we need. So it
accumulates every year that we don't build enough homes.

Saul Gonzalez>> So what's a consequence of that?

John Young>> Higher prices. Market prices go up. That means
the homebuyer coming in here today will pay a higher price next
year if we cannot as an industry build more homes and keep the
supply-demand ratio even rather than out of whack where you have
much more demand than you do supply.

Saul Gonzalez>> As Southern California struggles to meet
exploding housing demands, Ventura County has chosen a unique if
controversial response to development predators. The passage of
years will determine whether suburbs and farm fields can
peacefully coexist here. For Life and Times, I'm Saul Gonzalez.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts
and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most
interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life
and Times".

Val>> Living in earthquake country doesn't just mean a temblor
now and then. It also creates a culture of superstition, people
who claim they can predict earthquakes through cloud formations
or missing pets. Well, now a writer, David Ulin, has explored
the culture of earthquakes in a book called "The Myth of Solid
Ground". He talked with Vicki Curry about the fault lines that
exist between superstition and science.

Vicki Curry>> David Ulin, your book is called "The Myth of
Solid Ground: Earthquake Prediction and the Fault Line Between
Reason and Faith". What's a word like faith doing in a book
about earthquakes?

David Ulin>> That's a good question. I think that faith and
earthquakes are very related because I think to live in
earthquake country as we do is really an act of faith. You're
basically taking it on faith that your life won't be disrupted
or when it is disrupted, it will be disrupted in a non-
destructive way. I mean, the earthquake will happen at night
when you're safe at home, the earthquake won't happen when
you're separated from your kids, you'll have enough water, your
house won't fall down, those kinds of things.

I think that the idea of living what we would call a normal life
anywhere, going to work, going to school, having dinner, going
out with your friends, in an atmosphere like this where at any
moment the earth could shift underneath us and cause, you know,
enormous havoc is in itself an act of faith.

Vicki Curry>> So you started your journey when you were working
on your book by looking into something called the X Files. What
is that?

David Ulin>> Well, the X Files is a collection of documents
that a woman up at the U.S. Geological Survey Office in Pasadena
has kept. What they are, they started -- earthquakes, like any
kind of inexplicable large force, attract their share of both
serious researchers and sort of fringe enthusiasts. Often those
fringe enthusiasts predict. At the U.S.G.S. in Pasadena,
there's a file called the X Files which is a collection of all
the predictions that have come in since, I guess, the late
seventies or early eighties since this file started being kept.

There are predictions of various stripes. You know, some are
simple little notes. You know, there will be a 7.8 earthquake
at 6:35 Thursday morning. Some are these elaborately
constructed theories of how earthquakes work. Oftentimes having
to do with electro-magnetics or having to do with other kinds of
factors, groundwater, all of these things. It's interesting
that, in many ways, some of those areas are areas that actual
legitimate scientists are researching also, but the predictors
take them farther.

If you sit for several hours and read these predictions end to
end to end, you end up being drawn into what is almost like an
alternate universe where you're looking at the same phenomenon,
but they're interpreted differently and you kind of see echoes
from one prediction to the next. It really is like reading this
bizarre science fiction novel. It's kind of fascinating. So
from there, that sort of was the starting point and that led me
to everything else.

Vicki Curry>> So where did that take you? You met some of
these predictors?

David Ulin>> Well, I realized as I read some of these
predictions that they seemed to make sense to me. They read as
if they made sense. They followed a logical thought train.
They didn't seem completely out of left field. I couldn't
assess them because I had no background from which to work. So
I ended up going back and, also since I was at the U.S.G.S.,
making contact with a number of the seismologists and geologists
who were there and talking to them about both these predicted
theories and then I got really interested in the work they were
doing.

Vicki Curry>> But I have to say, a lot of us have heard a lot
about the U.S.G.S., CalTech, all the research that's going on
there. What was surprising to me in your book is all these
fringe predictors and even a term you call "sensitives". Tell
me about them.

David Ulin>> Well, the sensitives are actually an interesting
subcategory of predictors because, when you look at the
predictors, you can really break them down into people who are
just out there and the people who may actually be on to
something. Again, whether their scientific discipline isn't
rigorous or, you know, that's a whole other issue, but the
sensitives may in fact actually be tapping into something. The
idea is that certain people feel physical symptoms when an
earthquake is coming, whether it's a headache or body aches or
some people feel heaviness in their limbs or different kinds of
sensations, nausea, flu-like symptoms, different kinds of
sensations like that.

The theory is that certain humans have higher levels of
magnetite in the brain than others. You know, we all exist in
continuum and those people with those higher levels may be
sensitive to earthquakes in the same way that, say, dogs and
cats seem to be -- or some dogs and cats, I should say -- seem
to be sensitive to earthquakes.

I mean, not even all of us have heard these stories, but if you
go back in earthquake literature, you know, as far back as
ancient Greece and ancient China, there are stories of odd
animal behavior prior to an earthquake, which is a really common
anecdotal thread. So it seems unlikely that all of these
thousands of years of different culture that there wouldn't be
something to this even though we don't quite know what it is. I
think that human sensitivity may work the same way.

Vicki Curry>> And yet you make the point that the science of
seismology itself has changed radically over the years, so some
of the stuff that seems far-fetched now may not be in ten,
twenty or fifty years from now.

David Ulin>> If you really think about, seismology as a
subsection of geology is a baby science. People actually use
that phrase to describe it. Faults were in fact really only
identified in the 1880's, I believe, and it was really only in
the wake of the 1906 San Francisco quake that much of modern
seismology or the basis of modern seismology was developed. So
you're really talking about a kind of paradigm shifts that have
happened, you know, in the last hundred years which,
geologically and scientifically, is nothing.

The other thing about earthquakes is that you can sort of create
a very small fake earthquake in a laboratory by, you know,
putting pressure on rocks. You can't really construct an
earthquake in a laboratory, so you're waiting -- these
seismologists and geologist end up putting out theories and then
sort of waiting for the next quake to come to see how those
theories pan out.

That's why this Parkfield earthquake that happened a couple of
months was so fascinating and important because that section of
the fault was so heavily instrumented and they've been expecting
an earthquake there for a long time. They really were, for the
first time ever, sitting on top of an earthquake when it
happened and ready. So the data that comes out of that could,
who knows, as they analyze it, could change everything.

Vicki Curry>> Part of your journey was to go to Parkfield,
which was this spot that was expected to erupt at some point.

David Ulin>> Yeah, yeah.

Vicki Curry>> What did you do there?

David Ulin>> Well, Parkfield is a really strange place. When I
got there as I was writing the book, there was literally nobody
there. It's a town where the population is only thirty-seven
people, so it's not like there would have been huge crowds of
people anyway. But I was there for several hours and never saw
an adult. There was a school. I did see some kids playing, so
I knew it wasn't a ghost town, but it had this very ghost towney
feel. It was really a fascinating place because it had all this
sort of ghost towney stuff. It had these signs with sort of,
you know, early eighties bubble lettering about, you know,
"Welcome to Parkfield, Earthquake Capital of the World, Be Here
When It Happens". You could tell that they'd really tried to
market this thing like twenty years ago. I guess that's the key
a little bit, but it was way past its time.

What was really fascinating about Parkfield was the presence of
the San Andreas. It's a big chasm that's extremely present. I
mean, not just physically present, but you feel its presence.
It's there and it's always there five hundred feet away from the
school, five hundred feet away from everything. So in that
sense, I found Parkfield really became, to me, useful as a
metaphor for California.

This comes back to, I guess, what we're talking about, that the
notion that the fault is always somehow metaphorically five
hundred feet away, that the earthquake is always metaphorically
five hundred feet away. That was really useful for me in terms
of thinking about how Californians or how we as Californians
live in the presence of this.

Vicki Curry>> David Ulin, author of the "The Myth of Solid
Ground", thank you so much for being with us.

David Ulin>> Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or
contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> What kind of book would you get if you take a Pulitzer
Prize-winning columnist and team him up with a best-selling
suspense writer? Probably what you'd least expect: a children's
book. But not just any children's book. Humorist Dave Barry
and writer Ridley Pearson have written a prequel to the story of
Peter Pan. It's called "Peter and the Starcatchers". Patt
Morrison asked the authors how they did it and why.

Patt Morrison>> Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry, thanks for
joining us.

Dave Barry>> Thanks for having us.

Ridley Pearson>> Thank you.

Patt Morrison>> This book, "Peter and the Starcatchers", is, as
they say in Hollywood, the back story and we have your daughter
to thank for bringing it to us.

Ridley Pearson>> That is right. I was reading the original,
the classic James M. Barrie "Peter Pan" to my daughter, Paige.
She put her hand into the book and looked up and said, "Yeah,
but, Dad, how did Peter Pan meet Captain Hook?"

Patt Morrison>> She sounds like a producer (laughter).

Ridley Pearson>> (Laughter) She might be one one of these days.

Patt Morrison>> And did she like the result? Has she read it?

Ridley Pearson>> Oh, yeah, she loved it. I think she was more
excited about having reached the end of a 450-page book than
maybe the contents, but since then, she's very thrilled about
it.

Dave Barry>> Now you'd say if she really were a producer, she'd
say, "Does he have to be named Peter?" (Laughter)

Patt Morrison>> (Laughter) And can he have a dog? All right.
But for you guys, for the grownups in this, was it the pirates
that was the attraction? The flying? The tights? Come on.
What was it?

Dave Barry>> Not the tights.

Ridley Pearson>> Not the tights.

Dave Barry>> Ridley is into the tights, but I'm not. It was
the kind of idea that nobody had ever thought of, that we knew
anyway, and we know a lot of people (laughter). But the idea
of, okay, when you read "Peter Pan" in any version you pick, the
Disney version, the stage version, whatever, it starts out with
this kid who can fly and he doesn't grow old and he lives on
this island with pirates and mermaids and --

Patt Morrison>> -- I know three or four people like that
(laughter).

Dave Barry>> Well, you live in Los Angeles (laughter).

Ridley Pearson>> But it was like, why? Because Barry, you
know, wonderfully said this is the way it is. Well, we thought
how did it get that way? It just seemed like a fun story to do
and it really was fun. We were trying to make it -- this is
kind of a weird word to use when you're talking about this topic
-- we were trying to make it realistic. In other words, a story
that you could sort of believe, okay, that's how all that
happened.

Ridley Pearson>> You know, we really wanted a good plot.

Dave Barry>> We sat across a table from each other twice about
six months apart working the beginning framework out and then
outlining the rest of the book. That part, we really yelled at
each other and called each other stupid. You know, I take it
back (laughter).

Ridley Pearson>> (Laughter) Oh, sure, now.

Dave Barry>> But the actual writing, we did not do that.

Patt Morrison>> You were in Florida and he was in Missouri?

Ridley Pearson>> Right, right. We each took a set of
characters so that we could keep those characters consistent to
the book. I think, if we tried to write each other's characters
the whole time, you'd notice it. But Dave took a set of
characters, I took a set of characters and then we edited each
other fairly ruthlessly which neither of us is used to. Usually
in this literary world, you get these little comments in the
margins that say, "Oh, this character could be tuned up a
little." And in sending things back and forth with Dave,
there'd just be whole pages missing. Now they're just gone.

Patt Morrison>> Well, the other thing, of course, is that Peter
Pan, like many characters in fiction, is an orphan. You know,
you've got Bambi, you've got all the Shirley Temple movies where
she's an orphan.

Dave Barry>> Bambi is an orphan?

Patt Morrison>> I'm sorry to break the news to you, but --

Dave Barry>> -- I always thought just maybe the mom got out of
that fire okay, you know, and later on -- no?

Patt Morrison>> Why is it -- I mean, you're reading to your
kids, you read stories to your kids. It's the orphan who gets
all the fun in children's literature.

Dave Barry>> Yeah, you're right. You're thinking like being
terrific if the kids kill their parents (laughter).

Patt Morrison>> Yeah. Aren't you afraid of buying into this
genre a little bit here?

Ridley Pearson>> Well, we weren't killing off parents to begin
with. We took it up with these Lost Boys. I mean, how can you
not call them orphans when James M. Barrie calls them the Lost
Boys, which is so perfect?

Dave Barry>> Plus, if they weren't orphans, then we'd have to
worry about where their moms and dads were and they couldn't
stay on the island, that would be another subplot, you know?

Patt Morrison>> It would be much too complicated. It's much
easier to write about orphans. One thing you had said earlier,
Dave, was that you can't use some of the old models because
they're not PC any longer.

Ridley Pearson>> Yeah, and they're not pleasant.

Dave Barry>> Well, I guess we could say they're not PC, but
also they seem kind of dumb now when you look at it.

Patt Morrison>> Example?

Dave Barry>> All right. If you've ever seen the Disney cartoon
of Peter Pan --

[Film Clip]

Dave Barry>> There are Indians in there and they're just like
caricature red man, you know, kowabunga Indians, and it's
embarrassing. Everybody watching that cringes. We have natives
on that island, but we didn't want the natives to be like that.

Ridley Pearson>> So ours are Oxford educated.

Dave Barry>> Well, one of them is very smart and articulate.
They're all, you know, perfectly capable. They're not
subservient and they're not awed by the white man or anything
like that. So that was one -- you can call it PC or we just
didn't want dumb characters.

Ridley Pearson>> And Wendy.

Dave Barry>> The other big one is -- well, Molly, yes. The
character I'm least crazy about in Peter Pan is Wendy. The
Wendy in Peter Pan is very simpering. "Oh, Peter, Peter."

[Film Clip]

Dave Barry>> I just didn't like that. It's creepy to me. So
we wanted a really kick-boxer girl that our little girls would
like, so we created this character of Molly, but in the end,
it's Molly who sort of saves the world. She's the only one who
really knows what's going on. She enlists Peter's help and
Peter turns out to be a very brave and good person, but without
Molly, Peter wouldn't have a chance.

Patt Morrison>> So your daughter must have liked that part.

Ridley Pearson>> Oh, yeah.

Patt Morrison>> Was this fun to do?

Ridley Pearson>> Oh, man, it was a blast.

Dave Barry>> By far, the most fun I've ever had writing a book.

Patt Morrison>> Really? Because you could bring back childhood
stuff, or because you could deal at long distance with him?

Dave Barry>> Partly the story and partly having somebody to do
it with. When you have another person who's every bit as
involved in the book and knows every single thing you know, when
you have an idea, he can say, oh, that's a good idea or that's a
stupid idea.

Ridley Pearson>> And you're bouncing things off every day. So
every day, there's new pieces coming in or something you wrote.
I would try to slip sentences back in and they'd still be gone
the next time it came in.

Dave Barry>> But that was so great for me. I just was so
confident as the story kept moving on that it was getting better
and better. Ridley is like a nuclear generator of plot ideas.
If I would say, oh, man, I can't figure out --

Patt Morrison>> -- you're the Homer Simpson at the plant?

Ridley Pearson>> Much to a his detriment, I might say.

Dave Barry>> I'd say that I can't figure out if they're going
to have to get from here to here, they're going to need a boat,
but where's the boat going to come from? Ridley would -- five
minutes later, there'd be ten ways the boat could be there.
He'd say if we do this, we have to do that and he's got a lot of
stuff going on in there.

Patt Morrison>> Well, is this going to be a movie now?

Dave Barry>> You mean, this interview? (laughter)

Patt Morrison>> Yeah, yeah.

Dave Barry>> Oh, we hope so. I would --

Patt Morrison>> - we're up against Michael Moore --

Dave Barry>> -- I would like Brad Pitt to play me.

Ridley Pearson>> I mean, we've not signed anything with anyone.
There are people interested, but that's always been the case
with all of our stuff.

Patt Morrison>> Now because this is a prequel and there are
many children's books leaving many questions like this
unanswered, is this the new cottage industry from Ridley and
Dave?

Dave Barry>> Actually, we're not done with prequels to Peter
Pan.

Ridley Pearson>> We're having too much fun with "Starcatchers".
We're staying there for a while.

Dave Barry>> We spent 460 pages basically just getting to the
beginning of how Peter Pan became, you know, into being. So we
think there's more of a story to tell. In fact, we've already
outlined --

Ridley Pearson>> -- which means that we've yelled at each other
a little more.

Patt Morrison>> A couple of hints? Is it dark. Does it
involve --

Dave Barry>> -- it goes to London.

Patt Morrison>> It goes to London.

Dave Barry>> And we really like it.

Patt Morrison>> Ridley Pearson, slacker of the pirates, Dave
Barry, no beard, thank you both for being here.

Val>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at
Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

A group of teenagers commit a senseless act of animal cruelty.
Is there a way to turn their crime into a positive lesson for
kids?

>> Three bad boys killed a sting ray and three sharks.

>> And I think it's going to take us some time to figure out
why these kids did what they did.

>> I think that big things can come out of little people. If
you care enough about the community and what's happening around
you, big changes can be made by anybody.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.