Can our national monument survive growing efforts to sell public land?
The storm has calmed, for now. Yet many see the withdrawn proposal from Utah Sen. Mike Lee — one of the Capitol’s leading right-wing provocateurs — to sell large swaths of public land in the west to miners and housing developers as the start of long debate.
The notion of privatizing lands preserved in national monuments and forests triggered bipartisan hysteria, from the mountains of Montana to the shores of Santa Cruz County, where the Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument — first designated as such in 2017 — is set to open to the public next month. Might Santa Cruzans, and the rest of the country for that matter, stand to lose this rolling, coastal landscape to a private buyer right as they get it?
The answer, as I report in a story coming out tomorrow, is complicated. An easier question is whether or not such a sale is likely in the event that Lee’s proposal passes.
In deed, no, according to people with intimate knowledge of that property. That’s because of some adroit foresight by the local lawmakers and nonprofits who helped usher the land into the federal government’s hands more than a decade ago — specifically, some contractual finagling in the land deed that could tie even the White House’s hands. The same cannot be said, however, for other Central Coast monuments, such as Fort Ord in Seaside.
Yet, as Sara Barth, executive director of Sempervirens Fund told me, that doesn’t mean those who want to maintain the public ownership of Cotoni-Coast should relax.
More on that tomorrow.
OF NOTE
How funding for the Pajaro River levee is getting lost in Trump’s Washington: When a $38.5 million request for Pajaro levee construction was skipped over in the federal budget earlier this year, lawmakers and flood managers took notice, but remained unperturbed. Then it happened again, sparking some concern that the critical flood protection project could face unexpected delays under the Trump Administration.
Santa Cruz officials quick to take action … against art?: After three Santa Cruz artists converted a forgotten phone booth into a shrine for grief, city authorities quickly had the unauthorized installation removed. According to my colleague Gwynneth Holcomb’s reporting, even just the possible threat of a lawsuit marks the death knell for public art.
ICE has been making courtesy calls to the Santa Cruz Police Department: As Tania Ortiz reports, officers from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have been in contact with the Santa Cruz Police Department since May, giving local authorities a courtesy heads-up about local immigration operations. Ortiz reported earlier this month that ICE was doing the same thing in Watsonville.
POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
Another hearing on battery energy storage systems as a Santa Cruz County project progresses: On Wednesday, the county’s Commission on the Environment will host the second of three hearings focused on battery energy storage systems. These hearings are happening against the backdrop of a private company, New Leaf Energy, pursuing its own 200-megawatt battery system in South County, a project that has been heavily scrutinized following the Moss Landing battery fire in January. Wednesday’s meeting kicks off at 5 p.m. inside the county supervisors chambers at 701 Ocean St., in Santa Cruz, and can be attended virtually by following this link.
ONE GREAT READ
“Writing is thinking” An editorial published by Nature (June 16)
Over the past week, my diet of podcasts and news articles has primarily focused on artificial intelligence. More and more studies have examined how chatbots and large-language models such as Chat GPT and Google’s Gemini impact our brains.
The results confirm some of our worst fears, and much of it has to do with a blunting of neural activity when we lean on LLMs to do our thinking. In one study, MIT researchers found that after just three months of using ChatGPT to write essays, a group of students “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioral levels.” In just three months!
The only silver lining to AI’s rapid intervention in our daily lives is that it’s forcing us to answer big, philosophical questions for which we should, but don’t, have ready answers. Why is the economy important? What is the real aim of education? Why should people be active in their broader world? And so what if AI upends all of it?
The editorial above doesn’t try to answer those questions, but offers a brief creed on the importance of neural engagement, and why writing is among the most important acts we have to activate our minds.