There has been a lot of misinformation going around since the Friends of Bernard Biological Field Station decided to settle their lawsuit against CUC, the most significant of which being the belief that the BFS issue is settled. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Friends’ compromise allows KGI to be built on 11 acres of the field station, allows an additional 30 acres to be sacrificed for another school, permits a Native American monitor to be present during construction, and protects 45 acres of the 86-acre field station for a mere 50 years, probably the amount of time it would take CUC to build more colleges anyway. (The California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, lawsuit was filed because of an inadequate assessment of KGI’s environmental impact on BFS.)

Paving over 11 acres of the field station to build KGI will affect much more than simply what animals are on that land at the time of development, and cutting it in half will render it virtually unusable for ecological research. Animals like kangaroo rats, turtles, hummingbirds, red-tail and cooper’s hawks, coyotes, and migratory birds depend on this endangered ecosystem for survival.

BFS is already small in biological terms, and all of this land is necessary for a viable wildlife habitat and a working field station.

In addition to the Friends’ agreement gaining little more than lip service to the destruction of this natural landscape, the process by which the compromise was reached has been extremely undemocratic. The planned development of the field station is an issue that concerns the whole community. Yet all negotiations have been carried out behind closed doors, and all discussion of these negotiations has been strictly confidential. The settlement does not even represent the view of the Friends’ group, let alone Claremont’s larger environmental community. The compromise was the decision of five individuals, the Friends board.

The Friends haven’t held a meeting for over six months; thus, members of their own group have been left out of the negotiating process. Even the board was divided on the issue of compromising, and one member, Jason Venetoulis, resigned from the board in protest of this ludicrous deal.

Perhaps the most troubling outcome of the Friends’ compromise, though, is the fact that it’s being used to kill the issue of preserving all of the Bernard Field Station forever. At the meeting last November in which City Council removed the BFS referendum from the March ballot, the gross misstatement was made in the city’s staff report that "CUC and members of the public who signed the referendum petition have reported that their discussions have been successful." I signed that petition, along with 3,300 other Claremont residents, yet where were our voices in the lawsuit negotiations?

Despite the fact that the BFS controversy is only seemingly settled for five individuals, CUC and the City Council have been using the compromise as a public relations tool to quiet any future protest of the field station’s development, insisting that all pertinent parties are now in agreement.

KGI president Hank Riggs puts on his own public relations show to discredit dissent, his most recent attack on those opposing development accusing dissenters of being anti-technology Luddites. Although all of the local newspapers announced that the issue was settled in mid-November, CUC just signed the agreement this week. They have been stalling for the past three months, adding new clauses to the document. Any added changes have been slight, according to the Friends board; the deal remains completely unacceptable.

There is a bigger battle going on here than an argument over how much of CUC’s land to develop; our air is brown, our lakes are drying up, the temperature is rising, and cancer rates are soaring.

In a time when concrete and strip malls have become our environment and humans are completely disconnected from the life-supporting systems of this planet, the time has come to draw the line. The field station is one of the last remaining echoes of a time when the Earth wasn’t here for our personal profit and life was respected instead of patented.

Many students, faculty, and community members agree that every acre of Bernard Field Station is priceless, especially in a place like the Inland Empire. Members of the Friends also feel this way, yet negotiations were restricted to a few board members who, with the Friends being the most widely recognized group opposing the field station’s development, effectively spoke on the behalf of thousands.

Don’t be fooled by the hype; development of BFS is not a done deal. If you still have hope for sustainability, please help defend this invaluable piece of land. No compromise!

If you’d like to get involved, Students for the Field Station meets every Wednesday night at 8:00 in Pitzer’s Ecology Center upstairs in the Grove House. For more information, contact me at abigailsinger@hotmail.com or Lenny Molina at lmolina@pomona.edu.