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Published on Friday, April 22, 2005 by the Independent/UK
Plans by the actor Clint Eastwood to develop a golf course in the Monterey pine forest are being strenuously resisted by environmentalists
by Andrew Gumbel
Drive south along the Pacific Coast Highway past Monterey, and you can just about imagine you are entering one of the world's great unspoiled forests. The road rises from the flat strawberry fields of Watsonville, and offers just a few tantalizing glimpses of Monterey's pastel-colored townhouses before plunging into thick stands of Monterey pines, a rare but greatly prized species that grows in abundance here but in very few other places on the planet.
The pines thrive on the landscape, the fertile soil, and the atmospheric coastal fogs that roll in off the deep-blue Pacific and keep the temperatures cool, even in mid-summer. But the sensation of untouched beauty is no more than an illusion.
For more than half a century, the Monterey peninsula has been famous not for its natural landscapes but for the Pebble Beach golf resort that spreads among the trees and extends up to the lip of the low-rise cliffs above the ocean.
The only road into Pebble Beach is private, and costs each visiting vehicle $8.50 (£4.45) for admission. The 17-mile drive around the resort is sold as a tourist attraction, but in reality it offers a faintly depressing tour of what golf, retirement homes, fancy, country-club style restaurants and the financial ambitions of property developers can do to what would otherwise be one of the highlights of California's already spectacular coastline.
While golf enthusiasts flock to Pebble Beach for its major international tournaments and revel in the man-made rearrangement of its natural landscapes, environmentalists have spent the past few decades quietly mourning the intrusion of greens, bunkers and club houses on their beloved Del Monte forest. And now the mourning has turned to rampant activism. Last month, the Pebble Beach Company persuaded the Monterey County board of supervisors to give its approval to a major expansion of the resort, including an eighth 18-hole golf course, a resort complex with 160 visitor suites, residential and employee housing, an equestrian center and a driving range.
The problem with the plan is that it will involve chopping down about 17,000 more Monterey pines, increase tourist traffic and generally augment what is already a less than tender human imprint on the landscape.
David Dilworth, of the group Helping Our Peninsula's Environment (Hope), calls the plan a "slow-motion ecological train-wreck" and has just filed suit arguing that it breaks a slew of state and federal environmental protection laws.
But Mr Dilworth has powerful enemies. The Pebble Beach Company is a consortium co-owned by Arnold Palmer, the former champion golfer, Peter Ueberroth, the sports entrepreneur most famous outside the United States for
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