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running the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics as an aggressive, for-profit venture, and Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry himself, who knows a thing or two about blowing away irritating adversaries, both on the big screen and off.
Mr Eastwood and his friends have been planning and promoting the Pebble Beach expansion since they bought the company six years ago, and have proved characteristically canny about accentuating the positive in a project that environmentalists see little or nothing to be positive about.
The consortium realized very early on that the expansion, with all its complexities of mixed use and environmental impact, risked running into a barrage of regulatory obstacles with the county authorities.
So, five years ago, it submitted a ballot initiative to Monterey County voters effectively overriding the county's planning regulations and allowing the Pebble Beach Company itself to decide how to carve up the 150 acres of forest it wants to chop down.
Mr Eastwood, in particular, showed no hesitation in using his star power to sell the measure to voters, appearing in a flurry of campaign advertisements in which the plan was touted, intriguingly, as a means to preserve the forest, not destroy it. The consortium pledged, in exchange for the trees it intended to cut down, to set aside several hundred other acres of forest as untouchable, now or at any time in the future.
In fact, the company called its project the Del Monte Forest Preservation and Development Plan, insinuating, rather cleverly, that development and preservation were somehow two sides of the same coin. The voters were duly charmed, passed the ballot initiative by something close to a two-thirds majority, and the environmentalists resigned themselves to grim defeat.
But as it turned out, the showdown was only just beginning. The golf craze of the late 1990s - fuelled by a booming economy and the irresistible rise of Tiger Woods - suddenly hit a ceiling as the stock market tanked, boom turned to at least a modest bust and the attacks of 11 September took the wind out of everyone's entrepreneurial sails.
Mr Eastwood and his friends also sensed another potential adversary looming over the horizon in the form of the Coastal Commission, a California authority set up in the 1970s with the express purpose of making sure developers could not simply steamroller weak local county authorities and stomp all over the state's most precious natural assets.
At first they tried, with only limited success, to use their political contacts to influence appointments to the 12-member commission. Then Mr. Eastwood, in particular, fell back on his Hollywood charisma and attended a series of town meetings to make sure the bulk of the local community would be behind him. That would not, in itself, be enough to trump the authority of the Coastal Commission, but it would certainly put extra pressure on them.
The project itself was tinkered with over and over, a few dozen acres, more or less, set aside for preservation, a few handfuls of visitor suites, more or less, attached to the building plan. The principals put as human a face as possible on the whole process; at one point Mr Ueberroth even told an official meeting: "I am not a developer."
By the beginning of this year, the Pebble Beach Company decided it was ready and submitted the plan to the Monterey County board. On 15 March, the board duly rolled over and voted in favor, despite a bundle of letters from the Coastal Commission and other regulatory bodies warning them that the project may not be in compliance with a number of environmental protection laws.
Mr Dilworth, for one, took the county's vote as a declaration of war. In his lawsuit, filed last week, he accused the board of supervisors of failing to abide by their environmental obligations.
And, in addition to the pine trees themselves, he found three other rare species that he argued would be endangered by the project: a type of orchid, a type of cypress tree, and the California red-legged frog, made famous by Mark Twain in an essay he wrote about seeing them in California's gold country (The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County), where they are now extinct.
The Pebble Beach Company appears more bemused than threatened by these accusations. Across the United States, environmentalists have often clung to the Endangered Species Act and the protections it affords as the only instrument they have to
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