2001 Sea Grant State Fellow Fighting to Save So Cal’s Wetlands
February 23, 2007
Contact: Christina S. Johnson, csjohnson@ucsd.edu, 858-822-5334
There are those who see the glass half full, and then there are those like Megan Johnson who, despite the loss of 90 percent of the state’s wetlands, see the remaining 10 percent as filling up a whole glass, and a treasure to behold.
Megan Johnson, 2001 California Sea Grant State Fellow. Credit: Peter Cooper
Since January 2006, Johnson, a California Sea Grant State Fellow at the Coastal Commission, has been a project coordinator for the Southern California Wetlands Recovery Project or, as it is more familiarly known, SCWRP (pronounced squirp).
SCWRP is a non-profit partnership of 18 state and federal entities striving, against it would seem all odds, to accelerate the pace, extent and effectiveness of wetlands restoration in the sprawling metropolis of Southern California’s five coastal counties, home to 20 million. SCWRP is chaired by the California Resources Agency and funded in large part, but not exclusively, by the California Coastal Conservancy.
A lot of people ask whether it is futile, spending so much time and money trying to save wetlands when there are only 10 percent left and these are
plagued by invasive species, sedimentation and the like, Johnson said.
“This is the greatest reason to be working so hard,” she said. “We only have 10 percent left, but yet that 10 percent is incredibly productive. Our remaining wetlands are important for migrating birds on the
Gull billed tern chick. Credit: Phil Roullard
Pacific Flyway, for water quality and fish habitat. If we continue to chip away at them, our quality of life would diminish greatly.”
One project on her plate now is to restore commercial salt ponds at the South San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge. “This is an internationally recognized area for bird nesting and migration,” said Johnson, who earned a master’s in marine ecology from San Diego State University.
Prior to joining SCWRP, Johnson was a biologist with the environmental consulting firm Merkel & Associates in San Diego for four years. Before that, she was a California Sea Grant State Fellow in 2001 with the Coastal Commission in Ventura, where she worked on some of the very earliest stages of implementing the Marine Life Protection Act, including mapping out where to site marine protected areas.
An aerial view of the wetlands and homes around the Tijuana River National Wildlife Refuge.
Photo courtesy of SCWRP
Looking back at her experiences as a fellow, Johnson said, “It was difficult for me to see that decisions about land-use planning were not based in science. I realized there was not a lot of dialog between scientists and decision-makers.”
Seeing that deficit led her to decide to focus on fieldwork, nitty-gritty restoration and all it entails. “I was not quite ready to be sitting behind a desk,” she said.
Her perspective has shifted over the last six years, and she has greater sympathy for dilemmas faced by regulatory agencies, not the least of which is perpetual underfunding.
“I’ve come full circle,” she said. “Maybe I should have stayed at the Coastal Commission. They are fighting a hard fight, trying to protect the coast from development, which is now what I spend my days doing.”
.gif){kind=logo}
