Candace Carroll: Husband and wife debate the seals

(Photo courtesy by San Diego 6 CW)

I strongly disagree that the fight over the seals is silly.  I think the seals are worth fighting for.  I wish everyone recognized what an enormous gift we were given when the seals started using the Children’s Pool, and that people had not started a decade-long fight in an effort to force them to leave.   But since people seem determined to fight that fight, those of us who love the seals are forced to fight back.

While seals have apparently lived in the vicinity for more than 200 years, and have certainly used the Children’s Pool at least since 1970, seals and people shared the beach until 1997, when it was discovered that the water was so polluted with seal excrement that it was no longer safe for children to swim there.  The absence of humans  made the beach more attractive to the seals, who began hauling out there in larger numbers.  As a result, the Children’s Pool is now the largest seal rookery on the West Coast, offering the only high and low tide sheltered pupping and nursing haul-out area.  And tourists flock to the Children’s Pool — 100,000 a month in the summer! — and not only thrill to an up-close look at the seals, but spend their tourist dollars in La Jolla stores and restaurants.  Speaking purely from an economic standpoint, the effort to get rid of the seals is crazy.

Read Candace’s husband Len Simon’s counterpoint

But the question is not just economic.  We live in a time of a growing scarcity of natural areas.  I grew up playing in the woods behind our house, but my children didn’t, because the woods are gone.  More and more of our natural areas are gone, and more and more often  we have to travel to introduce our kids to nature.  Further, we are constantly bombarded with messages about conservation, recycling, global warming, the end of nature as we know it.  Yet when nature gives us the incredible gift of a pod of harbor seals raising their pups on our beach, and allowing both our children and tourists to visit them any time we want to, we should be celebrating our rare good luck, not trying to drive them away with lawsuits and recordings of barking dogs.

And I’m not persuaded by sanctimonious arguments about how Ellen Browning Scripps built the seawall for the children.  That was nice, and she meant well, but she was never asked what she’d think of  a seal rookery, and anyway, times change.  None of us can guarantee what will happen to our property or to gifts and plans we’ve made after we go.  There were probably lots of Indian chiefs who died believing they’d left huge swaths of the American West to their children.   I don’t feel any particular obligation to preserve things today the way yesterday’s people wanted them.  I feel only an obligation to preserve what’s best about today, and I’m convinced that those seals, and their pups, are one of the best things that ever happened to La Jolla.

And don’t tell me the kids need a place to swim.  We who live here have miles and miles of beautiful beaches where our children can swim.   Len and I raised our three boys here, and we never used the Children’s Pool, largely because of the lack of long-term parking.   My kids swam at La Jolla Shores beach and in people’s backyard pools, and got along just fine.  What they didn’t have — and what they take their friends to see when, now all grown up, they come home to visit, is the incredible natural spectacle of the seals at the Children’s Pool.

They should be preserved, and they’re worth fighting for.

Tags: SDNN

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 7:09 am and is filed under Columns, Lifestyle, Local News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.