News Subscribe  to Our Newsletter Sign  up for Email Updates CGF  In the News Press  Inquiries Past  Articles Calendar			The SF Chronicle February 7, 2003   Two sides to every  argument By Mark Simon The tenor of debate over environmental issues has prompted an e-mail from  the redoubtable Lennie Roberts, the legislative advocate for the Committee  for Green Foothills for more than 20 years and the Peninsula's leading  environmentalist. Specifically, Roberts was responding to last week's column about the elephants  that were brought in last fall by the Cozzolino family as part of its  pumpkin farm tourism attraction. The Cozzolinos want to bring the elephants back this fall, and they are  seeking a permit from San Mateo County. Half Moon Bay officials wrote a letter opposing the permit, from which  I offered some details. I characterized the letter this way: ". . . the letter touches every kind of environmental base, and with  the kind of practiced hand you'd expect from Half Moon Bay, where every  argument is about the future of the planet." In the same column, I also wrote, "On the Coastside, these days,  calm and reasoned discussion that gives credit to both sides of an issue  is as endangered as an Asian elephant." All of that prompted Roberts to write, "You are being too hard on  Half Moon Bay. "This debate is about whether the elephants and other  Cozzolino circus-like attractions are an allowable use in the agricultural  district (they are not). You trivialize the legitimate concerns that arise  over land use by characterizing Half Moon Bay's environmental concerns  as nothing short of planetary import. Most (but of course not all) of  the Half Moon Bay clashes do centeron whether something is in compliance  with the city's Local Coastal Program. You need to give people credit  for using something other than raw emotion over there. " 'Calm and reasoned' discussion with credit to both sides is hardly  the norm in the various debates over land use elsewhere in this county.  I am so tired of people trivializing environmental concerns when their  project du jour is being considered. Yes, many times opponents will seize  upon some ridiculous argument in their passion to stop the bulldozers.  But by far the worst offenders of civil discourse are on the side of environmental  destruction, not protection." She's right, of course. But Roberts also is one of the most reasonable  people with whom to argue. At a minimum, she doesn't immediately assume  that a disagreement is based entirely on a profit-driven desire to rape  the land. The latter is a continuing theme: Few people involved in the land-use  debates on the Coastside, particularly the current crowd in command of  much of the area's political machinery, seem willing to acknowledge that  the other side also may have the best interests of the community at heart. Too many of the debates seem posed as all-or-nothing matters, in which  participants see themselves as all right and the other side as evil. Page last updated February 20, 2003 .