John Wiley
Scroll through John’s photos above
By John Wiley
To celebrate the successful fundraiser to preserve the San Marcos Foothills West Mesa, we looked through some photos we like. The perspective is so different from the ground, air, and mountains!
If you haven’t visited it yet, we hope you get a better idea of how beautiful this area is. If you send Edhat some photos, maybe they can add them or publish a collection.
Thanks to all who joined us in supporting this effort. Can you tell where and when each of these pix was taken?
By Charles Brewster
San Marcos Foothills captured in February of 2018.
By Sheryl S.
As a native Californian, born and raised in this state. a wildlife conservationist, an artist, and decades long resident of Santa Barbara, I always get involved when preserving open space or helping wildlife is a thing. I attended the protests, painted big colorful signs, and watched as the police blocked people from trying to get to the gate and even arrested a couple of peaceful protestors.
I painted a wood panel painting of Santa Barbara and sold it for a good chunk to raise funds for this effort. A man in Las Vegas bought that painting from posts on my Instagram account. People from out of town even donated because we were all sharing this effort with friends and family and followers on social media. Here are some of my photos of our impassioned effort to preserve this beautiful land for wildlife, for open coastal space, for future generations and beyond. A few mansions for the wealthy would have done nothing good for our community as a whole, but this massive grass roots effort was healing, empowering, inspiring and successful. Here are some of my signs, the painting I sold, and a little video of some of the wild neighbors that we fought so hard for.
Thank you, to every single person who raised funds, donated, raised your voices, attended the events and made the effort. WE DID IT! I’m so proud of our community. This just makes my heart sing.
What are we celebrating exactly? Basically 19 million dollars was spent to acquire land. Thats fantastic but personally if the same effort was guided to a more important issue, such as the homeless i would feel a lot better about it.
About a million dollars in annual property taxes arenow permanently lost to the county after eliminating the few expensive homes sites on the small portion of land that had not already been dedicated by the prior for an open space preserve. Where will this property tax revenue loss show up on the county books after switching from the previous 80% open space preserve to the now 100% open space preserve?
The money spent on any one thing could certainly have been spent on something else, but the people who gave this money want this thing. I bet a lot of them also give money to other causes. Go raise money for homeless people if you want to.