The La Jolla Children’s Pool is a coastal landmark that in many ways is representative of other San Diego landmarks: it’s located on a gorgeously scenic spot and as such it generates more controversy than most other public policy issues in San Diego.
The La Jolla Children’s Pool is a coastal landmark that in many ways is representative of other San Diego landmarks: it’s located on a gorgeously scenic spot and as such it generates more controversy than most other public policy issues in San Diego.
Another local landmark, the Mount Soledad Cross, shares these traits, but combatants on this issue have been quiet ever since a judge ruled that the cross was constitutional as part of a war memorial. Oddly, the war memorial part of the equation didn’t exist until 70 years after the cross was put up on the land. In fact, a non-profit foundation dedicated the site as a war memorial in 1989, long after a string of crosses had first been installed there (including one that was burned down by the Klan in the ’20s, interestingly enough).
Similar to the issue of the Mt. Soledad Cross, the questions of intent and representation also show up in the Children’s Pool debate with the focus there being on the legal mandate the city of San Diego undertook when it took over ownership of the land.
The sole impetus for the construction of the Children’s Pool in the early 20th century was Ellen Browning Scripps. Scripps was enormously wealthy from investments in her brother’s newspapers and she had already donated money to found a dozen other institutions still around today, including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Scripps Hospital, and the La Jolla Public Library, when she decided that the children of La Jolla needed a place to learn to swim so as not to be sucked out to sea. (For a comprehensive history on the construction of the project, see this article by Jeremy Hollins from the Journal for San Diego History)
This was early in the history of the city’s lifeguard services, and at the time San Diego didn’t have the resources or the knowledge to protect a public that was just beginning to explore a previously feared ocean. Many drowned every year, and while it’s hard to imagine it now for one who grew up a few blocks from a crowded beach, the ocean was considered dangerous, unpredictable, unruly.
That’s why Ellen Browning Scripps decided to create a safe place for the children of San Diego to swim, and it’s also why she invented, funded, and even dragged from halfway across the world the engineer who was eventually to complete the project. Scripps then gave the Children’s Pool to the city with the stipulation that it be preserved as an area for public swimming.
Seals near San Diego taken by flickr user leeco
In the ’90s then and apparently from disuse by the human population, the protected beach of the Children’s Pool became a favorite roosting spot for a local seal population, and the seals then became a local curiosity. A series of lawsuits followed, started by one swimmer who objected to the seal’s dominance of a beach built for swimmers, and in 2005 a judge ordered that the beach needed to be cleaned of its inflated bacteria levels from the seal excrement in order so that humans could use it as legally mandated. Finally, another judge ruled today that the city must remove the seals in order to comply with the previous decision about their bacteria.
Now, one thing about San Diego is that the public here really loves its public spaces. Ordinances and ballot measures relating to the city’s beaches always generate controversy and the Children’s Pool is no different. On one side are local groups that want to dump the seals to have the Children’s Pool back for the children. They use the (probably accurate) legal argument that the city was originally mandated to keep the space as a public park and swim area. On the other side are environmentalists and fans of the seals (and there are many of them) who figure the public has a lot of public space already in which to congregate and swim, and that the seals have as much right to the space as we do.
Indeed, it does seem selfish to take yet another piece of coastline from a wild population that has few other safe spaces. Contrary to 1921, there are many other safe places for children to swim and so the Children’s Pool in this comparison will likely mean less to the human population than it will mean to the seal population. Outside of that, many ecologically-minded types are coming to feel an ethical responsibility to animals that have been pushed out of every other locale in their regions. When wild animals take some of that space back, some are happy to grant them what they’ve won after they’ve lost so much.
Amidst the latter attitude is where I tend to find myself. Actually, there even appears to be some human benefits to leaving the space to the seals, who could serve as educational tools and symbols of conservation for residents. In this regard, they do serve the community.
The city plans to use recordings of dogs barking to eject the seals, but they are not allowed to engage in any activity that harms the seals under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. According to one Voice of San Diego post, however, such a project may approach monumental difficulty as the recordings are sure to annoy the seals instead of encouraging them to go away. Consequently, the situation has a lot of promise for prolonging the argument about what to do about the seals while, in the meantime, the city blasts money at the problem and preserves the status quo.
La Jolla Children's Pool by flickr user chilsta
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One Comment
Having the seals at the children’s pool has been an amazing opportunity to show children that we are not separate from other species on this planet. Their presence blurs the sad line that we tend to draw between humans and nature–the idea that we are “here” and they are “out there” somewhere (or neatly confined in our zoos or wildlife amusement parks).
I believe that evicting the seals and ending our mini-coexistance with them will send the wrong message to people (especially children) in that it places our right to leisure above the seals’ right to rest safely along the shore. Surely, this type of action will be detrimental to future attitudes towards wildlife in general.