Power to the People - Activist considered soul of opposition to backcountry transmission line

Kelly Fuller of the San Diego Chapter of the Sierra Club has become a prominent opponent of the Sunrise Powerlink.

But after querying SDG&E officials about efforts to find alternatives to the power line – a transmission link that would cut across her beloved Anza-Borrego Desert State Park – Fuller abruptly burst from the meeting at a hotel in Rancho Peñasquitos.
 
“I just get so emotional,” the local Sierra Club spokeswoman said later.
 
To hear her passionate advocacy on behalf of the desert and the county's backcountry, it's difficult to believe that Fuller – who many regard as the soul of the power line opposition movement – ever had problems finding her place in life.
 
But Fuller spent years working in theater. It wasn't for her, she decided. Later, she spent years working as a technical writer. Again, not for her, she decided.
 
And now she's spent years working on her Ph.D. dissertation in American literature. That is for her, she insists, and she pledges to complete it this year.
 
Kelly Fuller
 
Personal: Age 44. Single. Born in Anaheim.
 
Education: Bachelor of arts in drama, 1983, San Diego State University; master's degree in English, 1996, Claremont Graduate University; doctoral candidate in English, Claremont.
 
Work history: adjunct professor, 1997 to present, Southwestern College; teaching assistant, 1996-98, Claremont Graduate University; tutor, 1996-98, Mesa College; technical writer, 1991-94, Equifax National Decision Systems; technical writer, 1991-92, Southern California Edison; costumer, 1988-91, Old Globe Theatre.
 
Interests: Hiking and cooking.
Fuller's assertion sounds sincere, but it's clear that the final push toward the doctorate competes with what seems to be her full-time job: monitoring, blogging, e-mailing, encouraging, phoning and generally communicating with anyone who wants to learn more and oppose a project called the Sunrise Powerlink.
 
The $1.4 billion, 120-mile power line proposed by SDG&E would cut through several backcountry communities, after traversing Anza-Borrego on towers that might rise as high as 160 feet.
 
The utility says the new line is needed to guarantee regional electric reliability and would be helpful in moving power from a host of renewable energy projects expected to be developed in Imperial County. SDG&E also says it's been unable to find enough renewable power within the county to meet its needs.
 
For her part, Fuller says goals for electric reliability and renewable energy can be met without the Sunrise Powerlink, which she insists would do serious environmental damage to pristine areas.
 
“What we should be doing is looking for how we can get more renewable energy in San Diego, so we don't have to build these giant transmission lines,” Fuller said.
 
While the fate of the power line remains unclear, it's clear that few energy projects could generate such passionate opposition. A string of community groups from Rancho Peñasquitos to Ranchita has arisen to oppose the project.
 
Asking members of those groups what moved them from concerned individuals to organized opponents frequently yields the same two words: Kelly Fuller.
 
“The woman is an inspiration,” said Teresa Crockett, a member of the Ramona Alliance Against the Sunrise Powerlink.
 
Crockett noted that she had never been involved in any kind of community group before the Sunrise project. But Fuller encouraged her to trust her own understanding and conclusions and to take action.
 
“In the beginning I leaned on her for everything,” Crockett said. “If someone said I'd be doing the things I'm doing now, I would not have believed them.”
 
Jeanette Hartman, a Julian resident, biologist and veteran of three decades in environmental work, says she has rarely seen an activist with comparable instincts.
 
“She is a brilliant strategist,” said Hartman, who met Fuller when the two worked to block development of a wind energy project near Volcan Mountain.
 
SDG&E declined to comment on her role in the power line debate.
 
Fuller's home base is a modest apartment in Alpine, from which she has easy access to her other passion – desert hiking. The athletic-looking 44-year-old teaches English at Southwestern College, though she's taken this semester off to work on her dissertation.
 
Fuller said her passion for the outdoors was seeded through childhood camping trips with her parents while growing up in Orange County.
 
“I am a third-generation Southern Californian who watched the butterflies and orange groves of her childhood give way to a smoggy swirl of tract houses and freeways,” Fuller writes in the introduction to her blog.
 
She was also a precocious teenager who graduated a year early from Marina High School in Huntington Beach. A drama major in college, she worked in costume design and other aspects of theater – including at the Old Globe – before drifting into technical writing about 15 years ago.
 
The writing led to a stint working at the San Onfore Nuclear Generating Station, where she spent a year writing computer and training manuals as an employee of Southern California Edison.
 
“I saw for the first time that folks in this industry have a really strong sense of hubris,” Fuller said.
 
A year of working as a technical writer for a credit agency in Sorrento Valley persuaded her to pursue a long-held interest in literature.
 
It's been during her time at Claremont Graduate University that several strands of Fuller's life conjoined. She chose to focus her academic research on Mary Hunter Austin, an author known for writing about the Southern California desert.
 
A century ago, Fuller says, “Mary Hunter Austin was about telling people the California desert was valuable and not a wasteland, that Native Americans were people with dignity who had values.”
 
Around the same time, she got back into hiking, going out with small groups of veteran hikers who Fuller calls her “desert fathers.” The desert treks were intoxicating in ways they had never been before.
 
“It provided the most incredible feeling of freedom,” Fuller said. “It was so much fun and made me feel so competent, which is particularly important for women.”
 
She added: “By this time I had fallen in love with the desert. . . . I just realized I wanted to fight for the desert.”
 
She soon began attending Sierra Club meetings. And when Fuller learned of East County residents resisting wind development projects in environmentally sensitive areas, she jumped into that dispute.
 
Bill Powers, a local energy engineer and environmental activist who also opposes Sunrise, says Fuller has brought many valuable assets to the movement.
 
“She is charismatic,” Powers said. “And one of the reasons she has such 'street credibility' in the backcountry is that she takes time to make sure people are what they say they are. She guards her own credibility by ensuring the people she is relying on are the real deal.
 
“I think it took me about six months to pass her test.”
 
Fuller began by scrutinizing documents regarding wind development in the backcountry, as well as querying state and federal land use officials, quickly making herself known to the Federal Bureau of Land Management and the California Department of Parks and Recreation.
 
She quickly displayed her skills at fact-finding, along with the energy to crank out a voluminous level of e-mails and phone calls.
 
“We in the Sierra Club want to see wind developed, but we want it in the right places,” she said.
 
Hearing proposals for development she considered in the wrong place – like the Volcan Mountain Reserve – “tore at my heart” – and bolted her into action.
 
Hartman recalls a session in which officials of SDG&E and a local wind energy company shared a panel in Julian with Fuller on the Volcan Mountain proposal.
 
“Kelly had her hands full educating us about the impacts of wind turbines. This one single woman up against SDG&E and this big wind turbine company. But she very adequately held her own and ruled the day. I don't think there was one person there who left supporting the turbines.”
 
Actually, there was at least one.
 
Richard Caputo, who spent 30 years of his engineering career working on high technology energy projects, said he was less than convinced by Fuller's presentation.
 
“I was surprised by some of the things she said,” Caputo said.
 
Being the scientific type that he is, Caputo spent the next month immersing himself in modern wind power and says he's come to disagree with Fuller about the level of noise that can be expected from modern wind turbines, as well as the fire hazard they present.
 
“She is one of the most effective public speakers I have met,” said Caputo, who noted that he also opposed wind development near Volcan Mountain. “I just wish her information wasn't so dated.”
 
A representative of AES SeaWest, a local wind energy development company involved in the Volcan project, declined to comment on Fuller's role.
 
Fuller says she's comfortable with her position and her facts about the wind project.
 
Most important, she says, is that wind development is proceeding without enough public involvement at the earliest stages. That is critical because she noted that as energy projects proceed, they develop a momentum of their own.
 
Corporate reluctance to a project grows in proportion to the level of investment.
 
“They are hard to back out of later,” Fuller said.
 
But it's the Sunrise Powerlink that now takes up most of her time.
 
Fuller says the power line is unnecessary, expensive and would do serious damage to habitats essential to backcountry wildlife.
 
In the process of opposing it, she says she's learning important lessons about “people power.” She's particularly pleased by the links communities are forming as they organize to oppose the project.
 
And she says all the years of hiking in the desert have brought her something unexpected.
 
“I've found my voice,” she said. “I never felt like I had found it before.”
 
It's a voice that resonates, say many backcountry residents opposing the Sunrise Powerlink.
 
Said Kathleen Beck of Julian “Kelly is the heart and soul of the whole movement.”