Breon, 38, is now the executive director of the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, which has its headquarters in the old red farmhouse at Cupertino's McClellan Ranch. In 1994 the SCVAS board of directors hired Breon as an environmental advocate when they decided to become involved in conservation. Breon, who also has a law degree, says he was able to take the poorly paid, half-time position only because he lived in his father's Portola Valley house for free.

"It was a way to allow me to help build the organization slowly," says Breon, who became the SCVAS executive director in October 2000. "The Audubon mission is a nice one, basically [to protect] birds, wildlife and habitat. Our work tends to be in four areas: creeks, wetlands, open spaces in the hills and habitats for rare and endangered species."

These areas are often near places where developers want to build homes or industrial parks. Legal clashes between developers and the SCVAS and its conservation supporters keep Breon busy. At any given time, he is working on about a dozen development issues. He relies on the 4,000 members of SCVAS to alert him to new projects and pays close attention to city council agendas.

"I typically can say I don't work on anything I'm not personally passionate about," Breon says. "A lot of people appreciate what I do. What I don't get in monetary compensation I get in sort of karmic compensation."

Breon, who graduated from law school at UC-Davis in the early 1990s, has chosen to be an inactive member of the California Bar.

"I'm not crazy about attorney's work," Breon says. "I got into law school because I wanted to be a conservationist and didn't have much of a science background."

Breon uses his environmental law knowledge regularly and is especially familiar with the California Environmental Quality Act, which requires developers seeking development permits to provide the overseeing government agency with environmental impact reports describing any environmental effects the project will have, along with remedies or alternatives.

"[The environmental act] doesn't stop many projects, but you can use it to change projects for the better," Breon says.

He prepares cases himself, argues before city councils and does settlement negotiations. Breon hires practicing attorneys only to file legal papers and to appear in court during lawsuits. During the past decade, most of SCVAS' cases have been won or lost at political or city council levels, not in courts.

The Stevens Creek Trail

Breon was part of the Stevens Creek Trail task force that met to decide the route and type of trail that will go through Blackberry Farm and, most likely, around McClellan Ranch.

"We would prefer an unpaved trail, more narrow, a little more nature-oriented, and not having bicycles because there is a sense this is a nature preserve," Breon says. "There is a lot of pretty sensitive wildlife here. We get deer raising their fawns in the field and a lot of neat bird species like orioles, barn owls, quail, bluebirds that are more sensitive to human interaction. We even get coyotes and bobcats here occasionally."

Breon says he has received "strong signals" from city council members that several acres by the creek in Blackberry Farm might go back to nature, allowing for the restoration of a fish habitat.

"I think McClellan Ranch is at this little tilting point between being able to be a little more wild and being suburban," he says. "The quail are only back in this area because several feral cats were trapped out by the city. For the first eight or nine years I was here, there were no quail because of the number of cats that we had."

Breon says a proposal to build a large school in Canyon Heights a couple years ago in the Cupertino foothills above Deep Cliffs Golf Course hasn't been resolved. The footprint of the proposed school is on a former quarry floor, which has become a riparian forest filled with wetland vegetation due to the influence of Stevens Creek, which runs through it.

"We and many residents of upper Stevens Creek beat back the first attempt," Breon says. "But the city council never made a final decision."

Spreading the word

During the last few years, Breon's board of directors decided they wanted SCVAS, an independent chapter of the National Audubon Society, to become more of an environmental education organization. The Wetlands Discovery Program is now SCVAS' largest educational program and takes 600­800 youngsters each year to Charleston Slough on the bay, near the border of Palo Alto and Mountain View, along with their teachers. Schools having a low-income Title I designation get the trips for free.

Breon says, "If I had one place to tell a beginning birdwatcher to go in this area, it would be Charleston Slough, because the wetland birds are larger and it's got a variety of different habitats, so it attracts a wide variety of birds. And they sit still more!"

SCVAS also provides in-school presentations for about 2,000 students annually through the efforts of its programs coordinator, Jennifer Peritz, and numerous volunteers. School groups come to McClellan Ranch to learn about life in creeks, and the Young Audubon program offers families an opportunity to go on excursions such as whale watching in Monterey Bay.

Breon thinks everyone should get connected to the nature around them.

"One of the first things I would tell anyone is to garden, ideally organically," he says. "I'm profoundly affected by working in the soil with plants. You see the seasons that way. You put things into the earth and you get things back from the earth. I think that's an absolutely fantastic relationship to have one-on-one or to do with your family."

The good fight

Breon spent his senior year of college at Exeter College in Oxford University, England, after which he went to Shanghai to teach English. He returned home after a year, went to law school and accepted volunteer conservation jobs that were often eye-opening.

"You learn right away that you're going to lose to big corporations more than you're going to win," Breon says. "The influence is just tremendous, and they can pay to have six attorneys in a room answering every question."

But Breon has also had his share of victories at SCVAS. "In my decade here, the most profound influence I've had is on the Santa Clara Valley Water District," Breon says. "I have by no means done it alone.

Whereas the water district was once eager to turn creeks into modern concrete waterways devoid of life, it is now spending more than $1 million a year on creek and wetlands restoration projects from a tax that was approved by a two-thirds vote in the local 2000 elections. The ballot measure was supported by SCVAS.

The first SCVAS conservation case was a joint 1996­97 lawsuit with the city of San Jose against a couple thousand proposed homes near Coyote Creek. A riparian station conducting important bird research was adjacent to the site. Breon says children, cats and dogs would have disrupted the station and local wildlife. The site was also downwind from the sludge pond of the growing city's sewage-treatment plant.

"In that case, the developer was still able to develop the land," Breon says. "It wasn't like we were out to save that land from ever being developed. Rarely is that ever a realistic goal in this region. Instead we were out to make it better, and we did by changing it in that situation from residential to office space."

Out of his many dozens of cases, Breon's favorite is the 40-acre Ulistac Natural Area, an old golf course gone wild and filled with a tremendous amount of bird diversity in the city of Santa Clara. In 1996 the city wanted to sell it, so Breon provided a group of Santa Clara residents with his professional advice about publicizing the issue, and he lobbied before Santa Clara's city council to turn the land into open space. To his amazement, the city council eventually voted to save and restore the entire acreage, a rarity, he says, since valley floor land is worth about $1 million per acre.

Ongoing battles

One situation that appears to be without a happy resolution involves the county's remaining 120 breeding pairs of burrowing owls, a native species of 9-inch-tall birds weighing one-quarter pound each. Their permanent nests are underground and too often in the path of bulldozers clearing land for development. After a decade of failed legal efforts, Breon says SCVAS is reluctantly considering trying to protect only owls that are on public land in the county.

"The species is declining and will continue to do so," Breon says. "Within 20 years, none will remain in Santa Clara County."

During the last 10 years, Breon's biggest disappointment was the loss of a lawsuit against a proposed Cisco Systems campus in Coyote Valley for 20,000 employees and their cars. Since then, the downturn in the economy has put the project on hold.

This summer a proposal to build 750 homes on an Alviso property known as Cisco Site 6 is a battle Breon says he will take on if the matter is not shelved due to ongoing objections by the Alviso community. Sensitive wetlands are adjacent to the property, along with the nests of burrowing owls.

Breon finds time to teach environmental law classes at Santa Clara University. He hosts a radio program, "Environmental News and Issues and African Music," on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, from 10 p.m. to midnight, on KKUP 91.5 FM.

But burnout from losses and from lots of driving to night and weekend meetings has taken its toll. Beginning in 2005, Breon says he will either take a 12- to 18-month sabbatical or resign from SCVAS. He plans to travel through part of the United States, to Central and South America and to Africa.

About the current violence in the world, Breon says he's not going to go looking for trouble. However, when it comes to encountering Mother Nature's kind of trouble, he's not concerned.

"I am a big fan of natural disasters, in a way," Breon says. "I don't want to see people hurt, but just being able to see the power of a hurricane or earthquake or flood is an awesome thing. It's a reminder to us that's we're still not in charge of everything."

For further SCVAS information, call 408.252.3747 or visit http://www.scvas.org.