NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Not many people are aware that I’m a former Bay Area boy, raised in Redwood City. As such, I tend to keep track of what goes on in Northern California as well as Southern California.

Lou and I were saddened to learn recently that the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper of my boyhood, might be going out of business soon.

The paper lost more than $50 million during 2008, with losses for 2009 projected to be even higher. Unless the paper can turn around its bottom line quickly, which seems unlikely in this economy, it will be put up for sale or closed.

To see the Chronicle on the brink of going under is shocking.

The Chronicle is California’s second largest newspaper, second only to the Los Angeles Times.

To the people of San Francisco, what’s important about that possibility is that the San Francisco Examiner has already gone out of business. If the Chronicle follows suit, there will be no major daily newspaper in San Francisco.

Readers of the Huntington Beach Independent have reason to be concerned about these events because the newspaper industry all across America is in a state of economic free fall.

Part of the reason is the economy, and part is changing times and the ascendancy of the Internet.

But a local newspaper is often the only way in which locals can get information about their city. Local news just doesn’t pop up on the Internet by itself. It takes an editor to make assignments and reporters to dig up the story. And it takes columnists familiar with the community to add some local color to the paper.

Naturally, we worry about our own local paper. Our favorite local Huntington Beach newspaper — the Independent — is owned by the giant Los Angeles Times, which is in turn owned by the Chicago Tribune. What happens in San Francisco can often happen down here. It might not be safe to assume that even the mighty L.A. Times will always be with us.

I have a special affinity for the San Francisco Chronicle because that’s the daily paper that I read growing up in the Bay Area. Reading the paper became a habit that I have indulged in ever since those days. Wherever I have moved, I have read the local paper: papers like the San Antonio Express-News and the Hartford Courant.

I will periodically watch a half hour of TV news, but when I do I’m appalled at how little news I actually received relative to the amount of time I invested. If I spend the same 30 minutes reading the paper, I get vastly more news out of my effort: politics, business, sports, and even a chuckle or two from a cartoon. I don’t mind Brian Williams and Wolf Blitzer, but they’re not very funny!

The newspaper also played a major part in shaping my environmental views. The San Francisco Chronicle had two great columnists whom I read faithfully. Both have been deceased for quite a few years now.

One was the famous Herb Caen (he invented the word “beatnik”) who always wrote about local San Francisco politics.

The other was Art Hoppe — not so famous. But Hoppe had a profound influence on me. Some of his columns were transcripts of conversations between God and the angels. Only an ace journalist gets access to material like that!

These conversations invariably focused on the little human beings that inhabited God’s favorite little planet, the one known as Earth.

You see, God considered himself the landlord for this planet and human beings as his tenants.

God was a kindly landlord who let us humans live on his planet for free. But like many other landlords, he was appalled at the damage being done to his property. Pollution and decimation of forests — damage on a scale far greater than scuffing the walls or staining the carpet. His angels constantly argued in favor of evicting the tenants, and God would think it over but always decided, by the end of the column, to give people one more chance.

Many years later there are still many things that I don’t understand about God, but I will never stop thinking of Him as our great and generous, landlord. Thanks to Art Hoppe and the San Francisco Chronicle for raising my environmental consciousness and maybe even my spiritual awareness.

As local columnists, Lou and I never know who we are influencing. Perhaps one of tomorrow’s environmental leaders is a faithful reader of our columns and is right now forming his or her world view.

I hope that we can return the favor that our predecessors in this business have done for us.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].