Mindful living conjures the image of socially responsible individuals practicing yoga and meditating as they envision a more equitable world.

Mindfulness has become a buzzword designating both a concern for individual health and an awareness of our environment. It’s hard to see how it can be controversial.

But the term also works as a wily catchphrase to sell coastal real estate in a questionable new development in Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.

A small town nested in an oasis on the Pacific coast of southern Baja, Todos Santos has gone over the past twenty years from being a quiet fishing and farming village to becoming a popular tourist destination. Words like ‘quaint’ and ‘unspoiled’ pop up in most articles written about it.

Considered a quieter alternative to its southern neighbor Cabo, Todos Santos is known for surfing, art galleries, film and music festivals, and is home to a growing community of American and European residents. In 2006, it was named Pueblo Mágico or ‘magic village’, by Mexico’s Secretariat of Tourism, a designation meant to ensure governmental commitment to sustainability.

But it is not devoid of problems. Water scarcity has long been an issue, the transition from agriculture to tourism has brought its share of social ills, and more recently an open pit mine plans to operate in the Sierra de la Laguna Biosphere Reserve, the area’s most important source of water, putting the region at risk of an environmental disaster comparable to the recent toxic spill in Colorado’s Animas river.

And now, the ‘mindfulness’ mega-project

And now Todos Santos is getting both a mega-development that brands itself as mindful and an ethically murky university campus.

A real-estate project called Tres Santos has permits to build 4,472 homes over 25 years, leading to an estimated indirect population growth of more than 60,000 new residents – quite a leap for a town whose population in 2010 hovered just above 5,000. Divided into three sections, beach, townfarm and hillside, the project frames the southern edge of town, along both sides of the new double lane highway that connects Todos Santos to Cabo San Lucas.

The beach section, already under way, is located at Punta Lobos (see photos), the only sheltered location along the open Pacific Ocean where local fishing cooperatives can directly access the beach with their skiffs.

Tropical depression Linda, which struck on 6th September, was a mild storm compared to last year’s Hurricane Odile that wrecked havoc in Cabo and much of the peninsula. Yet it caused serious beach erosion and flooding of the development’s existing construction.

Over the past few weeks, the beach has receded to the point that large boulders, originally placed there as part of the sea wall, have been exposed. This has damaged motors and propellers, extremely expensive equipment that local fishermen can hardly afford to replace repeatedly.

Locals blame the scale of beach loss squarely on the development, disrupting the normal flows of waves, sand and seawater across the bay. Of course, no one can prove what the beach would be like now had it simply been left well alone. But it’s easy to see a cause and effect.

And what no one can doubt is sheer, unbelievable, crass ugliness of the excescence that now disfigures what was once one of Mexico’s most beautiful and unspoiled beaches.

The real estate-educational complex comes to Baja

The townfarm section, planned on a dry patch of land on the outskirts of town, next to the town cemetery and far from the area’s agricultural fields, has already inaugurated Colorado State University’s first international campus, which started operating this fall. Establishing a research center with a strong background in sustainable agriculture and water use in Mexico’s driest state certainly seems worthwhile.

But the campus’s coziness with Tres Santos and with MIRA, the Mexican affiliate of Colorado-based Black Creek Capital, led by prominent real estate mogul Jim R. Mulvihill, who spearheads the project, have unsettled both the Todos Santos community and CSU students.

The campus is supposedly built on gifted land, but CSU does not have full ownership of the trust.  CSU is required to allow Tres Santos to use its name for marketing purposes, and is expected to keep its research farm in bloom during peak tourist season. Higher education, it seems, makes for great greenwashing.

As one of the project’s brokers in Todos Santos told me in an unguarded moment: “Other developments put in golf courses, we’re bringing in a university campus.”