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Article Excerpt
Of Big Sur, Henry Miller observed: "Paradise or no paradise, I have the very definite impression that the people of this vicinity are striving to live up to the grandeur and nobility which is such an integral part of this setting. They behave as if it were a privilege to live here, as if it were by an act of grace they found themselves here. The place itself is so overwhelmingly bigger, greater, than anyone could hope to make it that it engenders a humility and reverence not frequently met with in Americans. There being nothing to improve on in the surroundings, the tendency is to set about improving oneself." (1)
The Big Sur coast is both a natural wonder and social achievement. An area extending nearly one hundred miles along the California coast--from the Carmel River to San Simeon and inland some five or ten miles to the 5,000-foot crest of the Santa Lucia Mountains and Ventana Wilderness--few places have managed to preserve for public use thousands of scenic acres and coastline in populous regions. In years past, a series of place-names distinguished isolated pioneer settlements (Point Lobos, Palo Colorado, Mill Creek, Sur, Lucia) before the more inclusive name Big Sur became customary as contact with the outside world grew. Even today some would limit the Big Sur area to the populated valley twenty-six miles south of Carmel. (2)
Whether about place-names or politics, few matters elicit general agreement in Big Sur. Yet residents and legions of visitors are unanimous on one point: the stunning natural beauty of the place. Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry chronicled life on the coast during the 1920s and 1930s, described Big Sur as "the noblest thing I have ever seen," and painter Francis McComas called it "the greatest meeting of land and water in the world." Equally remarkable, Big Sur embraces a "vibrant, alive community" of 1,500 people spread thinly over several hundred thousand acres that are protected for public enjoyment and recreational use from the kind of development (though not all development) that otherwise might destroy this special environment in ways so prevalent along the southern California coast. (3)
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A distinctive place--"a state of mind" according to the novelist Lillian Bos Ross and a naturalist's haven for wildlife biologists Paul Henson and Donald Usner--Big Sur is not, however, unique from the standpoint of environmental protection. In California alone major environmental achievements grace the San Francisco Bay, West Marin-Sonoma Coast and Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco, the state's 1,100-mile coastline, and the Eastern Sierra watershed. Big Sur's environmental success, nevertheless, is particularly noteworthy. Over the last one hundred years, effective mechanisms for environmental protection have developed here, including responsible government, the environmental movement, historical tradition, creative planning, healthy conflict, and citizen participation mobilized by all of these factors. (4)
EXPLAINING ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION
Explanations offered for open-space preservation in case study descriptions and academic syntheses may be divided into two broad categories. One stresses citizen activism or popular movements, from the environmental movement to campaigns to save local places. Pressed about why citizens may act in one time or place rather than another, this explanation underscores local resources (e.g., wealth, education) and opportunities (e.g., some visible threat to the environment or new mechanism for collective action), with an emphasis on grassroots mobilization. The other approach emphasizes government, public policy, or what one author calls a "policy capacity model." Here "community civic resources" or social capital are included in the model along with the "policy system," corresponding roughly to government fiscal and administrative ability. Of course, citizen activism and public policy are not mutually exclusive, although the two approaches do prioritize the causes of preservation in different ways. Our purpose in this essay is to evaluate these reasonable arguments in light of a study of conservation in Big Sur that may contribute to a more complete explanation. (5)
The Big Sur case study illustrates several important aspects of conservation on the Central Coast. First, the goals and methods of land preservation are the product of decades of development, fashioned in the give-and-take between local interest groups, landowners, nonprofits, and public agencies. The process begins long before modern environmentalism emerged in the 1960s, and conservation traditions established earlier continue to operate. Explanations require historical perspective. Second, through the cooperative interplay of actors--including the California State Parks Department, the California Coastal Conservancy, the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, state- and federal-designated wilderness areas and national marine sanctuaries, The Big Sur Land Trust, The Nature Conservancy, and private ranches under conservation easements--Big Sur has become an exemplary case of environmental protection despite, and in some ways because of, conflict within the community. Here, the "community" is not the effective unit of analysis, as in other explanations where coalitions of groups and organizations often work in the face of opposition. Big Sur is a region, rather than an incorporated town or county, composed of many environmental interests that sometimes oppose one another. Third, state support in the form of new legislated tools, oversight, and millions of dollars for land acquisition has been crucial for the success of local efforts. Fourth, conservation activists have played a critical role in these events, acting as buyers, sellers, agents, intermediaries, advocates, negotiators, and sometimes protesters. At crucial moments, land trusts have moved between agencies and owners, sellers and buyers. This case study involves collective action through organizational networks that evolve over time.
The sheer size of Big Sur's protected area contributes to its distinction as a prototype for conservation: roughly 500,000 acres of protected land (including the northern portion of Los Padres National Forest)--even more when including Fort Hunter Ligget and the recently preserved Hearst Ranch. (6)
The story of conservation in Big Sur has been a tempestuous one, featuring pitched battles between local property owners and outsiders, among locals, and even among well-meaning environmentalists. This "battle for the wilderness"--as John Woolfenden describes the events of the 1970s and 1980s--continues to this day. (7)
A FATEFUL PAST
El Sur, "the south," was the name Spanish colonists gave to the great expanse of rugged land along the coast below the presidial and missionary headquarters established in Monterey in 1770. Although Franciscan missionaries led by Father Junipero Serra began at once to recruit Indians to the mission settlement as laborers and Christian converts, they understood little of Native American language, culture, or group differences. The Indians living in the immediate vicinity of San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo (Carmel Mission) were of the Ohlone group (or "tribelet"), whom the missionaries indiscriminately called Costanoans. The Ohlone constituted a distinct society from the Esselen, who occupied what is today the core area of Big Sur and who, numbering perhaps 1,200, "were one of the least numerous and remain one of the least known" California Indian groups. The Esselen left stunning rock paintings in backcountry caves and struggled to maintain their independence as colonial forces surrounded them after 1770. They were virtually extinguished in the nineteenth century as the result of disease and incorporation into colonial society through intermarriage and farm labor. (8)
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Large tracts of land under Mexican rule in the 1830s were granted to ex-soldiers and associates of the provincial governors, three near Carmel Mission at the gateway to El Sur and another twenty miles down the coast. An early drawing of Carmel Mission shows cattle grazing on nearby hillsides of the 8,876-acre Rancho San Jose y Sur Chiquito grant. To the south, the 8,814-acre Rancho El Sur grant passed through several owners, including Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado, finally coming into the hands of Captain John Rogers Cooper, whose family legacy is preserved today through the Andrew Molera State Park (named for Cooper's grandson). Under Cooper's management Rancho El Sur thrived from the 1840s as a cattle ranch and dairy, employing numbers of Hispanic and Indian vaqueros and supporting a school and community center. In his pioneer memoir, Sam Trotter recalled attending the "big dance Saturday night at the Cooper hall near the mouth of Big Sur [River] on the Cooper grant." (9)
Anglo settlement of Big Sur began in the late nineteenth century in response to homestead and timber claims offered by public land laws. Michael and Barbara Pfeiffer, "of Alsatian origin," arrived in 1869 with the first four of their children. Former Rancho El Sur vaqueros Manuel Innocenti, an Indian, and David Castro bought small farms. Many of the settlers were Yankees, such as William Brainard Post, who married Anselma Onesimo, a Costanoan-Rumsen Indian. Because Big Sur was isolated and its rugged terrain was generally inhospitable to the Mexican hacienda, a good deal of coastal land was available for distribution under homestead and timber claims. In the fall of 1893, Sam Trotter left his employment as a woodsman in the Santa Cruz Mountains and headed south to Big Sur with three friends, two pack mules, and one ambition. As he recalled years later, one of his companions, "Mr. Wm. Notley told me he had a letter from a Mr. I. N. Swetman that there was some good timber land in the north fork of Little [Sur] River ... and that there were some very good claims belonging to the government yet not taken up. He [Notley] wanted to know if I wanted to go down with him, look it over and if it was good timber we could each take up a claim." Through preemption, homesteading, timber claims, sales, and squatting, a growing number of settlers in the 1870s and 1880s acquired small farms. Mexican land grants were recognized after statehood, and designated government land moved from public ownership to small holdings (successfully patented homesteads and timber claims), some of which were subsequently consolidated in family holdings and by resale in ranches of a thousand acres or more. (10)
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In 1879, the voter registration roll for Sur...
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