“Horrible Washing Sawing”: Ecology and Anthropocentric Sublimity in Jack Kerouac's <em>Big Sur</em>

Se realizó un estudio para determinar el comportamiento poscosecha durante su almacenamiento en raíces de 12 híbridos comerciales de zanahoria y su respectiva casa productora: Bangor F1, Nandrin F1, Napoli F1 y Norwich F1 de Bejo; Big Sur y Sirkana de Nunhems; Bolero F1 y Concerto F1 (VAC 03 F1) de Vilmorin; XCR3688 y S-505 de Sakata; Esperanza y Dulce de Seminis, cultivados en Cot de Oreamuno, Cartago. Se aplicó un tratamiento poscosecha estándar a todas las raíces de los diferentes híbridos provenientes del campo, que consistió en lavar mecánicamente mediante cepillado con agua y extracto de semillas de cítricos (Kilol L DF-100), seleccionar las raíces comerciales y pasarlas por un hidroenfriador a una temperatura de 2°C durante 15 min; luego, empacar las raíces en bolsas plásticas comerciales, para ser llevadas al laboratorio poscosecha, donde se almacenaron en una cámara fría a 2°C durante 8 semanas (56 días). Se establecieron 2 grupos de raíces pertenecientes a cada híbrido; en el primer grupo se evaluó semanalmente en diferentes raíces las variables color externo, firmeza, relación xilema/floema y contenido de sólidos solubles totales (°brix); en el segundo grupo se evaluó semanalmente en las mismas raíces las variables color externo, pérdida de peso (cambio en la masa de la raíz) e incidencia de factores de deterioro poscosecha. Se encontraron 3 tipos de daños en las raíces evaluadas: daño fisiológico, agentes patogénicos y sin agente causal conocido. El comportamiento de los materiales evaluados fue el siguiente: no hubo diferencia entre híbridos para la pérdida de peso; el color externo solo difirió en Big Sur, con respecto a los demás híbridos; XCR3688 y Bolero F1 mostraron una mayor firmeza; Bolero F1 presentó el mayor valor para grados brix. Los híbridos con el mejor comportamiento poscosecha fueron Dulce, S-505, XCR3688 y Big Sur.

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The Battle for Big Sur; or, Debating the National Environmental Ethic

Big Sur ◽

10.1525/california/9780520294417.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Shelley Alden Brooks

Keyword(s):

Ronald Reagan ◽

Environmental Ethic ◽

Constitutional Rights ◽

Considerable Influence ◽

Local Management ◽

White House ◽

Big Sur ◽

Ansel Adams ◽

National Environmental ◽

Conservative Turn

At the end of the 1970s, Carmel resident Ansel Adams turned his considerable influence toward securing federal protection for the Big Sur coastline. Adams endeavored to secure the designation of a Big Sur National Seashore while Democrats still controlled Congress and the White House, but he had an uphill battle during the conservative ascendancy that brought Ronald Reagan into the White House at a time when the nation’s faltering economy challenged bipartisan support for environmental protection. Adams also misread the vehemence with which locals guarded their right to steward the land and live without a federal landlord. Chapter 6 examines the battle over Big Sur as Adams, U.S. congressmen and senators, the Wilderness Society, Monterey County officials, and Big Sur residents debated the cultural, political, and environmental borders of this prized landscape. The chapter argues that like other debates of the era, the question of management authority for Big Sur became value-laden as issues of constitutional rights, privilege, and spirituality played key roles in shaping opinions on the appropriate relationship between people and nature. A place as popular as Yosemite could not escape such national attention, but remarkably, Big Sur’s small number of residents could harness the conservative turn to argue successfully for local management of a national treasure.

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The Influence of the Counterculture, Community, and State

Big Sur ◽

10.1525/california/9780520294417.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Shelley Alden Brooks

Keyword(s):

Land Management ◽

The State ◽

State Parks ◽

State Regulations ◽

Big Sur ◽

Counter Culture ◽

Management Plans ◽

The 1960S ◽

The Mind

During the counter-culture era of the 1960s and early 1970s, Big Sur became a magnet for hippies, back-to-the-land activists, and New Age visitors exploring the mind-expanding retreats at the Esalen Institute. Added to these arrivals were the more mainstream families flocking to the state parks and beaches, and wealthy new residents. Chapter 5 examines the arrival of these various admirers and their influence on Big Sur’s image and land management. This chapter also broadens the picture to examine the statewide impact of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. The spill was a wakeup call to the state and the nation, and it reinforced the linkage between the quality of the environment and Americans’ quality of life. It spurred the passage of Proposition 20 in 1972 to protect California’s prized coastline. New state regulations required environmentally sensitive land management plans from all coastal counties. This chapter argues that Big Sur residents understood the importance (and accepted the irony) of coalescing as a vibrant community as they began to draft one of the most stringent antidevelopment plans in the state. Their sophisticated knowledge of land management helped retain this coastline’s distinction and their prized place within it.

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Nature’s Highway

Big Sur ◽

10.1525/california/9780520294417.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Shelley Alden Brooks

Keyword(s):

Contemporary Society ◽

Government Regulations ◽

Henry Miller ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Big Sur ◽

National Media ◽

Monterey County ◽

Popular Representations ◽

National Newspaper

Chapter 2 examines the transformative effect of the opening of Highway 1 in 1937. This chapter argues that planning foresight positioned Big Sur to become one of the state’s best-preserved coastlines, while popular representations of its dramatic natural elements provided the justification for such preservation. Before the highway opened, Monterey County established some of the first ordinances in the nation to prohibit billboards and require well-designed construction along the highway. Tourists responded with enthusiasm, drawn by Jeffers’s powerful verse and countless national newspaper stories extoling Big Sur’s beauty. In 1944 the avant-garde writer Henry Miller settled in Big Sur. Like Jeffers’s work, Miller’s representation of Big Sur left the impression that people belonged in and to this landscape. The highway set Big Sur on an irrevocable course toward participation in contemporary society, but aesthetic zoning, praise from the national media, and accounts from residents like Miller, all worked to blur the modern aspects of this coastal destination. Visitors to Big Sur sought a glimpse of the frontier that had supposedly closed four decades earlier, but ironically, the frontier they encountered derived at least in part from government regulations that responded to California’s phenomenal growth.

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Jeffers’s Country

Big Sur ◽

10.1525/california/9780520294417.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Shelley Alden Brooks

Keyword(s):

Extractive Industries ◽

Small Scale ◽

The South ◽

Big Sur ◽

Mode Of Life ◽

Monterey Peninsula ◽

Rapid Pace ◽

Early Century ◽

Modern Technologies

Chapter 1 opens with poet Robinson Jeffers’s introduction to the Big Sur landscape in 1914. Big Sur's rugged setting had long served as an obstacle to settlement or exploration, so that in the early century this coastline was sparsely populated and without modern technologies. Human endeavors had produced few permanent edifices, despite centuries of habitation and decades of small-scale extractive industries. The Spanish name for this coastline, “el sur,” represented how most people viewed the area in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even into the twentieth centuries: as a rather inconsequential place that existed to the south of the more manageable—and profitable—Monterey Peninsula and its surrounding valley. Not until the 1920s, when highways and commercial tourism proceeded at a rapid pace throughout the country and Jeffers’s published verse on Big Sur gained popularity, did Big Sur’s isolation and underdevelopment become recast as a great asset. This chapter examines how Jeffers’s approbation of locals’ archaic mode of life helped to establish the sense that nature’s elemental forces and Big Sur’s inhabitants could together produce the most appealing landscape.

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