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

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.

The Influence of the Counterculture, Community, and State

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.

Nature’s Highway

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.

Jeffers’s Country

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.

Open Space at Continent’s End

Chapter 4 revolves around the pivotal year of 1962, when Monterey County planners and Big Sur residents crafted a pioneering open-space master plan that foreshadowed the state’s commitment to coastal conservation in the following decades. Some residents balked at the idea of submitting to increased regulation, but the majority of residents understood that the government was going to have growing influence over the shape of landscapes and acknowledged the paradox that to retain a sense of the wild, residents would have to work alongside the government to determine viable residential and tourist features. Together, residents and Monterey County officials helped to secure in Big Sur a landscape quite distinct from two other notable California destinations: the rapidly commercializing Tahoe region and the newly established Point Reyes National Seashore. By accommodating a spectrum of visitors while restricting the numbers who could settle here, Big Sur locals and county officials secured the appearance of a democratic landscape long associated with the West, while, in fact, creating an increasingly exclusive landscape more representative of contemporary California.

Defining the Value of California’s Coastline

Chapter 7 argues that in the 1980s, as California dealt with the financial impact of Proposition 13, and the federal government called for reduced-cost preservation as a growing number of Americans rejected federal land acquisition, Big Sur became a successful test case for a new preservation model that relied upon private and public partnerships and novel conservation methods. The impetus behind the Coastal Act represented the growing sense among Californians that their coastline was a public commons. This 1,100-mile band of prized California landscape therefore became a flash point for hashing out shifting ideas about the role and responsibility of the government and private citizens to protect the coast, public access, and property rights. This chapter examines the work of the California Coastal Commission, the California State Coastal Conservancy, Monterey County officials, and Big Sur residents to protect the region’s natural and cultural resources. Embedded in Big Sur’s state-mandated Local Coastal Program was a form of preservation wrought by the political and economic possibilities of the late twentieth century, premised upon the cultural significance of this coastline as a last best place.

Big Sur: Utopia, U.S.A.?

The West that emerged in the postwar era—a rapidly growing, suburban, industrialized, consumer-oriented region—shaped American culture, and this culture became the foil against which Henry Miller and many others imagined Big Sur. Big Sur sat perched at the literal—and, increasingly, at the figurative—edge of the United States, and its cultural significance grew as the state continued to flourish. Chapter 3 examines the efforts from inside and out to paint Big Sur as a place apart but also as a hyper-representation of California complete with an exceptional landscape, a relatively young and flexible culture, a compelling lifestyle, and a place of perceived personal freedom. Ironically, this freedom and flexibility thrived within the zoning parameters established by Monterey County. A growing number of the diverse inhabitants of Big Sur, including the beatniks—drawn by Jack Kerouac—the artists, the professionals, and the upper-class residents, all shared at least one quality: they possessed social privilege and could use this capital to work with county officials to protect their haven from becoming one more commercialized coastal strip.

Epilogue

Big Sur is compelling not only for its exceptional beauty but also for what it reveals about Californians’ relationship to their coastline. Today, California’s coast reflects residents’ dual desire to protect a remarkable environment and a high quality of life. The world-famous coastline is integral to the state’s economy, to residents’ sense of well-being, and to the California Dream. In Big Sur, residents and local officials pioneered creative preservation measures that would later become common throughout the state. Open-space planning, conservation easements, intergovernmental collaboration and citizen activism, land trusts, and transfer development credits all addressed preservation in an age of increasingly high land values, erratic voter support, and unpredictable government funding. The epilogue examines several key people and places that illustrate contemporary economic and social realities along the Big Sur and California coast, including Peter Douglas, the late, influential executive director of the California Coastal Commission; Billy Post, a fourth-generation Big Sur resident who helped design the luxury resort Post Ranch Inn; and the idiosyncrasies of the Big Sur softball league.

Introduction

For seventy miles along California’s central coast stretches an exceptional landscape known as Big Sur. Looming mountains, precipitous cliffs, deep canyons, towering redwoods, abundant wildlife, and an expansive ocean are all defining features of this prized coastline. Big Sur’s timeless landscape compelled California legislators to cater to the growing auto-tourist demand of the 1920s by penetrating the isolated Big Sur with the Carmel–San Simeon Highway, later known as Highway 1. For over seventy-five years, this ribbon of road, etched into the Santa Lucia Mountains, has delivered millions of admirers to the dramatic Big Sur coastline. They seek contact with a landscape that possesses qualities similar to those of a national park, but they also come to Big Sur because it has long been a cultural symbol of California and the West, a place rife with meaning in contemporary society. Big Sur’s pioneering preservation model—developed by residents and local and state officials—is key to its mystique. Big Sur occupies a hybrid space somewhere between American ideals of development and wilderness. It is a space that challenges the way most Americans think of nature, its relationship to people, and what, in fact, makes it “wild.”