A couple of week-ends ago I cajoled some
family members into visiting the mission at Carmel, or San Carlos Borroméo de
Carmelo Mission. Looking like something
plucked from a Mediterranean hillside and plopped down in California, the
Mission is a reminder that California isn’t as “new” a place as we’re often tempted
to think. The labour by Native Americans
which went into building and maintaining the missions under Spanish rule marked
the end of an earlier era in our state’s history, one in which the pre-Contact population
of the state numbered in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.
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| The Mission at Carmel |
Visiting the mission reminded me of California
Forever, a two-part film (airing on PBS) about the history of our State
Parks and their place in California today (part 1 of this post). Although not a State Park, the Mission serves
analogous purposes. People worship
there. They visit the museum to learn
about their state’s history, about their religion, about Spanish
California. People come to be
married. They visit to walk in the
gardens, to smell the flowers.
Carmel Mission made me think of California Forever because one of the
things that the film did very well was to show the extraordinary diversity of
California’s State Parks. Although at
one time or another we’ve probably all known better, I suspect that most of us
(this was the case for me, perhaps a North State bias) have an image of State
Parks as wilderness areas, preserved for their scenic value. California
Forever was a salutary reminder of the multiplicity of purposes served by
State Parks. As Carolyn Finney, a
Geographer at Berkeley, put it in her comments after the screening of California Forever at the College of
Natural Resources, the film made the point that parks don’t simply exist, they do things, they bring communities
together, they compel civic engagement, they teach, they remind, they reflect the
changes occurring around us, slowing them down and setting them in stone, in weathered
siding, in long-grazed pastures and well-used forests.
Shasta State Historic Park is a monument
to the society that grew up around mining in Northern California, and marks the
foundational years during which California was incorporated into the United
States. California Forever highlighted Colonel Allensworth State Historical
Park, an historic San Joaquin Valley town where black Americans sought to break
new ground and carve out a freer kind of life.
Angel Island State Park, the “Ellis Island of the Pacific”, was the
first destination for immigrants after they passed through the Golden Gate
(many of them during years before the landmark bridge spanned the entrance to
the fabulous natural harbour). It was
also, for too many, the place where they first learned of the active
discrimination and even hatred they would face.
Today these monuments serve as markers for our history, markers which,
some would suggest, are instrumental if we are to find our way in the
future.
But if Parks are places where we can
come together and meditate on our shared past, they generate dilemmas of their
own. In some sense, they are a microcosm
of our state: growing in population, growing in complexity, posing problems
that some would suggest we can only manage, never solve. There are the ecological difficulties posed
by the return of ever-larger number of Elephant Seals to beaches on the Central
Coast, their strict protected status almost certainly creating a puzzle down
the road for coastal communities which might see more of their coastal land
closed to access when the gargantuan seals come ashore. Snowy Plovers are smaller, posing different
spatial constraints, but the Parks are doing their best to work with
communities, trying to fence off individual nests the better to maintain access
to beaches. This, of course, costs
money, and there are those who would say that the extinction of a small bird is
irrelevant. But many more of us would
see such an occurrence as a failure of our supposedly enlightened society, a rebuke
to the conceit that we can live sustainably if not harmoniously with our
natural surroundings.
Sometimes the problems pit people
against one another. Ocotillo Wells is a
premiere off-roading site in the deserts of southern California, but borders
the spectacular Anza Borrego Desert State Park.
The “conflict” of interests is often presented as a point of division,
but I’d actually see as a triumph the fact that what we’re usually told are
irreconcilable interests are not just at the table, but have a fairly good framework
for land use in place, one which simply needs maintenance, supervision, and some
tinkering from time to time.
California State Parks also reflect a
democratic mindset. There’s no great
shortage of space to roam in northern California, and even in the Bay Area it’s
not too difficult to get to some open space at least somewhat removed from the
hustle and bustle of city life. But in a
city the size of Los Angeles, hemmed in by suburbs which extend literally
beyond the reach of the eye, it’s a somewhat different matter, and the film
documents how Angelenos are going about remaking bits of their city into spaces
which serve the same physical, social and spiritual purpose as places like Mt
Tam or Castle Crags. The Los Angeles
Historic Park and the LA River are being remade into green spaces in that
smoggiest of cities, a testament far more to community willpower than the
wasteful, soul-crushing bureaucracy that critics would have us believe characterises
the interaction of state agencies with state communities.
It seems right that the State Park system
should continue to grow, to reflect our communities and our history which,
after all doesn’t stop happening. Parks
are a very republican ideal, restricted access to land having been a
cornerstone of monarchical and aristocratic privilege, and so perhaps it makes perfect
sense, given that California was—however briefly and enticingly—itself a
republic, that we should, as Rolf Diamant (formerly of the National Parks
Service) suggested, think of continued investment in our state parks as a “refinement
of the republic”.
In California
Forever, Kevin Starr, our state’s most prolific historian, described
neglect of State Parks as suggestive of something much more significant that
budget retrenchment. The hallmark of a
society, he said in the film, is that it makes unshakeably long-term
commitments to larger intentions, irrespective of the specific paths that
different parties might wish to travel. To
fail with our state parks would be yet one more indicator that California is
increasingly a society incapable of making such commitments.
Starr is an unabashed fan of California,
and sees the state as a somewhat extraordinary civilisation, comprised of an
incredibly diverse array of people brought together by global forces. Their journeys here were often difficult and
frequently the product of injustice or inequality. Their welcome in California was often equally
unpleasant. But the California State Parks,
Starr suggested, are one of the things that hold our culture together, along
with museums and libraries. They tell
everyone’s story. They tell a collection
of stories about where we’ve come from, and another tale about our visceral relationship
to our land. These are important things.
Starr said it very well: “If we lose our
state parks it would be the equivalent of losing all the great paintings of
California...all the great poems that were written about California, all the
great novels, all the great films, all the great architectural monuments. More importantly, we lose our usable past,
the past that defines the present and the future. We’ll become a people adrift. A people not knowing who they were, where
they came from, what mistakes they made and what things they did right. We lose the essential premise of stewardship
for our culture if we lose the state parks”.
