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The Trail Companion
Winter 2001
A Brief History of Bay Area Parks and Open
Spaces
Part 2. From the 1960s through the Present
Day
...continued.
Crisis Conservation
From the beginning, a threat to treasured
resources followed by direct action to counteract it
has been a major pattern in the open space movement.
The 60s and 70s showed an intensification of the
pattern, as the movement to save the bay exemplifies.
There was certainly no shortage of causes.
In 1968 the
Sempervirens Club responded to development threats on
Mount McAbee by reorganizing as the Sempervirens Fund
to help purchase the mountain and continue working to
protect the entire watershed of the area. The primary
means it adopted was raising funds to acquire
parklands, trees, and trails in the Santa Cruz
Mountains for Big Basin Redwoods, Castle Rock, Butano
and other Santa Cruz Mountains state parks.
Mount Diablo, long a
focus of competing pressures for development and
preservation, was endangered once more in the 1970s.
With subdivisions advancing toward the mountain, Save
Mount Diablo was founded on December 7, 1971. When
4,200 acres of the Blackhawk Ranch were proposed for
subdivision in 1974, the organization negotiated to
have 2,052 acres dedicated to Mount Diablo State Park
as a condition for development of the remainder, the
single largest donation ever to a State Park.
San Bruno Mountain was
threatened anew in 1975 when Visitacion Associates, a
major land holding company, proposed building 8500
residential units and 2 million square feet of office
space on various portions of the mountain. An outcry
for preservation ensued, bolstered in 1976 by the
listing as an endangered species of the mission blue
butterfly, an insect found only on San Bruno Mountain
and on Twin Peaks in San Francisco. The San Mateo
County Board of Supervisors, under pressure from the
Save San Bruno Mountain Committee, rejected the
Visitacion proposal in May of the same year. The
struggle ultimately resulted in the San Mateo County
Park District buying 1100 acres of land from
Visitacion and Visitacion donating 546 acres to the
County park, and 256 acres to the State. This secured
1,952 acres of open space to public ownership, the
greater part of San Bruno Mountain.
Crises in
conservation, while often accompanied by heated
rhetoric, are generally resolved in a legal, orderly
manner. In spite of the era's reputation for turmoil
the park struggles of the 60s and 70s followed the
usual pattern. An exception was 1969's People's Park
conflict in Berkeley, stemming from the local
counterculture's takeover and conversion into a park
of a vacant lot owned by the University of
California. When the University attempted to fence it
off and use force against protesters, a violent
confrontation ensued. One protestor died, and
Governor Ronald Reagan responded by imposing martial
law on Berkeley. Three years later the demonstrators
returned, tore down the fence, and essentially gained
their end. But there was little dialog and no true
resolution of the issue. People's Park is peripheral
to the story of open space in the Bay Area, but as an
instance of what can happen when extremes prevail and
minds are unwilling to meet, it teaches a valuable
lesson on how not to provide for the future.
Symbolic of the real
progress made by the late 1970s was the 1978
amendment to the Redwoods Act that had established
the National Park Service, reasserting the
system-wide standard of protection prescribed by
Congress in the original Organic Act.
New Challenges
Passage of Proposition 13 on June 13, 1978
drastically reduced tax funding of all local park
departments and regional agencies. The effect was to
swiftly curtail expansion and maintenance of park
systems, though it also slowed urban expansion as
municipalities grew cautious about extending their
service areas. Proposition 13 was a harbinger of
difficulties to come. The Reagan presidency brought a
neo-conservative movement to power in Washington in
1981, a movement for which "conservation" was not in
the lexicon. Formerly a rough consensus had prevailed
between the country's two major political parties on
the importance of protecting the environment, though
they differed in how much protection to extend and
how to provide it. This consensus was now over. A new
era of environmental confrontation began, typified by
Secretary of the Interior James Watt's incendiary
assault on the progress of the previous decades.
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