Maybe Government Is Obsolete
Nearly anyone showing first-time visitors around the San Francisco Bay Area has heard amazement at the vast gorgeous parklands around the Bay. How did these scenic lands come to be protected against profitable development? In the recently published, inspiring memoir, New Guardians for the Golden Gate: How America Got a Great National Park, (University of California Press), Amy Meyer, with Randolph Delehanty, answers that question. She was a key leader in the citizens movement that made it happen. She notes that “the GGNRA came into being at a time when many people believed in the power of government to do good, and when there was great optimism about the opportunities--and the necessity--for individuals to contribute to the betterment of society, the nation, and the world.”
Yes, I reflected, back in the 1970s we believed we could get our government to act in keeping with its Constitutional mandate to “promote the general welfare,” which requires clean air and water, and the protection of our natural heritage. Congress responded by passing the necessary legislation. Some people look back on that time as almost utopian, yet it was also wartime. The U.S. withdrew from Vietnam only in 1975.
Now people in high places in Washington are trying to dismantle the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and agencies established to protect our natural resource commons. They are squandering the nation’s natural wealth, pouring money into the hands of people who already have a surfeit, while taking it away from public services that benefit everyone else. We seem to have rulers now, while earlier we had government that collaborated with those governed. If so, our government has become obsolete.
As I ruminated along these lines, my mind began to fill with gloom the way lungs fill with carbon monoxide in a car rigged for suicide. Then, out of necessity (a friend visiting from far away was leaving the next morning), I took the afternoon off to go for a walk along Pillar Point Bluffs. This is one of my favorite places, not much more than half an hour south of San Francisco, yet wild, with views of pelicans at eye-level and harbor seals lounging on the rocks below.
It was a gorgeous sunny day, after many gray ones. I breathed in the cool salt air, tasting its flavors. The tide was very low and the intertidal shale reefs lay exposed, like the rough hide of huge creatures emerging from underwater. We followed the path close to the edge, carefully because huge hunks of ancient compressed sediment had fallen recently and more were about to go. To the landward side, yellow dots of blooming mustard brightened the brown dry grassland. Each time I had been here I’d wondered: Is this land protected? Today the answer appeared in the form of a wooden sign: Nature Conservation Area. The Peninsula Open Space Trust. (The Coastal Conservancy had provided $1 million toward the $3.7-million purchase of most of the blufftop land, the rest came from POST.) What a relief.
We descended to the beach sheltered by Pillar Point. The sand was smooth, we saw no human footprints. My friend, filmmaker Andrej Zdravic, hunkered down between two intertidal boulders to record the surge of water and the crash of waves. He would be far from this ocean he loves in a few hours. The recording might later appear in one of his film poems. He has worked for years to find the voices of nature--water, forest, lava pouring into the ocean--and transmit them, without words, through his films. There are ever-fewer places where natural sounds can be heard without mechanical and human intrusions. Today, this is one of them.
The tide was turning. Before long it would submerge kelp, surfgrass, and seapalm, and the boulders covered with mussels. I saw no trash in the wrack line. This beach is within the state Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, offshore waters are protected within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sactuary, created recently by the government--national, state, and local--because many groups of citizens and government officials worked together intensely to make it happen.
I realized that my mind had become befogged and polluted by the propaganda against government that has been bombarding us for years. As I drove home, we passed the tunnel under construction through Montara Mountain. Caltrans had intended to put a highway through a state park here but citizens fought for this tunnel. It took more than 30 years, but the citizens won. Last month, in a similar struggle, citizens scored another victory when more than 3,000 people showed up before the Coastal Commission to oppose a tollroad that would have cut through San Onofre State Beach.
When fear rules, our vision shrinks. Californians’ devotion to their coastal treasures has continued. Some of those who once were activists are now in government jobs. There’s a photograph in Meyer’s book of Mia Monroe as a college student volunteer in 1978. She is now supervising ranger at the Muir Woods National Monument.
Many changes required for the survival and well-being of our society and the planet can only be made when people and governments work together. Let’s participate--by going to public meetings where issues we care about are debated, by voting, and also by being willing to pay taxes. Some politicians would have us believe that taxes are evil. Perhaps that’s in their self-interest. But tax money, properly used, is essential for protecting the common good from plunder. I myself recently found it useful and energizing to reread the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address. In 1863, on a tragic battlefield, President Lincoln pledged himself and us to a sacred duty: “. . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."