Signifying; Warning, This Is an Environment

This is one of a continuing series of posts about signs and what they tell us — which isn’t always exactly what they were intended to say.

Here in California, we have at least one excellent law: You can’t own the beach.

From San Ysidro, just this side of the Mexican border, to the Oregon border, just north of Pelican Beach 840 miles away, the edge of the ocean is public land.

Sometimes that public strip narrows to a thin boundary, with large cities and towns of every size crowding along it, but no one can (legally, at least), claim the beach for private use or exclude anyone from access, although there are plenty of rules about what you can and can’t do on particular beaches.

I could easily devote some number of years here to writing and photographing ONLY the sights one finds along that enormous expanse of ocean. Those cities and towns have ports, harbors, highways, high rises and stretches of mansions. There are estuaries, wetlands, craggy cliffs, sand dunes, lighthouses and … an inexhaustible number of things.

In 8 years of blogging, I’ve scarcely touched on the coastline within a few miles of where I live. Here’s The Counselor on Ocean Trail, a favorite walk of ours.

This is the view from the north end of that trail.

The Pacific coast varies in an indescribable number of ways, north and south, as I said, not only the landforms but the flora and fauna differing enormously from one area to another. The coast looks entirely different 500 miles to the north on the edge of Redwood National Park.

Any picture taken along the coast makes the same point: from Imperial Beach to Oceanside to Pismo Beach, San Simeon, Big Sur, Crescent City … they’re all fascinatingly different.

Many of the species that inhabit these coastal zones are extremely site-specific, and live nowhere else on earth. One example is butterflies. The Palos Verdes blue butterfly exists solely in the particular climate and vegetation of our immediate area. Rare? I’ve never seen one. 20 miles to the north, the range of the El Segundo blue butterfly is a similarly tiny stretch of duneland squeezed between a city, an oil refinery and one of the world’s busiest airports. Good luck, Blues.

There is, though, one constant and universal fact that applies to nearly every inch of our precious border of coast: It’s threatened. Erosion, development, pesticides, herbicides, wastewater, drought, flood and climate change challenge the survival of species and environments that depend on a precarious balance of conditions to survive there.

Therefore, among the signs admonishing you (and your pet) about what you may and may not do with regard to swimming, building fires, bicycling, skateboarding, hang gliding, smoking, consuming alcohol or whatever else, you see signs like this one along that coastal Ocean Trail of ours:

Got it. Great. Thanks for the warning.

I don’t typically write this much about a sign, but there’s something ironic about the fact that we have to warn humans away from a large portion of our protected public land. It’s not just true along Ocean Trail, but everywhere from the slopes of Mt. Katahdin in Maine to Washington’s Hoh Rainforest. We establish preserves, monuments and parks, construct roads, bridges and trails so that people can go there and delight in them, and then immediately start defining certain areas because, oops, it’d be okay if one or two people a year walked there, but not a thousand or ten thousand or — at the really popular places — a million.

We’re the problem. In the past year, as I’ve written about the 100th anniversary of the U.S. National Park Service, I’ve been thinking a lot about the culture of “nature” we’ve created. I consider it possible that the national parks and the notion of paving roads to and through them, accompanied by hiking trails, campsites, lodges and snack bars has caused all of us to forget something:

We’re always in nature, not just when we finally set foot on Bright Angel Trail to descend into the Grand Canyon.

We’re animals, after all. Although we’ve paved over and built on a lot of the “natural” world we live in every day, it’s still “in” nature. We never stop being animals; the world never stops being part of the natural world.

We forget that, and feel we must shift gears to go from “non-natural” to natural mode. Once there, we have to be told not to walk or ride our mountain bikes or ATVs through the world’s only existing Palos Verdes blue butterfly habitat.

Up go the signs and fences. We understand signs and fences. Our neighborhoods are full of them. What we ignore is that “nature” is something we’re part of all the time, not just when we put on the hiking shoes and stuff a couple of water bottles into the backpack before driving to the trailhead parking lot where we think the natural world starts.

This, I think, is the harbinger of one of the 2018 blog post themes. Not all the time, occasionally: What’s “natural,” and do we have to go somewhere special to experience it?

Happy hiking.

© Brad Nixon 2017. “Animals” sign © Marcy Vincent, used by kind permission.