public lands

Every year that I am able I pay a visit to Big Sur, California, one of my favorite places since I was very small. I love the scenic drive up the rugged coast on the winding WPA-era highway One through the land where the mountains meet the sea. You've seen it in car commercials, and the famous chase scene from North by Northwest, and the picture in your mind, no doubt, is of the azure Pacific waters glistening in the sun as waves lap the rocky coast line below sloping Emerald meadows. As a kid I took all of this for granted, but I gradually came to realize that the ribbon of highway isn't the only feature there that is foreign to the natural landscape. The fact is that those brilliant swaths of Green shouldn't be there – and they wouldn't be were it not for the small herds of cows that regularly scour the fenced-in private ranches, allowing grasses to flourish where once there were coastal prairies and thickets of woods. The fact is that the Big Sur we have all seen in pictures and post cards for as long as we can remember is, in reality, a severely altered landscape, some of whose most iconic features are the result of large scale human-caused damage. In that sense, Big Sur, as we know it, is a perfect metaphor for the much larger environmental crisis facing the American prairies of the South and MidWest , and the way we have grown to accept the destructive agricultural practice known as “ranching” as an immutable facet of the American identity.