California Cuisine and Just Food

5. A Civic Culture of Parks, Planning, and Land Protection

5 A Civic Culture of Parks, Planning, and Land Protection Although many innovative industrial regions do not require a land base, a food district probably does. The Bay Area’s experience in land protection , dating back more than a hundred years, anchors the district both symbolically and more concretely in possibilities for creative food production and processing. Our food story therefore begins in the coastal pastures of Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge to the north of San Francisco. Long before there was an area designated as the “Bay Area,” there was “Marvelous Marin.”1 At statehood in 1850, both San Francisco and Sonoma counties argued for control over the little spot of land between them. While neither was successful, that dispute suggests, correctly, that Marin was divided: the suburban or southeastern half of the county was connected closely to San Francisco’s urban elites, while the county’s agricultural western half was integrated into Sonoma’s agricultural community to the north. Marin’s elite drew their economic strength and political power from “the city,” to which many commuted, but they also took great interest in the rural parts of the county, which they considered more or less an extension of their backyards. Although they were not professionally involved in the agriculture that dominated the western part of the county, suburban Marin residents initiated what became a statewide culture of protecting land and natural resources. Once they had gained the experience of several decades of advocating for parks in the county, civic leaders were well positioned to tie post–World War II regional planning, growth control, and environmentalism to new methods of conserving county rural lands. A subsequent generation of back-to-the-landers built on that heritage, demonstrating a new path for agriculture that could sustain working farms and ranches. 92 Chapter 5 Early Civic Environmentalists The Marin civic leaders’ first approach to land protection combined enthusiasm for national parks with a tendency to buy whatever land was threatened.2 Marin County Congressman William Kent, a leader in efforts to establish the National Park Service (NPS), Save the Redwoods League, and the state park system, advocated for a national park on Mount Tamalpais, the county’s most prominent geological feature. When that idea faltered, he donated land on its southeastern flank that became Muir Woods National Monument. Local hiking and conservation clubs— the Tamalpais Conservation Club (1912), the Tourist Club (1912), and the California Alpine Club (1914)—then worked to establish Mount Tamalpais State Park and saved the landscape from a highway and subdivision proposed in the 1920s.3 Garden club women in Marin began the Citizens Survey Committee in the early 1930s. They produced planning maps and a report designed to prepare the county for land use impacts from the pending Golden Gate Bridge. The group reorganized in 1934 as the Marin Conservation League, which has been at the forefront of Marin’s civic environmentalism ever since.4 The league identified Point Reyes Peninsula as a recreational and scenic resource and drove the county’s early efforts to protect the area.5 Following their lead, the county began to establish parks on coastal Marin beaches that were donated by the owners or acquired by public fundraising. The Marin Planning Commission pushed both the state and the county to protect additional bayside beaches and parts of the Inverness Ridge in 1943. Two years later, the first purchases for what became Tomales Bay State Park began. Marin’s land protection has always reflected the unusual wealth of those involved. It is nevertheless standard practice to puff the “selfless environmentalism and philanthropy of a few individuals” for saving the area’s natural beauty, which is fairly routinely described as wilderness.6 That ignores the agriculturalist occupants of the land and rarely acknowledges Marin property owners’ considerable interest in minimizing the supply of housing and the demands on public services in the county while maintaining the surrounding beauty. Yet the consequences of Marin’s land protection for the rest of the Bay Area have been significant, both positively and negatively. The protected lands provide recreational A Civic Culture of Parks, Planning, and Land Protection 93 opportunities for the region in gorgeous landscapes; however, Marin’s conservation has arguably intensified housing shortages in the county and shifted development pressure onto neighboring counties. With a growing portion of its land under protection, Marin real estate values rose steadily, and the county...