By Nate Seltenrich / San Francisco Chronicle
You don’t have to walk from Mexico to Oregon to appreciate the California Coastal Trail, but Morgan Visalli and Jocelyn Enevoldsen did anyway. The young marine scientists spent three months last summer exploring a proposed 1,200-mile route that many consider a symbol of California’s approach to managing its coastline.
A short stroll across scenic bluffs, shifting dunes or sandy beaches is equally worthy of protection, says Tim Duff, a project manager with the California State Coastal Conservancy, the state agency in Oakland that serves as primary architect of the trail.
“Public access is not just a north-south coastal trail — it’s all of the spur trails off of that,” Duff said. “The goal of the conservancy is to maximize public access to the coast. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to get to the coast.”
Many Californians take this level of access for granted. But 40 years ago, during the flurry of environmental legislation that also gave Americans the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species acts, it was an edgy idea amid a wave of coastal development and privatization.
The California Coastal Act of 1976 reserved for the public all land below the mean high-tide mark, and required local jurisdictions to identify an alignment for a contiguous trail that would run from one end of the state to the other.
More broadly, it outlined the philosophy of land management that is still shaping California’s coastal policy 40 years later. That philosophy was built on the twin pillars of regulation and promotion, and implemented by two discrete agencies. READ MORE
