MASTER PLAN FOR THE FUTURE 15 



minimum of disturbance of natural conditions, to afford those visiting 

 Point Lobos the maximum enjoyment of its most worthwhile values. 



The Park Commission and the Advisory Committee had before them 

 ample warnings. They had observed the fate of other celebrated landscapes, 

 whose fame and popularity had carried the seeds of their destruction. In 

 their own-state parks — in the Coast Redwoods of Humboldt County, where 

 steadily the roadside had been conventionalized and cheapened, as increas- 

 ing pressure of tourist traffic had induced "improvement" of the Redwood 

 Highway; at the Big Basin Redwoods of Santa Cruz County, the central 

 grove of which a generation ago was rich in all the attributes of the primi- 

 tive, the forest floor carpeted with ferns and flowering plants ; but which 

 today, frequented by milling throngs, cluttered with structures strangely 

 out of place among the stately redwoods, presents an aspect bare as the 

 ground beneath a circus tent. In the California Sierra, where one after 

 another the last fastnesses were being penetrated by automobile roads, 

 destruction following in their wake. Even in Yosemite, still incomparable, 

 they witnessed the steady and inexorable operation of the law of diminish- 

 ing returns, the disappearance when sought by many, of qualities which in 

 the past had given Yosemite its fame. The dictum of Robert Burns, that 



. . . "pleasures are like poppies spread, 

 You seize the flower, the bloom is sped," 



surely states the situation of some of the areas of greatest natural beauty 

 in California. 



What to do — or not to do — in a democracy, in order to perpetuate for 

 the public of today and tomorrow, in undiminished freshness, the perish- 

 able qualities of its own property? 



That was the delicate problem to which the members of the Point Lobos 

 Advisory Committee addressed themselves. Observing trends elsewhere in 

 the same field, they determined to escape if possible some pitfalls into 

 which others had fallen, to avoid some fetishes that had been set up in the 

 administering of public lands; to resist the pressure of scenic showmanship 

 which measures success in revenue or attendance; of recreational enthu- 

 siasm, which considers that piece of level land wasted which is not teeming 

 with citizens engaged in healthful and innocent outdoor sports, regardless 

 of their appropriateness to the site; of virtuosity, the aim of which is to 

 "paint the lily" or remake nature's design in keeping with the precon- 

 ceived notions of well-meaning individuals or groups, for the glory of 

 themselves and their techniques — or merely to satisfy an itch to 

 monkey with a landscape; of made-work projects, exulting in new-found 

 resources, more designed for expenditure of money than expenditure of 

 thought; of that pseudo-democracy complex which holds that if a piece of 

 property belongs to the public, they have an inalienable and limitless right 

 to use it, even if they use it up. 



Extreme as some of these things sound, they all represent tendencies 

 that have lessened the real value of public properties grouped loosely under 



■^ The rocky points mark the seaward 



margins of the cypress groves. Inland, the Monterey 

 pines form a solid covering 



