Thomas J. Osborne. Coastal Sage: Peter Douglas and the Fight to Save California's Shore. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Illustrations. xx + 227 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-28308-4; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-29665-7.
Reviewed by Matthew Pearce (University of Oklahoma)
Published on H-California (May, 2018)
Commissioned by Khal Schneider
Given this book’s title, one might think that historian Thomas J. Osborne has written the first biography of Peter Douglas, executive director of the California Coastal Commission from 1985 to 2011. Yet, in telling Douglas’s story, Osborne also hopes “to entice readers into thinking about and acting on coastal issues” (p. xv). In doing so, Coastal Sage attempts to show how regulators—public officials who oversee complex environmental mandates—have struggled to balance conflicting demands for natural resources in the United States.
Osborne wrote this book to educate readers about Douglas, an unknown figure to many outside of California, and the Coastal Commission, which “ocean activists” have counted on to protect California’s shoreline since the late twentieth century (p. xiii). Chapter 1 details Douglas’s early life. Douglas was born in Berlin in 1942 as Peter Ehlers and grew up the son of a Jewish mother who actively resisted the Third Reich before immigrating to Southern California after World War II. In 1954, a young Peter gained US citizenship and changed his surname. By the early 1960s, Douglas embraced “an ocean-and-beach-going lifestyle” and, in 1971, gained employment as a legislative aide to write a coastal preservation bill for state representative Alan Sieroty (p. 8). Chapter 2 provides a brief introduction to California’s approximately 1,100 miles of ecologically diverse, seismically unstable, and increasingly crowded coastline. Chapter 3 surveys California’s environmental movement, which emerged as an important political force by the early 1970s partly in response to a number of threats to the shoreline, including rampant real estate development, shrinking public beach access, and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.
The heart of Osborne’s short narrative (the book comes in at just under 160 pages) focuses on California’s Coastal Act and Douglas’s stewardship over the state Coastal Commission. Chapter 4 examines the passage and ramifications of the Coastal Act. According to Osborne, the Coastal Act declared “California’s commitment to public access to the coast” by protecting marshes, beaches, and threatened plants and animals (p. 87). Most significant, the act formally created a Coastal Commission to enforce this mandate. Any new developments along the shoreline had to obtain a permit from a community’s Local Coastal Program (LCP), whose work was overseen by the state commission. The commission had no say over developments that already existed on the coast, but it could deny any future construction that threatened wetlands, beaches, and other shoreline resources that the Coastal Act deemed a public asset. Of course, this regulatory responsibility subjected the commission to numerous confrontations with real estate developers, highway builders, and fossil fuel extractors. Chapter 5 details these conflicts by focusing on twelve case studies that occurred under Douglas’s watch as executive director. These battles—some won and some lost by the commission—include a decades-long standoff over public beach access between David Geffen and the city of Malibu, a compromise in restricting real estate development in Bolsa Chica Wetland near Huntington Beach in the mid-1990s, and contemporary efforts to limit offshore oil and natural gas drilling.
Osborne concludes his book with a short chapter on Douglas’s final years (he died in 2012 after a battle with throat and lung cancer) and a cursory assessment of his environmental legacy. Osborne asserts that Douglas was an “environmental leader,” but herein lies some of the challenges and frustrations with Coastal Sage (p. 155). Douglas published little and did not bequeath an archive of personal correspondence or writings. Thus, to get at Douglas as a historical subject, Osborne conducted a handful of interviews with former allies and opponents. Osborne also relies heavily on newspapers, court documents, and the Coastal Commission’s archives. Though valuable sources in their own right, they place Douglas at the margins for much of the book. The overall lack of material produced by Douglas, combined with notable omissions of key secondary sources on environmentalism and the state, will make it difficult for readers to interpret Douglas’s work within the context of the modern environmental movement and national regulatory efforts.
Indeed, the portrayal of Douglas and the broader struggle to preserve California’s coastline comes off as one-dimensional at times in Osborne’s narrative, which will likely disappoint many historians of California and the environment. For instance, Douglas was simply one of many individuals and groups increasingly concerned with the lack of public beach access during the 1960s and 1970s. Among the most notable figures in this movement was Ellen Sterns Harris of Beverly Hills, who, even Douglas acknowledged, played a leading role in promoting coastal awareness. Yet there is little discussion of the gender, class, and race dimensions of beach use and environmental activism in California during this period. Even Douglas’s political ideology is difficult to pin down. Originally presenting Douglas as a conservative only to transform into a liberal activist by the 1960s, Osborne goes on to categorize him as a “maverick” during his leadership of the commission. But Osborne fails to adequately define these political categories. Nor does Osborne reconcile Douglas’s “maverick” status with his “decidedly liberal” tendencies as executive director (p. 93). In all, the attempt to portray Douglas as a conventional “environmental leader” seems problematic amid contemporary efforts to write more nuanced and more diverse environmental histories.
Douglas dabbled in Deep Ecology and biocentric philosophy in his private life, but his public work required him to navigate between environmental activists, who often lamented that the Coastal Commission did not go far enough in preserving the shoreline, and conservative property-rights advocates, who believed that commission regulations placed unnecessary burdens on private initiative and free enterprise. To maintain a balance between both forces, Douglas could not be an “environmental leader” in a manner similar to John Muir or David Brower. Rather, Douglas was a consummate bureaucrat who worked behind the scenes and took to a bully pulpit only when necessary to enforce California’s Coastal Act. One wonders how his experiences compare to other regulators who have worked amid red tape, activists, and legislators to implement state and national environmental mandates.
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Citation:
Matthew Pearce. Review of Osborne, Thomas J., Coastal Sage: Peter Douglas and the Fight to Save California's Shore.
H-California, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51621
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