在一个替代马林县,一个备用计划et Earth, when you spend the day in Point Reyes, you take the Golden State Parkway up over Bolinas Ridge to the freeway interchange at Olema. Houses crowd the bluffs above Limantour Beach. There are golf courses, shopping centers and 66,000 residents.

On our Earth, in our Marin County, you drive winding Bear Valley Road over rolling hills until you reach Point Reyes National Seashore. You hike the trail to the expansive estuary of Drake’s Estero. You stroll windswept, unspoiled Limantour Beach.

How we gotourPoint Reyes is the question explored in Gerald Felix Warburg’s thoughtful, deeply researched “Saving Point Reyes: How an Epic Conservation Victory Became a Tipping Point for Environmental Policy Action.” The story has been told before, by journalist Harold Gilliam and historians John Hart and Paul Sadin, and in the 2013 documentary film “Rebels With a Cause.” What makes Warburg’s book distinctive is its native’s expertise — he grew up in Marin County — and its social science rigor. A professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, Warburg draws on archives, oral histories and interviews to guide us step-by-step through the political process that lifted Point Reyes from nature lover’s pipe dream to national park.

战斗开始于1950年代,当“island in time” — Gilliam’s description of the peninsula that hangs off Marin’s west coast and the title of his 1962 book — felt the development pressures urbanizing the Bay Area. Plans were sketched for freeways and houses. But Point Reyes’ beauty and ecological wealth spurred defenders. Chief among them was an affable second-term Congress member, Clem Miller, who successfully pushed to have Point Reyes designated the nation’s second national seashore (Cape Cod was first) in 1962.

The victory was incomplete and shadowed by tragedy. Miller died in a plane crash months later. And while the new seashore officially encompassed 53,000 acres, the federal government owned only 123 of them — and there was no money to buy more. By 1969 the New York Times was calling Point Reyes “a patchwork park in trouble.”

It’s in the second battle for Point Reyes that Warburg’s analysis is particularly acute. As the seashore fight heats up, he portrays clearly and often excitingly the “West Wing”-worthy wheeling and dealing among environmentalists, Congress and President Richard Nixon’s White House. New seashore defenders appeared, notably Katy Miller Johnson, widow of Clem Miller; she’d stepped away from politics after her husband’s death but became an effective lobbyist for the park when she saw it threatened.

One surprising note is the role Republican politicos had in protecting Point Reyes, a reminder that environmentalism wasn’t always the polarized by party issue it is today. One forceful advocate was Palo Alto Rep. Pete McCloskey. A law school friend of Nixon adviser (and later Watergate felon) John Ehrlichman, McCloskey convinced Ehrlichman that the seashore could be a winning issue for his boss. The gambit worked: It was Nixon who signed the 1970 bill quadrupling funding for Point Reyes National Seashore, helping ensure its future.

It’s compelling history, well told. Why does it matter now? Warburg argues, convincingly, that the fight for Point Reyes holds lessons for eco-activists today. You build coalitions. You expect setbacks. You remain persistent, even after defeats.

In 2023, Point Reyes National Seashore is in most ways a triumph, with 150 miles of hiking trails, 80 miles of shoreline and, last year, 2.3 million visitors. Yet Warburg also shows how islands in time must adapt to changing times. The continued use of park lands for cattle ranching — a compromise that helped establish the seashore — remains controversial. And as California’s housing crisis hits Marin County with a particular vengeance, it’s fair to ask what it says about a national seashore when only the rich can live anywhere near it.

Warburg’s book is, he writes, “a hopeful story where people of goodwill on all sides hammered a series of compromises, agreements that protected extraordinarily beautiful lands and waters for future generations.” If that sounds like a message from a planet we no longer inhabit, maybe “Saving Point Reyes” can help us find our way back there.

Peter Fish is a freelance writer.