While visiting in Finland some years ago, I learned that everyone there was free to wander in the woods, no matter who owned them, to pick berries and gather mushrooms. It was expected no gates would be left open and the privacy of nearby residents would be respected. This was so different from custom and law in this country that I was amazed. Yet it’s not unusual in Europe. Footpaths traverse fields that have been cultivated for hundreds of years in Germany and elsewhere. In England, walking is a favorite sport and the right to ramble and roam is firmly established (see Rambling and Roaming Rights in England).

In lands with ancient traditions and stable, relatively homogenous populations, unwritten ground rules may suffice because they come from shared values. On California’s coast, with its rapidly growing population and changing society, more explicit standards are needed. Here too there are footpaths, along blufftops and across coastal meadows to beaches and fishing spots, used for uncounted years by people who know where to find them. In some cases, historic use may have established public rights-of-way (see Rights by Use in California).

We are also fortunate to have expanding networks of trails and much more shoreline access than people enjoy elsewhere in this country. As more and more of the open space on the coast is either developed or protected, however, public access for recreation is increasingly formalized, codified, regulated, and restricted.

This trend is part of a societal change. We have become more fearful, less open to strangers. Our social contract is frayed, our sense of a shared commons diminished. As the gulf between urban and rural dwellers widens and impoverished school systems can no longer serve their essential function of preparing new generations of citizens to assume stewardship of our heritage, rules take the place of shared values. More and more signs with ever-longer lists of rules are posted in public places. No dogs. No skateboards. No loitering. Will we eventually see the sign that reads: Everything not expressly permitted is forbidden?

As Phyllis Faber reports in her review of the state of our coast, we have come a long way in protecting our shoreline from exploitation and irresponsible development (see State of the Coast). But as we assert authority over natural places, can we resist the temptation to overmanage?

When I was a child in the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, most afternoons my grandmother would take me and my little sister to a nicely manicured park. It was boring. But when we visited a favorite aunt and uncle at their farm, I found magical places. One day I walked into field of wheat that was taller than I, and following a furrow, discovered a little pond. It became my place. I did not need to own it. It was enough that I had found it and could go there, in fact or in dreams. I told no one about it.

All children need to discover special places where they can feel free in nature, even if only for a little while—and adults do too. My daughter grew up in San Francisco without ever seeing a golden wheat field with blue cornflowers and red poppies. But she and her friends had discovered neglected pockets of wildness and made them their own. (I didn’t know that till much later.)

In the urban landscape, wildness may be found in an abandoned industrial landscape that is being reclaimed by nature. Such is the Albany Bulb, an old landfill extending into San Francisco Bay from its eastern shore. It is now part of a new state park that is of symbolic significance, for the municipal garbage dumps that used to smoulder there were catalysts for the Save San Francisco Bay movement, which sparked the Save Our Coast movement, which led to the California Coastal Act of 1972. In this issue, Don Neuwirth, chief planner for Eastshore State Park, offers his perspective on the general plan that was completed in March (see A Planner's Perspective).

The Albany Bulb was a Gordian knot. Since the landfill was closed in 1984, life had moved in without asking permission. Wild shrubbery and grasses covered rubble and junk. Homeless people settled in, then were evicted, leaving behind not just trash but artful dwellings, paintings on rocks, and sculptures made of twisted rebar and old hubcaps (see the Eastshore Park art gallery). A group of artists began to meet on the shore on weekends to paint on hunks of concrete and sculpt shapes from Styrofoam washed in by winter storms. People who came to walk and let their dogs run on the Bulb discovered these creations, were amazed, told friends, and came back to see what was new (see Coast & Ocean, Winter 1999–2000). When the park planning process began, some of these people organized as Let It Be, to plead: Don’t mess with this unique place, it’s great.

The artists and the planners did not seem able to find common ground. It’s not clear how hard anyone tried, or what might have resolved the impasse. Neuwirth writes that the artwork “will be evaluated and removed.”

Was there no way to retain this little island of anarchy (i.e., self-organization) within the larger park plan—as long as it continued to work without causing problems? Was it simply fear of what might happen that ruled it out? We preserve Native American shellmounds as part of our cultural heritage. Is this old landfill, with the life that has manifested on it, not also part of our heritage? Might we not benefit from watching and studying the exuberant and unplanned processes taking place here, at least until there is good reason to do something else? By so doing, we might learn something we need to know about ourselves.