Nowhere is our real home … Community and Identity in the New West

From Henry Miller Memorial Library

A new speakers series exploring how developing areas in the West can maintain their wild character in our “virtual age.”

As you read this, it’s a sunny late-March weekday morning here on the coast, and approximately 85 cars are parked along Highway 1 near Big Sur Station.

It feels like July, but it’s late March.

If there was any doubt, it’s official now. The world is hip to Big Sur. The genie’s out of the bottle.

And this increased popularity, as we all know, brings with it a whole host of challenges affecting the land the visitors and the residents.

Workers’ housing. Short-term rentals. Traffic congestion. Public access curtailed. Clogged up vistor’s parking. Garbage in the wilderness. The commercialization of neighborhoods. Drones. (Yes, drones.)…

If you are concerned about these issues and what Big Sur will look in five, 10, 25 years, we encourage you to come to the Henry Miller Library on April 3rd at 4 pm.

We’ll be launching our new speaking series,
Nowhere Is Our Real Home:
Community and Identity in the New West.

Across the summer, some of the country’s most thoughtful conservationists, historians, and naturalists will talk about how developing areas can maintain their wild character in our “virtual age.”

Our inaugural speaker will be David Gessner, award-winning author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West and nine other books.
David will discuss his own “post-regionalist philosophy” about what home and its relationship to the wild might mean now, using Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Wendell Berry as touchstones.

Future speakers include Kenneth Brower (above; June 5th, Not Man Apart), Malcolm Margolin (July 31st, Life in a California Mission: Monterey in 1786), and Don Usner (Aug. 7th The Natural History of Big Sur).

More speakers will be added as the spring turns into summer. To learn more about this series, click here.

To RSVP for David’s talk on April 3rd please visit the library website. This talk is by donation.
Welcome!

Henry Miller Memorial Library | http://www.henrymiller.org | 831-667-2574