76-03-B1
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Running Fence[edit]
Transcript[edit]Would a piece of white nylon in the ocean disrupt the environment. Not likely, but it caused a furor in California. I'll be right back. It was only up for two weeks in September, but thousands of Americans saw it from automobiles (and a few from airplanes), and probably millions more saw it on the evening news. It was called "Running Fence", and that's just what it was: a white nylon fence, designed by the Bulgarian-born artist Christo Javacheff (YA-VA-CHEFF). It snaked its way westward for twenty-four-and-a-half miles over the gentle farmland of Northern California's Marin and Sonoma Counties to the headlands above the Pacific Ocean. There, it dipped down and disappeared beneath the waves. Christo, who sold two-and-a-half-million dollars worth of his own drawings and sculpture to pay for building and taking down his "Running Fence", is what is called a "conceptual" artist. Last year, he strung a bright nylon drapery across a canyon in Colorado and draped several miles of Australian cliffs. People will argue whether all of this is "art". And, though I didn't see "Running Fence", some who did tell me it was a beautiful sight. While the artistic arguments go on, most can agree it was an impressive job of engineering. It took some 400 workers to erect the more than 2,000 steel poles that held 165,000 yards of nylon. Christo had to go through 17 public hearings and a 450-page environmental impact report. The legal tangle, including three sessions with the state Supreme Court, involved more than $300,00 in legal fees. Two weeks after it went up, "Running Fence" began coming down. "This is the secret of the fence," he said. "It goes up like the mysterious black tents of the Sahara nomads and comes down again. We give the poles, the wire the fabric to the ranchers (some 59 landowners had given permission for it to cross their land). The land returns to its original state. The fence exists only in memories and in a film and a book being made of the project," —UNQUOTE. That's not the way the California Coastal Commission sees it though. They were the only group which refused Christo permission to build his fence. They had commanded him to stop the fence 1,00 yards inland from the ocean — the width of their jurisdiction. Christo ignored them on the grounds that his fence wouldn't damage anything and would be gone two weeks later. So upset were the commissioners, though, that even as the fence was being dismantled, they sued for damages. Some other states are considering establishing coastal commissions such as California's. It was created in 1972 by a statewide ballot initiative. Its purpose was to prevent California's thousand-mile coast from being harmfully overdeveloped. In the process, the Commission gained control over virtually all private property within 1,000 yards of the coast. It has the power to tell landowners what they may or may not do with their own land, but it does not have powers of eminent domain to acquire and pay for the land and, of course, it leaves the taxpaying to the owners. Some of the Commission's decisions have been sound ones; others have been worthy of comic opera bureaucrats. One, reported recently in a San Francisco newspaper, was a ruling that the owner of a beach house who had leveled the sand dunes in front of his house could have a retroactive permit to do so, provided he first restore the dunes to the way they were before he leveled them! And, speaking of fences, the Commission debated for 30 minutes recently on the color a landowner should paint his fence. They finally decided it should be "neutral". So much for sanity-by-the-sea in California. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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