Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. Dr. Tamara Venit-Shelton, Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, will be joining us. She is a will be presenting “The Road Not Taken: Big Sur and the Unimaginability of Retreat.”

California Highway 1 at Big Sur is an ideal case with which to think about how rural, coastal communities are and are not adapting to the changing climate. Since the 1980s, global climate change has made the landscape slide more freely and dramatically into the ocean, and road closures – which have always been a seasonal reality – have grown increasingly frequent and disruptive. Caltrans is investing to protect Highway 1 from crumbling into the sea with cable nets, rebar, and electrochemical treatments that fortify cliff faces as well as roads and bridges, but those efforts have not silenced debate over giving up on Highway 1 altogether. Permanently closing Highway 1 at Big Sur, if it ever happened, would be an example of an adaptation strategy that planners call “managed retreat,” the coordinated relocation of people and infrastructure in the face of changing environmental conditions. This paper is an environmental history of road closures that asks how Big Sur residents found ways to thrive, both personally and economically, in the absence of Highway 1 and probes the possibilities for life after it falls into the ocean.

See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/QgidfJXpSFqtBq8b9tfU9A