Shaping the shoreline: Environment, society, and culture in Monterey, California

"Shaping the Shoreline" explores the social and environmental history of the American coastline through a case study of Monterey, California during the twentieth century. To demonstrate how diverse groups of Monterey residents envisioned and shaped both the physical and social contours of the coastline, the dissertation focuses on the interplay between and changes within two specific enterprises: tourism and extractive industry, primarily fisheries.; From the late nineteenth century until World War II, Monterey's tourism and fishing industries engaged in a tug-of-war for control over the coastline. At the turn of the century, Monterey's status as an elite seaside resort clashed with the labor of Chinese immigrant fishermen, as tourist developers and fishers had competing ideas of how the coastline should be developed and for whose benefit. Both tourism and fisheries expanded in the early twentieth century, but the fishing industry began to eclipse tourism during the interwar years. With lucrative markets for sardine products, fish processing plants proliferated and developed efficient technology to increase production.; The sardine industry brought prosperity to many Montereyans, including the Sicilian immigrants who dominated the fishing fleet, but the fishery was far from stable. After a boom during World War II, fishermen faced disastrous sardine catches in the postwar years. With state and federal scientists unable to develop an explanation for the sardine's demise, Montereyans turned back to tourism. Initially, they focused their efforts on Monterey's literary heritage, capitalizing on John Steinbeck's picturesque novel, Cannery Row, to revitalize the former working waterfront. The Monterey Bay Aquarium, housed in a former fish cannery, subsequently became the anchor of Monterey tourism, showcasing local ecological diversity and appealing to a growing environmental consciousness among many postwar Americans.; "Shaping the Shoreline" thus has two larger goals. First, it endeavors to explore a landscape that has received limited attention from environmental historians: the coastline. Second, it attempts to bring a more nuanced social history to environmental history by examining how race, ethnicity, class, and labor structured environmental change and how the natural world, in turn, shaped social relations.