A Last Great Place : The Nature Conservancy has come with no-nonsense ways to enjoy the Nipomo Dunes without ruining them.

It’s a tricky thing to write enthusiastically about a special place like the Nipomo Dunes area. It’s probably the most beautiful wild place left on the Southern California coast--and a temptingly short drive north of here. But if I tell my readers that, they’ll want to get in their cars and go there. Or worse, get in their dune buggies and overrun the place.

The Nature Conservancy, a Washington-based international organization with strong programs in our state, has been wrestling with this kind of problem for 40 years. Recently, the group designated the Nipomo Dunes one of the Last Great Places. And they’ve come up with some no-nonsense ways to resolve the dilemma of how to enjoy the place without ruining it.

This weekend, up the coast between Vandenberg Air Force Base and Pismo Beach, you can check out how--in cahoots with the California Department of Parks and Recreation--they have made it possible for us to enjoy this LGP. Provided you are willing to play by the rules going into effect beginning Sunday.

Ken Wiley, area manager for the conservancy and spokesman for the Nipomo Dunes visitors program, bypassed all the usual environmentalist talk about bio-regions and preservation of endangered species. He got right to the point.

“It’s part of the future,” he said, “and the job is to incorporate real world and human uses.”

Since off-highway vehicles are a part of the real world of sand dunes, he’s cut a deal with the adjacent Pismo Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area to allow dune buggies in specific areas north of Nipomo Dunes, rather than prohibit buggies altogether.

Don Patton, superintendent of the Pismo Dunes area, spoke of the deal as “a cooperative venture” between his constituency of dune buggy enthusiasts and the Nature Conservancy in order “to protect a very special place.”

A similar arrangement, limiting the area local horse enthusiasts will be using, also goes into effect the same day. I wondered what kinds of problems such animals could cause, but then recalled that they tend to eat the sparse and fragile dune grass--about the only naughty thing a dune buggy doesn’t do.

If you’re ready to stroll along the most scenic parts of the Nipomo Dunes, special boardwalks have just been installed. This is because two-footed animals can do as much damage tromping around randomly as four-footed or four-wheeled beasts.

Some readers are going to be thinking by now that all this is rather restrictive of their freedom to enjoy nature. Well, that cuts two ways. We are often happy to hear that this oil company or that real estate developer has been “held in check.”

In the geological area known popularly as the Nipomo Dunes, the land owners have actually volunteered to live by the same rules as you and me. This is a novel development inasmuch as they own the land. They have banded together to bring in the Nature Conservancy as a sort of “property manager.” The conservancy’s “deal” with the owners of this 18-mile-long strip of shore north of Point Conception is to manage it as a “working model for large scale ecosystem conservation . . . where appropriate human activities are encouraged.”

The conservancy is doing this with oil company land (Union and Mobil), and even Air Force land (Vandenberg). Their other partners are the U. S. Bureau of Land Management, California Coastal Conservancy and Santa Barbara County Land Trust.

The military and the oil companies are doing business mainly on one corner of their turf. So they have hired someone to tend the rest in an eco-friendly manner? Unorthodox, from a conventional environmentalist’s viewpoint perhaps. Some would say a pact with the devil. Some would reject the cash some of these landlords have contributed to the conservancy’s worldwide operations over the years.

But the flip side is that the landlords--just like you and I when we are on the Nipomo Dunes--have agreed to mind their ecological manners forever more.

This concept has been extended, rather quietly, to seven other “Last Great Places in America.” The Nature Conservancy has management deals with public and private landowners in places as diverse as the Florida Keys, the barrier islands of Virginia, Block Island in New York (which is the East Coast equivalent of our Point Conception) and the tall grass prairie of Oklahoma.

At this point in my story, if we were on TV, you’d begin hearing the soundtrack playing “America the Beautiful’ in the background and there would be a swooping aerial shot of all these emotionally charged vistas.

Here, we don’t have to settle for television; we have access to the real thing--the best of the last great places right up the coast. And thanks to a band of environmentalists, landowners and California parks people, it looks as though it will endure. Even if we all drive up and look at it.

* FYI

In planning a visit to the Nipomo Dunes, call to check about hours and entrance rules--545-9925. For information on the adjacent state vehicular recreation area, call 473-7230.