We need to protect the Carrizo Plain. And we don’t have much time

June 8 was the 111th anniversary of the passage of the Antiquities Act, the federal law that gave President Theodore Roosevelt and his successors the ability to preserve places like the Carrizo Plain for all Americans — forever.

For the past 15 years, I have had the good fortune to live on an inholding within the Carrizo Plain National Monument. The monument is located in San Luis Obispo County, where I have lived since I was a teenager. I started visiting Carrizo and the surrounding area in the late 1960s to observe birds of prey and to hunt. I still go hunting on the Carrizo every year.

In the 1970s, the Carrizo was a mix of heavily grazed federal land and dying ranches. Decades of overgrazing and mismanagement left the area looking like the dust bowl. In the 1980s, The Nature Conservancy began to buy up some of the ranches and dryland wheat operations. Since the Carrizo was mostly an aggregation of Nature Conservancy, federal and state lands, they created a managing partnership to protect and enhance biological resources of the Carrizo.

The Carrizo is the last significant remaining piece of the San Joaquin Valley that has not been developed. Lack of water and lack of oil preserved the area from development. Farming and ranching occurred in this dry desert area, but over time, farming and ranching was hit or miss depending upon the weather. Folks looked for oil or tried to farm, but in the end, the land was sold or donated willingly for conservation and was combined with land already in public ownership to create a landscape-scale conservation area.