Category Archives: New York Times

January 4, 2007

WILLIAM LEININGER is not your typical environmental zealot. A Navy commander who works as a doctor at the Naval Medical Center San Diego, he is a Republican and lives in one of California’s most conservative counties, in a development of neat lawns and Spanish-style houses. His 2,400-square-foot, single-level house — “the usual Southern California design,” he said recently — is barely distinguishable from its neighbors, apart from one detail: the red-tile roof is crammed with solar panels.

Dr. Leininger, 42, is one of thousands of Californians, many of them unlikely converts to the cause of alternative energy, who have installed solar power systems in their homes in just the last year.

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January 7, 2007

WHEN he moved there from France in 1940, Henry Miller, who had grown up in Brooklyn, called Big Sur his “first real home in America.” Running from Carmel, 150 miles south of San Francisco, to San Simeon, Big Sur’s mass of tight mountains pushes brazenly against the Pacific swell. Kelp forests sway at the feet of rugged sea cliffs. Deep valleys shelter some of the southernmost redwoods. The only way through this fastness is along winding, breathtaking California Route 1.

Nearly two decades after settling in, Miller wrote “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch,” a collection of fond, philosophical sketches that expressed a nostalgia for the place born of his fear that Big Sur’s magic could only wane as more people came to visit. Certainly, summers can be a crush here, a paradise lost of RV traffic jams and overcrowded facilities.

Yet in winter, nature reasserts itself. Whales, elephant seals and monarch butterflies arrive after travels that have taken them thousands of miles. California sea otters, once thought extinct and rediscovered only in a single Big Sur cove, float among kelp beds as effortlessly as the recently reintroduced California condors soar above redwood crags.

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See what it looked like in the paper on Photographer Jeff Pflueger’s site…

December 17, 2006

LOLL in one of the pools at Pelican Eyes, a new development above the town of San Juan del Sur, on Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast: a tranquil breeze blows up the hillside from the perfect bay below, the pool’s disappearing edge merges with sea and sky, and the only sound is the rhythmic tapping of the bricklayers who are building the place — a compound of whitewashed, tile-roofed houses amid lush greenery and looking out to perfect sunset views. At the bottom is an airy palm-thatched restaurant, where cheerful waiters serve strong drinks and the patrons sit in the warm night air and talk about real estate.

This is Nicaragua as the Next Costa Rica, the sort of hopeful real estate appellation signaling that gentrification may now begin in earnest. In the last few years, as Americans on the prowl for second homes, or just an investment, have found places like the Last Costa Rica already overrun by their own kind, a boom has started in the country just to its north.

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