This poetic environmentalist account traces the history of the Glendale Narrows reach of the Los Angeles River, the one section where its movie-set-famous channelization is thwarted by the power of the river itself. This archival retrieval considers the relationship between humans and the river across cycles of drought and flood and lays out the shifting currents of environmentalist attitudes towards California’s waterways.

Should Los Angeles continue to exist? In this anxious love letter, father and son Angelenos and environmentalists Bob and Rob Sipchen decide their city's fate. The Sipchens examine Los Angeles' history of water appropriation, race relations, riots, suburban sprawl, and urban gentrification. Despite its recent history, the story of Los Angeles that the Sipchens ultimately tell is not one of enmity, gridlock, and irresponsible development. Instead, they see in Los Angeles decreasing division and slackening car-dependence among its citizens who, collectively, endeavor to make the city a cleaner and sustainable exemplar for other mega-cities around the world. Consequently, the Sipchens are pleased to answer affirmatively.

Albany Bulb, a former landfill, is a thirty-one-acre battleground for the Bay Area’s competing progressive movements for social justice, environmental conservation, and politically engaged art. Street protest, lawsuits, regulatory jockeying, anarchist camp-ins, and art have all been deployed in the name of saving this oddball spit of land from and for its users of many species. Drawing from information collected over sixteen years of visits to the Bulb, including scores of hours of interviews beginning in 2013, this essay brings together work from an interdisciplinary team of UC Berkeley students and Bulb residents to apply techniques of ethnography, contemporary archaeology, oral history, participatory mapping, mobile apps, botany, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning to the study of the Bulb.

The habits of 19th century Californians framed what becoming Californian would mean. Bitterly for Californians today, those habits did not come with a moral compass. The California Dream had been limitless in its promise of health, wealth, and happiness in the sunshine. Today’s Californians dream differently. As California becomes less exceptional, how will we describe California when it’s not exactly “Californian” anymore? The insights of critical regionalism and Foucault’s notion of “a particular, local, regional knowledge” may provide a guide.

Seven oil paintings and watercolors from artist Hiroko Yoshimoto’s Biodiversity series. In a brief introductory essay, Ursula K. Heise notes that “Varied shapes call up the enormous range of biological forms, from a single cell seen through a microscope and the texture of a sea anemone to the complex shadings of tree foliage and flashes of birds’ wings.”

In this extended interview, Peter Kareiva, the former chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and new head of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, talks about the connections between conservation science and cities. Among other topics, Kareiva discusses the importance of communications and creating shared values to help the public understand the urgency and potential of conservation and science.

Between 1924 and 2011 there were no known wild wolves in California. This article traces the known history of wolves in California, from the sparse traces they’ve left in the historical record, to recent discovery of a wolf pack by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, as well as debates over attempts to accommodate the animals, and wolve-dog mixes in our midst

On a tour of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert, the author discusses the risks and potential benefits of large solar farms like this one. The article is accompanied by stunning black and white photographs of the Ivanpah facility by Jamey Stillings.

An interview with Alex Steffen, a futurist and native Californian. Steffen, a self-described optimist, is nevertheless deeply worried about the inertia he has found in his home state. The power of the past—which, it turns out, has much to do with the California dream—weighs on the present, preventing the changes needed to ensure that the California dream continues to evolve. The irony is that how we think about the future is a big part of the problem.

California faces major challenges adapting to and mitigating climate change. This article examines two scenarios for the future of the state’s responses to climate change and argues that the state’s history of innovation suggests a viable path ahead.

A proposal to harvest and use the water runoff produced in the San Fernando Valley watershed. By mapping the places throughout the San Fernando Valley in which water runoff is wasted, used, sunk into groundwater, or contaminated, Hadley and Peter Arnold argue that even places with water scarcity can maximize their water use with the right type of urban design.

Chacha Sikes, a “millennial” technologist and “nerd for nature,” explains the need for a new, digital, interactive California water atlas, which is now being built by hackers and makers modeled on the original California Water Atlas published in the 1970s.

This article explores the work of several photographers, including Ansel Adams, Michael Light, Robert Dawson, Lauren Bon, and David Maisel, who have turned their lens to capture the landscape of the area through which the Los Angeles Aqueduct flows. By exploring ecological issues surrounding the surface mining of the Owens Valley, the original source of the aqueduct, the article emphasizes the material and metaphorical resonances between the aqueduct and the practice of photography.

An interview with jessikah maria ross about the restore/restory project.

This essay explores the ways we talk about water and fire in California, how that discussion is shaped by larger ecological and economic concerns, and how those concerns in turn shape exurban development in the state.

The Mojave Desert in California is undergoing a boom in renewable energy, mostly in the form of utility-scale solar power plants. These projects have met with resistance from diverse groups concerned about impacts on desert landscapes, ecosystems, water resources, archaeological sites, military training exercises, and other natural and cultural resources and land uses. This paper explores the current debate over renewable energy in the Mojave in the context of the region’s broader environmental history. What do Californians want from the Mojave Desert? We conclude that residents of the state want many things from the Mojave, but it remains unclear whether a desert under increasing pressure will be able to supply all of those competing demands.

“Buddha Rush” is a profile of the artist Casey O’Connor, who in 2005 dumped hundreds of quarter-size porcelain Buddha heads into the American River near Colfax, and a portrait of the town and region's response to the discovery of these unexpected objects. What were Buddhas doing in gold country, where did they come from, and what were they worth? The press sent reporters to find out and residents imagined the town reviving with tourist revenue. Then the Bureau of Land Management got involved: the heads may have been archaeological artifacts removed illegally from federal land. An arrest was made, but the mystery remained unsolved. Then in 2006 O’Connor came forward to take responsibility; the Buddha heads were not antiques from Asia but contemporary California art. Working from interviews, media reports, and online commentary, I track the Colfax “Buddha rush” as it grew, ricocheted off histories of the Gold Rush, the Central Pacific Railroad, and Pacific-Rim immigration, and rebounded into modern understandings of Buddhism. I situate the saga in a wider history of modern-contemporary representations of and responses to the Buddha. Ultimately, this is not a story that simply reaffirms conventional notions of the cool or contemplative Buddha; the Buddha's presence and meaning may be less clear, less detached from history, power, and violence than we assume. O'Connor's work and its reception pushes us in unexpected ways toward California’s complex relationships of artistic praxis, landscape, race, class, and culture.

Using the ideas of culture theorist Walter Benjamin (among others), I examine the public response to two dams, Friant Dam and Florence Lake Dam, to illustrate the political and aesthetic reasons why Californians have very mixed feelings about the state's dams. The history of John Muir and Hetch Hetchy is also alluded to.

In the past century, California has grown a convoluted governing nonsystem that combines the hyper-democracy of the initiative process with the increasingly constricted representative democracy of the formal elective governmental system, most of it imposed by direct democracy. Particularly in the past three decades, the initiative process, driven by a radically changed political culture and reinforced by a spectrum of new technologies, has come close to overwhelming representative democracy. By their very nature, initiatives either require or prohibit specified actions of the ordinary government. As legislatures, governors, county supervisors, city councils, and school boards—and sometimes the courts as well—become more constrained and unable to cope, public frustration increases, producing yet more demands for ballot solutions. As a consequence, the past thirty years have produced vicious cycles of initiatives in which one measure leads to another. The ultimate effect of that dynamic is not just to cloud government accountability but, in the end, the accountability of the voters themselves.

When confronted by the political controversies that frequently erupt over Lake Tahoe and the surrounding mountains, most observers believe these controversies to be “normal” environmental quarrels. This essay argues that, on the contrary, they arise from our expectations about the place. The greater Tahoe area was defined, early in its history, as a work of fine art; this act of definition is the most important factor in political brawls over the region. At the same time, greater Tahoe itself has a say in its own affairs, because natural forces in the area have a powerful influence over human reactions to the place.