An interview with Ron Nichols, director of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power surveys the past, present, and future of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the department's relationship with Owens Valley, restoration of Owens Lake, the role of the department and its unions in city politics, climate change and the challenges ahead.

A brief history of the phrase “Die Techie Scum,” which has been appeared as graffiti on San Francisco walls, handed out on postcards, printed on shirts, and yelled at commuters to Silicon Valley. The die [fill in the blank] scum construction has been used frequently in the past thirty years, most often when issues of gentrification are at play, such as “Die Yuppie Scum,” used in protests in New York City in the 1980s.

A partially reproduced photo album of two men, William Oliver and Henry Frick, who photographed their road trip along the Los Angeles aqueduct in 1915. The photos and their captions reveal contemporary car culture, engagement with the film industry, and interest in the origins of water in LA.

Traversing the kaleidoscope of memory of early adulthood in the San Francisco bay area, David Ulin describes the places as he remembers them with picturesque account: Andrew Molera State Park, Fort Mason, Marin Headlands, Old Waldorf, and Sutro Tower, with the particulars, and what happened to his experience of time in those places that summer of 1980. Experienced as a series of fleeting memories, joining together with others who lived there for a time. They left, and so did the author, experiencing the power of temporality or “abandon” both in and from this place.

This series of photographs illustrates both the scale and the vast strangeness of California’s Prison Industrial Complex. The prisons are photographed at night from a distance so that the lights from the prison illuminate the landscape. The light that controls the prison population stands as an indicator of state control. The visual effect references the images from the test sites of nuclear bombs, an enormous display of technocratic power reflecting a truly destructive invasion into otherwise peaceful pastoral settings.

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.

“Pacific” was the key term in the name of San Francisco's Panama Pacific International Exposition. The fair presented a vision of an increasingly unified Pacific region under the control of American economic and political power. Of course, California had been part of a coherent Pacific region for hundreds of years. Facing the Pacific was a key orientation for both the fair’s organizers and visitors. This article accompanies a portfolio of objects from the collections of the Oakland Museum of California

San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal, symbolized California’s desire for preeminence in Pacific trade and naval power. The expected reopening of an enlarged Panama Canal in 2015 is causing shippers, ports, and military strategists to reassess how the Golden State should adapt to the ever-growing importance of the Pacific world in global affairs. Such ongoing and future adaptations to the enlarged Panama Canal will continue to underscore and augment California’s perennially close ties to the Pacific world.

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.

New America Media asked young reporters in the Central Valley to capture how the drought has affected their communities in this powerful photo essay. Six photographs are presented here, each paired with thoughts from its subject or photographer.

These maps, based on research by the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s Center for Resilient Landscapes, reconstruct California ecosystems as they were in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries, and compare them to present-day landscapes. They are designed to provide an understanding of the complexity and diversity of California ecosystems, to help explain how landscapes worked, to track persistence and change, and to identify potential future scenarios. The changes made evident when the maps are compared remind us of the enormous power we have to shape the landscapes we inhabit, and of the wide range of potential options available—options to create diverse, functional, and beautiful landscapes, inspired by the past and grounded in local potential—as we imagine and then create the future.

A century after John Muir’s death, Glen MacDonald examines his legacy and argues that while Muir’s message of the value of wilderness to society might need to evolve for a twenty-first century audience, it is still relevant. For instance, Muir believed in the transformative power of visiting remote wildernesses such as Yosemite and urged everyone to do so, and his conception of nature preservation as preserving nature in a specific moment in time is now understood to be misguided. His specific prescriptions for relating to the natural world now seem old-fashioned, but his core values and his passion for getting Californians out in nature is just as important today, whether those natural places are national parks or city parks.

Chinese are leaving the Chinese city of San Francisco at the very moment that San Francisco has become, spectacularly, America’s most important Chinese city, with all the political prestige and potential pitfalls that ascendance implies. Middle- and lower-income Chinese Americans may be responding to the city’s affordability crisis by having fewer babies or by moving to the suburbs. But in an equally potent trend for the city’s future, overseas Chinese investment activity in San Francisco’s real estate is at a fever pitch. What no one doubts in San Francisco—in either the corridors of power or in the small shops along Clement Street—is that the city is now the great American Asian city. What we are just learning is how economics trumps race or ethnicity. The capital city of Asian America is becoming too expensive for many Asian Americans.

Maps have power. They can make the illegible legible and the invisible visible. They can make the obvious even more obvious and the impossible seem possible, as a map published in 2012 did when it mapped the routes of the private buses that ferry techies between their homes in San Francisco and their jobs in Silicon Valley. It shows that tech companies, in their libertarian, do-it-yourself way, have solved the transit problem for themselves, not waiting for a potentially time-consuming, representative political process to do the job. That, the author argues, shows a failure of belief in the city as a commons, a city that supports existing residents and new arrivals by integrating them into the collective spaces and systems perhaps best represented by public transportation. That there are entire networks of free transit options available to only some of the city’s wealthiest residents cannot help but create tension, especially against a background of skyrocketing housing costs and a wave of no-fault evictions.

This essay examines the song “Hotel California” by The Eagles, which has garnered legions of fans (and detractors) and taken on a variety of meanings as it has made its way around the globe. Well known in China and India, among other places, it even made a cameo appearance in the American spy plane incident of 2001, when Chinese guards asked members of the U.S. crew of a downed surveillance jet to tell them the words to this well known song from their country. The essay looks at the song’s popularity abroad, and the power of music in forming memories and conjuring a sense of place and time.

This timeline details the economic, social, and environmental impact that the Los Angeles Aqueduct had on the Owens Valley. It begins in the 19th century with the Paiute who lived in the valley, and covers local opposition to the aqueduct and attempts to sabotage it in the 1920s, controversial land sales, depletion of the valley water table, dust at the dry Owens Lake bed, the impact of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on the region, the second aqueduct and Mono Lake, the 1991 long-term water agreement, and mitigation efforts including dust control at Owens Lake and the Lower Owens River Project. The material is drawn from Stringfellow's There It Is—Take It! project.

Dana Gioia provides his accounting of his work as California’s tenth Poet Laureate. Originally delivered to the California Senate Rules Committee, this interview accounts for Gioia’s understanding of how poetry and the arts can connect with ordinary Californians in collaborative ways. Additionally, Gioia’s poem, “A California Requiem,” accompanies the interview.

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.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power public relations officer Chris Plakos describes how the Los Angeles Aqueduct works, from its headwaters near Big Springs to the Los Angeles Aqueduct filtration plant in Sylmar.

Novelist Alex Espinoza examines ways in which memory and place are tied to specific geographic sites of knowledge throughout his life as a Californian. His journey from the factory-lined streets and avenues of the San Gabriel Valley and the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area to the fields and farms of the Central Valley provide the author a change to examine what is lost and gained when patters of migration and movement give rise to new opportunities that both challenge and affirm our vast and complex identities as Californians