Fairly academic environmental history of the intertidal Bay, not far removed from its origins as the author's doctoral work at Stanford, so I'm not suFairly academic environmental history of the intertidal Bay, not far removed from its origins as the author's doctoral work at Stanford, so I'm not sure I'd recommend it for everyone, but good stuff for history nerds. I found the emphasis on property law to be a bit tedious. Speculation on water lots physically shaped San Francisco, but it doesn't seem like it directly influenced biodiversity or ecology in the Bay. People were probably going to farm oysters, mine gold, develop heavy industry, and generally fill and develop on and around the Bay shore whether or not people partitioned and sold underwater property. The links between salt and the chemical industry were unknown to me. Also the word for unseparated salt slurry is "bittern"?! Apparently etymologically unrelated to the bird.
Notes
p. 17 The Bay has drained during ice ages and re-appeared in between multiple times, and today's Bay is the largest and longest-lasting version we know of.
p. 19 He mentions that salt marshes are among the most productive natural systems on the planet, which I sort of knew, but it got me wondering how they compare to kelp forests... and I haven't found a good direct comparison. This article is kind of close (in Australia) but seems to focus on sequestration over production and may not incorporate production per unit area.
p. 25 He notes that cattle and annual grasses destroyed deep-rooted native perennial grasslands, thereby increasing runoff. Any evidence to support that (the runoff part)? Cursory search turns up many studies on grazing and hydrology generally, but mostly via abiotic effects like soil compaction, not specifically on grass species composition and subsurface plants.
p. 50 William Tecumseh Sherman on his pre-war career as a banker in the corrupt speculation boom of 1850s San Francisco: "I can handle a hundred thousand men in battle, and take the City of the Sun, but am afraid to manage a lot in the swamp of San Francisco."
p. 51 He says San Francisco was built out over the Bay so quickly that piers became sidewalks and people actually fell through the sidewalk and drowned. What did these sidewalks look like?
p. 55 If you've learned a bit about the ecological history of San Francisco (or dug a few inches into the ground in Golden Gate Park) you know that much of San Francisco, particularly the western parts of the city, were once a vast series of sand dunes. These dunes were the home of the Xerces Blue, described to science soon after the arrival of Anglo-Americans, and driven to extinction over the following 90 years by same. What was new to me was that part of the destruction of the dunes was in the service of filling in the Bay, and that California's first railroad was built for this purpose, carting sand from the dunes to the shore for fill, an ecological lose-lose.
Somewhere in this part of the book Booker also describes a rather insane positive feedback loop in which buildings built on fill would collapse in earthquakes when the fill and underlying mud liquified, creating rubble that would then be used to make more fill on more mud. Less of a feedback loop, but sediments from Sierra mining were used to create the levies that transformed the Delta from a world-class wetland to highly productive but highly vulnerable farmland.
p. 105 Anonymous farmer in the 1930s: "We are not husbandmen. We are not farmers. We are producing a product to sell." Is this why large-scale farm operators in California refer to themselves as "growers" and not "farmers"?
p. 129 Jack London's wanted to marry his childhood sweetheart, Lucy Cauldwell, a member of a prominent and well-to-do Black family in Oakland. Apparently they rejected him for being kind of a waster. I don't care much about Jack London, but this makes me want to read up on this history and who the Cauldwells were. Actually this dropped me down a Wikipedia hole and now I think I do care about Jack London.
p. 145 SFO was an oyster field, something I was thinking about as I landed there while reading this book....more
I can now say from experience that one of many excellent places in LA to read this book about the environmental catastrophe that *is* LA is the line fI can now say from experience that one of many excellent places in LA to read this book about the environmental catastrophe that *is* LA is the line for the Studio Tour at Universal Studios Hollywood, a "ride" that, among other things, shows you what it would be like to experience a massive earthquake in... a BART station. The bituminous gloom seeping from its pages was a prophylactic balm against the relentlessly inspiring video distractions that played as I waited with several hundred fellow athleisure-sporting Americans while we suffered another excruciatingly perfect California day in an effort to make the wallet-gouging we volunteered for seem worth it.
One main thesis comes in the tornado chapter: "these low-intensity intervals are nurseries of illusion about the Los Angeles envionrment and the extreme events [...] that constitute its ordinary metabolism" (p. 193). While Davis's focus was LA, he could easily have been speaking about all of California, and perhaps the American West, where equilibrium is punctuated by catastrophe at a cadence our civilization cannot accomodate without billions of dollars in damaged infrastructure and the loss of priceless lives. Every Californian should read this book for this reason: we all need to understand the powers that shape this place better than we do, from earthquakes to fires to floods. As I write this we're at the tail end of a series of atmospheric rivers that are only giving us a taste of what's possible. Davis, who sadly died last year, would undoubtedly urge us to hold on to the fear of Sacramento under water or hill towns below fire scars getting washed into the Pacific, to not forget, and act with respect for these powers by rezoning and not rebuilding in flood plains and steep coastal chaparral, but I suspect he would hardly be surprised at our failure to exercise such restraint.
The chapter on catastrophe in fiction was particularly amazing. The quantity of racist invasion stories was astounding to me, not for their racism, necessarily, but just for their volume and redundancy. I wish Davis had also done something to guage the impact of all these works. Presumably they sold, given how many were published, but how did they do relative to other kinds of fiction? I'm sure you could produce a similarly damning list of vitriolic nonsense today, and I'm sure someone's reading it, but are a lot of people reading it? Is it influential?
I'll stop. If you live in California you should read this book, and if you want a place to start, try "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn", which should be required before serving in municipal government in this state.
Notes
p. 15 tocsin (n): an alarm, supposedly derrived from Middle French for "touch a bell"
p. 101 Richard Minnich: "Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he'll never be arrested." As with so many problems, proximate causes are never more important than the context that allows them to do excessive damage.
p. 127
Beneath the flaming hills, the Pacific Coast Highway was paralyzed by a hopeless tangle of arriving fire trucks and fleeing Bentleys, Porsches, and Jeep Cherokees. Hundreds more trekked out on horseback, by bike, or on foot. A few escaped on roller blades. Three hundred sherfiff's deputies were brought in to guard against looting. The chaotic exodus was oddly equalizing: panicky movie stars, clutching their Oscars, mingled with frantic commoners. Confronted once again with its destiny as a fire coast, Malibu replied in the vernacular. "This is hell, dude," one resident told the Los Angeles Times.
p. 128 He recounts an astounding story in the Malibu Times (that I can't verify b/c it's not online) about two housewives who fled the fire in kayaks with their dogs... and left their maids behind.
p. 201 After Barbara Schoener was killed by a mountain lion in the Sierra foothills and the lion was also killed, a fund established to support the cub of the lion apparently raised more than twice as much money as a fund established to support Ms. Schoener's children.
p. 205 Gary Snyder: "the wild is perhaps the very possibility of being eaten by a mountain lion." I feel that, but it's rooted in the 19th century European notions of the sublime, like so much of how we think about the non-human world.
p. 206 He tries to claim that there are more mountain lions in LA than in Yellowstone. https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature... claims there are only 34-42 lions in Yellowstone... so that claim is probably accurate, at least at the county level.
p. 234 Davis retells several amazing tales of predatorless prey run amok, one of deer on Mt. Hamilton that I'd love to learn more about, but another WAY more insane one about mice overrunning the town of Taft in the southern San Joaquin Valley, where mice clogged mechanical harvesters used against them and supposedly killed a sheep. Sadly this draws from a single source that isn't freely available.
p. 250 this chronicle of rat- and ground squirrel-borne plague bears comparison to COVID. Plague got a lot of press and resulted in some extreme extermination campaigns, but deaths were in the low to mid triple digits, spread over 30 years, compared to 96,000 Californians dead from COVID in 2 years. From the perspective of our pandemic, or even the 1918 flu pandemic (29k Californians killed), this isn't exactly a disaster on par with quakes, fires, and floods. Still, it's not impossible that plague could jump from squirrels to people again. How would our favorite ecosystem engineers fare then?...more
With one large caveat I'll get to below, this was a wondrous and detailed account of four of the most iconic trees of present California's built envirWith one large caveat I'll get to below, this was a wondrous and detailed account of four of the most iconic trees of present California's built environment: redwoods, eucalypts, citruses, and palms. Did you know that the General Sherman giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park was initially named the Karl Marx by 19th century utopian socialists who had occupied the area? Or that Southern California's skies were engloomed by the black smokes of smudge pots lit to protect orange groves from frost long before the same effect was achieved by car exhaust and heavy industry? I did not! I feel like I know slightly more than the average Californian about our dendritic neighbors, but I certainly found this particularly human lens on their uses and misuses enlightening.
And, of course, also alarming and depressing. Farmer takes pains to illuminate the hubristic, bigoted, and often flagrantly racist ideologies that enervate most Western interactions with trees in California, on all sides of our many divides. Magnificent redwoods were superlative lumber to harvest, awe-inspiring curiosities that could earn a quick buck, and quasi-religious totems to preserve in perpetuity, but always objects of some Western mania. Likewise, eucs were variously instruments toward a horticultural utopia, financial investments, and invading barbarian outsiders to be evicted, if not murdered, and Farmer quotes numerous sources that make the analogies to human opinions of other humans very, very explicit. Largely, his own perspective is fairly balanced, though certainly tending toward the live-and-let-live side of the native/invasive divide.
Which is why I was especially disappointed by the omission of oaks, and not just because oaks are ubiquitous and distinctive in our state, or because I am a California native plant enthusiast who lives in a town called "Oakland." Specifically, oaks would have provided Farmer a way to escape his distinctively European viewpoint and discuss a human relationship with trees that extends far beyond the arrival of Europeans in California (Spanish or English). Oaks were a staple wild crop for generations of Californians prior to the arrival of the Spanish missionaries, tended with careful burning and harvested with care in a way that Westerners did not and largely do not understand or appreciate as agriculture. Oaks impressed our Western forebears for different reasons, evocative of the gnarled branches in remnant English forests and dripping with epiphytes like southern live oaks, and inspired many names (Oakland, Hollywood, Paso Robles), and, in many parts of the state, oaks remain prized backyard and street trees. Anyone who has taken the time to investigate the ways of other organisms in California will quickly recognize that oak woodlands sustain a more vibrant and diverse set of denizens than any redwood grove, and will appreciate the wild ingenuity in their ability to survive in situations varying from coastal bluffs to desert ridges to alpine cliffs. To me, oaks symbolize adaptation and not subjugation, and the people who appreciate them are those with a vision for these lands that exceeds quarterly profits, or even the earnings of a lifetime. They would have made the perfect subject for a final chapter that surveyed the preceding chapters from a different viewpoint, one from which he could have looked forward, too, as oaks survived California's shift from a wetter climate to our current dry one, and will undoubtedly survive a return to even drier conditions in the future. In an otherwise excellent history, this oversight seems glaring....more
Some required retroactive expectation management: Marc Reisner was a journalist, writing for a general audience. Much like Charles Mann and Pollan andSome required retroactive expectation management: Marc Reisner was a journalist, writing for a general audience. Much like Charles Mann and Pollan and other pop-non-fiction writers from the journalistic world, he was less concerned with thorough documentation than he was with persuasion and exposition (even though few things are more persuasive than accurate documentation and logical analysis). With that in mind, I should not have been so utterly enraged by the nearly complete absence of direct citations in this book, despite numerous facts, figures, and yea, quoted dialogue included. Reisner was writing without the benefit of Endnote, after all, and he was a well-respected, tweedy-looking academic, so I should just trust him, right?
Some intriguing propositions:
Teddy Roosevelt personally colluded with the city of Los Angles, the Reclamation Service, and the Forest Service to destroy the irrigated communities in Owens Valley for the sake of LA.
I guess the fact that TR's brand of environmentalism was way more utilitarian than most people think isn't exactly news, but the fact that his utilitarianism extended to provisioning a metropolis like LA was a bit surprising.
Irrigated agriculture in the American West was (is?) supported by a welfare state.
Apparently it's ok for the state to pay farmers in Ohio not to farm while practically giving away subsidized water to giant agribusiness conglomerates owned by oil companies in California, but universal healthcare is a waste of money and would never work. At least I know I'm free! Just not free to eat wild salmon.
Damming and hydropower in the Pacific NW was instrumental in WWII b/c electricity (and lots of it) are required to produce aluminum for planes and plutonium for A-bombs.
Reisner basically asserts that the US might not have defeated the Axis if it weren't for northwestern hydropower, which is a pretty amazing idea that would have been even more amazing with some supporting evidence showing increasing electricity generation and aluminum production in the US, Germany, and Japan during the war years. Should I read Richard Rhodes?
In addition to the citation thing, there were also these surreal moments of anti-Irish racism, like this description of William Mullholand: "[His] face is supremely Irish: belligerence in repose, a seductive churlish charm" (p. 58). Seriously, find a Japanese farmer who's "cunning and inscrutable" and you'll just about have me pegged, Marc! I might have to slam some Jameson and karate chop you to death! Maybe it's petty of me to go all ad hominem on a dead environmentalist who clearly, despite lack of citation, knew more about the history of water in the West than I ever will, and yes, the stereotypical Irish American is himself racist and perhaps anti-Irish bigotry is so outdated and comical that the Simpsons were able to repeatedly employ it to great comedic effect over a decade ago, *breathes* but c'mon, this kind of crap isn't appropriate in a respected work of non-fiction. Even from the 80s.
Overall, if I swallowed my aforementioned misgivings, this was a fascinating and engaging history of water in the West. I was both intrigued and impressed by Reisner's unwillingness to impose some kind of grand theory on it all. The events he depicts seem mostly driven by greed, incompetence, petty competition, and simple climactic contingency. I never got the sense that he was driving toward some absurdly reductive single flaw in our culture. Water use in the West is messed up, and this book is mostly about how it got that way, not why. For all its reputation as an environmentalist fire-starter (to mix metaphors quite horrifically), though, I was surprised at how little doomsaying Reisner indulged in. Not until the very end does he start talking about silting reservoirs and salting the earth. I should also say that despite the lack of citation, the bibliography looks great! I wonder if the interviews he conducted have been archived anywhere.
An adequate history of the district, but fairly uncritical. Depicts almost zero controversy, which seems highly improbable. No land deals gone sour? WAn adequate history of the district, but fairly uncritical. Depicts almost zero controversy, which seems highly improbable. No land deals gone sour? What about dog people vs. bird people, or eucalyptus people vs. native plant people? What about the repeated efforts to allow mushroom picking on EBRPD lands that have been consistently rejected? Seems to me there are a lot of interesting land uses issues that went uninvestigated. EBRPD is a magnificent achievement and a treasure to those of us who live in the East Bay, but I think the author was a bit too eager to depict a government agency as some kind of plucky hero....more
As a (very amateur) student of American environmental thought and admittedly inexperienced when it comes to history, it's difficult to view this book As a (very amateur) student of American environmental thought and admittedly inexperienced when it comes to history, it's difficult to view this book critically. Cronon argues so clearly and so thoroughly, and so concordantly with my ecologically-informed mindset, that it's easy to forget he's arguing at all, rather than simply stating the facts. But he is trying to make a point: that the ecological changes in New England during the colonial period were largely due to the cultures of the people present at that time. Superficially, this seems obvious: a white guy replaces a forest and deer with a field and cows, creating a very different kind of scene, but forests and fields have intimate connections with the surrounding landscape, and substituting one for another has implications far beyond line of sight.
I think what I liked most about this book was how apolitical it was. Cronon presents the Indians and the Colonists as two separate people with different mindsets and established practices that result in different ways of interacting with the physical world, and yield radically different ecosystems. The connection between an abstract concept like property and an ecological phenomenon like watershed drainage is really interesting, mostly because I just never studied this stuff in school (wish I had now, of course). We learned about notions like Manifest Destiny in high school, but ecology rarely attempts this kind of integration.
Notes
"Our project must be to locate a nature which is within rather than without history, for only by so doing can we find human communities which are inside rather than outside nature." (p. 15)
This is an interesting ulterior motive, ostensibly one that Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry have been pursuing for their whole literary careers, and one that traditional conservationists generally don't value. Part of what makes it difficult to understand is that we generally define "nature" as that which is outside of the human domain, i.e. things humanity did not create or at least does not control. Bill McKibben argued that the atmosphere stopped being "natural" when humanity began influencing it (he defined nature as "the world apart from man"). But Cronon, Berry, and Pollan adopt a view that is more difficult and more accurate: that whatever nature is, it is not apart from man. Rather, nature encompasses man.
p. 20 Cronon mentions off-hand that sassafras was sought as a cure for syphilis. An extremely cursory search supports the assertion, and debunks the plant's curative properties. This sounds like the making of a Bulwer-Lytton entry: "Two liters of root beer had done little to assuage my crippling syphilis."
p. 39 Got me wondering whether "alewife" referred to shad or bunker/menhaden, or something else altogether. Turns out they are all different. Alewife is Alosa pseudoharengus, American Shad is Alosa sapidissima, and bunker (Atlantic Menhaden) is Brevoortia tyrannus. They are all herring, but only the first two are anadromous.
p. 44 It's amazing that men and the meat they hunted provided more than 50% of the food for northern New England Indians. The Ohlone Way suggested that Indian men in the Bay Area provided very little nutrition compared with the acorns and shellfish gathered and processed by women. I see a lot more shellfish and acorns in my wanderings, so I wonder how accurate the New England figure is.
p. 49 Indian fire practices are pretty interesting. How long had they been doing it? Was it sustainable simply because of low Indian population densities?
p. 80 I realize this point about Indian happiness is ancillary, but I'd still like a little supporting evidence, particularly relating to the happiness of modern hunter-gatherers. How do we know they're happy?
p. 112 this discussion of white pine depletion made me want to read a similar book on the post-industrial historical ecology of New England. I wouldn't say white pines were particularly abundant in the post-colonial woods of my neighborhood, but they were certainly there. What are the good sources on the re-wilding of New England?
p. 133 "Individual wolves that were particularly rapacious might have an unusually high bounty placed on their heads: thus, New Haven in 1657 offered five pounds to anyone who could kill 'one great black woolfe of a more than ordinarie bigness, which is like to be more feirce and bould than the rest, and so occasions the more hurt.'" There are at least 5 awesome band / pub names in there. ...more
This is pretty much an issue-by-issue history of environmentalism in the Bay Area, starting with John Muir and Olmsted. If you're like me and you findThis is pretty much an issue-by-issue history of environmentalism in the Bay Area, starting with John Muir and Olmsted. If you're like me and you find the amazing abundance of nearby open space one of the many blessings of living here, this is an interesting read. Pretty much every park, every hillside, every tree not growing in someone's yard that you enjoy around here exists because someone decided it should. And not only that, but they decided it should be open to everyone, which is a pretty amazing thing.
My main caveat with the book is that Walker is unable to repress his political leanings (way left), and often makes incredibly charged claims without presenting evidence. He does, of course, cite thoroughly, but if this is a book for laypeople, I think he should back such claims up with evidence in the text. For example, on p. 240 he writes, "The richer and whiter people are, the better able they are to insulate themselves from factories, pollution, and toxics." Few would dispute the correlation, but the implied causation between race and geographic power demands proof, at least for people like me who aren't social geographers or political economists.
That said, I found many of his comments about class to be enlightening. I hadn't realized that much of the open space preservation in the Bay Area begins with the wealthy, who like their views and have the political might to preserve them AND keep them open for the general public. The differences between wealthy and working class uses of open space is also interesting, and the conflicts between wealthy and working class environmental movements.
I was also really intrigued by his early point that simply the topography of the Bay Area does not explain the widespread conservation that has happened here. I have always wondered whether being able to actually see mountains and forests in the distance influences the local land ethic, but Walker rightly points out that LA has, if anything, more natural beauty, and yet it doesn't have nearly the same kind of open space. I wish he'd gone into that more. A historical comparison of environmentalism in the two regions would be fascinating....more
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