California

California has long history of taking the lead on green issues.

Amber Mace, a leading expert on ocean protection policy, a UC alum, (bio) explains the problems but also why there's great hope because of the scientific work (including at UC) is informing policy here in California and in the White House (fifth Fred Keeley Lecture on Environmental Policy UCSC 2010).

News

California Watch covers the environment See also their data center.

The California Report from KQED radio, includes ClimateWatch. It has series on How water and power interrelate, cap and trade and water supply

Aquafornia water blog.

Grey Whale and calf in San Francisco Bay. 3/12 Oregon grey Wolf returns to California, first grey wolf in 90 years, and eagles nesting near UCSC and at Big Bear in Southern Ca (found by 3rd graders on a field trip).

California fights for labels 2/12

Battery breakthrough 2/12 Electric car charging stations 3/12

A ruling by a federal court in California threatens to upset a controversial new fishing management plan embraced by environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy. 3/12

Climate Change/Air Quality

Graph of temp increase 6.12

Climate Watch is a blog that list a variety of media, including NPR's Climate Connections. Includes coverage of carbon, as well as fire and water issues. See also "fun" stats

Shrinking glaciers

CA maps including CO2 map

CA water map (reservoir levels)

California at the Tipping Point KQED 4/9

UCTV has a wide range of videos on global warming and its effects.

Climate has enormous impacts on the marine life off California, influencing its major fisheries and the abundance of krill, seabirds and mammals. Join Tony Koslow as he shows how a 60-year ocean observation program, the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (or CalCOFI) is unraveling the impacts of the El Niño/La Niña cycle and human-induced climate. UCTV First Aired: 3/15/2010 52 minutes.

Cal-Adapt was built specifically to address projections about climate change in California, designed by Google, in collaboration with the California Energy Commission, the U.S. Geological Survey, several California universities and others. NEW

California - Carbon = A Cleaner World? GOVERNOR ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER. Recorded Sep 24 2009 Link (free Realplayer download required).

The New Gridlock: Los Angeles may be facing a new kind of gridlock; not on the road, but on the electrical grid. 3/09

Solar Realities: This two-part series explores the issues, opportunities and challenges surrounding solar power in California.

The Big Energy Gamble (Jan. 2009) Can California's ambitious plan to cut greenhouse gases actually succeed? Watch now (50 mins.) PBS Nova.

California status and map 2/12.

California's Top Polluters (map).

Sea Level Rise

SJMN editorial

Ocean Protection Council has published sea level data from UCSC: Nicole Russell and Dr. Gary Griggs of the University of California, Santa Cruz, recently published a new report titled “Adapting to Sea Level Rise: A Guide for California’s Coastal Communities.” The guidebook is intended to assist state agency staff, and managers and planners in California’s coastal cities and counties in developing sea level rise adaptation plans for coastal communities.

RISE: Part I Sounding the Waters Series: RISE: Climate Change and Coastal Communities. Sea level rise, includes Bay Area. San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary on the Pacific coast of the Americas. Yet it was once much larger – 40% of its waters and wetlands were filled to create real estate. The 29-inch rise of coastal waters predicted by 2050, along with rapid river run-off and flooding due to storm surges, will reclaim some of that land. Among the areas threatened are the airports, Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Financial District. Part 2 on farmers. Part 3: Chuey Cazares has lived all of his 21 years in Alviso, a tiny hamlet jutting into the salt ponds at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay. Part of a close, extended Chicano family, with hundreds of relatives living in town, Chuey works as a deck hand on a shrimp boat off Alviso's shores.

His town's history — and its future — are defined by water. In the 1800's, farmers drained the aquifer, and the land sank thirteen feet below sea level. Then, the conversion of wetlands to salt ponds made the rivers back up during heavy rains and flooded Alviso. Now sea level rise from the Bay and more rain swelling the rivers threaten more frequent flooding. Chuey's family was traumatized by the last big flood in 1983, and although they fear the next one, they don't want to move anywhere else. Meanwhile, Mendel Stuart of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working to save Alviso by restoring wetlands. But who is Alviso being saved for? As the flood risk lessens, property values are increasing, making housing in Alviso unaffordable for Chuey and his relatives. And the wetlands conversion has driven his boss's lucrative shrimping business out of the salt ponds.

PBS NewsHour on Southern Ca (video) 3/12.

Sea level rise effect on coastal communities, especially San Pedro. 4/12 (audio)

== Water == (See also main Water page

Aquafornia water blog.

Water wars? 4/12

Clearcutting forests endangers California water supply10/11.

Nitrates in the water from farming. Nitrates in CA drinking water 5/10 can lead to Blue Baby Syndrome.

Shrinking glaciers

CA maps including

CA water map (reservoir levels)

Sacramento Delta is incredibly important in terms of wildlife and drinking water.

Toxic Episode - Imperial Valley 1 In the burning fields of Southern California’s Imperial Valley, the honey bee population is dying, and so are millions of fish in the Salton Sea. Meanwhile, the squatters of Slab City try to live off the grid and hold on to what’s left of the American Wild West. VBS travels to this apocalyptic landscape.

California Drought 60 Minutes segment 12/09

Cadillac Desert is a four-part Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) video series on the remaking of America's West through startling feats of engineering and the consequences that this manipulation of water and nature has wrought. The first three programs are based on Marc Reisner's groundbreaking book "Cadillac Desert," an examination of how water created the modern American West--the most successful "hydrologic society" in history. The series begins with the story of Los Angeles and its unquenchable thirst for water in "Mulholland's Dream." The second program, "An American Nile," tell how the Colorado River became the most regulated river in history. Next in the series is "The Mercy of Nature" which tracks the political and environmental battles that ended in California's Great Central Valley being transformed from a semiarid desert into the richest agricultural region in the world. The fourth and final program is based on the award-winning book, "Last Oasis" by Sandra Postel. It examines the ramifications of the export of America's water development expertise to the rest of the world, and shows how conservation, recycling, and efficiency offer hopeful and sustainable solutions to the world's gathering water crisis. McHenry Library VT4840. Cadillac Desert VT4840 **** History of water in the West based on Reisner's excellent book. online

From the Toilet to the Tap Today, cities around the world are shifting away from the historical focus of wastewater management (i.e. the miracle of making the wastewater go away somewhere where we can't see it) and adopting a new paradigm of re-use. David Sedlak, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, studies wastewater and spoke about water recycling at the 2009 Nobel Conference on water conservation issues.

UC research on CA drought 7/09

California Water video KQED Quest. 10/9 story on mercury in SF Bay

sewage spills April 09 video KQED Quest.

Transitions Santa Cruz water working group

A run-down urban neighborhood finds life in a dead stream. San Diego and LA.

Amber Mace, a leading expert on ocean protection policy, a UC alum, (bio) explains the problems but also why there's great hope because of the scientific work (including at UC) is informing policy here and in the White House (fifth Fred Keeley Lecture on Environmental Policy UCSC 2010).

Chemicals

List of Superfund sites

Transportation

California High Speed Rail video 2007. Audio update and interactive map 11/09. video image gallery

== History == (see also History page

Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.

America's last whaling station (shut down in 1973 by Endangered Species Act) was in the San Francisco Bay Area. (video)

Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books, her newest Infinite City, is about San Francisco.

Search Amazon for California history.

Cruzcat UCSC library book search

California Environmental History bibliography.

Ruler and Rebels: A People’s History of Early California, 1769 – 1901, by Larry Shoup, focuses on the dramatic but little known stories of early California history, written from the point of view of rank and file working people.

The King of California This meticulous narrative of the rise of the cotton magnate James G. Boswell begins in the nineteen-twenties, when his family was driven from Georgia by boll-weevil infestations and brought its plantation ways to California's San Joaquin Valley. Not to be defeated by nature again, the Boswells leveed and dammed Tulare Lake, the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi, to the point of extinction. In its six-hundred-square-mile basin they grew cotton, while in Los Angeles office towers they built one of the country's largest agricultural operations, swallowing small farms and multimillion-dollar subsidies with equal vigor. Arax and Wartzman strive for evenhandedness but acknowledge the costs of Big Ag—such as evaporation ponds with selenium levels so high that ducks are born with corkscrewed beaks and no eyes, and the recurrent "hundred-year floods," stubborn attempts by the old lake to reassert itself.

Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath by Rick Wartzman.

Assembling California by John McPhee "takes readers on an intensive geological tour of California... looks at the conjectural science of earthquake prediction and gives an account of a recent San Francisco quake. His leisurely excavation meanders from Mexican explorer Juan Bautista de Anza's settlement of San Francisco in 1776 to 1850s gold-mining camps to the summit of Mount Everest, made of marine limestone lifted from a shelf that once divided India and Tibet. With this volume McPhee concludes his Annals of the Former World series, which he began with Basin and Range (1980).

Towers of Gold is about Isaias Hellman, who was California’s premier financier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a man whose financial acumen catapulted the state into the modern era and laid the groundwork for one of the world’s most dynamic economies... Hellman was both a builder and financier, a major investor and promoter of eight industries that shaped California—banking, transportation, education, land development, water, electricity, oil, and wine.

Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 by Richard Steven Street Amazon

Mining California: An Ecological History by Andrew C. Isenberg (see course reader)

The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area by Richard Walker

A history of California counties.

Californiahistory.com is absolutely devoted to the history of California. General and more difficult to search for details about one place.

Links to popular California history sites (e.g., railroads, museums)

History of the county of Los Angeles (not just the city--the entire county)

Land of Sunshine : an environmental history of metropolitan Los Angeles Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, c2005 McH Stacks - GF504.C2 L36 2005

History and nostalgia, for historic minded.

"Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century" is a story of the largest public works project in US history. audio interview. See also PBS Hoover Dam.

Bodie's Gold: Tall Tales & True History From a California Mining Town, Marguerite Sprague, College Eight '82 University of Nevada Press, 2003

Native Americans (see also Native American page)

Charles Mann, author of 1491(book exploration on how Native Americans used the land) has also written about interactions between colonists and Native peoples.

Another account of megafauna extinctions

Nature and the environment in pre-Columbian American life Kowtko, Stacy Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2006 McH Stacks - E98.S67 K69 2006

Millenia of CA ecology, a (LongNow video)