California
California has long history of taking the lead on green issues.
Climate Change
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
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.
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
Water
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.
CA maps including
CA water map (reservoir levels)
Sacramento Delta is incredibly important in terms of wildlife and drinking water.
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
Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books, her newest Infinite City, is about San Francisco.
Search Amazon for California history.
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
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
