By: Svetlana Babaeva

We’re thrilled to once again showcase the impressive work of a GIS student from Santa Monica College! This time, we spotlight the exceptional talents of Svetlana Babaeva, whose dedication and analytical skill shine through in her latest project. Svetlana has taken on one of the most urgent and complex issues facing Californians today: the dramatic and ongoing rise in rent across Los Angeles County. With a sharp geographic lens and a commitment to uncovering meaningful insights, she’s mapped and analyzed this crisis with clarity and purpose. In her own words …

Los Angeles, often seen as a land of opportunity and the embodiment of the “California Dream,” drew me in 2019 with its vibrant cultural energy. However, I soon encountered the city’s harsh reality: a crushing housing crisis that personally affected me and nearly a third of my neighbors who spend over half their income on rent.

Understanding the Housing Crisis Through GIS

After five years of observing this crisis and studying geography at Santa Monica College, I realized my personal struggle was part of a larger issue impacting over 60% of Los Angeles County residents. This led me to create Rent Pressure in Los Angeles, a story map using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to pinpoint areas most affected by severe rent burdens. My spatial analysis highlighted central and downtown Los Angeles County as particularly vulnerable, prompting questions about the sustainability of living here. This project has significantly deepened my understanding of how geographic thinking and GIS can illuminate and address critical real-world issues beyond just housing. These patterns clearly warrant continued investigation within this area of study.

Acknowledgements

I am incredibly grateful to the Santa Monica College Geography Program for their exceptional guidance. Special thanks to Professor Jing Liu, whose five GIS courses and unwavering support were instrumental in developing this project and my forthcoming Geospatial Technology certificate. I also extend my sincere appreciation to Professor Robert O’Keefe for introducing me to critical geographic thinking, Professor Pete Morris for his insightful, multidisciplinary approach to California geography, and Professor William A. Selby for his inspiring presentations. Their combined contributions have provided an invaluable foundation and continue to inspire my geographic explorations.

Showcase Your Geographic Work on Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography

Are you passionate about California’s landscapes, communities, or pressing challenges? Have you created maps, visualizations, research projects, or multimedia presentations that explore the geography of the Golden State? If so, we invite you to contribute to Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography — an online platform dedicated to telling California’s story through a geographic lens.

We’re looking for student and faculty contributions that connect clearly to California — whether you’re examining climate change impacts, housing and rent patterns, water resources, wildfire dynamics, transportation systems, cultural diversity, immigration, or any number of issues shaped by place and space. Submissions can be analytical or creative, visual or written, but they must offer geographic insight into the state’s dynamic human or physical landscapes.

By sharing your work, you not only gain professional exposure but also help inform and inspire others to better understand California — its regions, its people, and the challenges it faces.

If you’re interested in being featured, or have a student whose work deserves a wider audience, we’d love to hear from you! Let’s rediscover the Golden State together, one geographic story at a time.

The post Rent Pressure in L.A first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

At Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography, one of our missions is to feature the impactful work of students who apply geographic thought and analysis to pressing California issues. We’re proud to present Jason Runnels, a dedicated student from Santa Monica College.

Jason has completed a significant project titled Wells, Crops, and Crisis: Exploring the Spatial Relationships Between Groundwater Depletion, Crops and Landcover in Tulare County, CA. This timely and insightful work delves into the critical issue of groundwater depletion in Tulare County, examining its spatial relationships with agricultural practices and land cover.

We encourage you to explore Jason’s work by following the link above. Additionally, please take a moment to read his bio (see below) and learn more about his motivations for addressing this critical issue.

A twenty-five-year resident of California, Jason Runnells, the creator behind this featured project, brings a deeply personal perspective to the state’s pressing water resource challenges. With roots in a multi-generational Colorado farming family, he possesses a lifelong appreciation for the intricate relationship between land and water in semi-arid environments. This foundational interest has culminated in a focused exploration of Tulare County’s groundwater issues, a critical component of California’s larger sustainability puzzle.

This project leverages the power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to investigate the complex spatial interplay between shifting groundwater levels and established land use patterns. The resulting analysis provides valuable insights for the broader conversation surrounding water management and long-term environmental planning in the region.

Jason’s path to geography and GIS is as unique as his perspective. After a successful two-decade career in the music industry, a desire to more deeply understand the natural world led him back to academia. Under the mentorship of Professor Jing Liu at Santa Monica College, a passion for cartography and spatial analysis was ignited. This newfound dedication to geography has led to an internship as the GIS lead for The Canyon Alliance, where he is instrumental in developing geographic databases and tools to support local disaster preparedness efforts.

Upon graduating this spring with an associate degree in Geography, Jason will continue his studies at UCLA, pursuing a major in Geography/Environmental Studies and a minor in Geospatial Information Systems & Technologies. This project stands as a testament to his dedication and a promising glimpse into a future dedicated to applying the power of geography to real-world environmental challenges.

The post Wells, Crops, and Crisis first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Recently, news stories have circulated showing that a series of days in July of 2023 represented the warmest global temperatures on record. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), July 3, 4 and 5th, all exceeded previous marks for global average temperature since climatologists began charting these means in 1979.

As of this writing, the global average air temperature of the planet (as measured 2 meters from the ground) was 17.18° C (62.88°F) on July 5th. If that holds, it will beat the previous record set just 2 days before of 17.01°C or 62.62°F.

(November, 2023 updates to this story: After the summer of 2023 ended as the hottest summer on record and 2023 races ahead to become the hottest calendar year on record, November 2022 – November 2023 has already broken the all-time 12-month global heat record. You will find a summary here and more details here. Also, here is a recent article that summarizes our predicament and connects the many facets of global change. Finally, another informative treat appears in this message to you from Professor Jing Liu: “I discovered a new GIS resource hub for climate change visualization and analysis. Check it out – it is pretty cool!” Thank you Jing! Now, we can continue with Rob O’Keefe’s earlier story.)…  

This may confuse those expecting to see a much higher reading, say in the neighborhood of 57.42°C (135°F). But remember, the record above is an average of all temperatures everywhere . This record combines temp readings in tropical regions where it is hot all year round. It adds the temps in the midlatitudes, where it is alternately warm or cold depending on the season. And it factors in the teeth-shatteringly cold reaches of the poles which stay cold, or relatively cold, 12 months of the year.

So far, few direct rebuttals from the fossil fuel industry and other climate change deniers have surfaced. But some in the news and amplified by social media have started to shout to El Niño as the culprit. That is misleading at best, malfeasance at worst.

El Niño is a real and recurring phenomenon with the power to drastically alter weather globally in the short-term every few years. But as it is but a part of the overall ocean-atmosphere system, it cannot be singled out as a separate entity. Anthropogenic alteration of the atmosphere affects every aspect of the atmosphere. In this case, human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are now helping to drive and intensify ENSO (El Niño/Southern Oscillation) events, as well as everything else related to our weather and climate.

This is another reason why it is important to have a broad and deep understanding of the many processes that effect the Earth’s weather and climate before using individual weather events, no matter how dramatic, to make a point on climate.

Case in point …

From time to time in my physical geography or weather and climate classes, I’ll get a student who passionately expresses doubt about climate change. I vividly remember such one student who challenged the notion of a warming world by pointing out that the official record high was recorded over 100 years ago in Death Valley. In this student’s “gotcha” moment, they essentially argued the following: how can the world be getting hotter if the record has not been broken in over a century? On the face of it, it seems a valid question.

But questions like this, with no context or supporting evidence, represent the seeds from which climate denialism germinates.

But getting back to the question at hand, it is all a matter of statistics.

Outliers grab our attention. Record temperatures, on either end of the thermometer, make headlines. But these unusually high or low measurements only indicate conditions at both a specific location and a discrete time. Taken by themselves, such measurements are almost meaningless. That is even true of the recent record. Earth’s climate cannot be defined by single values.

NASA, for instance, has determined that the temperature on Mars has reached 21°C or 70°F, on occasion, since direct observations began in the 1970s. Based on that measure alone, the uneducated might be tempted to assume the red planet has a balmy climate not far off than say Santa Monica. In reality, the mean temperature of Mars is a bone-numbing -80°C (-112°F). Even in the coldest of winters high in the snowbound Sierra Nevada, the Golden State never sees temps that low.

This is why climatologists focus on the mean temperature when making statements about either a specific location’s climate or the global climate in general. Mean temperatures represent the average temperature over a specific period. It is a simple calculation. Sum up all the individual temperature readings and then divide by the number of observations. The standard convention is to have at least 30 years of uninterrupted weather observations/measurements in order to assess climate.

Record temperatures, by contrast, are isolated events that occur sporadically. There may be no rhyme or reason to them. Mean temperatures, on the other hand, reflect long-term trends and patterns. Climate change is characterized not by isolated heat waves but rather by shifts in average temperature over extended periods, often spanning decades or centuries. Analyzing mean temperatures, therefore, allows for a more comprehensive understanding of climate change patterns and their impacts than focusing on a single hot day or string of them.

You may be saying to yourself by now, aren’t the record global atmosphere temps set in July also just outliers? Not exactly. They do not deviate drastically from the mean. They will also be averaged into the data like all other observations, making the overall mean temperature of the Earth rise incrementally, relentlessly, with no thought or care about the worries of humanity.

With that thought, look again at the graph included in the link (and the other graphics in our other links) above and you will see the reality of climate change revealed in a frighteningly short period of time.

But there is also a certain irony I noticed as I wrote this piece comparing weather events with climate, contrasting outliers and means. While Death Valley may continue to hold the record high temperature on Earth for years or even decades to come, the planet’s mean temperature (as measured by day, month or year) is now likely to be broken over and over again. This tragedy is going unnoticed, or outright ignored, by a large swath of the public.

Increasingly, where you live and who represents you is coming to define how you view the problem of anthropogenic climate change.

California has led the way in charting a course that will help humanity avoid the the worst-case scenarios. Here are but 5 ways the Golden State has been and remains a vanguard in combatting global climate change.

1. Ambitious Emissions Reduction Targets: California has set aggressive emissions reduction targets, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. These targets have provided a strong policy framework for climate action and have become models for other progressive states and nations.
2. Renewable Energy Transition: California has been a pioneer in promoting renewable energy sources. The state has significantly increased its renewable energy capacity, with a focus on solar and wind power. The California Renewables Portfolio Standard requires utilities to procure 60% of their energy from renewable sources by 2030, and the state aims for 100% clean electricity by 2045.
3. Cap-and-Trade System: California established the first economy-wide cap-and-trade program in the United States. Under this system, a limit is set on greenhouse gas emissions, and companies must obtain permits (allowances) to cover their emissions. The program has successfully reduced emissions while generating revenue for clean energy investments.
4. Energy Efficiency Initiatives: California has implemented rigorous energy efficiency standards for buildings and appliances. These standards include requirements for energy-efficient lighting, insulation, and appliances, leading to reduced energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
5. Electric Vehicle Promotion: California has been a leader in promoting electric vehicles (EVs) to reduce transportation emissions. The state offers incentives for EV purchases, has established a comprehensive charging infrastructure, and aims to transition to 100% zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035.

** Now it should be noted that data used to calculate global mean temperatures does not represent actual ground measurements for every square inch on the globe. Numerical climate/weather modeling is used to accurately estimate values in areas where no direct measurements exists. Such interpolation techniques do not offer precision but they can be very accurate and often closely reflect actual conditions on the ground.

The post Now There Is No Denying Our World Is Getting Hotter first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

More recently, our state’s political leaders have begun to reflect its evolving, diverse demographics. It might seem safer to avoid what some consider contentious or uncomfortable topics within this project that embraces objectivity and attempts to educate a wider range of people. But, within such a tumultuous political atmosphere, these trends, maps, and people have earned our attention and we responsibly garner the courage to explore them here.   

Every Election is Different and Significant
Though the 2020 presidential election demanded our attention, we recognize how every recent statewide election has changed our state in profound ways. Partly because California’s four-year-term elections for governor remain perfectly out of sync with Presidential elections, we conduct consequential elections (that also include the House of Representatives, critical statewide initiatives, and local elections) every two years. Still, voter turnouts are much more impressive during higher-profile presidential elections that include many of those other down-ballot choices. In contrast, voter participation can plummet by between 11-30% during gubernatorial election years. This is one reason why savvy political experts and advocates are careful to time their preferred candidates and ballot measures to coincide with the election cycles most likely to attract likeminded, sympathetic cohorts.  

Clear Trends from the 2020 Presidential Election
Eligible Californians showed up in record numbers to vote in the November, 2020 presidential election. Voter turnout soared to 80.7% in 2020 compared to 75% in what was already considered a dramatic 2016 election. And though the energy and emotions topped any memorable election, the statewide outcomes settled into familiar, ongoing patterns in 2020. These results reflect a state’s total population that leans toward Democratic and progressive candidates, but trends more moderate on the many statewide initiatives, or propositions. And there continues a clear divide between the two Californias. This is most evident when comparing more progressive and Democratic coastal cities to the more conservative and Republican communities father inland, especially in rural northern and eastern California. We’ve analyzed this chasm in previous research and stories within this project and web site, but here is the latest evidence. 

The 2020 Presidential election was a statewide landslide by any measure, as Democrat Joseph Biden gained 63.5% of the vote compared to Republican Donald Trump’s 34.3%. But, Biden’s dominance in the usually progressive coastal cities faded as we work our way mostly inland and to the north. Trump voters dominated in the more extensive rural regions of the state. More than 11 million Californians voted for Biden and only about 6 million voted for Trump. The Secretary of State’s map shows a more even visual split since more conservative, Republican-dominated counties tend to be larger in area, but lower in population.          

Your Perceived Political Incompatible May be Closer than You Think
Some of the most astounding political differences are recognized in surprisingly close proximity. For instance, some Bay Area counties where Biden dominated over Trump, such as Marin (82% for Biden to 16% for Trump), San Francisco (85% to 13%), and Alameda (80% to 18%), are only about 100 miles, or less than a two-hour drive west of counties where Trump dominated over Biden. These include Amador and Calaveras Counties; Trump won them both by 61% to 37% and he also won in the counties to their north and south. Perhaps the most extreme example of how these rural/inland regions differ with the urban/coastal regions was in more distant and extensive Lassen County, where Trump beat Biden by 75% to 23%, but less than 12,000 people voted.        

Now we can examine another map (below), built by Dr. Jing Liu. She also uses the California Secretary of State’s presidential election data, but displays much more detail. Watch the ratio of blues and reds change in the pie charts as you sweep from west to east and back again. Her map suggests more gradual political geography trends, rather than rigid boundaries.

Issues and Initiatives Make More Complicated Maps

Results from 2020 statewide initiatives suggest a more moderate to conservative electorate as they rejected some progressive causes. As example, Proposition 15 would have made some changes to the landmark and historic Proposition 13 of 1978, which limited annual tax increases on California properties. The old Prop 13 eventually forced statewide budget-cutting that included schools and educational programs until our state, ranked near the top before it passed, plunged much lower on the list of states in per-student spending during the following years. So, the new Proposition 15 was written to continue those property tax controls for homeowners and zoned commercial agriculture, but to adjust higher-valued commercial and industrial property taxes to reflect their market values rather than their purchase prices. It became a classic battle between big property owners that included giant corporations with massive real estate holdings in California, versus citizens and labor unions and teachers, who believed the largest landowners were reaping the greatest rewards from an old initiative designed to benefit the average homeowner.        

Tax Policies Versus Education and Services
Opponents of the new Prop 15 saw a giant tax increase for large businesses that threatened to run them and their industries and jobs out of the state; supporters saw it as closing a big loophole to make an outdated and flawed initiative more fair. Put more simply, some big businesses would be the losers and schools and local governments the winners. Combining both sides, more than $120 million was spent in campaigns to convince voters on this one initiative in a state where politics was already a big, expensive business of its own. This may help explain why Prop 15 lost, but it was close. Initiative voting results show a state still divided, but with a slight majority of voters leaning toward the more conservative and pro-business arguments presented by opponents. 

Deceiving Maps Tell Compelling Stories
The Secretary of State’s map showing these results is even more fascinating. It first appears that Proposition 15 was rejected by a resounding landslide, rather than the thin 52% “no” vote to 48% “yes” vote. But again, the counties most enthusiastically rejecting the initiative were mainly larger and more sparsely populated. These relatively conservative counties cover a much larger percent of our state’s land surface, but they usually do not include the densest populations where the numbers add up fast over very small areas. So, the final vote tallies were a lot closer than this map might suggest. It’s yet another illustration of how California, like the nation, shows its divisions that can ebb and flow, sweeping to and fro across the state in various forms, depending on the candidate, issue, or initiative.

Now we can examine Dr. Jing Liu’s map (below) that uses similar data made available from the state. Notice how much more detail she placed into this one attractive map without making it appear cluttered. You can now see the percentages of votes for each county. A map like this one suggests that there are many more important stories to tell about the electorate. We can also see from this map that winning and losing percentages are wildly different in each county.

California’s Diversity Erupts on to the National Stage

Millions of Californians have compelling personal stories that demonstrate the diversity of our state and contribute to our political geography. Here are a few leaders that you have either heard of, or that have shaped your state and your world without your knowledge.  

A History of Political Diversity
The Golden State has elevated its share of political philosophies and candidates that have changed the nation and the world; we mentioned a few in our publication. It has been a wild political roller coaster ride since statehood. We sent conservative Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (a former Hollywood star who served two terms as governor) on to become presidents. We elected a range of powerful and sometimes controversial governors, personalities who often grew on to the world stage and others who sometimes grew away from steadfast partisanship and toward more pragmatic leadership during their terms. Some would argue that these might include Democrat Jerry Brown, who served two terms twice (1975-1983 and 2010-2018), becoming our longest-serving governor in history, as he gained a reputation for fiscal prudence; and there’s the Austrian-born celebrity body-builder-turned-movie-star Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, who jumped into a bitter political recall atmosphere as a staunch conservative, but exited in 2011 as a champion of many environmental causes.  Since politics should encourage healthy debate, we welcome and respect your well-informed opinions about which personalities and policies could be highlighted here. But we can all agree that the state’s political landscapes and leaders are changing to match today’s demographics and cultures.

What Pio Pico and Kamala Harris have in Common
Pio Pico was an established leader and the last Mexican Governor of an already very diverse California. He finalized the secularization of the missions and later became a U.S. citizen after the American conquest. He was a native Californian, a “Californio” with a mixture of Native American, Spanish, and African ancestry, who reflected the diversity and mixed racial backgrounds typical of many Californios in the 1800s. Fast forward to the 21^st Century and the most diverse state with no ethnic majority; enter Kamala Harris. Her mother migrated from India and her father from Jamaica, but they quickly established solid reputations in California as successful leaders in their professions.

Harris was born in Oakland and raised in Berkeley. She earned her law degree from the UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. She served as District Attorney of San Francisco and would eventually be elected and reelected to serve as California’s Attorney General (as the first female and African American in this office) from 2011-2017. Kamala Harris was elected U.S. Senator in 2017 to replace retiring Barbara Boxer and to continue the two-decades-plus long dominance of women Democrats from the Bay Area (including Diane Feinstein) representing California in the U.S. Senate. In 2021, this modern-day mixed racial native Californian became the first woman, African American, or Asian to serve as Vice President of the United States.

The Door Opens for a New Kind of Senator
When Kamala Harris moved up and on to Washington D.C in 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom fulfilled his duties to temporarily fill the U.S. Senate seat vacancy by selecting Secretary of State Alejandro Padilla, another Democrat. He was born in Los Angeles. Senator Padilla’s parents emigrated from Mexico and raised their kids in a working class part of the San Fernando Valley. He was eventually educated at MIT and trained as an engineer, but he was elected to the L.A. City council in 1999 as their youngest member. He served three times as L.A.’s first Latino Council President and was later elected to the California State Senate until he was elected Secretary of State in 2015. Packing such a resume by 2021, Alex Padilla became the first Mexican American or Hispanic to represent California in the U.S. Senate.                      

California’s AG Goes to Washington
Xavier Becerra was elected as California’s first Latino Attorney General and served as the state’s top law enforcement officer starting in 2017, following Kamala Harris. He was born in Sacramento and was the first in his working-class family to earn a college degree, which eventually included a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford and Juris Doctorate from Stanford Law School. He served in the State Assembly and was later elected to 12 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before his tenure as California’s Attorney General. President Biden tapped him to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2021, leaving another vacancy in this state where a fresh crop of leaders were gaining valuable experiences and graduating on. 

The Most Powerful Woman in a Divided House
These recent leaders we have sent to the Senate and the President’s Cabinet continue a long tradition of powerful influencers lifted to the national stage from California, and that is especially true in the House of Representatives. As a recent example, Nancy Pelosi has represented San Francisco’s 12^th District for more than 30 years. In 2007, she was the first woman to be elected Speaker of the House and she has been leading Democrats in the House of Representatives ever since. She has often been considered the most powerful woman in America, gaining praise from supporters, but scorn from her mainly Republican detractors who label her as a liberal progressive. She beat her opponent (another Democrat) by more than 55 percentage points in her 2020 reelection and resumed her tenure as House Speaker in 2021. In that election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, her campaign committee raised more than $27 million compared to her opponent’s approximately $1.7 million. Here is where we recognize that it would be difficult to imagine American leaders with more wildly conflicting politics and philosophies than California’s representatives in the House. And you can blame much of it on the geography we examine here.  

Digging in Their Heals in the San Joaquin Valley
Consider the conservative Republican districts that are evident in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Kevin McCarthy has represented California’s redrawn 23^rd District in the House of Representatives since 2007. He was born in Bakersfield and earned his BS and MBA at California State University, Bakersfield. As a 4^th generation resident of Kern County, he was reported to be the first Republican in his immediate family and has a long history as a staunch conservative in the Republican Party.

He served as minority leader in the California State Assembly before his election to Congress. He eventually served as House of Representatives Majority Leader for five years until 2019 and has been House Minority Leader since then. His district that is mainly in Kern and Tulare Counties is considered one of the most conservative Republican strongholds in the nation. He has gained a reputation as a prodigious fundraiser, thanks to backing from powerful business interests. Encouraged by his constituents, he also earned a reputation as one of President Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic and loyal supporters through some of the most tumultuous and controversial political struggles in U.S. history. This included his support to challenge the 2020 Electoral College votes and Trump’s attempts to reverse those election results. Kevin McCarthy won reelection to the House in 2020 by beating his Democratic opponent by more than 24 percentage points.  The Center for Responsive Politics reported that his campaign committee raised nearly $28 million just for his 2020 campaign, while his opponent raised less than $2 million.  

From the Farm to Washington
Right next door is redrawn Congressional District 22, where Congressman Devin Nunes has represented the traditionally more conservative Tulare and somewhat less conservative Fresno counties since 2003. He was born in Tulare into a family with Portuguese ancestry. He grew up on his family’s dairy farm there and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He has served as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Most folks from any political persuasion would consider Nunes one of the most conservative members of the House, and like McCarthy, he has earned his reputation as a controversial firebrand. Some of his views and most famous quotes have included dismissing scientists and the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic; he was also considered one of President Trump’s most ardent supporters. The media and even some of his Republican colleagues panned him for attempts to interfere with ongoing legal investigations and for his loyal support of President Trump’s conspiracy theories. He also voted to toss out voting results from the 2020 election. But Devin Nunes won reelection in 2020 over his Democratic rival by more than 8 percentage points. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, his campaign committee fundraising totaled about $27 million for his 2020 reelection, compared to roughly $5 million raised by his opponent. You can see that he and Kevin McCarthy proudly represent the political antithesis of Speaker Pelosi and some of the more recent California political stars we have highlighted here, but all these most powerful influencers have access to people, organizations, and companies with deep pockets.   

Diversity as a Dividing Wedge or a Common Thread
And so, just as our nation continues divided, so does this most powerful state – with 40 million people and the 5^th largest economy on the planet – remain divided in many ways. But the political landscape is changing and so are the people who do the landscaping. The optimist might imagine how a California cleaved between urban coastal and rural inland might set an example for the nation. Can we agree to use reliable facts and educate the public to find common ground and compromise so that we can accomplish the difficult work required to lift us out of multiple crises and back in to the light? The pessimist might predict our recoiling and entrenchment into our tribes and bubbles with our labels and slogans that will cause further damage and send us spiraling into decay. It’s a pivotal time and the Golden State has never had such a golden opportunity to demonstrate how we can work and learn and prosper together or wither and stagnate in our ignorance and obstinance. The direction people choose will help guide our leaders and vice-versa, and California is better positioned than any other state to demonstrate how we can blaze a better path into the future.

Some might think that the political dust settled in January, 2021. But those who are paying attention know that the political winds continue blowing as strong as ever and we have the power to steer them. We might have learned how to love or hate our elected officials; but, ultimately, those leaders only reflect the knowledge, ignorance, philosophies, and will of the people who voted for them. Regardless of our differences and historic diversity, everyone knows that maintaining democracy requires a lot of work from a well-educated and thoroughly-informed electorate. In other words, unless we find some common ground based on our knowledge of verifiable facts, the ground we stand on will soon turn to quicksand. So, stay informed with reliable sources. Get involved. Be the change. They’re not just slogans.         

You can find more details about voting results from the California Secretary of State:
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/prior-elections/statewide-election-results

The post Evolving Diversity Redraws our Political Maps first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Here, we transport you into some of the iconic landscapes that help define the Golden State, places where Californians have been trying to escape the grasp of this virus throughout the summer and into the fall of 2020. Data to support the text in this story has been gleaned from recent and relevant research, publications, and direct observations throughout the year as we try to summarize California’s pandemic predicament. The snapshots will transport you from the southwest corner to the northeast corner of the Golden State, combining to create a colorful pandemic picture book.

Geography of the Pandemic
The pandemic continues to at least indirectly impact nearly every landscape and person as it carves widespread lasting imprints on the human geography of California. Particularly hard hit are the densest urban neighborhoods on one end and rural farming communities on the other. Long-term health care facilities, prisons, and labor-intensive industries such as food packing plants have also become epicenters, or what might be considered producers of virus clusters and super-spreaders. The results, geographically, have predictably followed many of the trends we outlined in our spring update from  half a year ago. Throughout the centuries, geographers and people who think like geographers have contributed their perspectives and expertise to help us better understand and help control such pandemics and this one is no exception.

Two-tiered Risks and Impacts
Near the beginning of the year, COVID-19 may have been initially introduced into some middle- and upper-income circles by those who could afford international travel. But it quickly spread and has since been infecting, sickening, and killing much larger percentages of working-class populations living and/or working in more crowded environments. These include a larger percentage of people of color working in blue-collar jobs, such as service workers, who are in direct contact with the public and cannot fulfill their duties on line, but are exposed beyond the safety and comfort of their homes. These laborers are first pushed back into what could be risky work environments by personal economic pressures and then confronted with inadequate and/or budget-busting medical care when they contract the virus. These infections were often tragically spread to their elders in a state where about 74% of all COVID-19 deaths have been people age 65 and older. The data show that a much larger percentage of working-class people first lost their jobs to the epidemic, then were forced to return to work, and finally caught the virus. Those with greater education and higher incomes suffered much lower percentages and losses statewide (up to three times lower) on all three fronts.   

Concentrated Clusters and Super Spreaders
Other super-spreader events have erupted when some Californians have chosen to ignore scientific evidence and to dare nature’s statistical probabilities. These clusters of choice have sent out super spreaders that have locally and dramatically spiked infection rates and further slowed our recovery. So, we have learned that the geography of COVID is less about widespread infections blanketing the land and more about specific, concentrated clusters and super-spreader events that radiate beyond the confined spaces where they started: workplaces, neighborhoods, extended families, social gatherings, or congregations of cultural groups.

Learning from our Mistakes
Some of the most fascinating and tragic lessons we are learning from COVID-19 focus on our flawed psychology. It’s as if COVID is teasing us into looking into our mirrors. We not only see how particularly inept we have become at dealing with such a pandemic, but we are forced to reevaluate our lives and the world around us with probing questions and solutions that could lead us down more innovative paths, potential epiphanies toward improvement. Our first mistake was ignoring the power of science, the importance of understanding and using the scientific method, and the consequences of being ignorant about it. Our second mistake was retreating – often encouraged by the poison on social media – into our particular cultural and political tribes with blinders in place. We are now experiencing the pandemic fatigue that naturally follows our failures to stop the spread of this virus.  

Entrenched Beliefs and Politics versus Facts and Science
How have we allowed the politics to overcome the science and why do some people trust the words of their favorite uninformed demagogue over the scientists that have dedicated their careers and lives to finding solutions and saving lives? Had fatality rates from the virus been greater, say 20%, we would see bodies being dragged out of homes and carried away, repeated tragic scenes that would compel everyone to take extreme precautions. At the other extreme, if ICU admissions and fatality rates were similar to the common flu, there would be little need for extra precautions. But this COVID-19 continues teasing us with a dangerous in between, as every time we let our guards down to open up and dismiss what may seem to be an invisible threat, infections, serious illnesses, and death rates spike. Too often, entrenched belief systems become more powerful than overwhelming evidence, science, and facts, particularly when people within our narrow tribe are not negatively impacted and victimized.

Smart Personal Geography
How do we decrease the statistical probability of getting infected? That’s a pretty straightforward scientific question that means life and death for tens of thousands of Californians and many billions of dollars in income for millions more. And it’s mostly about geography. Like all things science, we must modify our understanding of COVID, and hopefully adjust our behavior and decision-making, to fit the available evidence of the day. This moving target, as we gather more scientific evidence, has been a difficult concept for a large percentage of the population that has ignored nature and science for too long. The destruction and suffering resulting from this ignorance is enhanced as we retreat into our tribes instead of working together to understand and respond to the threat.

Sensing our Spaces and Places
We must first confront the geographic term that COVID forced into every household: social distancing. Super spreader events that produce clusters of cases have included large and small congregations of people with only one or a few infected persons, who then transfer the virus to the others so they can spread it on to their families or cohorts. This results in dramatic, concentrated, local spikes in infections and deaths. The good news is how people are being forced to become better geographers, sensing their environments as they become more aware of whom or what surrounds them.

Reevaluating our Built Environments
Countless practical geography lessons rise to the surface. For instance, many years before COVID, especially coastal Californians were demonstrating how poorly ventilated enclosed spaces can be replaced by healthier, more productive, naturally-ventilated living and working environments that cost a lot less to keep reasonably comfortable. Those who reevaluated their spaces and places to reconnect to their surroundings are now reaping the benefits. Those who ignored these realities are now stuck with the most dangerous, deadly, and expensively-maintained closed COVID spaces that understandably make us all uneasy and anxious, and sometimes sick. Closed indoor malls, sealed office spaces, and confined classrooms in California are examples of the flawed public spaces left behind by this archaic thinking.

Sensing Your Air
Geographic awareness also helps us safely navigate our more open, outdoor spaces. Your 6-feet or 12-feet distancing rules only apply in relatively calm air. Sense the wind direction and speed. If you are upwind, the contamination from a potentially infected person is being transported away from you, but if you are downwind, twelve feet might not be far enough. Furthermore, your motion in relation to others could easily transport you into or away from their plume of contamination. Add more distance if you notice coughing, sneezing, singing, or shouting. For those of us who have always been cognizant of these people, spaces, and places, our senses have become sharpened. For those who had previously checked out on your screens and ear plugs and dismissed your relationship to your surroundings, welcome back to Planet Earth. The most geographically aware are more likely to increase their probability of surviving with their health.

To Mask or not to Mask: That is often a Geography Question
And speaking of aware, how have masks become political in California and across the nation? For decades, surgeons, doctors, nurses, and other health care workers have protected themselves, their patients, and their colleagues from spreading sickening and deadly diseases by using masks that provide barriers to countless pathogens. Pathogens and masks don’t care about your politics. It’s weird that we even have to mention this. More recently, every COVID-19 study of masks has shown their benefits and discounted suggested negative health impacts. And for the other extreme, the virus comes from infected people who get too close, not from fresh air. Here are just two examples of how fear can overcome the science. A friend of mine tried to shame me for not wearing my mask, after I stopped on my bike to say hello, across the street from her, on a street with no other people around. My mask remained in my pocket and I was not hesitant to set her straight with the geography and science. While walking her dog on a completely empty street at 6am, another friend of mine was scolded for not wearing her mask; the lone complainer felt the need to yell at her from nearly a block away. We’ve seen enough studies and had enough experiences to know better and to behave smarter by now. Wearing masks or not wearing them should never be likened to political pins or slogans or emotions, but how and when we use them may signal our knowledge of science and our connections to nature and reality.

Two Californias Stumble Forward
In a frustrating COVID world where we are discouraged from behaving in our most fundamentally intimate and human ways, where we have lost the magic of a human touch, we are constantly challenged to redefine personal space and our relationships with one another. Too often, our personal geographies and behaviors begin to reflect our entrenched beliefs and politics. For instance, as a larger percentage of urban dwellers have been protecting themselves and those who surround them, a larger percentage of rural and inland Californians, who may have always lived and worked somewhat socially distanced, have often resisted rules and ignored precautions that they believe might conflict with their more traditional, conservative, or libertarian values. And so, you can still watch these two Californias expressing themselves with masked or unmasked faces; this behavior has resulted in some very interesting and even confounding infection and death clusters that are ripe for research.

Geographic Distributions are Moving Targets
By November, California’s recorded infections (nearing one million total) and deaths (approaching 18,000 total) kept our state’s per capita rates (out of 40 million) slightly below the national average. Ranked by new cases/100,000, the state’s top ten (worst) counties in October were mainly rural, economically dependent on primary industries, and mostly in central and northern California. Ranked in order, they were Shasta, Kings, Tehama, Sonoma, Glenn, Monterey, Alpine, Tulare, San Bernardino, and Imperial Counties. All urban counties ranked below (better than) them, but were not the lowest. Perhaps the most notable stand out was San Francisco; at 44^th, it was, by far, the urban county with the fewest number of new cases. Little Sierra County ranked last (or best) of all counties, though only a few new infections could drastically change the ranking of counties with such small populations. We are reminded that infections, deaths, and rankings are changing by the day as each new cluster emerges. (And this December update: It is not surprising that the best and worst counties had shuffled a bit by late December, when infections and hospitalizations had exploded again across the state to new all-time highs. Cases even spiked in San Francisco and other Bay Area communities that had previously gained some control of the numbers. By the end of 2020, the suffering in California had grown to more than 2.2 million total cases and more than 25,000 deaths, with rates rising to about one death every 3.5 minutes or 400/day.)   

More Positive Probabilities
Of course, savvy geographic awareness and rational behavior doesn’t guarantee that you won’t get infected with COVID-19 or any other pathogen. But the science informs us how you can greatly decrease your probability of getting sick or dying. This is why most people try to eat well, exercise, avoid smoking, and don’t drive recklessly; those with healthy lifestyles who drive safer will greatly decrease (but can never eliminate) their chances of dying a painfully slow death or being killed in a car accident. Likewise, recognizing accumulating facts about COVID-19 encourages smart personal behavior that is likely to protect you and greatly decrease the chances that you will infect or harm others. 

Weighing the Evidence, Finding Our Balance
So, our debates should not be about the obvious scientific evidence, but how we respond to the realities and threats that confront us, and how our public responses and policies can either ease the pain or cause a lot of inconvenience and discomfort. Each of us has our personal, unique comfort zone as we try to navigate these dangerous waters. Some have isolated themselves, terrified to leave their homes. Others have been cavalier and even reckless, behaving as usual, pretending as if there were no COVID-19 filling the ICU’s and killing people. Most of us continue to search for that personal sweet spot between the two extremes that allows us to live our lives the best we can without getting sick, or worse yet, infecting our loved ones. In such a free society, finding this balance becomes more difficult while making public policies that can impact, sicken, or kill such a diverse population.

Science and Facts Must Drive the Response and Policies Debates
So we also struggle to find that public sweet spot that will protect the greatest number of people from the virus, while doing the least amount of damage to our lives and our economy. This response debate is healthy and should be carried out in an open atmosphere of respect for those who might see things differently. But, if we are to survive COVID, we are required to come to some general consensus that finds the best balance. Otherwise, we are plagued between the dueling extremes that proclaim, “I don’t want to be around people who want me to wear a mask no matter the situation” and “I don’t want to be around people who don’t wear a mask no matter the situation.” Or, consider the contrived conflicts between those who want to shut everything down and shutter everyone at home versus those who want to remove all restrictions and let the virus have its way with us. The potential inconvenience of proposed responses and policies should never change our understanding of the science as we find a rational middle ground between the extremes.

Public Images and Personal Stories
This brings us to our images of California’s COVID landscapes that demonstrate how diverse people from different parts of the state have been impacted and are responding through the summer and fall of 2020. How have folks been searching to find balance and how have their behaviors changed the human geography of the Golden State? We focus on local scenes, mainly from smaller cities and towns within iconic landscapes across the state. Our snapshots begin in the southwest corner of California and transport you toward the northeast corner of the state. We know that, even with all these images, we have missed many locations and have just scratched the surface.

As we travel along, we must remember that each Californian has a personal story to tell. One of the best ways to learn about these personal COVID experiences is from the best and most credible sources. The unprecedented nature of this pandemic encouraged the prestigious California Historical Society (CHS) to launch an informative project, Tell Your Story – California during the time of COVID-19. Here are just three excerpts from their project that continues to gather a wealth of diverse personal stories. We encourage you to visit the CHS web site for more: 

Adriana, Age 37, of Sacramento:  “My son asked me a little while ago what it was like when I was a kid and my school shut down for coronavirus, and I had to tell him that this is the first time something like this has happened in a hundred years, that it never even happened to his great-grandma.”

Natalia, Age 24, of North Shore, Salton Sea: “We live in the unincorporated city of North Shore with a majority migrant/immigrant population who are mostly farmworkers. COVID-19 has hit our community hard as most farmworkers cannot afford to stay home. Those who were laid-off or had to stay home to take care of children are in great disparity from being evicted, starving, zero access to clean water, and/or are high risk for contracting COVID-19. The line to get free food from the local food bank stretches over a mile, easily.”

Sean, Age 44, of San Francisco: “I am a massive extrovert, so the ‘shelter in place’ felt suffocating immediately. I don’t thrive working from home but had already been doing it for 10 days straight. Once Mayor Breed put in the order my trainer canceled on me, my gym closed, my barber canceled and so did our yard service. Nearly all businesses and human contact came to a halt within hours or days. It has been 4-5 weeks already and although I am lucky my job is fine and my family is healthy, I am starving for human connection beyond Zoom calls and 6 foot distances.”

Urban Center Pandemic Landscapes
The most dramatic changes continue to transform the densest downtown districts within our major cities. Though some recovery from the more severe lockdowns earlier this year is evident, there remains an eerie quiet and lack of activity in businesses and on city streets with no sense of excitement. One resident of downtown L.A. described it well, noting how the construction and long-term resurgence that you can see and hear in the background continues to erect buildings that were planned years ago. But this assembly of new buildings is now occurring in the absence of an assembly of people, as if someone has pushed the pause button.  And you can see the strain on people’s faces and the tension in the ways they interact with one another.  These more extreme pandemic scenes tend to radiate out like a wave that is propagated by the impact of a rock in a pond, usually becoming less evident as we move away from the urban cores. Even the infamous freeways and public transportation networks that connect these urban centers and their suburbs, and their exurbs beyond, continue to exhibit unusual and sometimes unpredictable traffic patterns that generally flow more freely compared to the vicious commutes of pre-pandemic gridlock.

Coping with COVID in California Cities
There are many examples of how neighborhoods near denser downtowns such as San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, L.A., and San Diego are finding creative and even ingenious ways to cope.  In San Francisco, a program called North Beach Delivers was formed by North Beach Neighbors to simultaneously save local restaurants, distribute food out to the community, and offer exercise opportunities for locals. In their own words, they are… “neighbors who care about supporting the backbone of our community – our neighborhood small businesses. Each week, we walk, ride, and (sometimes) run up the hills of the northeast corridor of the City to provide free delivery for our featured restaurant. We believe in the importance of supporting neighborhood businesses and spending our money locally.” And, “Since we’re volunteer-driven, North Beach Delivers runs with help from neighbors, like you. Whether you’d like to help make deliveries or find out about the restaurants we’re featuring each week, sign up to stay in touch!” You might try connecting to similar initiatives and programs that are springing up across the state in hopes to save your cherished neighborhoods and businesses.   

Reinventing Cityscapes
We – from larger to smaller cities – have also reinvented our street spaces. Many businesses, previously hesitant, are now eager to give up parking spaces in business districts, especially with the decrease in traffic and abundant empty parking. Decades ago, retail businesses discovered how the combination of dining and entertainment experiences increased foot traffic into stores. Suddenly, COVID eliminated those options and attractions, such as theaters. Now, restaurants have been converting one or two or more parking spaces into dining areas. This may be just enough to keep some local restaurants and retail afloat until the COVID turbulence calms. One geographic glitch emerges with winter weather, especially in northern California. What happens when outdoor heaters aren’t warm enough and umbrellas aren’t large enough to protect diners from inclement weather?

Working around COVID in Two Californias
We are reminded that those city streets and office buildings are quiet partially because it is so much easier for white-collar and gold-collar professionals to work remotely. COVID’s economic ripple effects are far more pronounced for the blue-collar working class. As white-collar jobs have mostly rebounded, blue-collar jobs are coming back much more slowly, often casting lower-income workers into more COVID-contagious environments. Now, economists warn that we may continue to experience what is known as a K-shaped economic recovery that will exacerbate existing inequalities. This occurs when well-educated and highly-skilled professionals (such as in high technology and software services) and investors enjoy prosperity and growth out of the COVID recession, while those with less education and skills (such as in the travel, entertainment, hospitality, and food services industries) suffer continued decline. Economic data supports these assumptions as workers earning more than $60,000/yr. have been recovering more rapidly than those earning near minimum wages and less than $28,000/yr., who are recovering much slower or not at all. And, as if the pre-COVID job market wasn’t already unsettled and transient enough, there is a growing number of roaming pandemic workers (usually younger and without families) who are willing or desperate to move around the state to find work.

Finding Healthy Learning and Working Spaces
Inequalities have surfaced in so many other spaces and places during our partial and spasmodic openings and recoveries.  One of the most striking can be experienced at home, within the quiet and order of spacious private rooms where some students can concentrate on their on line classes and assignments, versus the confined students crammed into small, shared living spaces, often with other siblings taking different classes, sharing whatever technology and screen might be hanging on by a thread. Homeless kids and their parents face even more obvious and extreme challenges while schools are closed. We will all pay a high price for letting some of these students, with the potential to excel, succeed, and make their own contributions, slip away from us without proper supervision or mentoring. And health officials are already measuring increasing problems within our younger populations that include obesity, particularly among those who relied on their schools’ playgrounds, physical education classes, and sports programs to invite them outside and keep them fit. Again, the physical and mental health problems appear more severe in denser, working class urban centers where people were already suffering from growing nature deficit disorders.

By the fall, people of all ages were being lured back out into the open by a diversity of organizations and entrepreneurs. They included schools and youth groups that reintroduced after-school and weekend athletics to local parks, soccer fields, and other open spaces. And they included local businesses that offered beach picnic packages for couples and small families, and yoga and other group fitness classes in parks and on our beaches.

Roommate Landscapes
This brings us to the remarkably uneven impact the pandemic has had on real estate and rental markets. We’ve all seen the “for rent” and lease signs that continue to multiply as struggling renters move out and then back in with family and friends, and as offices are vacated by failed businesses and those lucky enough to work remotely. Again, our urban areas are hit the hardest. News stories such as on NPR have noted how the majority of 18-29 year-olds now live with their parents. You can see the extra cars parked on residential streets that are home to growing sandwich households. And you can see the used furniture scattered along the sidewalks in those evacuated urban landscapes, while many second-hand stores are so flooded with furniture, they are rejecting donations. The impacts are particularly remarkable in college communities that have been vacated by students attending classes on line, leaving behind many of the dorms, apartments, and businesses that served them, from communities surrounding larger campuses, such as UC San Diego, to smaller college towns in northern California.

Urban Booms Gone Bust
And just as landlords were enjoying skyrocketing rental markets in our cities before the pandemic, the bottom has dropped out, driving rents down as much as 20% in neighborhoods within hipster San Francisco, San Jose, the Wilshire District of L.A., and its higher-end, luxury, downtown apartments. California’s dense urban cores are – at least temporarily – no longer booming. The cosmopolitan lifestyles that urbanites embraced have been upended by closed nightclubs, theaters, restaurants, sporting events, and the cancellation of festivals and other events that defined our exciting cities. The great migrations and gentrifications that brought wealth and culture back to our cities during the last few decades have temporarily stopped.

Deficit Landscapes
As local businesses shut down, large delivery companies thrive, serving on line shoppers who aren’t recycling money – and taxes – within their neighborhoods. Many family-owned businesses that survive are losing their savings and incurring larger debts, pushing more businesses and real estate into the hands of the largest players with the most capital. Will our pandemic public spending continue to exceed what we earn, as funding for city, county, and state projects dries up? Will this leave neighborhood and community improvement spaces vulnerable to become more generic privately-owned properties, leading to deterioration of our public spaces in the long run? Since many of these urban landscapes will be under stress long after COVIC-19, these are questions that need our attention now.

Urban Cultures Strain to Adapt
Those who moved to the big city have temporarily lost much of their urban cultures as surrounding businesses shut down. By the fall, urban residents desperate to celebrate some form of culture had been flooding open-air flea markets and lining up at makeshift drive-in entertainment events. The sense of personal and family safety in isolation was fueling a temporary resurgence in car cultures of choice and leisure unrelated to the workplace. Public transportation systems have been crippled as fearful riders abandoned and escaped what they perceived as overcrowded contaminated spaces. Though this trend back to the car was slowed by families suffering economic hardships caused by the pandemic, it was fueled by slumping gasoline prices that lowered the costs of car trips in a recession-like pandemic world that was buying and burning less fossil fuel. Many traditional models once used to explain and predict economic trends and human behavior were being reworked by a pandemic that changed the rules and reshuffled winners and losers.

Moving to the Countryside
You will find remarkable real estate winners just about everywhere else, assuming we are talking about those who already own property. The turbulent trends have been highlighted by industry mainstays such as Redfin and Zillow. Rock bottom interest rates that were further lowered to speed recovery have fueled exploding housing prices away from concentrated city centers. Armed with their high-tech devices and communication software, many urban professionals have at least temporarily relocated to the suburbs or even farther, where real estate prices have skyrocketed. They have temporarily settled for months or longer in places as far as Lake Tahoe and other resort locations, at least until in-person contacts can resume. These remote vacation resorts have been further populated by those looking for safe retreats and short vacations to ease their cabin-fevers-in-the-city, as they try to escape urban areas gone silent. After the initial lockdown drove many vacation businesses to the brink, restrictions were lifted, opening a floodgate of B&B seekers to crash into the great outdoors. Numerous resort towns and their businesses throughout the state are now thriving. You can see the throngs of urban escapees competing for space and looking for ways to spend their time and money, especially on weekends. This leaves many resort town residents to appreciate the booming business, but worry that a few infected visitors from the city could become the super spreaders in their hometowns. 

Escaping into the Great Outdoors
This exodus from the cities also helps explain the boom in recreational vehicle rentals that became so common on our roads by summer: families and friends looking for safe, confined transport and living spaces. We can also understand how campers escaping COVID and cabin fever combined with increased homelessness and limited entry to national and state parks to force large numbers of visitors into U.S. Forest Service lands. Some of them then became victims of the worst wildfires in state history: whiplash migrations from one disaster to another.

Competing to Reconnect to Nature
Now that we have transported you from California cities to the great outdoors, we can see how COVID has changed some of our most remote spaces and places.  The initial, more extreme lockdown first closed our city, county, state, and national parks and emptied the roads and resorts connected to them. Wildlife began to fill the gaps, roaming, grazing, hunting, and lounging around in places previously crowded by ecotourists. And as we warned in last spring’s COVID update, there was no coordinated effort to reopen all of our public parks at the same time. Instead, individual parks and trails that first opened were swarmed with visitors informed by social media. By early summer, traffic jams and waiting times to gain entrance to numerous trails and parks (as far away as McArthur-Burney Falls State Park in remote northeastern California) forced visitors and unhappy campers to change plans and turn back. As summer progressed, Yosemite National Park was forced to initiate a reservations-only entry system that quickly filled weeks ahead of time and turned back disappointed escapees, who then flooded nearby National Forests.

Connecting to the Bigger Picture These inconveniences and attempts at closer encounters with nature serve to remind us about a larger, global human/nature dilemma: As the world’s expanding 7.7 billion people continue to encroach on wild areas, the increased human interaction with wildlife is likely to unleash new viruses and pandemics that follow COVID-19. Could this pandemic be a recurring new normal instead of the exception? If this rings true, 2020 could be a dress rehearsal, a dystopian view into our future world, if we don’t get our acts together and learn from our suffering. 

An Excuse to Work Together for Positive Change
One way we must cope is to rise from the ruins and find the silver linings in what we have. Are we using these unprecedented opportunities to rediscover and reconnect to our health, our environment, and to one another? Here, we harvest some inspiration and two suggestions from leading psychologists interviewed within the media during the last few months: Name three ways your life has improved since COVID hit. Name three activities you have done or new discoveries or accomplishments you have made due to COVID.

In that spirit, we also hope you are informed by our visual snapshots of California places that have been transformed by COVID-19, summer and fall, 2020. As you now see, they started in far southwestern California and will end in the more remote northeast. Though they mostly focus on smaller towns and cities and some locations of escape, they illustrate places where all of our lives and landscapes will never be the same. As we and our loved ones tend to our personal physical and mental health, we remain connected by these spaces and places.  

We encourage you to read more personal COVID stories on the California Historical Society web site at: https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/

Jumping North. We will now take you to the second part, or volume, in this series of COVID-19 snapshots that help document how California has weathered the pandemic storm. We will first jump into the spine of the Sacramento Valley. Then, we will explore some of the state’s least populated places in eastern and far northern California, landscapes and cultures on the opposite corner of the Golden State that stand in stark contrast to the iconic southwest coast already surveyed.

Additional COVID-19 Pandemic Sources.
If you are interested in details, statistics, and some informative maps, here are some updated sources we listed in our previous California COVID-19 story from last spring. Good luck!:

L.A.Times tracks the virus in California:

https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/

John Hopkins University national maps show confirmed cases and deaths by county. Zoom in to California counties:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map

National Geographic:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/graphic-tracking-coronavirus-infections-us/

Google data:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=covid-19+maps+California

The post COVID-free Spaces in Pandemic Places: Coping with COVID-19 across California first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Will 2020 go down in history as the taxing year that broke California or the year when we met unprecedented challenges that forced us to make necessary changes and paved our way toward a brighter future? Can such a heartbreaking year of disease, distrust, and divisions be turned into the year when we discovered how to make positive change, when we celebrated our diversity and strengthened our connections that have been highlighted throughout this project? Those who might have previously questioned why we sometimes wandered into analyzing these struggles, conflicts, and controversies that trouble us aren’t asking any more in this year of reckoning. These lessons in human geography help us understand why each of us must accept personal responsibility for resisting or following those who have lost their moral compass, the selfish opportunists who exploit our divisions by creating more victims, enabling behavior that could leave us spiraling into a dystopian future.

The dragon that threatens us feeds on ignorance that digests into the putrid hate, stereotyping, fear, and discrimination that can poison our state and its people and its leaders. We must be armed with knowledge to slay this dragon. And so we offer plenty of information in this story and this project that might help speak truth to power and to those who might abuse it and to empower those who might not have it. Here, we will again take the higher road toward a brighter future that starts by using the knowledge that liberates us. In our never-ending efforts to encourage researchers with different perspectives who can add to the wealth of evidence that informs us about the Golden State, Bill Bowen will make his contribution with maps. We can slay the dragon by learning from such geographers and related influencers with their diverse expertise.   

He is a native of where the Sacramento Valley spills into the Delta. He earned his PhD studying with renowned geographers during the exciting growth years at a storied institution: UC Berkeley. He migrated to southern California to build a family and a long, distinguished career as a leading geographer at California State University, Northridge. Today, he remains very active, years after finally returning to the other side of Sacramento with his family, proving how geographers can make notable and lasting contributions long after “retirement”. Bill Bowen continues to be an impactful influencer, by refining and applying his geospatial technology skills, and using them to produce impressive and informative maps that shed more light on our Golden State. We thank him for contributing substance to our project through the years and for sharing some of his latest creations.         

We start with two images Bowen captured from the air back in the autumn of 2016. They demonstrate how a geographer can look down on his home with a clearer lens that reveals fascinating patterns; these are the detailed imprints on our landscapes that unveil secrets about the physical and human systems and cycles that rule our world. The first image (above) displays how agricultural patterns and activities still dominate so much of the Sacramento Valley and how farmers use prescribed burns (on allowed burn days dictated by air quality) to remove crop residues such as hay and rice and to better control weeds, pests, and diseases. It reminds us how the Sacramento Valley plays a key role in making California the leading agricultural state, still without a close rival.

The second image (above) looks east and upstream along the Yuba River as it flows out of the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Yuba City. You can see imprints left behind from 170 years of mining and water management that have altered the Yuba River drainage basin’s natural hydraulic and sediment transfer systems. You can also see the maze-like dredge tailings, known as the Gold Fields, reminding us of the historic Gold Rush that changed California forever. This basin is now being reimagined and reengineered with long overdue 100-year flood protection and ecosystem restoration projects. The purpose is to block and control flows that can then be diverted or percolated into local aquifers, while protecting endangered migratory birds and fish. Dantoni, Marigold, Hammonton, Timbuctoo, and Sucker Flat are just a few of the colorful historic place names along this river basin that most people never thought of as Californian, places with histories, cultures, and landscapes pretending they could be thousands of miles away from the state’s powerful coastal cities.

Next we turn our attention to the informative maps that Bowen has recently produced, demonstrating how GIS has transformed the way we make maps and examine our state. The first map (above) unveils political divisions that we have frequently addressed in our publication and on this web site. It reminds us of Rob O’Keefe’s county map in our publication, where he displayed presidential election results from 2016. Bowen’s points map clearly paints those two Californias and the transition between them. Democrats dominate in most coastal cities, but less so as we move inland and into more distant suburbs. The farther we travel into more remote rural inland communities, the more Republicans tend to dominate the electorate, with some notable exceptions.

The next map (above) shows the percentage of adult Californians at each location who have NOT graduated from high school. Note that, in and near most coastal cities, less than 3% of adults have not graduated from high school. But that number dramatically increases to more than 21% as we move inland into rural communities where primary industries (such as farming) dominate. Specifically, the Central Valley, Imperial Valley, and Salinas Valley stand out. These regions are home to high numbers of migrant farm workers and fewer educational opportunities. The contrasts between highly-educated populations concentrated in coastal cities and clusters of less-educated people in rural inland communities is clear. Exceptions can be found within a few low-income neighborhoods in some cities that house pockets of less-educated service workers. On the other extreme of exceptions are the occasional clusters of inland communities that have attracted retirees or other more educated Californians escaping from crowded cities into resorts and communities surrounded by nature and open spaces, such as in the Sierra Nevada foothills.           

California’s patterns of polarized politics, cultures, and economies are evident on these maps. For instance, Berkeley (where there are 24 Democrats to every Republican) stands out in Bowen’s political map. (The other top Democratic strongholds are an interesting mix of both upper income white and lower income communities with people of color in the Bay and L.A. areas.) The cultural connections are fascinating. For instance, in the annual Niche rankings that are based on what are considered rigorous analysis of data and reviews, Berkeley consistently leads as one of the top ten best places to live in America, including the best suburb and healthiest city. Recently, Apartment Guide ranked Berkeley as the top coffee city in the country, with the greatest number of coffee shops and cafes specializing in coffees and teas/capita (1/2,073 residents). San Francisco ranked third in the nation in the same coffee study. And it is no surprise that the state’s wealthy coastal communities (such as in Marin County, with its high percentage of graduate degrees) consistently rank highest in educational attainment AND cost of living surveys. Follow along to examine the two Californias. 

These communities with high numbers of students, professors, and highly-skilled professionals (such as the Silicon Valley and southern California’s Silicon Beach and Tech Coast) stand out in contrast to lowest-ranked communities that are usually found far inland, where primary industries with their less skilled work forces dominate economies, cultures, and landscapes and where the cost of living is relatively low. Central Valley or Inland Empire cities often place on worst places to live lists (such as research published in 24/7), where surveys find some of the least healthy residents with the highest poverty rates and lowest educational attainment. There are plenty of Californians who live in cities, suburbs, and remote inland locations who would take exception to what might be considered unfair over-generalizations and stereotypes here. Our state has 40 million different perceptions and definitions of happiness and quality of life and even more ways of measuring them. But that doesn’t dismiss the power of these maps and what we can learn from them. 

Notice the striking general similarities between trends in northern/central California and southern California. Dominant greens show highly educated populations along the coasts, trending to a more varied mix into the suburbs, especially locations that could be perceived to be within commuter distance of major cities. As we move farther inland, we become more detached from the coastal cities until the reds of large percentages of people without college degrees may dominate.

Combine all of these maps and you can see many different variations and methods of measuring and defining the two Californias. According to studies in publications such as Education, people with advanced graduate degrees earn 3.7 times more than those who have not completed high school. These highly educated people tend to settle in and near major metropolitan areas with corporate headquarters and the best jobs. We can now add ethnic groups into the mix. Compare these with the previous maps to better understand which communities thrive with highly educated populations and which communities struggle without education and other resources, yet more ways to define and measure the two Californias.

How might you use the information in this story to respond to the challenges that have erupted during 2020? As I write this, the symptoms of the disease are all around us. They come in the form of the Public Safety Alerts that blare out of our phones to announce the latest curfew, the constant whine of sirens from responders trying to quell the violence, and the ominous presence of National Guard forces that have settled on our city streets. The symptoms are also evident in the senseless violence that left the detritus of destroyed businesses and public property in our downtown that will cost us millions of dollars to restore. In the middle of this chaos, one of the more poignant and common graffiti read, Eye for an Eye, an unintended and somewhat ironic reminder of how we continue to act in ignorance as if we were all blind. So, it is hoped that some of the information here might encourage us to use our intelligence that will help cure our disease and build a road toward the light. Knowing “where” is just a start.

The next logical step is to add to the impressive research and analyses that help us understand these patterns we observe. Historical institutionalized discrimination, segregation, racial restrictive covenants, redlining, white flight, migrations, growing gaps between working- and upper-classes, gentrification, access to and defunding of public education, tribalism, growth of new ethnic enclaves, job opportunities for highly-skilled and less-skilled workers, affordable housing and cost of living, access to health care and other services, commute times, and perceptions of living standards are part of a much longer list of multiple variables to be studied. Environmental considerations such as topography, microclimates, exposure to pollution, access to open space and natural resources, natural hazards risks, and related quality of life variables also help explain these maps since these factors are perceived very differently by diverse groups when they are forced to decide where to live. Many of these variables can be mapped and layered to help us understand what are otherwise extremely complicated human behaviors, decisions, and patterns on the land. Such research will help us solve the problems that confront us in 2020 and beyond as we more effectively address the issues we have tackled in this project and in our publication.

Start with a wealth of practical and research experiences, add astute and perceptive landscape appreciation, throw in some good geospatial technology skills, and you have created some impactful geography with powerful influence potential that can change the world. Now, it’s your turn.

The post Bill Bowen Maps California’s Many Faces first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Some trends could have been predicted. Our initial shelter in place and quarantine efforts that locked us down helped to keep the state’s infection and death rate curves below thresholds that could have otherwise overwhelmed our health care systems and left tens of thousands of sick patients without care. By mid May, our state with by far the greatest population still ranked only 5th in the number of cases. California has avoided the exponential curves, astronomical numbers, and senseless deaths that are too often experienced in the world’s less fortunate communities and countries. This allows most of us to feel lucky and healthy enough to express our empathy for families who have lost loved ones to the pandemic. But the reactions and results, so far, vary dramatically across the state.

After its initial introduction into the Bay Area, the virus spread throughout the state, but it is now impacting, infecting, and killing a much larger proportion of people in working-class families and communities who are also concentrated in our urban areas and some farming communities, and that includes people of color. The elderly (especially those living in nursing facilities) and those with preexisting health conditions (such as diabetes) suffering from inadequate health care are particularly vulnerable. But so are those in service and health care industries who are required to work under conditions likely to expose them to the virus. Working class people of all ages who do not have the financial and technical resources to study or work from home are further marginalized in what was already a two-tiered economy and society. The two Californias become evident again as one set of mainly blue-collar workers are required to return to what may be dangerous public-contact work places to earn their paychecks while another set of mainly white- and gold-collar workers earn their incomes from the safety of their homes. Impacts remain less evident in many more rural counties and communities in far northern and inland California, where less onerous restrictions were frequently first resisted or ignored and then lifted. Big exceptions include a few important agricultural communities and prisons that have experienced dramatic spikes in cases, such as in Tulare and Imperial Counties. 

We have also stifled the world’s 5^th largest economy and sent millions of workers into unemployment. And so, as we have saved tens of thousands of lives, some are now asking why killing this virus should require killing our economy. How do we reopen safely and efficiently? In classic California fashion, the predominately progressive coastal cities have lined up on the side of safety first, while more conservative rural communities farther inland and north of Sacramento (such as the Jeffersonians) dismiss the threats and barrel full speed ahead into traditional work and routines that will pay the bills. Polarized sides bring their arguments to the forefront, either by shaming those who ignore health risks or by criticizing and attacking government interventions that are perceived to limit their freedoms. Once again, the 40 million people in the most diverse state find themselves at the center of a classic American debate. Are we all community in the same boat that keeps everyone, even the selfish, above water, or is this another opportunity to celebrate our fierce independence and rugged individualism? Regardless, social media has helped to blur some of the geographic boundaries that would otherwise separate these seemingly disparate philosophies, cultures, and communities, statewide divisions that we highlight in our publication.

Here, we explore a popular and controversial example from Huntington Beach. Recent election results suggest that Orange County has shifted away from its ultra-conservative history to become more progressive in culture and politics. But responses to the pandemic lifted some of that traditional stereotyped OC culture back toward the surface in the form of right-leaning protestors who resent any government incursion into their economic lives. Their philosophical bonds with those rural cultures farther inland and north of Sacramento made Huntington Beach a magnet for attracting anyone who wanted to demonstrate their contempt for what they saw as government overreach during the pandemic.

The signs spoke volumes. Animosity toward the sitting progressive Democratic Governor Newsom, libertarians, white nationalists, Trump supporters promoting FOX News and conservative radio personalities, anti-vaccine groups, conspiracy theory believers, pro-gun industry supporters: it was a cast of characters you’ve seen so often in the sensationalist media that thrives on conflict, all converging into a relatively small but raucous crowd in front of the closed Huntington Beach Pier.  A couple of them even stormed the closed gates, only to be met by a team of officers who were forced to cart the troublemakers off from the end of the pier. The circus atmosphere included a cacophony of competing bullhorn and loudspeaker noise from people touting their favorite brand of right-wing politics and an army of police officers on foot, horses, and vehicles trying to calm the tension that sometimes erupts between demonstrators and counterdemonstrators. A few of the spectators cheered the protestors on, while a few repulsed passersby were overheard labeling them as “crazy nuts” through their protective masks. The images we share here thrust you into this California scene, while the surrounding activity may be even more telling.

Downtown Huntington Beach streets (especially Main Street) were packed with summer-worshiping crowds soothing their cabin fever in May without facial masks, and open businesses seeming to purposely flout all social distancing and stay-at-home rules. The “no virus threat here” spectacle spread for miles in both directions along the beach where revelers brought their families and friends to swim and surf and relax on the sand, some ignoring official pleas to encourage social distancing and to keep moving. “Surf City here we come” stood in dramatic contrast to beaches and communities in adjacent L.A. County that remained sparsely visited, if not empty, while most of their few mask-clad recreators adhered to social distancing rules and law enforcement occasionally enforced those rules. The two Californias were evident on this same sunny May Saturday afternoon in these adjacent counties during this unprecedented pandemic.

Just as the number of COVID-19 victims grew in May, impatience with the two-month-long lock down was also growing, first spreading from these early epicenters of discontent like a ripple that turned into a wave that might gradually introduce more Californians back to work and play. It is a very different kind of experiment with unknown results among the amazing diversity of communities that make the Golden State. If you are reading this long after May, 2020, you may already know the results, whether this pandemic did permanent damage or if we weathered this storm and came out stronger in the long run.

We have all learned that it is relatively easy to lock the state down to save lives or open it up to save the economy, but as the pandemic drags on, how can we find ways to achieve both goals? These questions and their answers are far more complicated than the shallow, oversimplified media-driven debates. Just as this pandemic is unprecedented, it will take an unprecedented wealth of creative thinking, great minds, hard work, good will, and cooperation to find common ground and move us back into the light. Even in our divisions and tribes, we continue floating together on that same boat.

There is a growing variety of active sites where you can gather information about the pandemic in California. As of May, 2020, the maps and graphics display a wide array of sometimes puzzling trends. Per capita cases are high in Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties, but also in isolated Mono and agricultural Tulare and Imperial counties. Throw in Santa Barbara County and you have the highest per capita counties to date, but the data are changing fast. Each of the following links is a moving target that may evolve, change, or disappear after this story is posted. We include the full addresses to help your research. Good luck in your endeavors to be healthy, wealthy, and wise! 

Some useful links:

UCLA Anthropologist Daniel Fessler discusses the flip side of these images by sharing his historical and intellectual perspective about our human dilemma. You’ll need an hour to digest these thoughts:

L.A.Times tracks the virus in California:

https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/

John Hopkins University national maps show confirmed cases and deaths by county. Zoom in to California counties:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map

National Geographic:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/graphic-tracking-coronavirus-infections-us/

Google data:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=covid-19+maps+California

Orange County (where the images in this story were recorded): https://occovid19.ochealthinfo.com/coronavirus-in-oc

The post COVID-19 Update: Divisions Resurface in the Golden State first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Since this story is only a quick snapshot in early April, 2020, we don’t know how much pain and suffering and destruction COVID-19 virus will finally leave in its wake. But as people (especially the most vulnerable, such as the already ill and elderly) are sick and dying, medical services are being strained beyond their capacities. Mental health experts are urging all of us to reevaluate and differentiate between what we perceive as inconveniences and real problems in our lives.

Our reactions to this pandemic are transforming the state’s people, cultures, landscapes, and economies faster than most could have imagined. How can anyone attempt to describe or predict the final extent of COVID-19 impacts on our state at this stage in the battle? We have an obligation to share at least a few relevant observations here as we continue to consider and research new ways to rediscover the Golden State. You are welcome to fill in the many gaps as we also invite you to explore with us a few iconic landscapes at this pivotal time in California history. All images (unless otherwise noted) were captured from the Malibu hills and coast to Santa Monica and Venice Beach during the first days of the lockdown. They were all taken from legally-accessible sites during early stages of the pandemic response, while adhering to all health guidelines. Some sites have since closed. We are all reminded that public officials are struggling to do their jobs, so be responsible and stay safe.

It is already clear that our state and our Rediscovering the Golden State project, at least for 2020, has evolved into two narratives: before and after COVID-19. The new Coronavirus and our responses to it are rewriting the human geography that we have researched and shared in our publication and our web page.  

An eerie, foreboding quiet has been cast over our city streets and many other private and public spaces, featuring odd AWOL-like human landscapes. It reminds us of those science fiction movies with images of hunkered-down neighborhoods waiting for the terrifying monster to stomp through. This tempts the geographer in us to rename the virus Godzilla-19. Will the monster destroy us or will we destroy ourselves and our communities preparing for and fighting it? After this pandemic spreads so much inconvenience, pain, and suffering, can a new and improved California emerge? If you are reading this after the crisis, you may already have formulated some answers.

As of the start of April, how have 40 million people in the most culturally diverse place on the planet reacted to our state shut down? At first, within otherwise seemingly abandoned cities and suburbs during daylight hours, some families could be seen walking and playing together in parks, beaches, and the other open public spaces that have become so precious to Californians, especially as we were blocked out of those meticulously planned private landscapes that were designed to encourage us to spend our dollars. More recently, officials have been closing even our shared public outdoor spaces to keep the virus from spreading, as some became overcrowded with visitors trying to escape their limited confines.

Rural Californians working in primary industries may have, at first, had to make the fewest adjustments to adhere to the temporary COVID-19 protocols. You might not have even noticed pandemic symptoms in some of the state’s more rural and remote communities where annual incomes and the cost of living are relatively low. The big exceptions include communities dependent on tourism and ecotourism, where their streets and hospitality businesses are left empty and severely damaged.

Common sense must rule as geographical and spatial epidemiologists monitor Godzilla’s destruction and work to educate us about the details. Will the monster have its way with California cities as it did NYC? Will the pandemic quickly infect the densest urban neighborhoods and gradually trickle into rural areas? Will it hit certain ethnic groups harder than others? We already know that the elderly are most vulnerable. Will the per capita infection and illness rates be higher in working class or wealthy communities, homeless or prison populations? Will changing seasons slow or accelerate the spread? Did our quick, proactive response slow (flatten) California’s per capita infections and deaths curves compared to many other states and nations, or was there something else about our geography that made us unique? There are too many questions and unknown variables in these uncharted waters during this uncertain spring, but the final maps promise to reveal fascinating mysteries and hidden tragedies.

We already declare many losers in economic geography, particularly in a state where such activities as tourism, transportation, manufacturing, international trade, entertainment, and services (each worth hundreds of billions of dollars) recently fueled our economic engines to soar over $3 billion, more than 14% of U.S. GDP. Sober fiscal realities become clear when you check the economic specifics in Chapter 10 of our publication: our state’s economy is being crippled by this devastating Godzilla. And the catastrophe is spreading faster than at any time in history: note the millions of able workers applying for unemployment.  

Past mistakes haunt us…again. While California was smart to boost its rainy day funds during the last decade of growth that built the 5^th largest economy in the world, the Federal Government debt was allowed to balloon in reckless fashion. The Godzilla-19 crisis promises to quickly deplete our once impressive state surplus, while the nation’s debt will skyrocket to historic and perhaps unmanageable or even unimaginable levels. We will all have enormous debt burdens that could last for generations and it will show in every future decision we make, from building infrastructure, to supporting education, and from funding our parks, to supplying vital social services. It is too late to encourage the discipline that could have built rewarding household and government rainy day funds. The rainy day has arrived.

Other industries, each worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, are playing key roles in keeping us alive, sometimes literally. The global epicenter of biotechnology industries is in the Golden State, particularly from southern Orange County through San Diego County. Will treatments and cures for the COVID-19 scourge be discovered here? The high technology capital of the world remains in the Silicon Valley and has spread beyond the Bay Area, spilled in to the Central Valley, and leaped into coastal Southern California. These technologies have become crucial in supporting the schooling and working and social networking from home that has kept our economy from crashing, while guarding millions from getting sick. As just one example, it is no surprise that Zoom Video Communications is headquartered in San Jose. Other communications technologies and delivery companies have allowed millions of Californians to purchase and receive vital products without risky human contact. So it is true that if California sneezes, the nation will get sicker. All eyes necessarily turn to our overburdened health care industry.

The crash in service industries that require human contact and the inaccessibility of many technologies to low-income Californians promises to increase inequities, poverty rates, and the already record gap between the rich and poor. Those ubiquitous delivery trucks that have converged on higher income neighborhoods are serving far fewer working class households where there are people who have lost their tips and weekly paychecks and now can barely afford their necessities, much less pay for deliveries. Smaller, struggling businesses are folding or being gobbled up by those with the capital to ride out this unprecedented storm.

This pandemic offers too many opportunities to reexamine ourselves, our priorities, our neighborhoods, our landscapes, and how we evaluate the issues and solve the problems that confront us, the very topics we have been addressing in this project that has evolved throughout its more than 20 years. We are forced to consider potentially devastating impacts on the most vulnerable populations that include those stuck in poverty without adequate health insurance, more than 100,000 homeless people, and more than 100,000 prisoners in the state. We are startled to see how our living environments improve without the congestion, traffic gridlock, and air pollution that plagued many of our cities when the economy was growing full steam ahead. The pain and suffering brought by COVID-19 offers renewed opportunities to apply geography and “to place California’s human and physical resources, issues, problems, and landscapes in a geographic perspective”, as stated in the last chapter of our publication.

When faced with such a crisis, we are forced to refocus on geographic realities that we have too often ignored. In the long term, unfortunate synergies are growing from local to global scales, such as the effects of climate change, pollution, habitat destruction, the introduction of aggressive non-native invasive species, and our accelerated encroachment into wild spaces. These trends that define the Anthropocene also conspire to produce even more potent future Godzillas than the one we are fighting. And is everyone recognizing the uncanny parallels in our debates about how to handle this crises and more long-term environmental challenges such as climate change? Overreact by investing now and we might save ourselves in the long term at some short-term expense; underreact and we might allow an uncontrolled experiment with unknown consequences to run amok and destroy us. Should we ignore the scientific evidence that commands us to flatten the curve, we risk unleashing an unimaginable wrecking ball into our communities. This Godzilla has reminded us that nature is in charge no matter how we might try to ignore her. And so, as of today, most of our overreactions to this pandemic have turned out to be the proper reactions.

In a state and a world with economies that are fueled by trade and travel and other human interaction, there are many logistical reasons why we can’t erect the perfect barriers such as travel restrictions and quarantines that could quickly end future threats from the outside. But we can work to eliminate islands of inequities that exist in our health care systems, because these may be the petri dishes that nurture the next monster that erupts to produce the next pandemic. So much of our health and survival depends on our ability to – with clearer lenses – rediscover our surrounding environments and reimagine our communities as we view into this new world. Such success will require that we rely on the evidence and science-based decision making that makes us smarter and stronger so that we may better understand these complicated problems and muster the social cohesion required to solve them.    

This is more than our chance to become better prepared to fight an even deadlier biological Godzilla-20 or 21 that epidemiologists warn could attack us in the future. We might use this opportunity to reestablish healthier families and cultures, as the importance of household and neighborhood communication replaces alienation and isolation. Cooperation and community could replace selfish cynicism, tribalism, and hyper-competition for the few remaining scraps. Through it all, our appreciation and love for geography can be rekindled as we become more prepared for future disasters such as that catastrophic earthquake that is in our future. The least imaginative leaders have already forced us to confront moral and philosophical questions about the importance of money and wealth versus life and health, as if they could be neatly separated for conflict. This might be an opportunity to recognize how our economy AND public health are powerfully connected: sick workers operate sick economies; healthy Californians are more productive Californians.

While keeping my social distance in the checkout lines, I have done some rough surveys. Why were so many people hoarding products that are easily restocked by reliable supply chains, even during a crisis like this? After all, farmers must continue to bring their food to markets as it becomes edible. The California Grocers Association reassures us and demonstrates how the supply chain is intact and reliable, so what is fueling this irrational and wasteful panic buying? The other day, I asked the person in front of me why he had filled his cart with so many plastic bottles of water. He blamed it on orders from his wife, but like every other bottled water hoarder I’ve asked, his only answer was that “everyone else was doing it.” Yet anyone knowledgeable about our state’s water delivery systems knows that our inexpensive tap water is usually as good or better quality than plastic bottled water that costs as much as gasoline, except for very few neighborhoods and isolated communities suffering from locally contaminated water (especially groundwater) supplies. Still, companies pushing their bottled water have made fortunes off convincing millions of clueless Californians to waste their hard-earned money to buy something that is already offered to them almost for free, with or without a home filter. Meanwhile, the unnecessary plastic bottle waste piles up in our landfills and on our beaches while consumers drain their wallets to pay for something they don’t need. It’s another Tragedy of the Commons drama that can be eased with some knowledge of geography.

And spatial epidemiologists can tell you that riding your bike or walking with your family on the beach or a mountain trail is perfectly safe as long as you keep your safe social distance. Especially during these times, everyone can benefit from decreasing stress hormones, blood pressure, and heart rates in open and natural environments that can strengthen our natural immune systems and quell our nature deficit disorders. Enjoy neighborhood walks, find a garden, but keep your safe social distance. Still, there is pressure to close all of our calming public spaces during this crisis at the expense of our freedom to stay physically and mentally fit. Conflicts and debates quickly erupt as medical experts tell us there is no threat to anyone who observes proper social distancing in open air environments, while these activities often result in enormous improvements to our physical and mental well-being. What do you think is healthier personal and social behavior?…remaining cooped up behind four walls, or walking along an open trail in fresh air under an open sky with or without your family, while maintaining safe social distances?…disconnected inaction or engaged participation? A little bit more knowledge about diseases and our need to connect to our surrounding environments would help us make better choices.

Geography helps us understand why particular public parks and trails were forced to close after selfies and social media over-advertised them as escapes from the Godzilla drama. Parts of Marin County to Pt. Reyes, Newport and Laguna Beach, and other popular local, state, and national parks and nature trails adjacent to our largest urban areas were overrun and then first to close when the hordes were crammed dangerously closer than the social distance required. This heaps greater burdens on the fewer public spaces remaining open until they are forced to close under a cascading negative ripple effect. Unintended consequences take over. One- or half-day journeys to the open, expansive, calming places have been thwarted by closures sometimes encouraged by wealthy locals who are fortunate to live adjacent to the resources, but who might fear the crowds more than the virus. Tragedy of the Commons revisited.

We are challenged to imagine more sustainable ways of reacting and how we might eventually reopen our state and our lives, especially as this crisis carries on for months, particularly when the curve is finally falling. When the threat eases, more effort can be made to warn potential visitors about overcrowded open spaces so they can be avoided. Officials might coordinate with local volunteers to direct, disperse, and educate visitors along one-way loop trails and other outdoor experiences that encourage social distancing so that all parks and beaches might reopen. Alternating parking days permitting only odd or even license plates or birth years could cut crowds at other public areas. There are many other examples as simple as this one smart sign that read, “Our public parks are open. Please maintain safe social distance.”, until even that park was later closed. If you think these ideas are unworkable, here’s a chance to propose your own solutions instead of sitting back, watching, and complaining.

A wave of volunteers, cooperation, and social cohesion will be required to avoid dangerous congregating in our cherished open spaces so that we can conquer this monster. Our path toward freedom and sanity will require a bold vision and strategy, a labor-intensive effort that we haven’t seen in many decades. It will necessitate unprecedented coordination between local, state, and federal agencies and officials. But we cannot let this attack from nature further disconnect us from our physical geography, from what is really vital to our health and survival, the natural world that nurtures us. Without these herculean efforts, we may become the latest victims living through our five stages of grief over our many losses within our manufactured Tragedy of the Commons in a sort of Godzilla Meets the Twilight Zone landscape and culture.

Visiting any store, business, neighborhood, or public place during this crisis, you can’t help wishing that the late screenwriter, Rod Serling, could have lived to witness real people behaving as the characters in the stories he once imagined for us, the stories that could make us look in the mirror and love what we could be or hate what we have become.

You can see that there are many new and urgent reasons why we will be sharing more of our own stories about the Golden State to inform and to explore with you while we are all fighting together and finally recovering from this Godzilla-19 monster. It is a perfect opportunity to imagine how we can open a new door and live up to our potential to become the state we want to be. And as Rod Serling once declared, you unlock this door with the key of imagination. Stay tuned.

This snapshot story ends with the late Maya Angelou’s words that seem more relevant than ever: “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”

The post COVID-19 Attacks California first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Some Tijuana History

By the mid-1900s, Tijuana was gaining a stereotyped reputation as a tourist town where you could find horseracing, bullfighting, cheap souvenirs, and plenty of Ugly Americans searching for their next shots of Tequila. It also evolved as the city between, as Californians traveled through it to their vacation homes and resorts in such places as nearby Rosarito Beach and Ensenada. For the more adventurous, it was the staging grounds for explorers traveling farther down the Baja peninsula. It was also the last stop before migrants from Latin America took their last step – legally or illegally – north into a promising California of their dreams. One thing is certain: it has never been your average Mexican city.

This border town of immigrants quickly grew from about 60,000 in 1950 to more than 1.5 million by 2018 and up to 2 million including the greater sprawling metropolitan area. When trade barriers eased in the late 1900s, maquiladoras erupted on the Mexican side of the border. These manufacturing industries (that some would label sweat shops) exploited the cheap labor pools that then flooded north by the hundreds of thousands, often in the form of young Mexican women fleeing the poverty that would motivate them to work hard for long hours. Mexico’s and Tijuana’s relaxed labor and environmental regulations attracted mammoth corporations from around the world that could make inexpensive products and easily ship them to the consuming masses across the porous border. To the east, Tecate and Mexicali also grew into manufacturing behemoths.

Maquiladoras Attract Immigrants

Tijuana quickly became one of the world’s great manufacturing centers, especially in electronics. It has been the world’s leading manufacturer of TVs since the 1980s. Add computer components and accessories and other electronics and by 2016, more than half of Tijuana’s formal jobs were in manufacturing. 

Just before and since the turn of the century, billions of dollars have been pumped into Tijuana’s economy in single years. Tens of thousands of new jobs were added as payrolls grew by more than 10 percent each year. Signs across the city announced “Se Necesita Personal”, especially in the Mesa de Otay industrial zone. Even U.S. exports to Mexico soared to record billions of dollars per year in the ongoing trade boom.

The impacts on Tijuana cultures and landscapes have been profound as its populations grew at more than 5%/yr. These represented the greatest migrations in Mexico since the 1960s. Hundreds of thousands of new arrivals crowded Tijuana’s streets, straining an already overwhelmed infrastructure, spreading wealth, diverse cultures, poverty, pollution, and crime well beyond city and national borders. Squatters’ barrios had no services or infrastructure, such as power, water, and sewage disposal.

Many transient immigrant workers took their hard-earned money and returned to their homelands in Mexico, while others continued their migrations into the United States. All of this activity continues to have obvious impacts on California: San Ysidro and Otay Mesa just to the east are recognized as the busiest border crossings in the world. These powerful connections that include labor pools, commercial trade, and tourism helped boost crossings from Tijuana to San Diego to more than 60 million people each year.  

Housing and Services for New Immigrants
Solutions to infrastructure and environmental problems bear costs estimated at billions of dollars/decade as Tijuana attempts to catch up with these historic economic and migration trends and stabilize its border populations. But each year, new developments challenge those efforts.

When thousands of Haitians from Brazil arrived in 2016 and 2017, an estimated 6,000 of them were placed in shelters scattered around TJ. And the more “permanent” settlement of about 3,500 Haitians has been used as a model to handle the latest humanitarian crisis. This comes in the form of the now world-famous caravan of thousands of refugees from Central America escaping extreme violence and poverty, hoping to be admitted into the U.S. While passing north through southern Mexico, the caravan was supported with food, medical care, and temporary shelter. They were followed by media from around the world. Some of them split off and diffused into other parts of Mexico. But their stories are very different form the Haitians that settled just before them.

Caravan at the Border
That humanitarian support soured as thousands approached the U.S. Border. Using terms such as invaders and criminals, President Trump sent thousands of troops to stop them. Large numbers of troops called to the Texas border with Mexico were left with nothing to do when the caravan funneled along the same paths and toward the same city as the hundreds of thousands before them: Tijuana. Some (including the Mayor of Tijuana) note how these latest Central American refugees arrive with different stories and baggage than other groups, such as the Haitians who settled just before them.

Already with limited resources, Tijuana institutions and infrastructures are being strained beyond their limits. Some locals even organized public demonstrations displaying open hostility toward the refugees. American and Mexican lawyers (the borderlands legal industry is visible throughout Tijuana) huddled with the refugees to announce the dreaded truth: only about 20% of Central American applicants are granted asylum status in the U.S. and that process can take many months. Thousands of applicants are being added to the list while only about 100 are being processed at this border crossing each day.    

Nevertheless, with the support of social media and volunteer organizations, more than 5,000 members of the caravan converged on Tijuana before December 2018. Tensions mounted in this crowded city. Tijuana makeshift shelters became overcrowded with asylum seekers who would never make it legally into the U.S. Talk turned to the legal implications for the impatient who might try to cross into California illegally. Others considered applying for more accessible Mexican humanitarian visas that might allow immigrants to seek asylum and even work in Mexico. Hope soon turned to despair for thousands of refugees who had travelled over 2,500 miles north.

Public Perceptions Evolve as U.S. Officials React
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers were seen guarding the border in full anti-riot gear. On November 25, agitators managed to incite one immigrant group to storm the border. The consequences were predictable: violent images of desperate refugees running full speed as they were met with tear gas and sounds of weapons fire. The struggle was splattered in spectacular fashion throughout popular media. After brief closures into San Diego, President Trump vowed to permanently close the entire border if threats of illegal crossings continued.  

Scholars have exposed many of the hidden tragedies in the latest circus of mistakes that characterize our dysfunctional immigration policies over the years. Harvard University professor Ieva Jusionyte has noted how the styles, heights, and locations of border walls have delivered physical punishment to immigrants who dare cross without permission. Those who illegally cross where there is no wall will face wilderness, where bandits or winter’s bitter cold and summer’s searing heat have tortured or killed thousands. Some of the more athletic may try to scale the walls, only to lose fingers at the top or to seriously injure or break feet, ankles, legs, and spines while falling down to the U.S. side. Volunteers and border enforcement officers keep emergency responders busy with the 24/7 calls after helpless victims are found. The sick and injured often require long periods of medical care for rehabilitation. Still, they keep coming.

You will find a much more detailed analysis of immigration’s impacts on California in Chapters 7, 8, and 9 within the 4^th edition of our publication. Our perceptions of immigrants and our policies toward immigration too often fall into emotionally-charged, politically-motivated good immigrant/bad immigrant debates. Demagogues on one extreme attempt to demonize them while the other far side lifts them up on pedestals of angelic innocence. But a little research and experience proves that today’s immigrants are very similar to those who came before to populate our state and more similar to all of us than we might want to imagine, sharing kindred dreams and fears, strengths and weaknesses, good and bad.            

Confronting the Sources of Desperation
Debates continue on both sides of the border about how to craft and implement effective, comprehensive immigration policies, while volunteers hope that such terms as dignified and humane will determine how we treat the latest refugees. Many don’t realize that as the number of border crossings decreased during the last decade, the number of asylum seekers have substantially increased. So if any new policies are to work, they must address the uncomfortable truth that Americans too often ignore: thousands of these refugees are fleeing violent drug cartels in Central America and Mexico that are doing business with the United States.

Those cartels are buying most of their weapons from the U.S., which is why you will find hundreds of firearms dealers locating their businesses near the border. The majority of crime firearms in Central America and Mexico are being traced directly back to those U.S. dealers in a “vast guns bazaar”: we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of firearms worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

And we know the cartels are getting most of their cash to buy our weapons by selling illicit drugs to a second-to-none U.S. consumer market that is terribly addicted. Since this ongoing and now historic deadly cycle is no secret to anyone who wants to do some quick research, we might ask why it is not getting more media and policy-making attention. It is certain we will not solve these immigration problems and the appalling human suffering on both sides of the border unless we confront and help eliminate the source of these desperate immigrants’ problems. Like so many other California problems and their solutions, our road ahead will require a lot of looking in the mirror.              

Still Crossing the Border

Those of us who have travelled from California to Mexico over the years recognize how border crossings and the Tijuana and Baja experiences have changed. The walk or drive south into Mexico remains relatively smooth and easy, no questions asked. But crossing back north and into California has become a time-consuming hassle, even for U.S. Citizens. More drastic changes appeared after the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks. Eventually, passports were required – even for U.S. citizens – to cross back into the U.S. Thousands of legal U.S. residents who were not citizens have been shocked in recent years after learning that they deported themselves simply by walking into Tijuana for a few hours. Waiting periods for vehicles and pedestrians headed back north toward San Diego have ranged from a half hour (usually after midnight on weekdays) to up to three hours (such as on Sunday afternoons and evenings).

The carnival atmosphere that once entertained lines of waiting commuters and other travelers now often turns to dread when leaving a bustling, crowded TJ, signs that border politics and policies have changed. (By 2021, repeated reversals in U.S. border policies had created a type of whiplash reactionary atmosphere of confusion, especially for those considering crossing over. This was fueled by a change in administrations in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic that had already complicated immigration policies. And ongoing political conflicts between U.S. lawmakers continued to block the sensible comprehensive immigration reform required to introduce more stability and order to the border.) Still, powerful connections and potentials remain between these remarkable, evolving conurbations we call San Diego and Tijuana, borderlands that are home to about 5 million people. 

Walking Around Tijuana

Our images here (from a few years ago) serve to introduce you to a few notable landscapes as we walk across California’s borderlands and into urban Tijuana. We suggest you visit on your own so that you can enjoy the street tacos and rich cultures. Bring the family and friends, make sure your legal status allows your return, follow all the rules, and don’t forget your passports.  

Tijuana Border Controversy

Unmistakable Landmarks

Shopping and Entertainment

Worshiping Traditions

Catholic History

Architecture and Culture

Precious Open Space

Wealth and Poverty

Mexican Legend

Dreams on the Other Side

Squashing Against the Border

Carnival Atmosphere

Blending Cultures

Colorful Business Districts

Pushing the Limits

Center of Culture

Finding Identity

Slicing into History

Parking Abarrotado

Nutritious Options

Waiting to Cross

Pick Your California City

Last Stop/First Stop

Crossing on Foot

Legal Services

Water Pollution Knows No Border

Desperation River

Made in Mexico

The post Welcome to Tijuana: Caravans, Computers, Carnivals, and Controversy first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

In our publication, we have examined how California’s wild economic roller coaster can quickly create individual and geographic winners and losers. Likewise, the economic and geographic distances between the wealthy and working classes have also become more noticeable as the middle class has shrunk during the last few decades. These trends have fueled astonishing transformations in our cultures and human landscapes. Particularly within the state’s largest coastal metropolitan areas, many neighborhoods have experienced a kind of gentrification on steroids.

Our book’s “There Goes the Neighborhood” special section focuses on these trends. You can see the results in places like San Francisco’s Fillmore and Hayes Valley, much of Berkeley and Oakland, and in and near downtown Santa Ana and Long Beach. Near downtown San Diego, gentrification has already done its work around the Gas Lamp and in North Park and Hillcrest and in other neighborhoods near Balboa Park. As similar powerful forces spread into Barrio Logan and City Heights, familiar backlashes of resistance are championed by locals who work to support small businesses and keep their cultures intact. Lively debates often turn contentious as residents struggle to define their multicultural communities and help determine who can afford to live where.

Silver Lake in Los Angeles is a poster child for debates and research about the good and bad of gentrification. Regardless of the sides you choose, it has already happened there and most researchers agree that it will intensify at least in the short term. This is a hilly neighborhood north of downtown L.A. and not far from Koreatown, Los Feliz, Dodger Stadium, and an adjacent Echo Park that is now following Silver Lake’s footsteps along the path to gentrification. Many observers agree that Silver Lake is already there, citing how almost all of the working-class families that populated this neighborhood just a couple of decades ago have been priced out. Who and what has replaced those mostly lower-skill, lower-wage people, many who were forced to move farther away from the service and construction jobs that hold this city together?

The new arrivals are often well-educated, higher-income professionals who can afford to buy expensive fixers and then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars designing them into their castles. They are also young professionals who are waiting to buy or are not interested in the responsibilities and obligations that accompany ownership, but willing to pay exorbitant rents to live cosmopolitan lifestyles that include shorter commutes. Yesterday’s YUPPIES have already evolved into a new generation of hipsters living as singles, couples, or small, young families with lots of disposable income. They want culture and are willing and able to pay for it. In Silver Lake, that translated into median home values of more than $1.1 million by 2018, 14% higher than the year before and about double the prices from just six years earlier. Median rent soared to over $3,900/month by 2018, also higher than the L.A. average.   

The trendy restaurants, juice and other bars, and specialty shops that decorate Sunset between downtown and Hollywood are clear signs: this is what gentrification looks like in California. And it may be coming to a neighborhood or business district near you.      

Extreme Gentrifucation

Homeless

Urban Forest

Remodeling

Diverse Views

Million Dollar Views?

Urban Cultures

The post Extreme Gentrification? first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.