Geoengineering Cultures and Confirmation Bias

We can start with more than a decade of very public statements and events that finally inspired this story. My first big wakeup call came around 2011, while wandering into one of those Occupy Wall Street encampments at City Hall; I noticed a giant “Chemtrails=Geoengineering=Crimes Against Humanity” banner draped across the plaza. When I extended my hand and politely quizzed the protagonist about his sign, he asked me why I was bothering to explain the science for him and then he walked away in frustration. While radio-channel surfing several years ago, I chanced upon a DJ on a famously progressive-leaning all-news station asking for donations during a pledge drive. She was ranting about how chemtrails were so prevalent one day and absent on others, proving that some sort of secret government program was responsible for spraying our skies with poisonous chemicals that were changing our weather and how their investigative reporters were getting to the bottom of it all. Then there was the popular local TV news anchor who went on a special assignment interviewing people who believed that their health problems only flared up when those mysterious chemtrails appeared overhead above 25,000 feet. That perspective earned a series of prime-time TV stories shamelessly designed to boost network ratings.

More recently, on May 15, 2025, I stumbled upon a popular right-leaning radio talk show interview with the documentary-maker, chemtrail promoter, and champion of climate conspiracy theories, Matt Landman. He trumpeted to millions of listeners how recent devasting fires in Hawaii and California (and other tragic disasters) were caused by geoengineering. He also claimed that rainmaking had been “perfected”, and all that government and other “powers that be” had to do is flip a switch and make it rain on top of those fires and put them out. I was finally pushed into doing this story when a friend of mine, who is educated about these matters, wrote, “I know several people including some smart friends who 100% believe jet trails are a nefarious something that is being done by the “government”. They say if the jet trails were just vapor, they would disappear right away and they don’t.”

Regardless of your politics (geoengineering believers are commonly found on the far right and far left of the political spectrum) … Mission Control, we have a big information problem that needs our attention. Objective scientific explanations and analyses of climate intervention makes a lot of people uncomfortable; presenting solid evidence that unveils mysteries and may challenge true believers can foster resentment. Scientists and educators are sometimes intimidated until they become uneasy about truth-telling in such a hyped-up confirmation bias cancel culture. So, we must jump into this pop-culture controversy with our continuing commitment to just keep to the facts.

Jet Trails or Contrails or Chemtrails?

People have noticed and photographed jet trails (or contrails) in the sky for a century, ever since the beginning of jet aviation. In my book, The California Sky Watcher, I wrote about the science behind contrails in the section about clouds. Here is an excerpt with some editing for this story:

When you see jet trails—or condensation trails (contrails)—forming, they are announcing that the upper altitudes, where jets are flying, are near their dew points. You might notice them during any season, but once they form, they are likely to drift faster with higher-velocity winds as nature’s winter jet streams sweep farther south. Jets emit particulates and moisture from their exhaust into air at around 30,000 feet (9,140 m) altitude. Way up there, where it may be colder than –50°F (–46°C), vapor will almost immediately freeze around the jet exhaust to form ice-crystal cirrus-cloud streaks. When jet trails are thicker and last longer, there are often cirrus clouds forming near them in the saturated air at these high altitudes. When drier upper layers are not near their dew points, the jet trails will quickly sublimate (turn from ice directly into vapor) and disappear into the clear air. Jet trails may also quickly form by a process called aerodynamic condensation, which occurs as air is forced over the wings, causing adiabatic expansion and cooling of the moist air to its dew point. If you want to learn the detailed physics behind that specific process, here’s an article.

Technologies (see below) allow us to track particular airline flights that might be making trails; just follow their flight patterns. Research has shown that these slender clouds can combine to block and reflect enough shortwave sunlight back to space to suppress afternoon surface temperatures downward by a degree or more. When conditions are favorable, look for the linear shadows they can cast through hazy skies. But they also absorb longwave radiation from Earth’s surface at night, only to reradiate it back toward the surface, keeping overnight low temperatures just a bit warmer. The net result might be slight global warming in our atmosphere. At these high altitudes, the suspended jet exhaust pollution will likely be carried hundreds or thousands of miles in strong upper-level winds until it gets diluted and dispersed into global circulation patterns.

You might recognize how foolish it would be to attempt to poison a particular place or population with a chemtrail above 25,000 feet that is likely to drift a continent or ocean away as it is mixing and dispersing in the upper atmosphere. And then there are the thousands of scientists, engineers, pilots, and all the support staff and other workers who would be keeping these secrets from all of us. And don’t take my word or it. Check out the following explanations from the experts who dedicate their careers to researching this stuff.

Chem trails debunked: Royal Aeronautical Society

American Meteorological Society, 2017 Research Paper on Contrails

You can also use several apps (Flightradar24 , FlightAware , Plane Finder) that allow you to track flights in real-time and see exactly what planes are flying overhead. Flightradar24 even offers an augmented reality (AR) feature to identify planes by pointing your device at the sky. 

Some who have finally cast aside their claims of secret government flight chemtrails still argue that someone is purposely placing chemicals, designed to poison us and/or change the climate, into jet fuels. But fuels must be carefully formulated to keep flights safe and efficient and the dangerous chemicals often mentioned aren’t even found in jet fuels. Nevertheless, public officials, including our current US Health and Human Services Secretary, have fueled these rumors with reckless rhetoric and empty promises.

Some political leaders (from at least 8 states) are even trying to pass legislation to stop something that doesn’t exist. Here is an article that traces the roots of several decades of geoengineering history and some myths that have often been championed by those on the far left and then far right of the political spectrum, which is now morphing into legislation of the bizarre.

Weather Radar

Another rumor gone viral (and promoted by some who must know better) is how weather radar stations are designed to change our weather. But radar technologies have been widely used in law enforcement and air traffic control and our atmosphere has always been bombarded with radio waves from the universe, not to mention more than a century of humans’ radio and TV waves. Equipment within “those round domes” you might see uses Doppler radar (microwaves on the electromagnetic spectrum) to detect the speed and direction of moving objects. They use the Doppler effect, tracking the change in frequency of their propagated and then reflected radio waves, to measure the direction and speed of objects in the sky. Those spherical “radomes” are just shells designed to shield the sensitive equipment inside and minimize interference with radar signals.

These radar technologies have greatly improved forecasters’ ability to immediately monitor precipitation and storms as they form and move and they can even detect powerful winds and circulations in the clouds before they become dangerous funnel clouds or deadly tornadoes. You can thank such technologies for saving thousands of lives each year and making your plane flights safer. Yet, in the spirit of you can’t make this stuff up, some clueless (or worse) public officials have proposed banning them! Here’s another plea to not take my word for it and do your own research. How radar works

Weather radar stations in the US, including both NEXRAD (Next-Generation Radar) and TDWR (Terminal Doppler Weather Radar), are operated by different federal agencies. The National Weather Service (NWS), an agency within NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), operates and maintains NEXRAD stations. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) maintains and operates TDWR stations. Additionally, the US Air Force also plays a role in the NEXRAD system.

You may also have heard the sordid stories about HAARP, especially from talk radio programs and other media looking to boost their ratings. This acronym for the scientific research facility in Alaska stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, where they have been using a high-frequency transmitter to study the ionosphere, that charged-up rarified top or our atmosphere that affects radio wave propagation and extends from more than 30 miles high on out into space. Unfortunately, HAARP research scientists have been accused of manipulating weather and even engaging in mind control, which should make us wonder who’s trying to control whom.

Cloud Seeding

Here’s where humans have been experimenting with weather modification for years, but with mixed results at best. So that we don’t try to reinvent the wheel, I will use another edited excerpt from my California Sky Watcher book to summarize cloud seeding in California:

“Cloud seeding is one of the most studied and debated forms of weather modification. It exploits natural processes to enhance precipitation from thick clouds that are potential precipitation producers. Such cloud-seeding experiments date back more than seventy years, with some “success.” Remember that most of the substantial rain you have experienced in California started high in the clouds as ice and snow that eventually melted before reaching the ground. In some clouds with favorable dynamics, adding just the right number of minute particles (either launched from the ground or from planes) that can act as freezing nuclei (such as silver iodide) seems to slightly enhance precipitation totals. This happens as the freezing nuclei grow layers of ice by attracting very cold water in clouds that then freezes on to the nuclei surfaces. (This is also known as the Bergeron process.) The ice crystals grow large enough to fall through the clouds, attracting more moisture along the way and producing heavier precipitation than might have been expected. (Similar methods have been used to clear thick, cold fog banks.) This process does not work in warm clouds that may drop lighter rain and drizzle.

Rain- and snowmaking is a tricky business given that even when seeding is considered successful, a lot of uncertainty and risk management remains. We have much more to learn about weather modification, which explains why the American Meteorological Society encourages only the most well-designed experimentation and research and recommends caution when people are fooling around with these natural processes. In spite of these uncertainties, as of 2025, several California agencies continued experimenting with cloud-seeding efforts, especially to enhance Sierra Nevada snowpacks. (An increasing number of studies have suggested snowfall enhancement success of up to 3–10 percent in the mountains.) Water and utility districts such as in Sacramento and the East Bay, PG&E, the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority, and Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties continue their experimental programs, hoping for the best.

We have come a long way since Charles Hatfield roamed our drought-stricken state in the early 1900s, advancing what some believed to be his magical rainmaking skills. When he was finally hired to break the 1915 drought in San Diego, by chance a historic nearly 30 inches (76 cm) of rain fell in less than a month, causing devastating and deadly flooding. Hatfield’s shenanigans even inspired a classic 1950s Western movie, The Rainmaker. Our weather knowledge then was barely a drop in the bucket compared to what we know today, as better-informed scientists and would-be rainmakers continue with their weather modification debates and efforts. Such struggles with nature make me suspect that the Native Americans before us better understood some of California’s weather and water cycles.”

The historic July 4, 2025 flash flood tragedy along the Guadalupe River in Texas (see our adjacent website story) brought cloud seeding into the headlines again when it was learned how a California-based company called “Rainmaker” had been working in Texas. But the company had only seeded two small clouds in distant south-central Texas two days before the flood, and the puffy potential rainmakers evaporated within a couple of hours. Rainmaker wisely suspended operations two days before the Texas floods as moist air masses moved toward the region and forecast models warned of big storms in the days ahead. Still, clueless social media posts pointed fingers in attempts to displace the blame.

You will find a wealth of links to research on cloud seeding at the end of this story (below).

Become Part of the Solution by Spreading the Knowledge

It is our responsibility to combat confirmation bias by moving forward with transparency and integrity. Please share these back-to-reality facts with your friends who have been misled by some skeptics who are well-intentioned, some who are true believers and followers, some who take advantage of people’s fears and vulnerabilities, and others who should know better. Show them how old-fashioned critical thinking and use of the scientific method can clear up any confusion they might have about climate intervention/modification, or what they call geoengineering. And if they insist on following these distracting conspiracy theory trails that lead to dead ends, remind them of the old adage I have slightly modified, but applies perfectly here: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, weird weather we’re having, eh?”

To repeat “Don’t take my word for it.”, here are some relevant links to share:

The Latest AMS Statement on Climate Intervention

NOAA Fact Check on Climate Modification

Weather Modification Project Reports from NOAA

Cloud Seeding Links and Details:

Recent GAO paper on Cloud Seeding

In case you missed that Texas flash flood/cloud seeding article, here’s the link sent from climatologist Bill Patzert.

From 2016: The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) has been regulating and monitoring cloud seeding programs in California, which are used to enhance precipitation, particularly snow and rain. These programs involve the release of substances like silver iodide into clouds to promote ice crystal formation and increase precipitation. The DWR requires sponsors to file notices of intent and comply with environmental regulations.

To track cloud seeding programs in the US, you can consult resources that include the Colorado Virtual Library, NOAA’s Library, and the North American Weather Modification Council. Some other states also have their own programs, such as Colorado’s Weather Modification Program. Additionally, organizations such as the Desert Research Institute conduct research and operate cloud seeding projects.

Just in case you haven’t seen enough contrail images ….

THE END

The post Geoengineering and Climate Intervention: Jet Trails and Radar and Cloud Seeding, Oh My! first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Just more than a century ago, the typical California commute or road trip around our growing cities and outposts was by foot, streetcar, or cable car, except for those who could afford a horse and buggy or carriage. Longer cross-country trips required wagons, stages, or trains. Bicycles were also pedaled into early urban scenes, with thousands of bicyclists organizing into bicycle clubs and demanding better roads for smoother bike rides. Our fledgling California settlements and wannabe cities grew into the 20^th century without widely-paved roads and parking lots to accommodate cars.

Revolutionary “horseless motor carriages” began rolling across the Golden State in the early 1900s. By 1905, there were already more than 6,000 vehicles (including motorcycles and trucks) bumbling through city streets and breaking down and getting lost and stuck on treacherous dirt roads to nowhere across the state. By 1906, the Auto Club was erecting directional road signs along crushed rock surfaces covered with oil and less-navigable dirt roads to serve those who were wealthy enough to afford their own vehicles. Auto Club members were issued ever-changing and improving road maps.

After Ford rolled out the Model T in 1908, cars became more affordable for average families (and much less expensive than the shorter-range electric cars that were already navigating city streets) and the California car culture was off to the races. By the time the $18 million State Highway Act was passed in 1910, funding was far too paltry to build the roads and other car infrastructures that the public demanded in nearly every town, city, and county. Still, the bonds funded groundbreaking and paving designed to start a continuous system of roads built to connect cities and other key points from north to south (including the birth of what we now call Hwy 101).

As the number of vehicles multiplied, there were plenty of critics. They noted the clouds of smoke belched out from unsafe vehicles that were running over defenseless pedestrians and crashing into one another, resulting in appalling rates of injury and death. But an unstoppable wave of car culture momentum took control and our relationships with cars eventually became as complicated as the people who have driven and interacted with them and the astounding varieties of automobile makes and models that have come and gone over the years.

Into the early 20^th Century, advancing streetcar tracks and technologies led to more efficient electric railways in our cities, often championed by real estate speculators who profited from increasingly dependable public transportation systems connecting to their new developments. Families with the financial resources were encouraged to move farther away from city centers to find their California Dreams on bigger lots within sprawling suburbs. Volumes have been written about how these early public transportation systems, ironically, set the geographic stage and paved the way for the freeways that would replace them.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway (later renamed the Pasadena Freeway) was completed in 1940 as the state’s (and arguably the nation’s) first freeway, connecting downtown LA to Pasadena suburbs. This was just a prelude to the pavement that was increasingly spreading and thoroughly covering and sealing the ground throughout cityscapes and suburbs and then extending in long and wide paths that radiated out to more remote coastal, mountain, and desert terrains. Following WWII, mass migrations into the state and out of our inner cities (commonly referred to as “white flight”) plopped millions of mostly middle-class families into outlying suburbs. These more distant developments were financed by bread winners encouraged by the accessibility and reliability of new free-flowing highways and freeways that quickly and conveniently linked commuters to urban centers.        

Those with the resources evacuated the inner cities and took their wealth with them, leaving behind those without the means. Exacerbating the segregation and inequalities, freeways and other car-culture connections to the suburbs were often built through older neighborhoods with the least political and economic power to stop them. Bifurcated working-class communities from the Bay Area to Southern California looked on as people drove through and passed by their neighborhoods to their jobs in the city in the morning and then carried their earnings out to spend in the suburbs every evening and throughout most weekends. By the mid-1900s, LA’s Bunker Hill (which once served as home to the wealthy business class) became another symbol for the new urban California. The old Victorian homes were abandoned and then razed and replaced by sleek steel and glass skyscrapers to serve as office spaces for the growing number of commuters from the suburbs. The car-culture wave impacted every California city, but LA became the poster child. Automobile worship was first tempered and then ridiculed by some as a series of seemingly insurmountable and disturbing problems developed. Stand-out San Francisco fared better and even thrived at times by offering a denser, more cosmopolitan urban experience with all the exciting, cutting-edge cultural attractions and innovations (and convenient public transportation systems) that go with it. Most other California urban centers weren’t so lucky.      

Little Selby (your author) was born into this California that was growing and changing faster than anyone could grasp. Our working-class outpost on the western edge of Santa Ana was quickly surrounded by a population and economy that seemed to take off with unimaginable changes in some places while other communities suffered from abandonment. Open fields that once supported orchards and truck crops grew cookie-cutter housing tracks attracting middle-class newcomer commuters. We watched new highways and freeways blaze their way through what remained of partially-open thoroughfares or reach farther by using eminent domain to scrape away older properties and neighborhoods that got in the way, new routes erected to support millions of neophyte commuters in their single-occupancy vehicles. We didn’t realize it then, but the growth and change was wild and unprecedented.

The times were exhilarating and exciting to some winners and participants, but troubling and destructive to some perceived losers who loathed a landscape and car culture with no sense of place or permanence. And these changes required wider roads, parking, and other paved spaces that dominated an infrastructure where cars were king. You know the old Joni Mitchell line about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot? Or how about Tom Petty’s editorial regarding life in Reseda, which more correctly referred to nearby parts of the San Fernando Valley: “There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard.”    

Relatively sprawling and expansive, Southern California’s coastal plains served as perfect foundations for the pavement that was stretching from the beach to the base of the mountains. As LA’s urban heat island developed into a massive urban heat basin, local and then regional microclimates warmed by at least a few degrees. Place your hand near a paved surface on any sunny afternoon or try walking barefoot across the pavement on a summer day: you will quickly sense the additional heat that now radiates through every California urban landscape. Now follow the trails into nearby undeveloped hills covered with the natural plant communities that existed before our pavement: Evapotranspiration from Mediterranean grasslands, coastal sage, chaparral, and oak and riparian woodlands keep afternoon temperatures noticeably cooler. You can also compare the hot paved surfaces to the relatively cooler afternoons common to our city parks or beneath the street trees that decorate our precious urban forests. Further proof of how pavement transforms microclimates is found in research showing how urban heat islands have become particularly extreme even across car-dominated desert cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, after the natural soils, cacti, and other desert scrub communities are covered by expanding suburbs. I examine these changes in more detail in my California Sky Watcher book, which will appear in a few months, published by Heyday.

By contrast, you can also sense how the San Francisco Bay Area has evaded some negative effects of our car culture. Constricted on its bumpy little 49-square-mile peninsula, San Francisco was built and cast in the 1800s without cars; and its steep, narrow streets show it. The famed cable cars, streetcars, and hostility to automobiles stand out to this day as if The City were showcasing its antithesis to LA. Beyond The City, the Bay Area’s physical geography helped drive growing differences and perceived divisions between Northern and Southern California. Enormous water bodies separated spreading megalopolises and obstructed potential freeway routes that would have otherwise connected them. Limited car lanes were directed and merged toward the few exorbitantly-expensive bridges that acted like hourglasses; the flowing traffic had to be squeezed into narrow funnels that opened toward urban landscapes on each end of a bridge. The Bay Area’s combined hilly terrain, giant bays, and other assorted and dramatic natural landscapes concentrated populations, restricted where freeways could be built, and forced other ways of imagining transportation and daily commutes.     

From the 1960’s and 70’s and beyond, car troubles were emerging from the paved horizon and they impacted more than our urban landscapes. Exhaust that belched out of millions of vehicles without pollution controls began literally choking Californians to death, emboldening air quality management districts to exert their growing powers. Folks who didn’t develop lethal respiratory illnesses still felt the pain of ozone and other air pollutants originating from dirty vehicles. The problems were realized by kids like us who struggled to get a breath while participating in competitive sports and other recreational activities. We didn’t know that we would damage our health when exercising in smoggy air that was twice as polluted compared to today.

Like most adventurous California teens at the time, road trips for me meant escaping to the freedom of new places and open spaces. And the list of magical places to visit and experience grew as my mental maps expanded. I started driving when I was 16 so that I could get to my part-time blue-collar jobs and save some money that would lead to more independence and the great outdoors. I bought my first junk car with that money before graduating from high school. “Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway” became a theme song for this new-found freedom as long as I could keep my car from breaking down. I tuned in my car stereo and turned up the volume to overcome the roar of wind whooshing into my open windows and past my ears as landscapes raced by and more distant and exotic places called out. What a rush! At last, I was free to break away and both figuratively and literally blaze my own trails. Fantastical vistas and the most remote trailheads were finally within my reach.

Back then, new freeway and road traffic flowed relatively freely compared to today. Global warming and anthropogenic climate change and crushing traffic gridlock had not yet entered into the public discourse. The expanding freeways and additional lanes to everywhere began resembling massive arteries and veins that gradually narrowed into capillaries to feed commuter traffic into more distant communities. When my unreliable clunker was working properly, I could smoothly zip between my jobs and college classes. I occasionally slapped my class notes on my steering wheel to cram study time into my drive time. Once, suffering from sleep deprivation and carbon monoxide poisoning from all the car exhaust, I dosed off while driving on the freeway. I woke up at what seemed to be nearly a mile later, still in my lane, stunned to realize how my steady foot on the accelerator kept my car pacing the steadily-flowing traffic. This was, literally, a car culture wake-up call that I wouldn’t forget. I realized how fortunate I was to be alive and free to make it to my job and classes that day among all the car-commuter madness. You would certainly not survive such an experience in today’s traffic that is constantly stopping and reaccelerating within much narrower lanes.         

And then the traffic monster raised its ugly head. During car culture growth years, if a freeway or road got too crowded, we widened it or built another one. But the throngs of new arrivals and commuters would quickly pack the new lanes until we had to build another and then another until we began running out of places to build them and neighborhoods that would allow them. “Rush hour” commutes expanded to two or three hours for some. And so we developed dysfunctional love-hate relationships with our cars and I shared those feelings even though my commutes were never that long. As we worked our way into the final years of the last century, many commuters found themselves trapped by the very car cultures and suburban lifestyles that were supposed to liberate them. Those who couldn’t afford to move closer to their school and work were stuck in gridlock, wasting away both physically and mentally in their nearly stationary cars, poisoned by the high concentrations of air pollutants surrounding them.

For too many Californians, today’s car culture represents an inefficient loss of precious time and a deteriorating quality of life and health. Bay Area commuters have settled as far away as Stockton and other relatively inexpensive Central Valley locales. Thousands of daily commuters into the LA Basin come from more affordable lnland Empire and high desert communities. Many of them drive up to two hours to their jobs in the mornings and then another two hours back home in the evenings. Living around relatively affordable Bakersfield and working in LA County job centers has become a lifestyle for some. Residents around other growing conurbations (such as the state’s second-largest city, San Diego, and in Sacramento) have watched with trepidation over the years and revolted with movements earning names such as “Not Yet LA.” Yet, apparently irresistible car culture momentum has also overwhelmed many of those communities to commit what critics consider the same old mistakes while expecting different outcomes. Look at the gridlock that builds each weekday afternoon as commuters check out of their jobs near the coast and then cram onto freeways, jamming all lanes that point inland, toward more affordable eastern San Diego County suburbs. Listen to the sometimes-daunting daily traffic reports reverberating from Sacramento and every other major California metropolis when serious injury and fatal accidents block lanes here and shut down freeways there. The lucky ones just get stuck in traffic gridlock behind each incident. For the least fortunate, their beloved (or hated) cars turned on them to become violent high-speed killing machines when seat belts, air bags, and other safety features weren’t enough to stop the carnage.  

The car-culture momentum balloon started deflating decades ago in some of our major cities, partly because it became too expensive and destructive to rip up neighborhoods and make way for more cars. You could argue that the revolt began way back in the 1970s when the San Francisco Bay Area committed to building and supporting efficient public transportation systems such as BART. I was a beneficiary of those attempts to get people out of their cars. When I moved to densely-packed San Francisco, it was like landing on another planet or in the Land of Oz. I quickly learned that trying to maneuver my manual transmission (AKA a clutch) while frantically bobbing my car up and down the steep, narrow streets was asking for stress and trouble. And it wasn’t necessary. So, I would leave my junky car behind for days and effortlessly ride safe and efficient buses, streetcars, and BART, with no worries about parking or traffic. And I got frequent free entertainment from the circus-like cast of characters that would unexpectedly appear on all the different public transit options. My car came in handy when leaving The City for one-day adventures over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Headlands, Mt. Tam, Muir Woods, Pt. Reyes, Stinson Beach, or to points south such as Santa Cruz Mountains haunts like Big Basin Redwoods, or the scenic beaches around Pescadero, Año Nuevo, Davenport, and Santa Cruz. The car was discarded and convenient public transportation embraced during weekdays to get to graduate school and work, but the car was cherished during weekends. I’ve been the fortunate one to live, work, and play in the best of both transportation worlds.

The Bay Area’s anti-automobile movement was bolstered by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that badly damaged or destroyed elevated two-level portions of the Embarcadero and Central Freeways. Instead of replacing them, City residents successfully fought to reclaim their views and neighborhoods. The results are seen as today’s unobstructed spectacular views of the Bay from the Embarcadero and in the parks and other public spaces along Octavia Boulevard, landscapes that were previously sliced, blocked, and dominated by massive freeway structures. During this revolutionary period, San Francisco’s late poet laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, famously expressed the growing popular frustrations: “What destroys poetry of a city? Automobiles destroy it, and they destroy more than the poetry. All over America, all over Europe in fact, cities and towns are under assault by the automobile, are being literally destroyed by car culture.”

In contrast to stereotypes, Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California have also recently rejected some new freeways. It may be no surprise that the once-proposed Beverly Hills Freeway (which would have cut through some of the wealthiest communities in the state) was scrapped decades ago. And the last freeway to slice through densely-populated LA Metro neighborhoods was the 105 (Century Freeway), completed in 1993, costing more than $2 billion. Today, giant billboards advertising personal injury law firms soar over this freeway and its working-class neighborhoods that didn’t have the power to stop such a divider. But more recently, South Pasadena and surrounding communities finally blocked the long-planned extension of the 710 Freeway that would have bifurcated their neighborhoods.

And just a few years ago, after long and bitter battles, activists managed to save beloved Trestles surfing beach and San Onofre State Beach (near the border between San Diego and Orange Counties) from a massive toll road. New highways and freeways are still being proposed and debated farther out in Inland Empire and high desert exurbs, complete with the familiar clashing pro and con players fighting to gain momentum and win the hearts of residents, business leaders, and policymakers. Similar battles over what to do about cars continue in inland exurbs beyond the Bay Area that extend well into and through Central Valley cities. They pit car-friendly traditionalists, motivated by growing traffic and commuter crises, against those who see what has happened to larger conurbations closer to the coast and want to preserve what remains of the places and environments they cherish.     

We must pause to pay homage here to some of the most offensive monuments demonstrating how we, in our desperation, torture ourselves when we are forced to crowd together with our cars: parking structures. Yes, multi-level parking structures save precious urban space for other activities and they decrease the extent of paved surfaces compared to sprawling parking lots. But once inside a monotonous parking structure, have you noticed that you could be anywhere at any time? It is difficult to imagine how we could build more generic and dull environments. Not only do the different sections and levels all look the same in one structure, but they look and feel no different in cities and suburbs hundreds of miles away. There is just no “there” there. As soon as we enter the gates, we lose our sense of time and place and become disconnected from the unexpected surprises waiting for us in the outside world. Day or night, rain or shine, who cares? We are suddenly surrounding by bland concrete surfaces in every dimension, as if stuck in a Twilight Zone existence. But we are forced to tolerate this loss of precious quality time and sense of place so that we can reach our desired destination, which could be government or business offices, or a clinic, college class, sporting event, amusement park, concert, store, theater, or some other mall-like experience. You can’t be blamed for suffering from a case of claustrophobia while hunting for a space to squeeze your car in to and then walking through these hardscape labyrinths. And don’t even dare start wondering what might happen during an earthquake or fire. The insults to the senses multiply when impatient drivers honk their horns and compete for the closest space and when cheap car alarms are activated to echo among the other commotions … parking structures quickly devolving into unnerving peace stealers. “It’s not a walk in the park” is the understatement for such experiences, which makes one wonder why we don’t demand better from the people who design, build, and maintain these scars on our landscapes and psyches. How about adding, at the least, a few more colorful murals or other displays of art and humanity?

As we progress through this century, you will notice valiant efforts in nearly every city to get people out of their cars. They include innovations in telecommuting, building more affordable housing near schools and jobs, and funding and encouraging the use of public transportation and safer pedestrian and bicycle right-of-ways. As example, several California cities are fishing for more resources to fund light rail and that includes new lines that are stretching across the LA area. Meanwhile, according to Public Road Data from the State of California, we now have more than 175,000 miles of maintained roads in the Golden State, with about 400,000 lane miles. The more than 14 million registered automobiles and 31 million total registered vehicles travel more than 330 billion miles each year on California roads. And according to the California Office of Traffic Safety and CHP in 2022, around 4,000 people (and 1,100 pedestrians) are killed in hundreds of thousands of accidents that result in hundreds of thousands of injuries on our state’s roads every year. We see every day how cars, and the infrastructures and landscapes we have built to accommodate them, are suddenly or in the long-run impacting all of us whether we like it or not. Even in many remote locations, the very same vehicles that give us access to the great outdoors are interrupting the peace and wild landscapes we cherish. Our bipolar love-hate relationship with cars intensifies.           

And isn’t it fitting that debates about cars have become just as polarizing as most political debates these days? Listen to the advocates (often on the political right), who mostly celebrate traditional car cultures, life in the suburbs and exurbs, and the perceived libertarian independence that accompanies such lifestyles. You’d think that cars were sent to us from heaven above. And for those living in the most rural and remote regions of the state, cars and trucks continue to represent necessary tools for survival. By contrast, listen to the pundits on the opposite side (often from the political left and clustered in our urban centers) echo the criticisms and sentiments of the late revolutionary writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti. You’d think cars were instruments of the devil.

What are your experiences with and views about cars? Do you think they represent freedom and independence or are they killing us and destroying California lives and landscapes? A little of both? I’ve chased the California Dream across our state on foot, on my bike, in my car, and on all types of public transportation; and I’ve been fortunate to have lived and learned from all of these experiences, celebrating in and sometimes suffering from very different transportation worlds. But I’m also now fortunate to live in a city (Santa Monica) where I have transportation options that include hopping on my bike and pedaling in almost any direction along our many relatively safe bike routes. Our ability to build bridges and pathways toward a brighter and more efficient transportation future depends on a better understanding of the important rolls all of these options (and that includes our traditional cars and newer EVs) have played and will play as we attempt to steer toward better living and working environments.     

View this animation illustrating how roads were paved across much of celebrated car-culture poster child LA County until there was no more room for them. The authors suggested that demand on those roads has been growing for nearly 40 years as more cars were crammed into limited transportation infrastructures. Check out their other maps showing historical growth in LA County.

Here are some traditional maps showing major California highways.
And: https://www.tripinfo.com/maps/ca

This impressive interactive GIS site classifies our highways and roads. You can click to choose a wide range of valuable information related to this story.

Finally, as a bonus for navigating through this story, you are invited to breeze through the following colorful photo essays that showcase classic California cars and transportation landscapes. The first set (click to page 2) skips around California’s landscapes made for cars and some that have rejected cars. The second set (click to page 3) celebrates various classic cars that I have recently photographed to illustrate some of California’s car art and culture history.

The post Cars: Driving and Dividing California first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

One topic of concern that is familiar to Angelinos is the toll that the car culture has on the environment and quality of life in southern California. In a detailed and informative story map presentation, Amir Heibl, a GIS student at SMC, posed real-world geospatial questions while employing appropriate and innovative spatial analysis methods to address those issues.

We invite you to view his thought-provoking work entitled Gimme Shelter!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with GIS, it can be thought of broadly as the marriage of computer cartography and database management. More specifically, it is a computerized system for capturing, storing, managing, analyzing, and visualizing geospatial information. Crucially, the data in a GIS contains a locational element which allows for spatial analysis of anything plotted on the surface of the Earth.

GIS is frequently used to answer why things are where they are. In the case of many human endeavors, it also helps decide where things will go or be. Businesses increasingly use GIS for such tasks as locating their customer bases, maximizing the efficiency of delivery fleets, and finding the best location to put in a retail store. Governments use GIS for a host of applications. From knowing the location of a city’s fire hydrants, to managing critical habitat and open space, to tracking and understanding the movement of goods, services, and people though a city, state or nation, GIS helps administrators make informed and timely decisions with real-world implications for the people they serve.

But GIS, along with interactive mapping applications, can be used effectively as a tool for stimulating learning and inspiring critical thought. As we have now seen in Amir’s work above, GIS allows you to explore spatial data, ask questions about that data and display it in ways that provide insights and inspiration for others to follow up on or act upon.

If you are interested in learning GIS at Santa Monica College, please check out their offerings in Geography Program in the Earth Sciences Department.

** Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography welcomes submissions of California-themed projects from students and faculty from any CA institution of higher education to be highlighted on our web site. This includes, but is not limited to, articles, papers, maps and presentations– GIS or otherwise).

Even if you are working/ studying outside CA, we’ll consider your contributions too provided the content has a clear and unambiguous connection to California geography.

For more information: info@rediscoveringthegoldenstate.com

The post Gimme Shelter! first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

California has nurtured its share of oversimplified stereotypes about its diverse people and places and you are probably recalling some of them as you read this. The world-famous beach town and tourist attraction known as Santa Monica may be just one example. With today’s home prices averaging more than $1.5 million, it is often considered just another poster child symbolizing overpriced beach communities that have pushed most working and even middle-class families far inland to more affordable locations within or beyond the Golden State. But, as in so many other communities, it hasn’t always been this way. It was once home to thriving working-class neighborhoods, where people without wealth could enjoy open spaces, iconic beaches, and refreshing breezes off the ocean…a piece of the California Dream without the riches. You might visit today’s Virginia Avenue Park to see how City officials and community leaders have struggled to support vestiges of these historic neighborhoods that have earned a closer look.    

The following one-hour video is a masterfully-produced blending of art, history, and geography that helps us understand the stories behind these landscapes. Though the setting is in the Pico Neighborhood of Santa Monica, it could be about your family or neighborhood or the multitude of other California communities and ethnic groups that combine to define the most diverse state in the history of the world. After viewing the video, you might want to tour through the series of current images that follow here. They illustrate how a traditional working-class neighborhood has evolved after being bifurcated by a major freeway more than 50 years ago and, more recently, threatened with gentrification pressures familiar to countless other California communities. If you wish to learn more about L.A.’s working-class neighborhoods beyond Santa Monica, you will want to visit our earlier story on this web site, Eat Your Way through L.A.: A Cultural Tour of Los Angeles. For now, enjoy the video:            

Learn about the project and view the video:

The Trailer:

Once you have seen the one-hour video, you are invited to follow the following images that wander through parts of today’s Pico Neighborhood, July, 2021.

One last reminder: If you wish to learn more about L.A.’s working-class neighborhoods beyond Santa Monica, you will want to visit our earlier story on this web site, Eat Your Way through L.A.: A Cultural Tour of Los Angeles.

The post Excavating History in our Hoods first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Today’s L.A., Tomorrow’s World?
As developing communication and transportation technologies continue to dissolve global borders (at least in the long term), we know that such interaction and diversity foretells humanity’s future; today’s L.A. represents a glimpse into that future. So, does California’s and L.A.’s cultural experiment represent a beacon of light, a warning sign, or something between those extremes as we imagine humanity’s future on this planet? 

Tasting the World in a Day
More than 20 years ago, we started a project that would help shed light on how L.A.’s people and landscapes are reflections of our world, how the world is being changed by L.A., and how this great experiment is progressing. We repeatedly bused up to 50 people through L.A., stopping to survey specific neighborhoods and cultures. Nearly two decades ago, scholar Lisa Harrison designed our first guidebook by piecing together the stacks of articles and research projects we used to inform us about each location. Here is the expanded, refined, and updated 2020 version. This was and continues to be our attempt to experience, examine, and better understand as many different cultures, neighborhoods, and landscapes as possible in one L.A. day. Call it what you want; we call it See the World in a Different Way: Eat Your Way through L.A.

Reexamining Cultures within Landscapes of Reality and Vice Versa
This cultural tour includes a lot of history, but has been updated to just before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. It is intended to unveil the genuine working parts of L.A., the rich cultures and ethnic foods championed by its people, and the sometimes hidden stories about these cultures and neighborhoods that are too often overlooked in the media. Throughout the years, our theme has been reworked and recast by local food critics and cultural researchers from many disciplines with somewhat different perspectives and spins, while others have even used our title, all recognizing and celebrating these unparalleled opportunities to learn about different people, cultures, neighborhoods, and cuisines. During 2020, we watched as the COVID-19 pandemic, social upheavals, and the resulting wildly erratic economic environments closed some of the businesses we visited here and began rearranging  these urban landscapes in surprising (and often heartbreaking) ways that offer new learning opportunities.

Historic Diversity Spreads Outward 
To say that L.A. has grown to become the planet’s most diverse metropolitan area is now an over-simplistic understatement. This is why we don’t have the room in this guide or the time in one day to visit all the cultures and neighborhoods that combine to make this complex conurbation. For instance, we will miss the largest concentration of Vietnamese people outside Asia in Little Saigon, Orange County. We will miss the largest concentration of Cambodian people outside Asia in Cambodia Town, Long Beach and the too-distant, but renowned “Little India” business district along Pioneer Blvd in Artesia. We will also miss the largest concentration of Chinese people in North America (now in the San Gabriel Valley). And we don’t have time to visit the largest concentration of Armenians outside Armenia, centered in Glendale. And did you know there are more Pacific Islanders in L.A. County (especially concentrated in South Bay cities) than anywhere beyond the islands? Many of these cultures and their neighborhoods (such as Leimert Park, the epicenter of African American culture in L.A.) have been the focus of separate stories on our web site, but they are just outside the boundaries of this route.  

Anchored Ethnic Enclaves
Cultural geographers and anthropologists have sometimes debated whether some of these neighborhoods might be considered ghettos, ethnic enclaves, or a little of both. You might be challenged to make your own assessments in each case, knowing that an ethnic enclave is usually a neighborhood populated by people who voluntarily surround themselves with those who share similar and familiar cultures, all living within their personal comfort zones. In contrast, outside forces (such as discrimination and lack of economic opportunities) tend to enclose people into ghettos, where they are forced to live in poverty. As one example of an enclave, Southern California and specifically L.A. is also home to the largest Persian population outside of Iran. Concentrated on the West Side, you will notice their footprints (representing diverse religions and cultures) especially along Westwood Blvd in Westwood. Just as other ethnic and cultural groups have adopted local nicknames, many Iranians have even used the terms Irangeles or Tehrangeles or Irangelinos to reaffirm their connections to L.A. Many of these neighborhoods are just a little too far away from our one-day driving, walking, and dining trail, but they and many others have at least earned a shout out and a separate visit.

Concentrations of the Largest and the Oldest
Fortunately, we do have time to visit neighborhoods that have been home to the largest single concentrations of Koreans, Central Americans, and Mexicans beyond their original homelands, the first official African town in the state, L.A.’s oldest Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Greek, and Jewish districts, and a wealth of intermixing cultures along the way. Join us on this more “compact” journey by vehicle and on foot that should take at least a full day, including your sampling of ethnic foods. Though our complete one-day tour is designed for quick stops, you could easily consume an entire day surveying and experiencing each of these neighborhoods and business districts. Look over our guide before you decide.

Discovering and Experiencing Change
The COVID-19 pandemic and social upheavals that cast economic chaos across California in 2020 did more than break hearts and kill dreams in these neighborhoods. They left new opportunities to do fresh research and make new discoveries about who and what has disappeared or survived in a brutal sink or swim economy and landscape that rewards resilience and punishes those lacking the financial cushions to weather such storms. Note the changes since we updated our tour (just before 2020). Can you sense a greater disparity between the haves and have nots, or has the collapse of long-established landmarks opened doors to new residents and entrepreneurs with fresh perspectives?

Let’s Get Started with Caution and our Curiosity
You are warned not to try the tour from about 3-7 pm on weekdays as you will be overcome by L.A.’s notorious traffic monster, though that inconvenience has become a possibility almost any time. You can try public transit, since many of the stops are along corridors, but this may become a complicated and frustrating experience in such a sprawling city with a transportation system mainly designed to get people to work or school or specific events. And finally, the directions here are subject to obvious changes caused by construction, redirection of traffic flows, and your own instincts about how to stay safe and avoid trouble and delays. Use your best instincts to find parking; some stops are more challenging than others, so read all parking signs carefully. Put on your walking shoes, your seat belt, and bring your curiosity and appetite to explore the cultures and cuisines of L.A. and our world as these landscapes speak to us. Simply click through the 25 pages in their proper order as we guide you through the tour.      

The post Cultural Tour of Los Angeles: Eat Your Way through L.A. 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.

Here, we offer Patterson as an exhibit. It is strategically located off Interstate 5 southwest of Modesto and just more than an hour from major Bay Area cities. Patterson residents might tell you it is much more than a distant bedroom commuter community or a hub for distribution centers. Like so many Central Valley cities, it has a rich farming history; in Patterson’s case, that includes a label as the apricot capital and an annual festival to celebrate this juicy fruit. But like many of those Central Valley cities, Patterson’s farmland is being gobbled up by new developments and a population that has exploded well over 20,000 in recent years, roughly doubling since our first edition at the turn of the century. Here, you will see signs of these changes in a conflicted landscape of traditional farmland and harvests juxtaposed against generic suburban landscapes that could be almost anywhere in California.

Patterson e-Commerce

Large, open tracts of relatively inexpensive land near large population centers have made the Central Valley and attractive location for e-commerce distribution centers to be planted.

Off and On

Strategically Located

Commutable

Vacancy

Loading Docks

Not Just Amazon

Construction

Seasonal Crops

Changing Crops

E-commerce

Conveniences

Welcome to Patterson

Mixed Development

Cost of Living

Suburban Sprawl

Losing Farmland

Losing Farmland

Farm Stands

Big Box Bingo

The post Patterson Welcomes E-commerce to the Exurbs first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

This project and this web site have necessarily highlighted the profound impacts of an accelerating technological revolution on the Golden State’s people and landscapes. From geospatial technologies to e-commerce distribution centers, new technologies continue to make radical changes in the ways and the locations where we carry out our daily activities.

The latest example erupted in 2018 and has impacted nearly every mobile person who leaves home in our more crowded urban environments. As if suddenly falling from the sky or spewing from some mysterious volcano of technology and engineering, e-scooters became popular and then ubiquitous in nearly all of our more densely packed urban landscapes by 2018. And though the eruption happened fastest and is most obvious in the state’s larger urban areas, they have impacted smaller cities (such as around Lake Tahoe) from near our northern to our southern borders. Like most new innovations, they caught regulators and traffic engineers by surprise, creating a Wild West atmosphere that jarred many off their feet or out of their cars. 

These scooters can be discarded and relocated anywhere, they only require a smart phone and credit card and a dollar to get started, and they have allowed us to redefine and rethink how to make short efficient trips that could not be served by cars or public transportation. The companies Bird and then Lime quickly distributed them across urban landscapes and just as quickly became multi-billion-dollar businesses. As one might expect, a host of issues and controversies soon erupted over motorized scooters.

Pedestrian space rights advocates complained about reckless scooter riders on sidewalks and other paths at speeds up to 15 mph. As some scooters zipped around pedestrians unwilling to give up their limited spaces, other riders were crunched into already dense traffic lanes with too few safe pathways. Breaking state and local laws, most rode without helmets, many were obviously children without licenses, and some even rode with passengers. The results could have been predicted: a rash of accidents with serious injuries and some of the victims weren’t even riding the scooters. Others complained about the abandoned scooters cluttering pathways and neighborhoods as they waited for the next rider or the part-time employee that would take them home for a recharge.   

Some cities responded with temporary bans until they figured out how to deal with this scooter chaos and the accompanying liabilities. But most cities searched for a regulatory environment that might encourage this clean and efficient form of short trip connective commuting without endangering the commuters. Here is an example where each community sought a general template that could then be redesigned to suit their specific needs and urban landscapes as they envision more sustainable transportation infrastructures.

The long-term health impacts range far beyond safety. Just as popular electric bikes allow us to go farther and faster without the exertion, so do the new e-scooters take pedestrians off their feet for a quicker commute at the expense of an invigorating walk. Several communities were also demanding that e-scooters be made equally accessible to low-income neighborhoods instead of only concentrating where the already well-to-do could conveniently zip farther ahead. 

Depending on when and where you are reading this, you may already know whether this was just another short-term fad or another lasting technological revolution that took advantage of California’s mild weather to democratize transportation and make us wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner. Here’s to a happy and safe commute.    

Wanna Ride?

Properly discarded off the boardwalk path, these e-scooters are ready for their next riders.

New Rules?

Racing to make new rules that keep up with the technology.

Bikes for Rent

Most of the bikes at this station are already rented and on the bicycle path, but e-scooters are scattered everywhere.

e-Scooter Etiquette

An e-scooter rider properly uses the bicycle path as she passes pedestrians in the background.

e-Tickets?

Enforcing these new rules and training people to follow them may be a bigger challenge.

The post E-scooters Remake Urban Transportation in California first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.