were so many people ready to take the bait was that house prices had bloated up out of reach of ordinary household incomes, which had been stagnant for years among the lower half of wage earners, as noted in Chapter 4. Even more disturbing in light of California’s history of relative equality and a wide middle class, the state has recently been in the vanguard when it comes to widening inequality. On the one hand, wages and salaries have gone nowhere fast, and poverty rates have shot up with every recession, as remarked upon in Chapters 3 and 8. On the other hand, people at the top have done all too well. The top 10 to 20 percent of professional, technical, and managerial workers have ridden their skills and position to happy heights on the tsunami of high-tech profits. Even worse has been the untrammeled enrichment of the top 1 percent—even 0.1 percent—of wealth holders. California has more billionaires and millionaires than any other state, led by tech heroes, movie moguls and investment bankers. Companies like Apple, Chevron, and Wells Fargo are awash in money. At the same time, inequality has grown to the worst levels in US history, California has become the most racially diverse state in the country, in which the vast majority of working people are people of color, and Whites have become a minority. California is one of the great experiments of our time in the potential for a racially blended society, the hope—never realized—of the Great American Melting Pot and the possibility of a non-White working class joining the ranks of that other idolized entity, the Great American Middle Class. There are certainly hopeful signs, such as the rising percentage of mixed-race children in the state and the surging numbers of young college students of color on the campuses of the state colleges and universities. But the obstacles to full admission to the California Dream are considerable. Today’s youth are being hit from all directions: by more poverty, greater hunger, worse schools, and grimmer job prospects, as seen in Chapters 7 and 8. Meanwhile, some of California’s greatest material accomplishments of the past have gone sour and left serious problems for today’s citizens. The wastelands and toxicity of the mining era are still with us, especially in the Sacramento Valley. Clear cutting of timber and the roads built into the Klamath and Siskiyou mountains have left the North Coast with a legacy of silted and clogged rivers. The industrial farming practiced by California agribusiness has left its mark, with pesticides and nitrates in groundwater, toxic runoff, and saline soils throughout the Central Valley. We detail these problems in Chapter 6, which looks more closely at air and water pollution. There, too, we take up the most salient output of modern California, carbon emissions, and the chilling prospects of climate change. To their credit, Californians have often been the first to see the damage of unrestricted industrialization and urbanization, and to call for preservation and restoration of the natural landscape. No place has been more aggressive in taking up the cudgels in defense of the
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Earth, perhaps because the despoliation of our magnificent natural heritage has been more readily apparent than almost anywhere else. California has been a leader in the conservation movement since the days of John Muir and the founding of the Sierra Club. It led the way in the postwar era, with fights over oil spills and coastal reserves, dams and wild rivers, mountain resorts and wilderness areas, pesticides and farmworker protection, wetlands and bay fill, and much more besides. Today, California’s government has been among the few in the USA to take heed of global warming and to enact policies for energy conservation and carbon controls. Californians are leading the way in solar energy, electric vehicles, green buildings, and other technologies, and in trying to rethink the form of cities and means of transit, from the Smart Growth movement to the Critical Mass cry for bicycle-friendly streets. In short, it is possible for the people of California to change our current trajectory and to create a better future for this wonderful state. To do this, however, it is vital that today’s Californians face up to the shortcomings of the Golden State, putting aside the sunny myths of the California Dream, and weighing past successes against the many wrongs. We hope that this atlas can help awaken and prod the public to demand that state government and the powers-that-be do better. We make no pretense of neutrality; the facts presented here constitute a call to action on many fronts, from increased funding to public education to better control of water pollution. But wait! Is such advocacy a violation of the honest goals of a California atlas? Is an atlas not a neutral purveyor of facts and geographic orientation? Such is the prevalent fiction, but, as the history of geography shows, it is far from true. Of course, atlases are meant to inform, and they should do this in a manner as honest, elegant, and truthful as possible. Nevertheless, maps are a language like any other, in which the speakers pick and choose what they want to say, or what they want the reader to hear. The maps of the Southern California Automobile Association always feature freeways, the hard lines of orientation for Angelinos, but that is only one way of seeing Greater Los Angeles or Southern California. The vegetation map in Chapter 1 looks quite strange by comparison, until one gets used to it; soon the familiar patterns emerge that Southern Californians know well, if they have kept their eyes open. Other maps here may show unknown territory, such as prisons, inequality, or racial segregation, which we hope to make Californians more familiar with. So, dear readers, enter this atlas with eyes wide open, and see what wonderful things—and disorienting ones—await. Richard A. Walker Berkeley, May 2013 Suresh K. Lodha Santa Cruz, May 2013
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the team at Myriad Editions for their yeo(wo)man work: Jannet King for steering the project skillfully through a deluge of drafts, comments, and changes, and Isabelle Lewis for transforming the data into elegant and creative graphics. Both were incredibly fast, efficient, and full of useful ideas that made this atlas a better finished product. Thanks to Candida Lacey at Myriad and Kim Robinson at UC Press for believing in the project and putting together the whole team. We thank Nichole Zlatunich, and Hiroshi Fukurai and his students for their early contributions; Ben Crow, Ruth Langridge, Ellen Hanak, and Nico Secunda for their feedback on specific topics; Sandra Taylor and Josh Begley for their contributions on photographs; and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. The following people provided background research on specific topics: Daniel DeSanto Hunger & Homelessness Riley Doyle Evans Crime & Incarceration Anthony Hendrix Water Supply, Water Use Madhu Lodha Pre-K Education Cory Lee Mann Crime & Incarceration Molly Solomon Agriculture Erin Stephens Energy Supply, Energy Use, Renewable Energy Brooke Velasquez K–12 Education Richard Walker wishes to thank Annie for her boundless enthusiasm for life and for her tolerance of the time spent bent over his computer. He dedicates this atlas to his favorite Californian, Zia. Suresh Lodha wishes to thank Madhu for her unwavering care and support. He shares the joy of this atlas with Chandan and Anand. Photo Credits Myriad gratefully acknowledges the use of the following photographs: p16 spirit of america/Shutterstock.com; p30 CDCR; p42 Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock.com; p54 iofoto/Shutterstock.com; p66 AlexMcGuffie/iStockphoto; p78 Kyoungil Jeon/iStockphoto; p88 Jeffrey Skoller; p100 justasc/Shutterstock.com; p112 Catherine Yeulet/iStockphoto; p116 alphaspirit/Shutterstock.com
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Chapter One
Land & People
California enjoys the most distinctive and varied landscape in North America. It boasts high peaks and sunken valleys, live volcanoes and earthquake faults, rolling hills and lava beds, white water and level plains. Its climate is even rarer, falling between rainy northwest and arid southwest, with a Mediterranean balancing act in between. Coastal fog and alpine snow frame the scene. But nothing prepares the visitor for the astounding array of microclimates and regions, nor for the fantastic biodiversity nestled into the innumerable corners of the state. California’s unique landscape is the stage on which its rich history has played out, leading to claims of three, four or a dozen different Californias divided by mountain ranges, ocean vistas, and water politics. Without a doubt, the wealth of nature has benefitted Californians economically, but it has equally touched their hearts, making this the world center of environmentalism for over a century. Millions of people have been drawn to California since the Gold Rush, creating a state of permanent migration, both domestic and international. It remains an unsettled place in many ways, a mixing
