Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2021 i Journal of Alta California

Regina Romero, the mayor of Tucson, Arizona, calls herself an “innate environmentalist.” Romero’s father, whom she describes as a “real boots-and-hat cowboy” from the mountains of Sonora, Mexico, taught her the value of open spaces and conservation. “I was the sixth and the youngest in the family. I received all the hand-me-downs,” she says of growing up in Somerton, Arizona. “Saving electricity, saving water, recycling everything—it was ingrained in me.” That ethos has defined her priorities in public office, first as a member of the Tucson City Council for 12 years and now as the city’s first Latina mayor. Since her election in 2019, Romero has spent much of her energy confronting climate change, an issue that hits especially hard in the desert. Tucson is the third-fastest-warming city in the…

There was a time, back in the automobile’s infancy, when cars and pedestrians shared the road equally and equitably—there’s even documentary proof of it. Filmed in San Francisco in 1905, with the great quake a few months away, A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire shows footage of cable cars, automobiles, horse-drawn buggies, and walkers making their way along the main thoroughfare of a city soon to be destroyed, with everyone and everything moving in the most orderly of (frighteningly chaotic) fashions. After San Francisco was rebuilt, Market Street would become the most traffic-clogged roadway in the city, with pedestrians pushed to its margins. It took 115 years for pedestrians to become ascendant again. In January 2020, all noncommercial motor vehicles were permanently barred from the busiest stretch of…

The majestic Klamath River runs through Northern California and parts of Oregon. “You knew you were going to see a lot of fish,” says Amy Cordalis, a member of the Yurok Tribe who grew up fishing there. “You knew you were going to fill up your smokehouse [and] freezer.” The Yurok are the largest tribe in California; fishing the Klamath is essential to their way of life—economically, culturally, and spiritually. But decades of agricultural runoff, climate change, and restricted waterways have seriously jeopardized the health of the river. Cordalis was a junior in college, in 2002, when locals began observing tens of thousands of dead or dying salmon along the river. That fish kill, unprecedented in tribal memory, inspired Cordalis to attend law school, with the goal of protecting the…

“You can only be in the virtual world for so long. You need the physical and digital to work hand in hand.” There’s a lot to miss (spontaneous conversations, lunches with colleagues) and to not miss (awkward holiday parties in the conference room, dry cleaning bills) about being in an office. By making remote work a norm, the pandemic has not only upended office rituals; it has likely changed the workplace forever. As many as 23 million people, or roughly one-tenth of adults of working age, in the United States are planning to relocate, often in search of more affordable housing, according to one survey. “Office centricity is over,” tweeted the CEO of the tech company Shopify as early as last May. Designers who previously applied themselves to creating Insta-worthy…

Even at its silliest, Abbey’s work, like Stegner’s, never neglected that element that had gone missing in the writing of so many of their East Coast contemporaries: wilderness.—DAVID GESSNER, FROM HIS BOOK ALL THE WILD THAT REMAINS It’s getting harder to find wild country around these parts, at least south of Alaska. Nature free from the impact of Homo sapiens is becoming a memory. Even wilderness areas are at risk of becoming like zoos, protected managed habitats for tourists and filmmakers. Never mind the fact that the land they set aside was once the home range of Native Americans. Big fauna is on the retreat everywhere. The frontier is a shifting baseline, to borrow a term from Daniel Pauly, the marine biologist who first wrote about how each generation thinks…

What plants can we incorporate onto this wall to entice local pollinators? How close can we get these fresh herbs to a chef’s kitchen?” Amanda Goldberg spends a lot of time thinking about how people use spaces. The Emeryville-based founder and CEO of Planted Design has a background in industrial design and sustainability and oversees a team that creates living walls—made out of plants—for offices, public spaces, private homes, and events. Chefs and honeybees aren’t the only beneficiaries. Guests at a Maker’s Mark pavilion at the Kentucky Derby were invited to pick fresh mint directly from a Goldberg-designed wall for their cocktails. A project for a client “has to not only have a beautiful aesthetic,” says Goldberg, “but be functional and serve them in the long term.” On the power…

In the mid-2000s, Audrey Lee was pursuing her PhD in electrical engineering, toiling alone in a dark lab. But she wanted to work on something more tangible. She found her passion in public policy. “I’m interested in infrastructure and the basic needs that it provides to society—energy, transportation, water, agriculture, and buildings,” says Lee, who lives in San Francisco. She’s worked to mitigate the effects of climate change in the public sector (she helped shape the Clean Energy Standard at the U.S. Department of Energy) and the private sector (she served as VP of energy services at Sunrun, the largest U.S. residential solar panel company). She also volunteered as a cochair of Clean Energy for Biden. On the government’s role in transitioning the United States to sustainable energy: “Even in…

SKATEBOARD-SCRAP BOTTLE OPENER In 2008, skateboarder Lindsay Jo Holmes began trading freshly baked cookies for broken boards to upcycle into products like earrings and planters. Thirteen years later, her Portland, Oregon–based company, MapleXO, collects old, broken, and discarded skateboards donated from across the United States to make her unique designs. Holmes initially conceived the paddle-style bottle opener shown above to impress a bartender she was wooing, and it has since become one of MapleXO’s bestselling products (small, $20; large, $30). The smooth wooden handle is more comfortable to grip than the classic metal version, and the colorful cross section of a board makes it a fun addition to anyone’s kitchen drawer. “The purpose of my brand has always been to save as many skateboards from landfills as possible—to reduce the…

We were all in quarantine, hiding from an airborne virus that attacks the lungs, but that wasn’t the reason George Floyd couldn’t breathe. No, there was a police officer’s knee on Floyd’s neck, out in the street, all of us watching and left guessing which breath was his last. “Mama. I’m through,” he cried. We all heard him, every Black matriarch and woman, dead or alive. It reached Simonne Mitchelson in the rolling hills of Arroyo Grande. She watched the video once—that was all she could stomach. She remembers being in her living room, shaking uncontrollably with rage. When you are a Black woman, you know what happens when you hear a cry like that. The way it sinks into your bones and everything aches. Everything had been aching. Mitchelson…

Striding across a golden-brown hillside dotted with live oaks, Kent Reeves scans the ground. After a few minutes, he stops. Crouching down, he selects several short grass stalks, holding them between thumb and forefinger. This native needlegrass predates Spanish and other white colonials in California by at least a million years. The broad black brim of Reeves’s flat-topped gambler hat obscures his eyes as he peers closely and notes a hair-thin, jagged line across the tops of the four-inch-high green shoots. “These have been chewed on,” Reeves declares. “It’s not a clean nip, and it’s angled—most likely a rabbit.” Reeves’s 12-year-old border collie mix, Zero, nuzzles in close to his Wrangler-clad knee as Reeves studies the plant’s barren core. The cows grazing nearby have the run of this vast pasture,…

When the pandemic erupted last year, many California theater companies and music organizations responded initially with shock, followed by a headfirst plunge into the virtual. “I’ll never forget the week of March 9th,” recalls Jennifer Bielstein, executive director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.). “We went from gatherings of as many as a thousand people to zero.” Toni Stone, a period drama about a pioneering female baseball player in the Negro Leagues, had its premiere on a Wednesday. “Opening night,” Bielstein says, “turned out to be closing night.” As executive and artistic director of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA), Kristy Edmunds grasped the seriousness of the coming pandemic earlier than most. “I tend to be the kind of person who pays attention, out of habit,…

He may be known for his visually extravagant interiors, but designer Ken Fulk starts every project with a portrait in words. “I begin to reflect on odd, often cultural references, places, people, things,” says Fulk, who oversees teams in San Francisco and New York. “It’s like pitching a movie.” Those references serve as the foundation for any of his projects, whether it’s “an over-the-top party, a hotel, a yacht, a plane,” he says. During his 25-year career, Fulk has transformed his written narratives into such creations as a pastel-saturated Belle Époque–style restaurant (Sadelle’s in Las Vegas), a tropical-oasis oyster bar (Leo’s in San Francisco), and even a multimillion-dollar Tolkien-inspired wedding (tech entrepreneur Sean Parker’s nuptials in Big Sur). On being in the moment: “It’s wonderful to dream and plan. We…

When Chuck Taggart arrived in Los Angeles in 1982, as a graduate film student from New Orleans, his new address was just minutes from Los Angeles International Airport. The very location seemed to imply a contingency plan: no matter what happens, easy in, easy out. “I came out here completely blind,” Taggart admits. After a cross-country road trip, he and his roommates secured a “cruddy apartment” among the modest single-family homes on Arbor Vitae Street near La Cienega. “All of that is gone now,” Taggart says. Back then, “jumbo jets [were] coming in for a landing directly over our building every six minutes,” he remembers. “But the rent was cheap. My share was $165.” That stretch of fast road leading to LAX wasn’t something you’d see in a movie montage…

I just want to make things that are functional and feel good,” says Portland, Oregon–based ceramicist Kati von Lehman. Her work tends toward unfussy forms, like a rounded vase with large white polka dots, or her latest take on a mug, which has a “squished-in side” to leave extra room for the owner’s knuckles. Von Lehman was drawn to furniture and woodworking while studying interior design but found clay to be a better fit after she had a baby. She bought a wheel, put it in her basement, and started throwing pots while her daughter slept. “Ceramics was an easier medium to work with in a more limited amount of space and time that would satisfy my desire to complete a project from concept to design to production to finished…

“Guilt is a ghost,” Myriam Gurba reflects, more than once, in her memoir, Mean. It’s a refrain, a call to exposure, a statement that works from either side. Mean, after all, is a book of ghosts, including, on some level, Gurba’s own. It is also a book of guilt, of responsibility: a reckoning, or a set of reckonings. What makes this so good? There are many answers, beginning with Gurba’s radical and necessary empathy. She is a survivor of sexual assault, attacked in her hometown of Santa Maria, California, the summer after her freshman year at UC Berkeley. And yet, if this makes Mean a true-crime narrative of sorts, Gurba has deeper concerns. Her focus is less the incident per se and more all the ways it insinuates itself, how…

I write because I would like to live forever. The fact of my future death offends me.” This is the opening to the late Reginald Shepherd’s essay “Why I Write.” It is an essay with which, if I am being completely vulnerable, I am mildly obsessed—a long, deeply thoughtful and courageous engagement with the relationships between creativity, the ego, and the sublime. Poetry is the crux upon which Shepherd’s expedition spins. His essay is a manifesto written on the edge of the abyss. I imagine that Shepherd, who was aware that he was dying as he wrote, also knew—therefore—that he had nothing to lose. I begin here because I think we read and write poetry because we are looking for a voice—any voice—courageous enough to resist the pastel propaganda of…

Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s originally from Sonoma, California, and lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Stillwater Cove It seemed a furtive magic—sun ricocheting off cresting waves nearStillwater Cove, the soft rock cliffs of sandstone and clay, the wind-tiltedcypress trees leaning towardthe blue Pacific—and it was only you that saw the whales. A migrating podof gray whales going northward newcalves in tow, shooting a spray of frothy expelled water from their blowholesand making a show of breachingin the clear spring air off the coastline. We’d whine that we nevercaught a glimpse of a slick back or tail slap,nary a spyhopping head raised above the swirling surface. Too youngto look outward for long, we’d lowerour eyes…

Mandy Aftel says the idea for her perfume Sepia came while she was driving through ghost towns in California’s gold rush country. “I was struck by their desolate splendor…the beauty of ruins and old buildings and the countryside,” says Aftel, a niche perfumer based in Berkeley. Sepia opens with notes of mandarin and blood cedarwood, moves into coffee, cocoa, and pink lotus, and culminates with musky flowering tobacco, ambergris (an intestinal by-product of sperm whales), and cèpe (porcini mushroom). You can almost see faded wooden structures baking in the sun as they release scent ghosts of yesteryear. Many of today’s perfumers seek to capture the essence of place with the fidelity of Ansel Adams. From forests to beaches, from an entire city to one building, the alchemical wizards of scent…

Leave no trace” is such a familiar command, encouraging us to tread lightly in wild spaces and minimize our ruinous impact on the natural world, that it’s been adopted by everyone from the Sierra Club, an august 128-year-old environmental organization, to Burning Man, an annual art-centric bacchanal in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Yet the mesmerizing large-format images of the arid American West by San Francisco aerial photographer Michael Light compel us to admit the futility of this conservationist principle. For almost 20 years, Light’s ongoing photo series Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West (published in four stunning volumes by Radius Books, with one more planned) has documented the mammoth gouges, fissures, and calligraphic swirls we’ve etched into the Great Basin landscape, between the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, with our…

When Gustavo Aguir-re Jr. took a job at the Central California Environmental Justice Network, it wasn’t necessarily a leap into the unknown. His parents had been farmworkers (his father was with United Farm Workers for more than two decades), and his grandfather had been an organizer with Cesar Chavez. “I work a ton with farmworkers because, particularly in the Central Valley, they are very exposed to environmental racism,” says Aguirre, who is the organization’s Kern County director. “My ability to continue that work with the farmworker-justice struggle, through this lens of environmental justice, [is] gratifying.” Aguirre—who works closely with his brother Cesar at the network—focuses on helping communities that are most vulnerable to pollution from oil drilling, pesticides, garbage, and other environmental contaminants. It’s difficult to inform people who breathe…

With wine country ever growing, brew culture thriving, and America’s fruit basket ripe and productive, it’s no surprise that California provides an ideal habitat for the craft distilling industry. Over the past few years, spirits makers across the state have been concocting ambitious gins, whiskeys, and other liquors that feature locally grown ingredients and evoke the state’s bold character. Here are some of our favorite liquid refreshments. Nicholas Mancall-Bitel is an editorial associate at Eater. 1. FOUR GRAIN STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY BY SPIRIT WORKS DISTILLERY In the face of wildfires or COVID-19, Sebastopol’s Spirit Works put out a stunning four-grain bourbon in 2020. Under the leadership of married cofounders Ashby and Timo Marshall as well as head distiller Krystal Goulart, the distilling team combined four organic ingredients—corn and wheat from…

Last year, 20-year-oldNalleli Cobo posted a picture on Instagram of herself as a third grader: wearing a heart monitor and staring down the camera, fists on her hips, with a determined look in her eyes. At the time, she had started having health problems, including heart palpitations and nosebleeds. She wasn’t the only one suffering such symptoms in her South Los Angeles neighborhood—her family and neighbors were also getting sick. So Cobo and her mom started organizing, knocking on doors to try to shut down the AllenCo Energy oil site located near their home. “I was being poisoned because of my socioeconomic status, my ethnicity, our language, our immigration status,” she says. “That gave me even more of a drive to fight for my community.” The experience ignited Cobo’s passion…

As a designer, Alvin Huang has created near-zero-waste dining tables. As a professor and the director of graduate architecture programs at USC, he’s lectured on topics such as the interplay of coincidence, incidence, and interference in the creative process. And as the principal and founder of the firm Synthesis Design + Architecture, he’s conceived a 24,000-square-foot art gallery and event space called Uxmal in Los Angeles’s Arts District and mobilized volunteers to 3-D print personal protective equipment. “Where a lot of people think of design as solutions, I think of design as problems,” Huang says. “It’s about coming up with a better problem, because more-interesting problems require more-interesting solutions.” A prime example would be the Pure Tension Pavilion. The client, Volvo, needed a portable pavilion that would fit inside a…

Stuzo Clothing was created out of necessity. When Stoney Michelli shopped at department stores, merchandise wassplit into men’s and women’s sections. “There wasn’t a section for me,” Michelli says. And when she found clothing she liked—a pair of men’s jeans, say—“everything was just so misproportioned.” At five foot two, she had to alter nearly every purchase. “I probably pay double the amount by the time I’m done,” she says. “Also, I felt really uncomfortable in the men’s section, because a lot of guys would be like, ‘What are you doing here?’” So Michelli, whose background is in fine arts and graphic design, created her own gender-free clothing line, Stuzo, “where nobody could feel, ‘Oh, well, this is not made for me.’” An early success came out of her frustration with…

In 2004, when Nick Lum was a college senior, he had an idea for improving on-screen reading. “We made screens as a way of mimicking paper,” he says. “And that makes a lot of sense.” Paper, after all, works great for readability. But Lum wondered whether adding a color gradient could help readers track lines of text more efficiently. It’s expensive to add color to print—but not so to a screen. Lum’s idea became BeeLine Reader, which he built after working as a corporate lawyer. Tests have shown that the tool, which he launched in 2013, helps users read faster and improve comprehension; it also aids people with ADHD, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities. Lum, who’s based in Menlo Park, says that interest in the product has surged, since “everybody’s…

WHY I WRITE No Soy Gabriela It was New Year’s Eve in Guadalajara and we were celebrating the march of time with my abuelitos. Their home moldered in a neighborhood called Mezquitan Country, and because a hamburger stand operated across the street, the house often smelled of charbroiled beef. In the living room, we arranged seats in a shape that a generous observer might’ve described as circular. Tortas ahogadas rested on plates resting on our laps. My grandfather stood, outstretching his arms as he announced, “I am Ricardo, the man of this house! We will take turns and everyone will introduce himself! We are all friends here!” My grandfather tucked his arms beneath his gray serape and sat. In her dementia, my grandmother stared at the wall. I knew everyone…

My new book, a collection of essays called The Hard Crowd, begins with a quote from Clarice Lispector: “What others get from me is then reflected back onto me, and forms the atmosphere called ‘I.’” As I assembled my observations about the world, the lives I’ve lived, people I’ve known, stories I’ve heard, I began to realize that much of what I’m trying to convey—“what others get from me,” as Lispector tells it—is also part of a quite private psychic economy. The atmosphere called “I” includes my sense of who I am to other people, which shapes who I am to me. What I refer to here isn’t akin, or akin merely, to an insecure glimpse in a mirror, hoping to finally see what one looks like, but something more…

EFLEDA SLIPPED FROM HER MOTHER IN A TWILIGHT FOG, hair dark and a squall to rival the waves. The ease of her birth became a frequent story, a boast for parents to tell at parties. “We were driving,” her mother would say, eyes glittering, bouncing Efleda on a hip, a knee, stroking her cheek as she slept in a bejeweled bassinet, “and we thought we’d make it, but she was too quick for us!” She would raise a glass, bubbles drifting toward the surface, and toast her daughter, and stroke the girl’s hair, laying it flat so as to kiss the dark, smoothed run. And the guests would laugh, and smile, and nod agreeably, as if they knew something they had not before. In this way, the edges of the…