California Environment

Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved our contemporary coastline—and foretell even greater changes to our shores. From the beaches of the Mexican border up to the sheer-cliffed North Coast, the voices of Indigenous leaders, community activists, small-town mayors, urban engineers, and environmental scientists commingle. Together, they chronicle the challenges and urgency of forging a climate-wise future.

Pacific Gas and Electric was a legacy company built by innovators and visionaries, establishing California as a desirable home and economic powerhouse. In California Burning, Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer finalist Katherine Blunt examines how that legacy fell apart—unraveling a long history of deadly failures in which Pacific Gas and Electric endangered millions of Northern Californians, through criminal neglect of its infrastructure.

At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults.

On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead.

John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning.

The biggest redwood trees are over 1,000 years old, rising more than 35 stories in what's left of the once-vast, ancient redwood forest. Believed to be impossible to ascend, these majestic giants have remained unexplored until recently, when a tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists discovered a lost, dangerous, and hauntingly beautiful world high above California.

Journalist Susan Casey was in her living room when she first glimpsed this strange place and its resident sharks, their dark fins swirling around a tiny boat in a documentary. These great whites were the alphas among alphas, the narrator said, some of them topping 18 feet in length, and each fall they congregated here off the northern California coast.

In this gripping historical memoir, journalist and famed redwood activist Greg King examines how investors and a growing U.S. economy drove the timber industry to cut down all but 4 percent of the original two-million-acre redwood ecosystem. King first examined redwood logging in the 1980s—as an award-winning reporter. What he found in the woods convinced him to leap the line of neutrality and become an activist dedicated to saving the very last ancient redwood groves remaining in private hands.

Essayist. Preservationist. Mountain man. Inventor. John Muir may be California’s best-known icon. A literary naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club and Yosemite National Park, Muir left his legacy on the landscape and on paper. But the celebrity of John Muir does not tell the whole story. In Essential Muir, for the first time, Muir's selected writings include those that show his ecological vision without ignoring his racism, providing a more complete portrait of the man.

In The Sea Forager's Guide to the Northern California Coast, Kirk Lombard combines a startling depth of knowledge with wry humor and colorful storytelling to guide listeners' quests to hook fish, dig clams, and pick seaweed for themselves. Leighton Kelly's stunning, occasionally idiosyncratic illustrations complement practical instructions for gathering a variety of fish and seafood and delicious recipes for what to do with each catch.

Warden Force is a collection of award-winning short stories currently spanning seven volumes. Each story reveals the true adventures of California Fish and Game Wardens and the wildlife-destroying outlaws they pursue. These stories illustrate the wide variety of wildlife-related problems wardens face in California, which has a greater diversity of wildlife and wildlife habitat than any other state and is second only to Alaska in its vast expanses of wilderness.

Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero. Kendra's family raised their children to thrive in this harsh landscape, forever at the mercy of wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Most of all, the Atleework children were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. But it came at a price.

Rising from the depths of the North Pacific lies a fabled island, now submerged just 15 feet below the surface of the ocean. Rumors and warnings about Cortes Bank abound, but among big wave surfers, this legendary rock is famous for one simple (and massive) reason: this is the home of the biggest rideable wave on the face of the earth.

Alexandra Morton has been called "the Jane Goodall of Canada" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance.

In the summer of 1870, Professor Joseph LeConte (1823-1901), and some of his students at the then brand-new University of California, went on a five-week camping trip on horseback to Yosemite and the High Sierra, including Mono Lake and Lake Tahoe. Along the way, LeConte and his students faced hardships of weather and terrain. They had difficulties with their horses and finding trails, and the weather made the men broil and freeze. But in spite all of the harsh conditions, LeConte was enraptured by the awesome beauty of Yosemite Valley, the High Sierra, and Lake Tahoe.

For fans of Nancy Drew! When art restorer Chloe Harper is called to assess a hidden painting discovered behind a wall in the historic Hawthorne House, she’s stunned to find the signature of Elizabeth Sinclair—a brilliant artist who vanished from Seabrook in 1965 without a trace. What begins as an extraordinary artistic discovery quickly turns into a tangled mystery. The painting may be one of a long-lost series, and clues hidden within its brushstrokes could finally explain Sinclair’s disappearance and threats to the environment. But as Chloe investigates, she realizes she’s not the...

For nearly a decade, Palley has been on the frontline of fire. He has witnessed homeowners on the worst day of their lives. He’s seen puddles of aluminum where cars were once parked. He’s watched as 150-foot walls of flame cascaded down mountainsides and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. And he’s captured, time and again, the tireless commitment of firefighters as they work to save lives and homes, in terrain where fire always seems to have the upper hand.

One of the SurfWriter Girls' Best Beach Books "...a gripping story about two people who do not seem to belong together but somehow fit perfectly." — Award Winning Author Alicia Dean Set in contemporary London and California, In Your Dreams! is an emotional roller coaster following an upper-class British actor’s pursuit of an American who is not impressed by or attracted to him just because he’s the leading man in a BBC-TV drama. Jamie’s star is rising and—tired of fake-dating for publicity—he would like to meet a smart lady with compatible interests and values, who is not star-...

Myriam Gurba has lived in California her entire life, with its plants and soils, forests and ecology, immersing herself in the language of the landscape as refracted through the languages and memories of her ancestors. In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling, part study of place. Gurba traverses themes of language, power, ancestry, and California's ecology, in masterfully constructed sentences that seem to defy gravity.

Take a walk in the park. Or explore a forest, gorge, campground, even a historic site. Spend a week or a weekend. Go biking, hiking, fishing, boating, hunting or cross-country skiing. Or just relax and enjoy the most beautiful scenery in the West! This is a guide to the state and the national parks throughout California, the wildlife refuges, nature and bike trails, historic sites, facilities and activities at each site, and contact information. Nearly 100 state parks are described, six national parks, plus 28 other points of interest.