Journal of Alta California Spring 2021

ADAM FISHER “On a Wing and a Prayer,” page 10 Your story about flying cars begs the question: Have you ever dreamed up your own wild invention? An electric snowboard. Envision a snowmobile-style track, inset in the back of a unidirectional snowboard. Imagine the possibilities of uphill snowboarding! Imagine the money one could save on lift tickets! I don’t have the mechanical skills that would turn this brain wave into an actual prototype. So all I ask of you, dear reader, is that when you build one of these things, you get in touch with me. CHRISTINA GANDOLFO “California’s White Wine Problem” photos, page 48 Did you sample any wines while on assignment in San Luis Obispo County? I couldn’t due to COVID restrictions, but Justin Trabue, who I was…

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…

On the day the first lockdown is put into effect in San Francisco, March 17, 2020, I get a call from my friend Dezső Molnár. COVID-19 has hit California—Governor Gavin Newsom has already declared a state of emergency, and there is a mood of panic in the air. Molnár is calling me from the road, driving from the Bay Area back to Los Angeles, because he’s getting the hell out of Dodge. Yet the voice on the phone is dead calm. Molnár has a message for me. “You know the movie Mad Max?” It isn’t really a question, just a setup for one of Molnár’s rants. “Nobody understands that movie,” he explains. “People think that it’s about what you need to do in order to survive after the apocalypse. But…

When it comes to flying cars, The Jetsons got a few things wrong. The latest versions don’t have cool bubble tops, for one thing, and can’t fold up into a briefcase, origami-like, once you reach your office. But today’s electric air taxis, which could be soaring high above U.S. cityscapes as soon as 2023, have their own special charms. These fliers promise speeds of 100 to 180 miles per hour, which means that your two-hour drive to work in gridlocked traffic could become closer to 20 minutes. Most are fully electric, have one to four seats, and boast of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capabilities that eliminate the need for runways. In your commute of the future, you might hail one of these with an app—think Uber, but for the…

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…

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…