Browsing by Subject "California"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    California Dreaming: Place and Persona in the Essays of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz
    (2019-12) Christoff, Claire Elizabeth; Rebein, Robert; Kovacik, Karen; Minor, Kyle
    Joan Didion, a native of Sacramento, California, is the author of many acclaimed collections of journalism and memoir, the first of which were Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). Eve Babitz, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, has produced two such volumes: Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (1977). While much critical ink has been spilled over Didion’s oeuvre, Babitz was, until the recent reprinting of the aforementioned titles, known best as an artist and muse. Perhaps due to this disparity in recognition and renown, no extant critical piece serves to compare the nonfiction of Didion and Babitz, despite their close geographic and social proximity. In viewing their early work side by side, the Golden West of the 1960s and ’70s emerges as the clearest point of comparison; however, the ways in which Didion and Babitz use place and time in their work often differ due to the marked contrasts in the identities they convey. In characterizing herself as a journalist and an observer, Didion offers a perspective that feels objective but is, at turns, wry and cool. Babitz, writing in a manner that was, at one time, considered autofiction, positions herself as the freewheeling focal point around which Hollywood’s dizzying cultural landscape unfolds. By manipulating the constructs of place and persona, these writers are better equipped to tell the story at hand and analyze their places within it, cementing their work in California’s literary canon.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Establishment of agencies for local groundwater governance under California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
    (2018) Milman, Anita; Galindo, Luisa; Blomquist, William; Conrad, Esther
    With the passage of its 'Sustainable Groundwater Management Act' (SGMA), California devolved both authority and responsibility for achieving sustainable groundwater management to the local level, with state-level oversight. The passage of SGMA created a new political situation within each groundwater basin covered by the law, as public agencies were tasked with self-organizing to establish local Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs). This research examines GSA formation decisions to determine where GSAs formed, whether they were formed by a single agency or a partnership, and whether agencies chose to pursue sustainable groundwater management by way of a single basin-wide organization or by coordinating across multiple organizational structures. The research then tests hypotheses regarding the relative influence of control over the resource, control over decision making, transaction costs, heterogeneity and institutional bricolage on GSA formation decisions. Results indicate mixed preferences for GSA structure, though a majority of public water agencies preferred to independently form a GSA rather than to partner in forming a GSA. Results also suggest GSA formation decisions are the result of overlapping and interacting concerns about control, heterogeneity, and transaction costs. Future research should examine how GSA formation choices serve to influence achievement of groundwater sustainability at the basin scale.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The impact of over 100 years of wildfires on mercury levels and accumulation rates in two lakes in southern California, USA
    (Springer, 2010-05-01) Rothenberg, Sarah E.; Kirby, Matthew E.; Bird, Broxton W.; DeRose, Margie B.; Lin, Chu-Ching; Feng, Xinbin; Ambrose, Richard F.; Jay, Jennifer A.
    In southern California, USA, wildfires may be an important source of mercury (Hg) to local watersheds. Hg levels and Hg accumulation rates were investigated in dated sediment cores from two southern California lakes, Big Bear Lake and Crystal Lake, located approximately 40-km apart. Between 1895 and 2006, fires were routinely minimized or suppressed around Big Bear Lake, while fires regularly subsumed the forest surrounding Crystal Lake. Mean Hg concentrations and mean Hg accumulation rates were significantly higher in Crystal Lake sediments compared to Big Bear Lake sediments (Hg levels: Crystal Lake 220 ± 93 ng g−1, Big Bear Lake 92 ± 26 ng g−1; Hg accumulation: Crystal Lake 790 ± 1,200 μg m−2 year−1, Big Bear 240 ± 54 μg m−2 year−1). In Crystal Lake, the ratio between post-1965 and pre-1865 Hg concentrations was 1.1, and several spikes in Hg levels occurred between 1910 and 1985. Given the remote location of the lake, the proximity of fires, and the lack of point sources within the region, these results suggested wildfires (rather than industrial sources) were a continuous source of Hg to Crystal Lake over the last 150 years.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Marking Time in the San Gabriel Mission Garden
    (Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 2014-03-03) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth
    Each of the twenty‐one missions constructed from 1769 to 1823 by Franciscans and Native American “neophytes” along the California coast and inland valleys has some form of a “mission garden” as part of the contemporary landscape. These ornamental gardens, in contrast to the more utilitarian uses of the landscape during the colonial era, were first constructed in Santa Barbara in 1872 and continued to be built throughout the twentieth century in the central courtyards and forecourts of the missions. Using historical documentary and visual evidence, as well as analysis of the contemporary sites, this paper analyzes features such as sundials, inscriptions, memorials, and ruins (both real and fabricated) as physical, metaphorical, and metaphysical markers of time. In this construction of time, past, present, and future are implicated both in the gardens’ design elements and in their reception by those who produced and consume the landscape. Specifically, the gardens are cast as peaceful, beautiful oases in which visitors can “step back” to a simpler time. They commemorate the lives lived and lost in the missions, and they signal the biblical associations of the cloister gardens as Edenic sanctuaries and portents of a paradise yet to come. The time markers operate in a recursive way to locate the spaces in a broader historical narrative and to signify "heritage" in contemporary cultural practice. Even as the missions are promoted as iconic sites in the state's origin story, these time markers in the mission garden operate to mediate contradictory meanings of the sites' colonial heritage.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    To Consolidate or Coordinate? Status of the Formation of Groundwater Sustainability Agencies in California
    (Stanford University, 2016) Conrad, Esther; Martinez, Janet; Moran, Tara; DuPaw, Marcelle; Ceppos, David; Blomquist, William