In disturbing letterheads I didn't anticipate seeing at work today

Today! Free on Zoom for those of you who appreciate California history

I couldn't find much 1960s coverage of families displaced by the W-X freeway. So I looked at households listed on W or X in the 1950 census & called up the kids to see if they were still living there when construction began. I found two amazing people? Reporting is fun www.sacbee.com/news/local/t...

Moderating this fun discussion of California myths at the California state library this week! Join on Zoom to learn more about Calafia, pulp novels, and Ramona

Re-establishing Wildcat Canyon as a through route to exurban Contra Costa County is a mistake. Fix it if you must, and leave it closed.

Cadiz Inc up to new antics, zombie projects never die

Prop 13 continues to be my enemy

I literally had a conversation with colleagues yesterday who told me about their behavior to avoid mountain lion encounters and I reminded them that they're much more likely to die driving to work

AI not only requires tons of groundwater or surface water to operate it, but it also heats up that water to kill all the tiny microbes that make groundwater clean!

There is one extremely active nimby who has made it her mission to make sure that this intersection isn't safer for cyclists and pedestrians, sadly

Please follow up with a detailed history of property tax repossession, been waiting for someone to write one for a decade kthanx

watching closely to see if there's a spike in citations for Neither Settler nor Native

Land Sale of the Century, James Watt’s dream come may come true.

Counterpoint: Jaws is just Duel, revamped, so actually the template of the movie is about the terror of the open road and mysterious road rage

Death valley has more Joshua trees than Joshua Tree. Protecting those trees and the areas around the NP will continue to protect the best habitat for the charismatic species moving forward

The lobby for this is exclusively golden duplex owners in Berkeley who don't want to improve things for their tenants

The federal government had a little known program to sell off lands under the small tract act, and they had to end it because of too much interest and too much chaos. Today's checkerboard sale would be more of the same

Villages connected by freeways

Public transit helps you understand society in both the best and most car-brained ways

Meanwhile Raymond Williams shouts into the void: what if the country and the city should be conceptualized together?

As someone who works in small towns, cities and countryside are so intertwined that it's impossible to talk about rural America without its many metropoles

People who hate on public transit clearly have not been on my last two trains, on which someone offered to buy me a drink and another kind person offered and successfully opened a notoriously annoying thermos that I should not use for my tea

I got to pick where I live so I could bike and train commute, but not everyone gets that choice. Expanding bike lanes gives people the option to stop driving everywhere

While we are all reeling from the budget and its major cuts to NASA, NIH, USGS, etc. I want to also draw attention to this little nugget about State Wildlife Grants, which is the mechanism for funding State Wildlife Action Plans. Eliminating SWG will destroy state natural resource agencies.

Are dirt bikes cows? The answer to this question is revealed in my new article in @envirohistory.bsky.social

The irony of this likely being AI-generated and fraudulent data is that one of his "findings" was that AI use makes people unhappy. I guess he's finding that out the hard way now.

Public lands are the birthplace of rivers and are our largest source of clean, safe, reliable drinking water. We must keep public lands in public hands to protect healthy rivers and our nation's water security. www.americanrivers.org/2025/01/the-...

Reminds me of one of my favorite California landmarks in Ludlow, where they thought they'd just use old nukes to make I-40 straighter. Glad project Carryall didn't end up nuclear bombing the Mojave

Must read: Mahmoud Khalil speaks out for the first time since his arrest by the Trump administration in an exclusive letter, dictated over the phone to his family, from ICE detention in Louisiana.

The checkerboard still rules everything around me

The @NatlParkService and @forestservice layoffs threaten cultural preservation and conservation. With 3400 Forest Service and 1000 NPS staff gone. National parks risk fewer rangers closed trails and neglected sites. #NationalParks #Publiclands nativenewsonline.net/environment/...

if you find yourself reluctant to support the guy at Columbia because you find some of the politics he espoused distasteful or even abhorrent, you should know that this is exactly the reaction that they hoped for in choosing him as a target for unlawful detention based on political speech.

I personally know at least three people whose private-sector jobs/companies have been impacted by federal cuts and freezes, frequently in places most wouldn't even consider

The chair of a federal civil service board has ordered the Trump administration to temporarily reinstate thousands of fired Department of Agriculture employees, including U.S. Forest Service workers: www.politico.com/news/2025/03...

"All this recent change was squeezing the unique high alpine areas and the species that have adapted to them. Soon they would have nowhere left to go." 🌎 www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/t...

Now have achieved my life goal of being on KALX

Listen to my ongoing attempts to make administrative law interesting and understand land use politics in the 1970s through dirt biking on the Social Science Matrix podcast with @marionf.bsky.social.

Applications for unemployment benefits are rising, and this is without the anticipated 220,000 new applications expected with federal layoffs and associated businesses. Everyone I work with in natural resource issues (including me) is expecting to be out of a job in the next 3 months.

One thing I've learned from interviewing FS employees over the last year is that when it's fire season, everyone works on fire. You thought you were a NEPA planner? Recreation? Grazing? You're all helping with fire now. Cutting non-fire positions hurts firefighting.

"You can’t have people spend this kind of money and then just pull the rug. I didn’t spend the money thinking maybe I’ll get it back. I spent the money because we had a signed contract." Illegal freezes on federal funding is causing havoc in rural America investigatemidwest.org/2025/02/24/c...

Gregg was the only full-time wilderness ranger in the Naches Ranger District, arguably one of the best places to recreate in Washington State. With other cuts, there's probably no seasonal rangers this summer, and very limited law enforcement. People like Gregg make our forests work for pennies

Don't forget about the Bureau of Land Management, always chronically understaffed and manages more lands!

Outsourcing planning and design might be the most penny-wise, pound-foolish decision ever.

Bright passionate people who wanted to dedicate their lives to public service were fired in a mass email over the holiday weekend. This has absolutely nothing to do with efficiency, fraud, waste, or abuse. And your life will be worse because of it.

I feel like every couple of years the news rediscovers administrative law, which I will happily remind you has been here all along, silently structuring how we do everything

In my work in rural communities, many of them know that they depend on federal and state employment-- if they didn't, people wouldn't whisper rumors to me about proposed downsizing at Pelican Bay state prison.

there could be armed uprising in the streets while the university loses all federal funding, and still the only messaging from the university would be, 'Another amazing semester is underway! Remember to complete your online research compliance and conflict of interest trainings. Roll Tide!'

This is what happens when you go to rural.gov which used to be the site the Biden admin used to connect/discuss federal programs targeting rural communities. USDA is the only fed agency with the specific rural mandate, including housing, internet, + infrastructure