How to Kill a Golden State.

Rating:
Summary: readable, well-researched and photographed....
Review: ....this book gives a bleak but accurate diagnosis of the ways we've made California, once thought to be near the "Terrestrial Paradise," a combination tract neighborhood and garbage dump. Given all the beauty-oriented boosterism about this state, such a book sorely needed writing.

My one concern is that while it's necessary to confront the policymakers, real estate developers, lumber and power companies, utilities, etc. with the consequences of what they are doing to California, getting personal by calling them swindlers and idiots has not advanced an environment-based sensitivity on any front. In our anger at unbridled greed and destructiveness we might do well to bear in mind that it's these wanton behaviors we're opposing, not the people who indulge in them. Shaming them won't get us anywhere with healing this damaged planet.

Rating:
Summary: readable, well-researched and photographed....
Review: ....this book gives a bleak but accurate diagnosis of the ways we've made California, once thought to be near the "Terrestrial Paradise," a combination tract neighborhood and garbage dump. Given all the beauty-oriented boosterism about this state, such a book sorely needed writing.

My one concern is that while it's necessary to confront the policymakers, real estate developers, lumber and power companies, utilities, etc. with the consequences of what they are doing to California, getting personal by calling them swindlers and idiots has not advanced an environment-based sensitivity on any front. In our anger at unbridled greed and destructiveness we might do well to bear in mind that it's these wanton behaviors we're opposing, not the people who indulge in them. Shaming them won't get us anywhere with healing this damaged planet.

Rating:
Summary: UGLY CALIFORNIA
Review: Bruce Springsteen once said thay Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land" as an angry reply to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," Well, this was written as an angry reply to "Beautiful California," a coffe table book from SUNSET magazine published in the mid-60's. The book shows the extent to which Americans have, to be blunt, "killed" California in ways both great (freeways) and small (littering). Bronson should publish a new edition of the book---it's sadly more pertinent than ever.