Category: Climate Change

How the Jones Act Strangles California Innovation and Keeps I-5 Packed with Trucks

A century-old law, the Jones Act, is keeping coastal shipping off the map—while traffic, costs, and emissions keep rising on land.

A Maersk container ship (and many others) sits off the California coast during Covid in 2020. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

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President Trump recently issued a temporary waiver of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, allowing oil to be moved on foreign-flagged vessels between US ports in an effort to ease supply constraints and lower prices. The move put a spotlight back on this century-old law that quietly shapes how goods move around the United States. Then on Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a segment examining the Jones Act itself and the decline of the U.S. maritime industry it was designed to protect. The picture it painted was not of a thriving, competitive shipbuilding sector, but of one that has been in steady decline for decades, particularly compared to the massive shipbuilding industries of places like China, Japan, and South Korea.

The topic is familiar to me. A few years ago, I reported on the Jones Act for Quartz and asked important questions about how the act impacts California. I’d like to readdress that question here because the issues I wrote about then are just as important now, if not more so.

Port of Los Angeles (Photo: Erik Olsen)

The Jones Act is protectionist. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. It was designed to shield U.S. shipbuilders and maritime operators from foreign competition, reserving domestic shipping for American-built and American-crewed vessels in the name of national security and economic self-reliance. Sadly, as 60 Minutes pointed out clearly, it has not done its job very well.

In California, the Jones Act effectively prevents the state from experimenting with something it seems perfectly built for: a “blue highway” running just offshore, moving goods between ports instead of forcing so much of it onto already traffic-clogged roads. And with congestion worsening, infrastructure under strain, and growing pressure to cut carbon emissions, it is worth looking again at how California could begin to solve several huge problems. Because if this century-old policy were rethought, or even partially reformed, California could open the door to a new era of coastal shipping and transportation innovation.

Shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles (Photo: Erik Olsen)

California is defined by trade. Cargo arrives from across the Pacific, pours through Los Angeles and Long Beach, the largest port system in the country, it spreads into warehouses and rail yards, and then begins its second journey up and down the state. Trucks clog I-5. Trains thread through the Central Valley. The coastline, though, stretching past the state’s major population centers, remains oddly quiet.

It’s strange. One of the world’s busiest maritime regions depends overwhelmingly on highways to move goods between its own coastal cities. WTF is going on here?

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In theory, the ocean should be part of California’s domestic freight system. Ships already cross it every day carrying containers, vehicles, fuel, and raw materials from Asia. A smaller feeder vessel moving containers, automobiles, construction materials, or empty containers between Southern California and the Bay Area would be entirely ordinary by global standards.

But not in California. Or the rest of the US, for that matter.

Los Angeles traffic is some of the worst in the country. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Across Europe, short sea shipping is a core part of logistics networks. Containers arrive at major ports like Rotterdam and are redistributed by smaller feeder vessels to secondary ports rather than being hauled long distances by truck. Japan, South Korea, and China all operate extensive coastal shipping systems linking major industrial regions. In those places, the ocean functions as an extension of the transportation network, not just an international gateway.

Not here. There is no blue highway.

The problem is the Jones Act. Because foreign-built vessels cannot carry cargo between U.S. ports, the enormous potential to offload a huge portion of shipping traffic onto the sea is lost. Under the Jones Act, ships must be built in the United States, flagged here and manned entirely by US crew. The first part of that is the rub, because it is prohibitively expensive, and sometimes not even possible, to build ships here. Exactly the problem the Jones Act was supposed to solve.

So all freight stays on land.

The consequences show up everywhere. The I-5 corridor carries immense truck traffic moving containers, agricultural goods, vehicles, and construction materials between Southern California and the Bay Area. Highways wear down. Congestion builds. Supply chains slow.

In Los Angeles, drivers lose roughly 80 to more than 130 hours a year sitting in traffic. If you live here, you know we have a term for it: soul-crushing. But it also translates into real economic loss, roughly $1,500 per driver annually, and billions of dollars across the region. Statewide, congestion costs run into the tens of billions when lost time, fuel, and freight delays are combined.

Trucks are a huge part of the problem. They burn fuel in traffic. They wear down infrastructure. Sure, they move goods efficiently door to door, but at scale they add to the strain.

And yet, just offshore, there is another option.

Port of Los Angeles. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Marine transport is significantly more energy efficient per ton-mile than trucking. Even modest coastal shipping could remove thousands of truck trips, reduce emissions, and add redundancy when rail lines shut down or highways close due to wildfire or accidents. The coastline offers a ready-made corridor that requires no new pavement.

Studies have repeatedly pointed to the benefits. A West Coast marine highway analysis identified the Los Angeles to Oakland route as one of the most promising coastal shipping corridors, currently entirely unused. Another assessment estimated that even at 10 percent market penetration, coastal shipping between Southern California and the Bay Area could divert more than 2,500 truckloads per day in each direction.

But not with the Jones Act.

Its defenders argue that it protects national security and maritime jobs. Those concerns are real. But the results after almost 100 years show that at least as far as jobs are concerned, that ahem, ship has sailed. The United States today builds only a tiny fraction of the world’s commercial ships, far behind China, South Korea, and Japan. The number of large U.S.-flagged vessels has diminished to almost nothing, as the 60 Minutes piece pointed out. American shipping is already in rapid decline and there’s very little that can be done to solve the problem.

Critics have pointed this out for years. John McCain called the law “protectionism at its worst,” arguing that it distorted markets without achieving its goals. Analysts across the political spectrum have made similar arguments, pointing to higher shipping costs and limited competition in domestic maritime markets.

Workers observe a propeller installation for USS Nimitz at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Bremerton, Washington, October 16, 2018. Photo by Brian Kilpatrick/U.S. Navy

In places that depend heavily on ocean shipping, the impacts are even more direct. Bringing goods to and from Hawaii, for example, is dominated by a small number of carriers, including Matson. That’s why even basic goods in Hawaii like milk, eggs, and fuel are often 20–50% higher than on the mainland, reflecting both shipping costs and the lack of competitive alternatives.

In California, the impact shows up as heavy traffic, more pollution, and degraded infrastructure. But there are even more opportunities lost. Imagine being able to take a ferry from San Diego to LA. Or LA to San Francisco. Or San Diego to Seattle. A cruise ship, perhaps? A slow-ish energy-efficient cruise ship that goes up the whole West Coast for retirees wanting to experience the glorious West Coast. How cool would that be? Alas, too bad. I mean, a ferry between Los Angeles and San Francisco isn’t prohibited in theory. But it would have to use a US-built vessel. That makes it prohibitively more expensive to launch than similar services in Europe or Asia, where operators can purchase vessels from a global market.

Entrepreneurs have tried to make this work before. When I first reported this story, there were even claims that British businessman Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, had explored a high-speed coastal ferry capable of making the Los Angeles to San Francisco trip in eight to ten hours. Whether or not that specific plan ever fully materialized, the broader idea has surfaced repeatedly. Others have tried and failed. It has never taken hold, in large part because of the economics shaped by the Jones Act.

The Jones Act does not ban coastal shipping. It makes it difficult enough that it rarely happens at scale. Even today, proposals like a Santa Monica–Malibu “Blue Highway” ferry are still in early stages, facing the same cost and feasibility challenges. The ship would be Jones Act compliant. It’s hard not to wonder how much bigger, faster, and more ambitious these projects could be if operators were allowed to buy vessels on the global market.

A ferry similar to this one might serve Marina del Rey, Santa Monica and Malibu. A partnership called Pier to Pier says passengers will experience a faster, more peaceful trip on the ocean, rather than contending with PCH and the 405 Freeway. The company hopes to launch service this year. (Pier to Pier)

So what can be done? One place to start is the most restrictive piece of the law: the U.S.-build requirement. Allowing foreign-built, U.S.-flagged vessels to operate in domestic trade and human transport would immediately expand the pool of ships and lower the cost of entry, making it possible to test routes that today never get off the ground. Or sea.

We’re constantly searching for ways to reduce congestion, cut emissions, and extend the life of infrastructure that’s falling apart. Yeah, we’re investing in rail, and some of it is doing a great job, although the California High-Speed rail project is currently a costly disaster. All the while, one of the most obvious transportation corridors remains largely unused.

So, a century-old law, passed in a very different era, continues to shape how goods move through the 4th largest economy in the world. Why? The coastline is there. The cargo is there. The need is there.

The question is whether the policy will ever catch up.

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The Man Who Saved the Owens Pupfish

How biologist Phil Pister helped rescue a species that had nearly disappeared

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This is a happy story, but first we need to get through the downer stuff:

The news is full of extinction stories. A species that once thrived runs headlong into the modern world and vanishes. Habitat disappears, invasive species arrive, ecosystems unravel, and before long another name is added to the list of things that used to exist.

The numbers are grim. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List reports that about 900 species have gone extinct since the year 1500, the baseline used for “modern extinctions.” Further, more than 48,600 species are threatened with extinction; that’s about 28% of all assessed species. Many believe we are living through the Anthropocene, a period in which human activity has become the dominant force shaping the planet. For many plants and animals, it is an era they simply cannot survive.

Elizabeth Kolbert captured the scale of the problem in her book The Sixth Extinction. I’ve read it. It’s great, if depressing.

But every so often, there are stories that tick in the other direction. Small victories. Species that somehow slip through the cracks and hang on.

Amanda Royal over at Earth Hope does a wonderful job documenting some of those rare moments of recovery. And there are more of them than you might think if you look closely.

One of them begins in the high desert of California’s Eastern Sierra, with a fish no longer than your finger.

The Owens pupfish.

Its story is not a sweeping comeback. The species is still endangered and survives only in a few carefully protected places. But its survival came down to the actions of a handful of people and, in one crucial moment, the determination of a single biologist who refused to let an entire lineage disappear.

Sometimes that is all it takes to change the ending.

Less than 2.5 inches in length, the Owens pupfish is a silvery-blue fish in the family Cyprinodontidae, part of a group of small egg-laying fishes that includes killifish and topminnows. Endemic to California’s Owens Valley, 200 miles north of Los Angeles, the fish has lived on the planet since the Pleistocene, becoming a new species when its habitat was divided by changing climatic conditions, 60,000 years ago. The fish is a survivor. But of course, as is too often the case, when man comes along, even the most hardened creatures face peril.

Owens pupfish (California Department of Fish and Wildlife)

For thousands of years, the Owens Valley was largely filled with water, crystal-clear snowmelt that still streams off the jagged, precipitous slab faces of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Pupfish were common, with nine species populating various lakes and streams from Death Valley to an area just south of Mammoth Lakes. The Paiute people scooped them out of the water and dried them for the winter.

In the late 19th century, Los Angeles was a rapidly growing young metropolis, still in throes of growing pains that would last decades. While considered an ugly younger sibling to the city of San Francisco, Los Angeles had the appeal of near year-round sunshine and sandy beaches whose beauty that rivaled those of the French Riviera. And still do.

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But by the late 1900s, the city began outgrowing its water supply. Fred Eaton, mayor of Los Angeles, and his water czar, William Mulholland, hatched a plan to build an aqueduct from Owens Valley to Los Angeles. Most Californians know the story. Through a series of shady deals, Mulholland and Eaton managed to get control of the water in the Owens Valley and, in 1913, the aqueduct was finished. It was great news for the new city, but terrible news for many of the creatures (not to mention the farmers) who depended on the water flowing into and from the Owens Lake to survive.

So named because they exhibit playful, puppy-like behavior, the Owens pupfish rapidly began to disappear. Pupfish are well-known among scientists for being able to live in extreme and isolated situations. They can tolerate high levels of salinity. Some live in water that exceeds 100° Fahrenheit, and they can even tolerate up to 113° degrees for short periods. They are also known to survive in near-freezing temperatures common in the lower desert.

Owens River in the Eastern Sierra (Erik Olsen)

But hot or cold are one thing. The disappearance of water altogether is another.

As California has developed, and as climate change has caused temperatures to rise, thus increasing evaporation, all of California’s pupfish populations have come under stress. Add to these conditions, the early 20th-century introduction by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife of exotic species like largemouth bass and rainbow trout to lakes and streams in the eastern Sierras (bass and trout readily prey on small fish), and you get a recipe for disaster. And disaster is exactly what happened.

Several species of pupfish in the state have been put on the endangered species list. Several species, including the Owens pupfish, the Death Valley Pupfish and the Devils Hole pupfish are some of the rarest species of fish on the planet. The Devils Hole pupfish recently played the lead role in a recent (and excellent) story about a man who accidentally killed one of the fish during a drunken spree. According to news stories, he stomped on the fish when he tried to swim in a fenced-off pool in Death Valley National Park. He went to jail.

The remains of the Owens River flowing through Owens Valley in California. Credit: Erik Olsen

The impact on the Owens pupfish habitat was so severe that in 1948, just after it was scientifically described, it was declared extinct.

That is, until one day in 1964, when researchers discovered a remnant population of Owens pupfish in a desert marshland called Fish Slough, a few miles from Bishop, California. Wildlife officials immediately began a rescue mission to save the fish and reintroduce them into what were considered suitable habitats. Many were not saved, and by the late 1960s, the only remaining population of Owens pupfish, about 800 individuals, barely hung on in a “room-sized” pond near Bishop.

On August 18, 1969, a series of heavy rains caused foliage to grow and clog the inflow of water into the small pool. It happened so quickly, that when scientists learned of the problem, they realized they had just hours to save the fish from extinction.

Edwin Philip Pister
Edwin Philip Pister

Among the scientists who came to the rescue that day was a stocky, irascible 40-year-old fish biologist named Phil Pister. Pister had worked for the California Department of Fish and Game (now the California Department of Fish and Wildlife) most of his career. An ardent acolyte of Aldo Leopold, regarded as one of the fathers of American conservation, Pister valued nature on par, or even above, human needs. As the Los Angeles Times put it in a 1990 profile, “The prospect of Pister off the leash was fearsome.”

“I was born on January 15, 1929, the same day as Martin Luther King—perhaps this was a good day for rebels,” he once said.

Because of his temperament, Pister had few friends among his fellow scientists. He was argumentative, disagreeable, and wildly passionate about the protection of California’s abundant, but diminishing, natural resources.

Pister realized that immediate action was required to prevent the permanent loss of the Owens pupfish. He rallied several of his underlings and rushed to the disappearing pool with buckets, nets, and aerators.

Within a few hours, the small team was able to capture the entire remaining population of Owens pupfish in two buckets, transporting them to a nearby wetland. However, as Pister himself recalls in an article for Natural History Magazine:

“In our haste to rescue the fish, we had unwisely placed the cages in eddies away from the influence of the main current. Reduced water velocity and accompanying low dissolved oxygen were rapidly taking their toll.”

Los Angeles Aqueduct. Credit: Erik Olsen

As noted earlier, pupfish are amazingly tolerant of extreme conditions, but like many species, they can also be fragile, and within a short amount of time, many of the pupfish Pister had rescued were dying, floating belly up in the cages. Pister realized immediate action was required, lest the species disappear from the planet forever. Working alone, he managed to net the remaining live fish into the buckets and then carefully carried them by foot across an expanse of marsh. “I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species,” he wrote. “I remember mumbling something like: “Please don’t let me stumble. If I drop these buckets we won’t have another chance!”

Pister managed to get the fish into cool, moving water where they could breathe and move about. He says about half the the population survived, but that was enough.

Pister died in 2023 near Bishop, and today, the Owens pupfish remains in serious danger of extinction. On several occasions over the last few decades, the Owens pupfish have suffered losses by largemouth bass that find their way into the pupfish’s refuges, likely due to illegal releases by anglers.

Today the Owens pupfish hangs on in a small constellation of protected springs and marshes in the Owens Valley. The largest populations in Fish Slough may number in the thousands, but altogether the species occupies only a few acres of habitat. In 2021, biologists even created a new refuge population to give the fish another chance.

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California’s Daily Tidal Wave of Life

A lobate ctenophore in the ocean twilight zone. (Photo: NOAA)
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If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you already know I’m obsessed with submarines and undersea life. I believe we’re at the beginning of a new era of ocean discovery, driven by small personal submersibles, remotely operated vehicles (ROVS), and autonomous explorers (AUVs) that can roam the deep on their own. Add AI into the mix, and our ability to see, map, and understand the ocean is about to expand dramatically.

One phenomenon we are only beginning to fully understand also happens to be one of the most extraordinary animal events on Earth. It unfolds every single night, just a few miles offshore, in a region known as the ocean twilight zone about 650 to 3,300 feet below the ocean surface. Twice a day, billions of tons of marine organisms, from tiny crustaceans to massive schools of squid, traverse the water column in what researchers call the Diel Vertical Migration (DVM), the largest mass migration of animals on Earth. A heaving, planetary-scale pulse of biomass rising and falling through the dark.

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It happens everywhere, in every ocean. But California is special for several reasons. California’s cold, southward-flowing current and seasonal upwelling flood coastal waters with nutrients that feed dense plankton blooms. These blooms provide food for thick layers of migrating animals. California has one of the most robust and productive ocean ecosystems on the planet. (Take a read of the piece I did about life on some of our oil rigs.) When you add Monterey Canyon into the mix, which funnels and concentrates life, this global phenomenon becomes more compressed and visible. In fact, with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) based at Moss Landing near the head of the canyon, Monterey Bay has become one of the most intensively studied midwater ecosystems on the planet.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, perched at the edge of Monterey Canyon, one of the deepest submarine canyons in North America. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

This “tidal cycle of shifting biomass” is not driven by gravity, but by the rising and setting sun. Animals rise by the trillions during the evening to escape predation, then settle during the day, when light would otherwise make them visible to hungry predators.

The discovery of this phenomenon reads like a Tom Clancy novel and took place just off our coast. During World War II, U.S. Navy sonar operators working off San Diego and the Southern California Bight began detecting what looked like a “false seafloor” hovering 300 to 500 meters down during the day, only to sink or vanish each night. The mystery lingered for years, until the late 1940s, when scientist Martin Johnson and others at Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed that the phantom bottom was not seafloor, but vast layers of living animals rising and falling with the sun. We now know this as the Deep Scattering Layer (DSL), so named because the gas-filled swim bladders of millions of small fish, primarily lanternfish which number into the quadrillions around the globe, reflect sonar pings like a solid wall.

The deep-scattering layer (DSL) graphed as an echogram, or a plot of active acoustic data. Warmer colors indicate more backscatter, meaning that more (or stronger) echoes were received back from the organisms at that depth. The red line indicates the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) trajectory as it performs transects throughout the layer. (Source: NOAA)

So let’s talk about those amazing lanternfish, aka myctophids, a species that many peole have likely never heard of. These small fish may make up as much as 65 percent of all deep-sea fish biomass and are a major food source for whales, dolphins, salmon, and squid. They use tiny light organs called photophores to match faint surface light, a camouflage strategy known as counterillumination that helps hide them from predators below. These are just one of the many different species that inhabit the twilight zone as part of the DVM. 

A lanternfish photographed in the ocean twilight zone, its body dotted with tiny light organs called photophores that help it blend into faint surface light as it migrates toward the surface at night. (Photo: NOAA)

Monterey Bay is arguably the world’s most important laboratory for DVM research, thanks to the Monterey Canyon, and several ground-breaking discoveries have come out of MBARI. For example, scientists at MBARI, including the legendary Bruce Robison, have used ROVs to document what they call “running the gauntlet,” when these migrators pass through layers of hungry, waiting predators. They encounter giant siphonophores with stinging tentacles, squids snag lanternfish, and giant larvaceans that build sprawling mucus “houses” that trap smaller animals. It’s like an epic battle scene out of Lord of the Rings, every single day.

This migration is also a key part of the ocean’s carbon cycle, which includes a scientific process known as the biological pump. When larger animals eat carbon-rich plankton at the surface, they eventually defecate all that carbon into the water, aka the “active transport” mechanism. Much of that carbon sinks to the bottom, sequestering it for decades or even centuries. In some regions, DVM accounts for one-third of the total carbon transport to the deep ocean. MBARI has a very interesting, long-term deep-ocean observatory called the Station M research site and observatory located nearly 12,000 feet below the surface off Santa Barbara. This site has been continuously monitored for more than three decades to track how organic matter produced near the surface eventually reaches the abyssal seafloor and feeds deep communities. I did a video about it for MBARI a few years ago.

Deployment of Mesobot, an autonomous midwater robot developed by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for exploration of the ocean twilight zone above Monterey Canyon, California. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Other cutting-edge technology is being brought to bear as well to help us better understand what life exists in the deep waters off California. A UC San Diego study shows that we can now use low-volume environmental DNA (eDNA) to detect the genetic signatures of huge numbers of different animals, even if we can’t see them. This free-floating DNA moves with ocean currents and can be sequenced to identify species ranging from copepods to dolphins, allowing researchers to track who is participating in the migration even when organisms are too small, fragile, or fast for traditional nets.

All of this plays out each day and night off our coast, a vast symphony of animal movement and deadly combat that, until recently, was not only poorly understood but largely invisible to science. And it’s all happening right off our shores

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Upwelling, the Ocean’s Engine Beneath California’s Waters

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I recently revisited a book I enjoyed: The Blue Machine by physicist, oceanographer, and writer Helen Czerski. It is a beautifully clear exploration of the deep mechanics of the ocean and why those processes are so essential to keeping our planet cool, biodiverse, and stable.

One of the core ideas she returns to is ocean upwelling, a process that is especially important for those of us who live in California. Upwelling is one of those hidden forces that quietly underlies everything around us, and once you read about it, you realize that so much of what we know and love here simply would not exist without it.

Few marine processes are as impactful on the abundance of sea life off the coast of California as upwelling. It may not be a term you’ve heard before, but the natural oceanic process of upwelling is one of the most important engines driving climate, biological diversity, and the ocean’s food web.

It’s time to pay attention.

The abundance of sea life around some of California’s oil rigs is due in part to ocean upwelling near the continental shelf. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

In simple terms, upwelling is when cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean rises to the surface, replacing warmer surface water. A churn. Along the California coast, prevailing northerly winds push surface waters offshore through the Coriolis effect, allowing deeper, colder water to rise in their place. Over the continental shelf off shore California, this upwelled water is rapidly brought into shallower depths, delivering nutrients directly into the photic zone where phytoplankton can grow. This is one reason continental shelves, including areas around offshore oil platforms (which I wrote about a few weeks ago), are biological hotspots.

California’s upwelling system is one of the most intensively studied in the world because it fuels the region’s crazy marine productivity.

In California, upwelling occurs year-round off the northern and central coast. It’s strongest in the spring and summer when northwesterly winds are at their most powerful. Upwelling is reduced in the fall and winter when winds are more variable.

Killer whales benefit from upwelling because the nutrient-rich waters fuel a surge in phytoplankton, which triggers an increase in the populations of smaller prey fish and marine mammals that orcas rely on for sustenance. (Photo: NOAA)

Researchers from institutions like the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Stanford University have used a variety of methods, including satellite observations and computer modeling, to study upwelling. One of the groundbreaking studies was the CalCOFI program (California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations), which began in the late 1940s. It was a joint venture between Scripps and state and federal agencies to investigate the collapse of the sardine fishery. The study showed that the sardine collapse was not just due to overfishing but also large-scale ocean and climate variability, a finding that reshaped fisheries science. Over decades, it has expanded its scope and now provides invaluable long-term datasets that help scientists understand upwelling and its impacts on marine populations.

Deep, cold ocean water is rich in nutrients because organic matter from the surface sinks as it dies or is consumed, and is broken down at depth, releasing nutrients back into the water. When that water is brought to the surface through upwelling, it delivers a fresh supply of nutrients that fuels phytoplankton growth and supports the entire marine food web.

The food web is kind of like a ladder. Or a chain. Nutrient-rich cold waters support blooms of phytoplankton: microscopic, photosynthetic organisms (meaning they are teeming with chlorophyll) that produce oxygen and form the base of marine food webs. When these primary producers flourish, it triggers a chain reaction throughout the ecosystem: zooplankton feed on phytoplankton, small fish feed on zooplankton, and larger predators, including fish, marine mammals, seabirds, (and humans) reap the rewards! So a well functioning upwelling system is pretty important for abundant sea life.

Also, cold water holds more dissolved gases like oxygen compared to warm water (yet another reason that warming seas could be a problem in the future). Oxygen is crucial for marine animals. In cold, oxygen-rich environments, organisms can efficiently carry out metabolic processes, which leads to higher rates of feeding, growth, and reproduction, thereby further boosting biological productivity. Everyone wins!

But there’s a problem.

Sardines off the coast of California (Photo: NOAA)

Studies have shown that natural changes in climate, like El Niño and La Niña events have a significant impact on wildlife and the local ocean ecosystem. During El Niño events, warmer waters and weaker upwelling reduce nutrient levels in the California Current, lowering phytoplankton productivity and causing deadly ripples through the food web. La Niña conditions generally strengthen upwelling, bringing nutrient-rich water to the surface and boosting marine productivity.

Climate change adds a potentially dangerous new layer of uncertainty: oceans are warming and growing more acidic, which can disrupt the timing, strength, and benefits of upwelling. While climate change does not necessarily mean more El Niño years, it does mean that El Niño events now play out in a warmer ocean, often amplifying their impacts and increasing stress on marine life, with serious consequences for some organisms.

Sea lions off the Southern California coast. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

We’ve been seeing some of these impacts. Take sea lions and large fish populations. In years of strong upwelling, prey is more abundant and closer to shore, allowing California sea lions to forage more efficiently and increasing populations. During weak upwelling years, prey becomes scarcer and more dispersed, forcing sea lions to travel farther for food, increasing stress and reducing reproductive success. Variations like this have been observed in recent years during El Niño periods along the California coast, showing how quickly marine ecosystems respond to shifts in ocean conditions.

Of course, upwelling isn’t just a California thing; it’s a global phenomenon that occurs in various parts of the world, from the coasts of Peru to the Canary Islands. It serves a similar churning life inducing function in these places, too. But California is sort of the poster child for scientists thanks to extensive research here and its vital role in a multi-billion dollar fishing industry that includes species like albacore tuna, swordfish, Dungeness crab, squid, and sardines.

Anacaps Island in California’s Channel Islands (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Upwelling is one of those critical oceanic processes that helps maintain our stable and immensely productive California waters, but warming ocean temperatures and changes in wind patterns could cause big problems, disrupting the timing and intensity of upwelling, putting sea life off California’s coast at risk.

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Of course, I do not mean for this piece to be yet another downer about climate change. California’s coastal ecosystem is, in many ways, healthier today than it has been in decades, thanks to policies and practices put in place once we began to understand what was truly at stake. Whenever I get offshore and experience the ocean firsthand, I feel deeply grateful for what we have now, even as I remain aware that it is something we could still damage if we’re stupid and careless…which is not out of the question. The encouraging part is that Californians have shown, again and again, a real capacity to rally when it matters. For now, then, it is worth appreciating what we have and getting out there to experience it whenever you get the chance.

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The Happy Nut: California’s Rise to Pistachio Power

Pistachios grow on a tree in the Central Valley (Photo: Erik Olsen)
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I just got back from a filming assignment in California’s Central Valley. That drive up I-5 and Highway 99 is always a strange kind of pleasure. After climbing over the Grapevine, the landscape suddenly flattens and opens into a vast plain where farmland and dry earth stretch endlessly in every direction. A pumpjack. A dairy farm. Bakersfield. There’s a mysterious, almost bleak beauty to it. Then come the long stretches where the view shifts from dust to trees: pistachio trees. Especially through the San Joaquin Valley, miles of low, gray-green orchards extend to the horizon. At various points, I busted out a drone and took a look, and as far as I could see, it was pistachio trees. A colorful cluster of pistachios hung from a branch and I picked on and peeled off the fruity outer layer. There was that familiar nut with the curved cracked opening. The smiling nut.

California now grows more pistachios than any place on Earth, generating nearly $3 billion in economic value in the state. Nearly every nut sold in the United States, and most shipped abroad, comes from orchards in the Central Valley. The state produces about 99 percent of America’s pistachios, and the U.S. itself accounts for roughly two-thirds of the global supply. And that all happened relatively quickly.

When the U.S. Department of Agriculture began searching for crops suited to the arid West in the early 1900s, the pistachio was an obvious choice. In 1929, a USDA plant explorer named William E. Whitehouse traveled through Persia collecting seeds. Most failed to germinate, but one, gathered near the city of Kerman, produced trees that thrived in California’s dry heat. The resulting Kerman cultivar, paired with a compatible male variety named Peters, became the foundation of the modern industry. Every commercial orchard in California today descends from those early seeds.

For decades, pistachios were sold mainly to immigrants from the Middle East and Mediterranean. It wasn’t until the 1970s that California growers, backed by UC Davis researchers and improved irrigation, began planting on a large scale. By the early 1980s, they had found their perfect home in the southern San Joaquin Valley—Kern, Tulare, Kings, Fresno, and Madera Counties—a region with crazy hot summers, crisp winters…according to researchers, the kind of stress the trees need to flourish.

Pistachio trees in the Central Valley of California (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Then came The Wonderful Company, founded in 1979 by Los Angeles billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick. From a handful of orchards, they built an empire of more than 125,000 acres, anchored by a vast processing plant in Lost Hills. Their bright-green “Wonderful Pistachios” bags and silly “Get Crackin’” ads turned what was once an exotic import into a billion-dollar staple.

But the company’s success is riddled with controversy. Mark Arax wrote a scathing piece a few years ago about the Resnicks in the (now, sadly defunct) California Sunday Magazine. The Resnicks have been criticized for their immense control over California’s water and agriculture, using their political influence and vast network of wells to secure resources that many see as public goods. Arax described how the couple transformed the arid west side of the San Joaquin Valley into a private agricultural empire, while smaller farmers struggled through droughts and groundwater depletion. “Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful,” Arax writes. (Side note: Arax’s The Dreamt Land made our recent Ten Essential Books About California’s Nature, Science, and Sense of Place.)

And yes, pistachios have been immensely profitable for the Resnicks. Arax write: “All told, 36 men operating six machines will harvest the orchard in six days. Each tree produces 38 pounds of nuts. Typically, each pound sells wholesale for $4.25. The math works out to $162 a tree. The pistachio trees in Wonderful number 6 million. That’s a billion-dollar crop.”

Pistachios at golden hour. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Alas, California’s pistachio boom carries contradictions. The crop is both water-hungry and drought-tolerant, a paradox in a state defined by water scarcity. Each pound of nuts requires around 1,400 gallons of water, less than almonds, but still a heavy draw from aquifers and canals. Pistachio trees can survive in poor, salty soils and endure dry years better than most crops, yet once established, they can’t be left unwatered without risking long-term damage. Growers call them a “forever crop.” Plant one, and you’re committed for decades.

The pistachio has reshaped the Central Valley’s landscape. Once a patchwork of row crops and grazing land, vast acres are now covered in pistachio orchards, the ones I was recently driving through.

Pretty much everyone growing anything in California – pistachios, almonds, strawberries (especially strawberries) – can thank the University of California at Davis for help in improving their crops and managing problems like climate change and pests. Davis is a HUGE agricultural school and has many programs to help California farmers.

UC Davis is one of the world’s leading research centers for nuts, especially pistachios, almonds, and walnuts. Scientists here study everything from drought-tolerant rootstocks to disease resistance and pollination, making it the quiet engine behind California’s multibillion-dollar nut industry. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

In the case of the pistachio, recent research at UC Davis has shed new light on the tree’s genetic makeup. Scientists there recently completed a detailed DNA map of the Kerman variety, unlocking the genetic controls of kernel size, flavor compounds, shell-splitting behaviour and climate resilience. The idea is to help growers by making pistachios adapt to hotter, drier conditions. UC Davis is now one of the world’s leading centers for pistachio and nut science.

Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know: pistachios can spontaneously combust. Pistachios are rich in unsaturated oils that can slowly oxidize, generating enough heat to ignite large piles if ventilation is poor. Shipping manuals classify them as a “spontaneous-combustion hazard”, a rare but real risk for warehouses and freighters hauling tons of California pistachios across the world. Encyclopedia Britannica notes they are often treated as “dangerous cargo” at sea.

Now, some pistachio biology: The pistachio is dioecious, meaning male and female flowers grow on separate trees. Almonds are not. Farmers plant one male for every eight to ten females, relying on wind for pollination. The trees follow an alternate-bearing cycle, heavy one season, light the next. They don’t produce a profitable crop for about seven years, but once mature, they can keep producing for half a century or more.

California grows nearly all of America’s pistachios, and most of them come from the empire built by Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the power couple behind the Wonderful Company. Their orchards stretch across hundreds of thousands of acres in the Central Valley, transforming a desert landscape into one of the most lucrative nut operations in the world.

Another strange quirk of pistachios is that they are green and, if you look closely, streaked with a faint violet hue. The green comes from chlorophyll, the same pigment that gives leaves their color, which in pistachios lingers unusually long into the nut’s maturity. Most seeds lose chlorophyll as they ripen, but pistachios retain it, especially in the outer layers of the kernel. The purple tint, meanwhile, comes from anthocyanins, antioxidant pigments also found in blueberries and grapes.

As I walked among the pistachio trees recently, I marveled at how alone I was on one of the dirt roads off Highway 99. Not a soul in sight, only the hum of irrigation pumps and the rattle of dry leaves in the breeze. I like to write about the things we all see and experience in California but rarely stop to look at closely. Pistachios are one of those things. If you’ve ever driven through the San Joaquin Valley, you’ve seen how the landscape stretches for miles in orderly rows of pistachio trees. It’s easy to forget, amid the fame of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, that so much of California’s wealth still comes from the land itself, from agriculture and other extractive industries. The pistachio boom is a story of astonishing scale, but it’s also riven with the contradictions and complexities of modern California itself, where innovation and exploitation often grow from the same soil.

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Ten Essential Books About California’s Nature, Science, and Sense of Place

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You can scroll endlessly through TikTok and Instagram for quick bursts of California’s beauty, but to truly sink into a subject, and to savor the craft of a great writer, you need a book. I’m an avid reader, and over the past decade I’ve dedicated a large section of my bookshelf to books about California: its wild side, its nature, and its scientific wonders.

There are surely many other books that could be included in this top ten list, but these are the finest I’ve come across in the years since returning to live in the state.They capture the extraordinary diversity of California’s landscapes and wildlife, found nowhere else on Earth, and many also explore issues and themes that hold deep importance for the state and its people. Although I’ve read some of these titles digitally, I love having many of them in print, because there are few things more satisfying than settling into a beach, a forest campsite, or a favorite chair at home with a beautifully made book in hand.

California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline by Rosanna Xia

I first discovered Rosanna Xia’s work through her stunning exposé on the thousands of DDT barrels found dumped on the seafloor near Catalina Island. It remains one of the most shocking, and yet not technically illegal, environmental scandals in California’s history.

Her recent book, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, is a beautifully written and deeply reported look at how California’s coastal communities are confronting the realities of climate change and rising seas. Xia travels the length of the state, from Imperial Beach to Pacifica, weaving together science, policy, and personal stories to show how erosion, flooding, and climate change are already reshaping lives. What makes the book stand out is its relative balance; it’s not a screed, nor naïvely hopeful. It nicely captures the tension between human settlement — our love and need to be near the ocean — and the coast’s natural (and unnatural, depending on how you look at it) cycles of change.

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Xia is at her best when exploring adaptation and equity. She reminds us that even if emissions stopped today, the ocean will keep rising, and that not all communities have equal means to respond. The stories of engineers, Indigenous leaders, and ordinary residents highlight how resilience and adaptation must be rooted in local realities. I was especially drawn to Xia’s account of the California Coastal Commission, a wildly controversial agency that wields immense power over the future of the shoreline. Yet it was the commission and its early champions, such as Peter Douglas, who ensured that California’s coast remained open and accessible to all, a decision I consider one of the greatest legislative achievements in modern conservation history.

Thoughtful, accessible, and rooted in the coast we all care about, California Against the Sea challenges us to ask a pressing question: how can we live wisely, and with perspective, at the edge of a changing world?

The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story is an expansive, heartfelt tribute to California’s most iconic mountain range. Because of the Sierra’s vast internal basins, which are missing from many of the world’s other great mountain ranges, Robinson argues they are among the best mountains on Earth. His point is hard to refute. He makes a convincing case that the Sierra Nevada may be the greatest range in the world, formed from the planet’s largest single block of exposed granite and lifted over millions of years into its dramatic present shape.

Blending memoir, geology (my favorite part of the book), and adventure writing, Robinson chronicles his own decades of exploration in the Sierra Nevada while tracing the forces — glacial, tectonic, and emotional, that shaped both the landscape and his own life.

Considered one of our greatest living science fiction writers (I’ve read Red Mars — long, but superb — and am currently reading The Ministry for the Future — the opening chapter is gripping and terrifying), Robinson might seem an unlikely guide to the granite heights of California. Yet reading The High Sierra: A Love Story reveals how naturally his fascination with imagined worlds extends into this very real one. The drama of the range, with its light, vastness, and sculpted peaks and basins, feels like raw material for his other universes.

The Dreamt Land by Mark Arax

The Dreamt Land is a portrait of California’s Central Valley, where the control of water has defined everything from landscape to power (power in the form of hydroelectric energy and human control over who gets to shape and profit from the valley’s vast resources). Blending investigative journalism, history, and memoir, Arax explores how the state’s rivers, dams, and aqueducts turned desert into farmland and how that transformation came at immense ecological and social cost.

I’ve read several Arax books, but this one is my favorite. He’s one of the finest writers California has produced. He writes with passion and clarity, grounding his ideas in decades of firsthand experience with California’s land and water. His focus on the fertile Central Valley, where he grew up as a reporter and farmer’s son, gives the book both intimacy and authority, revealing how decisions about water shape not just the landscape but the people who depend on it. There are heroes and villains, plenty of the latter, and all of them unmistakably real. Yet Arax’s prose is so fluid and eloquent that you’ll keep reading not only for the story, but for the sheer pleasure of his writing.

Assembling California by John McPhee (1993)

If you’re at all fascinated by California’s wild geology — and it truly is wild, just ask any geologist — this classic from one of the finest nonfiction writers alive is a must-read. McPhee takes readers on a geological road-trip through California, from the uplifted peaks of the Sierra Nevada to the fault-riven terrain of the San Andreas zone. He teams up with UC Davis geologist Eldridge Moores to explain how oceanic plates, island arcs, and continental blocks collided over millions of years to “assemble” the landmass we now call California. His prose is classic McPhee: clean, vivid, perhaps sometimes overly technical, as he turns terms like “ophiolite” and “batholith” into aspects of a landscape you can picture and feel.

What makes the book especially rewarding, especially for someone interested in earth systems, mapping, and the deep time, is how McPhee seamlessly links everyday places with deep-time events. You’ll read about gold-rush mining camps and vineyard soils, but all of it is rooted in tectonics, uplift, erosion, and transformation. I’ve gotten some of my favorite stories here on California Curated from the pages of this book. It can be ponderous at times, but you’ll not regret giving it a try.

The California Lands Trilogy by Obi Kaufman

The Forests of California (2020)

The Coasts of California (2022)

The Deserts of California (2023)

Obi Kaufman’s California Lands Trilogy is one of the most visually stunning and ambitious projects in California natural history publishing. Beginning with The Forests of California, the first of three volumes that reimagine the state not through its highways or cities but through its living systems, Kaufman invites readers to see California as a vast and interconnected organism, a place defined by its natural rhythms rather than human boundaries. Each book is filled with delicate watercolor maps and diagrams by the author himself. The result is part art book and part ecological manifesto, a celebration of the interconnectedness of California’s natural world. Kaufman’s talents as an artist are breathtaking. If he ever offered his original watercolors for sale, I’d be among the first in line to buy them. Taken together, the series forms a panoramic vision of the state’s natural environments.

That said, Kaufman’s books can be dense, filled with data, maps, and cross-references that reward slow reading more than quick browsing. If I’m honest, I tend to dip in and out of them, picking them up when I’m bored or need a break from the latest political bombshell. Every page offers something to linger over, whether it’s a river system painted like a circulatory map or a meditation on the idea of rewilding. For anyone fascinated by California’s natural systems, all Kaufman’s Field Atlases are invaluable companions endlessly worth revisiting.

The Enduring Wild: A Journey Into California’s Public Lands by Josh Jackson

My first job out of college was with the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., by far by the nation’s largest land management agency. A big part of that work involved traveling to sites managed by Interior across the country. I came to understand just how vast America’s public lands are and how much of that expanse, measured in millions of acres, is under the care of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

Josh Jackson takes readers on a road trip across California’s often overlooked public wilderness, focusing on the lands managed by the BLM, an agency once jokingly referred to as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining. He shows how these so-called “leftover lands” hold stories of geology, Indigenous presence, extraction, and conservation.

His prose and photography (he has a wonderful eye for landscapes) together invite the reader to slow down, look closely at the subtleties of desert mesas, sagebrush plains, and coastal bluffs, and reckon with what it means to protect places many people have never heard of. His use of the environmental psychology concept of “place attachment” struck a chord with me. The theory suggests that people form deep emotional and psychological bonds with natural places, connections that shape identity, memory, and a sense of belonging. As a frequent visitor to the Eastern Sierra, especially around Mammoth Lakes and Mono Lake, I was particularly drawn to Jackson’s chapter on that region. His account of the lingering impacts of the Mining Act of 1872, and how its provisions still allow for questionable practices today, driven by high gold prices, was eye-opening. I came away with new insights, which is always something I value in a book.

I should mention that I got my copy of the book directly from Josh, who lives not far from me in Southern California. We spent a few hours at a cafe in Highland Park talking about the value and beauty of public lands, and as I sat there flipping through the book, I couldn’t help but acknowledge how striking it is. Part of that comes from Heyday Books’ exceptional attention to design and production. Heyday also publishes Obi Kaufman’s work and they remain one of California’s great independent publishers. But much my appreciation for the book also comes from from Jackson himself, whose photographs are simply outstanding.

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What makes this book especially compelling is its blend of adventure and stewardship. Jackson doesn’t simply celebrate wildness; he also lays out the human and institutional connections that shape (and threaten) these public lands, from grazing rights to mining to climate-change impacts. Some readers may find the breadth of landscapes and stories a little ambitious for a first book, yet the richness of the journey and the accessibility of the writing make it a strong addition for anyone interested in California’s endless conflict over land use: what should be used for extraction and what should be preserved? While I don’t fully agree with Jackson on the extent to which certain lands should be preserved, I still found the book a wonderful exploration of that question.

The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan

Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a charming and unexpectedly personal journal of bird-watching, set in the yard of Tan’s Bay Area home. Tan is an excellent writer, as one would expect from a wildly successful novelist (The Joy Luck Club, among others). But she also brings a curiosity and wonder to the simple act of looking across one’s backyard. I loved it. Who among us in California doesn’t marvel at the sheer diversity of birds we see every day? And who hasn’t wondered about the secret lives they lead? A skilled illustrator as well as a writer, she studies the birds she observes by sketching them, using art as a way to closely connect with the natural world around her.

What begins as a peaceful retreat during the Covid catastrophe becomes an immersive odyssey of observation and drawing. Tan captures the comings and goings of more than sixty bird species, sketches their lively antics, as she reflects on how these small winged neighbors helped calm her inner world when the larger world felt unsteady.

My only quibble is that I was hoping for more scientific depth; the book is more of a meditation than a field study. Still, for anyone who loves birds, sketching, or the quiet beauty of everyday nature, it feels like a gentle invitation to slow down and truly look.

“Trees in Paradise” by Jared Farmer

California is the most botanically diverse state in the U.S. (by a long shot), home to more than 6,500 native plant species, about a third of which exist nowhere else on Earth. Jared Farmer’s Trees in Paradise: A California History follows four key tree species in California: the redwood, eucalyptus, orange, and palm. Through these examples, Farmer reveals how Californians have reshaped the state’s landscape and its identity. It’s rich in scientific and historical detail. I have discovered several story ideas in the book for California Curated and learned a great deal about the four trees that we still see everywhere in the California landscape.

In telling the story of these four trees (remember, both the eucalyptus and the palm were largely brought here from other places), Farmer avoids easy sentimentality or harsh judgment, instead exploring how the creation of a “paradise” in California came with ecological costs and profoundly shaped the state’s identity. While the book concentrates on those four tree categories, its detailed research and insight make it a compelling read for anyone interested in the state’s environment, history, and the ways people shape and are shaped by land.

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California Is a Nobel Powerhouse

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You can keep your Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, and Tonys. Take your Pulitzers, Bookers, and Peabodys, too. Even the Pritzker and the Fields Medal don’t quite measure up. For me, nothing competes with the Nobel Prize as a symbol that someone has truly changed the world.

I’m not a scientist, but my mind lives in that space. Science, more than anything else, runs the world and reshapes it. This newsletter was born out of my fascination with how things work and the quiet mechanics behind the visible world and my love for all that California has to offer in the way of innovation and natural beauty. I love standing in front of something familiar and asking: why? how? what exactly is going on here? And nothing satisfies that intense curiosity more than science.

That said, I’ve never loved the word science. It feels cold and sometimes intimidating, as if it applies to people in lab coats and not to everyone else. I kinda wish there were a better word for that spirit of discovery that lives in all of us. Maybe it’s wonder. Maybe curiosity. I dunno. “Science” turns people off sometimes, unfortunately.

Whatever you call it, the Nobel Prize represents the highest acknowledgment of that pursuit. It is the world’s way of saying: this mattered. This changed something. And there are few places (if any) on Earth that can rival California when it comes to the number of people who have earned that honor.

This year, 2025, was no different. Three of the Nobel Prizes announced this week carried California fingerprints, adding to a tradition that stretches back more than a century.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine came first. It went to Mary Brunkow, Shimon Sakaguchi, and Fred Ramsdell, the last of whom studied at UCLA and UC San Diego. (In epic California fashion, Ramsdell, who studied at UCLA and UC San Diego, didn’t even learn he’d become a Nobel laureate until after returning from a trip deep into the Wyoming wilderness, where he’d been out of contact with the outside world. What’s more Californian than that?) Their research on regulatory T cells explained how the immune system knows when to attack and when to stand down. Ramsdell’s discovery of a key gene that controls these cells has transformed how scientists think about autoimmune disease and organ transplantation.

Next came the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to John Clarke of UC Berkeley, Michel H. Devoret of UC Santa Barbara and Yale, and John M. Martinis of UC Santa Barbara (big shout out to UCSB!). Their award honored pioneering work that revealed how the strange laws of quantum mechanics can be seen in circuits large enough to hold in your hand. Beginning in Clarke’s Berkeley lab in the 1980s, the trio built superconducting loops that behaved like subatomic particles, “tunneling” and flipping between quantum energy states. Those experiments helped create the foundation for today’s quantum computers.

The Chemistry Prize followed a day later, shared by Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi of UC Berkeley for discoveries in metal–organic frameworks, or MOFs. These are crystalline materials so porous that a single gram can hold an entire roomful of gas (mind blown). MOFs are now used to capture carbon dioxide, filter water, and even pull drinking water from desert air. Yaghi’s Berkeley lab coined the term “reticular chemistry” to describe this new molecular architecture. His work has become one of California’s most important contributions to the climate sciences.

California Institute of Technology (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Those three announcements in as many days lit up California’s scientific community, has garnered many headlines and carried on a tradition that has made the state one of the world’s most reliable engines of Nobel-level discovery.

The University of California system now counts 74 Nobel Prizes among its faculty and researchers. 23 in physics and 16 in chemistry. Berkeley leads the list, with 26 laureates, followed by UC San Diego, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and UC San Francisco. Even smaller campuses, such as UC Riverside, have ties to winners like Barry Barish, who shared the 2017 Nobel in Physics for detecting gravitational waves.

Linus Pauling with an inset of his Nobel Prize in 1955 (Wikipedia – public domain)

Caltech, which I have written about extensively and is quite close to my own home, counts 47 Nobel laureates (faculty, alumni, or postdocs). Its history is the stuff of legend. In 1923, Robert Millikan won for measuring the charge of the electron. In 1954, Linus Pauling received the Chemistry Prize for explaining the nature of the chemical bond. He later won the Peace Prize for his anti-nuclear activism, making him the only person to win two unshared Nobels.

Stanford University sits not far behind, with 36 Nobel winners in its history and about 20 currently active in its community. From the development of transistors and lasers to modern work in medicine and economics, Stanford’s laureates have changed the modern world in ways that is impossible to quantify, but profound in their impact.

These numbers tell a clear story: since the mid-twentieth century, about one in every four Nobel Prizes in the sciences awarded to Americans has gone to researchers based at California institutions, an extraordinary concentration of curiosity, intellect, and ambition within a single state.

University of California Santa Barbara (Photo: Erik Olsen)

California’s Nobel dominance began early. In the 1930s, UC Berkeley’s Ernest Lawrence invented the cyclotron, a device that would transform physics and eventually medicine. Caltech, meanwhile, became a magnet for the world’s brightest physicists and chemists.

Over the decades, California’s universities turned their focus to molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics. In the 1980s, the state’s physicists and engineers drove advances in lasers, semiconductors, and now, quantum circuits. And as biotechnology rose, San Diego and the Bay Area became ground zero for breakthroughs in medicine and life sciences. One of the great moments in genetics took place in Asilomar on the coast. 

Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden (Photo: Erik Olsen)

This is all about more than geography and climate (although those are a big sell, for sure). California’s research institutions kick ass because they operate as ecosystems rather than islands. Berkeley physicists collaborate with engineers at Stanford. Caltech chemists trade ideas with biotech firms in San Diego. Graduate students drift between labs, startups, and national research centers like Lawrence Livermore and JPL. The boundaries between university and industry blur, with campuses like Stanford turning breakthrough discoveries into thriving commercial ventures (look how many of our big tech brains came out of Stanford). In California, research doesn’t end in the lab, it often turns into companies, technologies, and treatments that generate both knowledge and enormous economic value. Just look at AI today. 

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I think the secret is cultural. Over the years, I’ve lived on the East coast for almost two decades, and abroad for several as well, and nothing compares to the California vibe. California has never been afraid of big risks. Its scientists are encouraged to chase questions that might take decades to answer (see our recent story on just this idea). There’s an openness to uncertainty here that works well in the natural sciences, but can also be found in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and, of course, space exploration. 

When next year’s round of early morning calls comes from Stockholm, it is a good bet that someone in California will pick up. Maybe a physicist in Pasadena, a chemist in Berkeley, or a physician in La Jolla. Maybe they’ll pick up the phone in bed, maybe a text from a spouse while camping, or on a morning jog. That’s when a Swedish-accented voice tells them that the world has just caught up to what they’ve been quietly building for years.

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