Tag: california

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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Curiosity Is the Point

Diving and filming beneath one of California’s oil rigs. (Photo: Kyle McBurnie)
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If you’ve recently encountered this Website, welcome. I hope you find something here that feeds your interests and gives you a reason to look a little more closely at the world around you. And if you’ve been here for a while, I’m genuinely grateful you’ve stuck around. What a few years ago as a passion project has slowly turned into something closer to an obsession. It felt like a good moment to pause and explain what this is really about. If I had to choose one or two words, it would be curiosity…and ignorance.

If you spend enough time outside in California, you start to realize how much you don’t know.

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I often hike in the San Gabriels or the Sierra and see a bird flash across my field of view and think, “What was that?” (California has more bird species recorded than any other U.S. state.) I’ll read about a strange fish or see a magnificent one on a dive, or more likely an invertebrate, and wonder how it avoids predators, what it eats, and how it moves through its environment.

Even driving through the state has its moments of awe that might otherwise seem mundane. How often do you pass along a highway and notice the massive roadcuts carved into hillsides, without realizing they are a goldmine for geologists trying to decode California’s distant past?

A roadcut in California’s San Gabriel Mountains. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

On a four-day hike in Yosemite a few years ago, I found myself wondering where all the granite that forms those magnificent domes actually came from. It turns out the answer is far more interesting than I expected.

The more you look around in California, the more you realize there is almost always something fascinating to notice and something worth learning a little more about.

As a longtime journalist who has reported from dozens of places around the world, including Antarctica, Micronesia, Ukraine, Haiti, Indonesia, and much of Europe, I’ve often found that my birthplace holds some of the most fascinating stories.

Filming during an expedition to summit Mt. Whitney for The New York Times. (Photo: Heidi Schumann for the New York Times.)

There’s a real joy in living somewhere so rich in natural beauty and ecological complexity, and in being able to pause, maybe pull out your phone, snap a photo, record a bird call, or look something up and start learning. If there’s one thread that has followed me throughout my life, even while living in many other places, it’s the sense that the world is filled with wonder, and that paying attention to it, learning from it, and staying curious about it is one of the things that makes life feel most meaningful.

California Curated grew out of that kind of crazy restlessness.

California feels like a living laboratory. The Sierra Nevada rise as a tilted slice of Earth’s crust, revealing granites that formed in fiery violence miles beneath the surface. The San Gabriels are growing a tiny, tiny bit each day as movement along the San Andreas system shears the landscape. Parts of today’s deserts were once seafloor, and the Central Valley held vast inland waters. The geology alone tells stories on a scale that is hard to fathom.

Monterey Canyon cuts into the continental shelf and descends more than 3,000 meters, forming one of the largest submarine canyons in North America. (MBARI)

And then there is the coast. California has roughly 840 miles of shoreline, and just offshore the seafloor drops away into one of the most extraordinary underwater landscapes on the planet. Monterey Canyon cuts into the continental shelf and descends more than 3,000 meters, forming one of the largest submarine canyons in North America. Because it begins so close to land, it has become a natural laboratory for ocean science. Institutions like Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography have spent decades studying the life and physics of these waters, leading to a much better understanding of how climate change is affecting the seas.

I’ve had the privilege of joining several major ocean expeditions around the world, including a submersible dive to more than 2,000 feet, as well as watching robotic vehicles descend into the twilight zone. On an expedition near Kiribati, I was one of the first people ever to witness a glass octopus floating like an alien in space. Experiences like these make it clear just how much of the deep ocean remains unknown. Few places, too, is that more true than off our own coast.

Glass octopus in the Phoenix Islands (Photo: Schmidt Ocean)

In the high Eastern Sierra, there is a supervolcano, a caldera, that once unleashed massive eruptions, blanketing much of the West in ash and reshaping the landscape we see today. You can not only still see its remnants up there, but you can luxuriate in hot springs that are heated by the same lingering geothermal energy beneath the surface. What could be better than being out in a place like that, and also understanding a little more about what you’re experiencing while you’re there?

That tension between wonder and ignorance is what drives this project.

Long Valley Caldera in the Eastern Sierra. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

California is rich in scientific discovery. Our universities are world-class. Our scientists and researchers are awash in Nobel prizes. California scientists have long shaped global conversations about health, biology, chemistry, physics, and on and on. Yet much of this work remains abstract, locked behind the expensive paywalls of scientific journals or lost in headlines that never quite connect back to the landscapes around us.

California Curated exists to close that gap.

The goal is not just to provide answers, but to make you look around differently. To give you enough context that the next time you hike a ridge, paddle a bay, or walk along a beach, you see a little more than before. Where does all that sand come from anyway? To spark the kind of curiosity that leads you to ask your own questions and even to seek your own answers.

I really don’t cover politics. I spent a few years doing that at ABC News in New York and quickly realized it wasn’t for me. Much of what fills our information feeds today is meant to provoke fear, anger, or to deliver a quick burst of dopamine, but it’s so often transient, fleeting, disposable. That isn’t what California Curated is about. I research and write these stories with the hope that they remain just as interesting and meaningful ten years from now as they are today.

Burned sequoias. (Photo: Finley Olsen)

Every story begins with something small, a sighting, a conversation, an otherwise tangential paragraph in a bigger story, a nagging thought. From there, I get to dig in, read papers, call scientists, visit sites, and try to condense a complicated tumult of information into something more singular and compelling. It is a privilege to do that work. It’s fun.

That is what California Curated is about. Paying attention. Following the questions. And sharing what we find.

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The Valley That Feeds a Nation

How tectonics, sediment, and water created one of the most productive landscapes on Earth.

Aerial view of California’s Central Valley, where Interstate 5 slices through a vast patchwork of irrigated fields, some of the most productive farmland on Earth, shaped by deep alluvial soils and Sierra Nevada snowmelt. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
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I love California’s bizarre, complicated geology. For many years, I had a wonderful raised-relief map of the state on my wall made by Hubbard Scientific (it hangs on my son’s bedroom wall today). On the map, color and molded plastic contours reveal the state’s diverse and often startling geological formations. I loved staring at it, touching it, imagining how those landscapes came to be over geologic time.

There is so much going on here geologically compared to almost any other state that geologists often describe California as one of the best natural laboratories on Earth, a place so rich and varied that entire careers have been built trying to understand how all its pieces fit together. As the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) puts it, nearly every major force that shapes the Earth’s crust is visible here, from plate collision and volcanism to basin formation and mountain uplift. Some of my favorite writers, like John McPhee, have described California as a collage of geological fragments, assembled piece by piece over deep time, in a way that more closely resembles an entire continent than a single region.

But when we think about California’s geology, most of us probably imagine the Sierra Nevada’s towering granite peaks, the pent-up force of the San Andreas Fault, or the fact that Lassen Peak is still an active volcano. Those places grab our attention. Yet when it comes to a geological feature that has quietly shaped daily life in California more than almost any other, we should consider the Central Valley, arguably the state’s most important geological masterpiece.

Topographical and irrigation map of the Great Central Valley of California: embracing the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Tulare and Kern Valleys and the bordering foothills (Source: NYPL Digital Collection)

Sure, the valley is flat as a tabletop, stretching out for mile after mile as you drive Interstate 5 or Highway 99 (one of my favorites), but once you consider how it formed and what lies beneath the surface, the Central Valley reveals itself as a truly remarkable place on the planet, another superlative in our state, which, of course, is already full of them.

The Central Valley was formed when tectonic forces lowered a broad swath of California’s crust between the rising Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west, creating a long, subsiding basin that slowly filled with sediment eroded from those mountains over millions of years. For thousands of years, the southern end of the valley was dominated by Lake Tulare, a mega-freshwater lake that was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. You might remember that just a few years ago, Lake Tulare briefly reappeared after a series of powerful atmospheric river storms. I went up there and flew my drone because I was working on a story about the construction of California’s long-troubled high-speed rail, which had halted construction because of the new old lake.

Lake Tulare reemerges in the southern San Joaquin Valley after powerful winter storms, flooding roads and farmland and briefly restoring the historic inland lake that once dominated this basin. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

On the other side in the west, the Coast Ranges rise up, hemming in the valley and basically holding it in place, forming something like a gigantic, hundreds-of-miles-long bathtub. One popular Instagrammer commented that it looks as if someone used a huge ice cream scoop to dig out the valley. As the surrounding mountains continued to rise, rain, snowmelt, and wind carried untold tons of silt and sediment downslope, steadily depositing them into this enormous basin over millions of years.

This process created what geologists call the Great Valley Sequence, a staggering accumulation of sedimentary material that, in some western portions of the basin, reaches a depth of 20,000 meters, or approximately 66,000 feet. Ten MILES.

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This long, slow process produced what geologists call the Great Valley Sequence, an immense stack of sedimentary rock built up over tens of millions of years as the basin steadily subsided and filled. In some western portions of the valley, that accumulated package reaches a depth of 20,000 meters in thickness, about 66,000 feet, or close to ten miles of layered geological history lying beneath the surface. That’s kind of mind-blowing.

Endless rows of pistachio orchards stretch across the Central Valley at dusk, a geometric testament to the deep soils and engineered water systems that have turned this ancient basin into one of the world’s great agricultural landscapes. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

It’s not just “dirt”; it’s a ridiculously deep, nutrient-rich record of California’s geologic history. There are the remains of trillions of diatoms, or microscopic plankton, whose organic remains were crushed into oil shales that are home to significant petroleum deposits. During the late Pleistocene and into the Holocene, the southern end of the valley was dominated by Lake Tulare, mentioned above, a vast freshwater lake that in wet periods spread across 600 to 800 square miles, making it the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. As the water evaporated and drained, the valley floor became exceptionally flat, similar to what we see today.

Most valleys are narrow corridors carved by a single river, but the Central Valley is a vast, enclosed catchment shaped by many rivers, trapping minerals and sediments from surrounding mountains rather than letting them wash quickly out to sea. This mix created near-ideal conditions for agriculture. For the uninitiated, the Central Valley is typically divided into two major sections: the northern third, known as the Sacramento Valley, and the southern two-thirds, known as the San Joaquin Valley. That lower region can be further broken down into the San Joaquin Basin to the north and the Tulare Basin to the south.

Relief map of California showing the Central Valley standing out as a wide, uninterrupted green swath between the rugged Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges, its flat, low-lying basin sharply contrasting with the surrounding mountains that frame and define it.

Today, because of all that fertility, the Central Valley is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, growing over 230 different crops. It produces roughly a quarter of the nation’s food by value, supplies about 40 percent of U.S. fruits, nuts, and vegetables, and dominates global markets for crops like almonds, pistachios, strawberries, tomatoes, and table grapes. Truly a global breadbasket.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without water. The real turning point in California’s story was learning how to capture it, move it, and store it. From mountain snowpack to canals and reservoirs, controlling water has been the quiet engine behind much of the state’s success. When human engineering intervened in the 20th century through the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, it essentially redirected a geological process that was already in place, replacing seasonal floods and ancient lakes with a controlled system of dams and canals.

Roadside cutout farmer holding bright green heads of lettuce at the edge of a Central Valley field, a playful nod to the region’s identity as one of the most productive agricultural landscapes in the world. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Alas, this productivity is not without geological limits, and we’ve done a pretty good job over-exploiting the valley’s resources, particularly groundwater, to achieve these things. The same porous sediments that store our life-giving groundwater are susceptible to compaction. In parts of the San Joaquin Valley, excessive pumping has caused the land to subside, sinking by as much as 28 feet in some locations, causing the soil to crack and the landscape to physically lower as the water is withdrawn. How we deal with that is a whole other story. Recent storms have helped California’s water supply tremendously, but the state seems destined to remain in a permanently precarious state of drought.

But when you talk geology, you talk deep time. You talk about eons and erosion, mountain ranges that rise and are slowly worn down, sometimes leaving behind something as breathtaking as the granite domes of Yosemite.Against that scale, the Central Valley can seem almost plain, but as I hope I’ve made the case here, when you look a little closer at even the most mundane things, you realize there is magnificence there, and few places on this planet are as magnificent as the state of California.

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Measuring the Earth’s Tremors and the Development of the Richter Scale

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Seismometer measuring earthquake impact.

We all know California is known for earthquakes. AND most people probably know there’s a reason for that: California lies along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and it also sits at the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, creating the San Andreas Fault and making it especially prone to seismic shaking. Even if you’ve lived here for just a short while, the chances are you’ve felt a tremble or two.

Of course, the biggest earthquake most people are aware of in California was the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which shook the city hard and led to a massive, all-consuming fire that together destroyed more than 28,000 buildings, killed an estimated 3,000 people, left roughly a quarter million residents homeless, and reshaped the city’s development and building practices for decades afterward. (Here’s a story about one particularly important building). One of my favorite books on the subject is Simon Winchester’s Crack at the Edge of the World, which is filled with wonderful facts and stories about California’s precarious geology and what happened that day in San Francisco.

More recent events continue to underscore the ever-present threat of significant temblors. In December 2024, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast near Eureka, prompting tsunami warnings and evacuations. More recently, in March 2025, the Bay Area experienced a series of minor tremors along the Hayward Fault. While these quakes caused minimal damage, there is always the looming threat of ‘The Big One’, a potentially catastrophic earthquake expected along the San Andreas Fault, well, any day now . Scientists warn that the southern section, overdue for a major rupture, could trigger widespread destruction, with estimates suggesting a magnitude 7.8 event could result in “significant casualties and economic losses”.

Damage to Interstate 880 in Oakland, CA, after it collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake In October 1989.
(Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP)

But what about that number, 7.8? Where does it actually come from, and what does it mean?

When we talk about measuring earthquakes: their size, their energy, their destructive potential, most of us still instinctively think of the Richter scale. It’s now shorthand for seismic strength, although, ironically, scientists today rely on other, more modern magnitude systems. We’ll get to that shortly. But the Richter scale remains one of the most influential ideas in the history of earthquake science.

The story of how it came to exist starts in a lab at a world-renowned scientific institution in Pasadena: the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). It begins with a physicist named Charles Richter.

In 1935, working with German-born seismologist Beno Gutenberg, Richter laid the groundwork for modern earthquake study and quantification. Their breakthrough work helped transform vague and subjective observations into precise, quantifiable data. Scientists could now better assess seismic risk and ultimately help protect lives and infrastructure. So the effort not only changed how we understand earthquakes, it laid the foundation for future advances in seismic prediction and preparedness.

Charles Richter studies a seismograph log that records the earth’s movements.
(Credit: Wikipedia and Gil Cooper, Los Angeles Times)

At the time, existing intensity-based earthquake measurements relied on subjective observations and the so-called the Mercalli Intensity Scale. That means that an earthquake’s severity was determined by visible damage and how people felt them. So, for example, a small earthquake near a city might appear “stronger” than a larger earthquake in a remote area simply because it was felt by more people and caused more visible damage. For example, the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, estimated around magnitude 7.9, ruptured hundreds of miles of the San Andreas Fault, but because it struck a sparsely populated stretch of desert and ranch land, it caused relatively little recorded damage and few deaths.

Like any good scientist, Richter wanted to create a precise, instrumental method to measure earthquake magnitude. He and Gutenberg designed the Richter scale by studying seismic wave amplitudes recorded on Wood-Anderson torsion seismometers, an instrument developed in the 1920s to detect horizontal ground movement. Using a base-10 logarithmic function, they developed a system where each whole number increase represented a tenfold increase in amplitude and roughly 31 times more energy release. This allowed them to compress a wide range of earthquake sizes into a manageable, readable scale. So, for example, a magnitude 6 quake shakes the ground 10× more than a magnitude 5. Also, a magnitude 7 quake releases about 1,000× more energy than a magnitude 5 (i.e. 31.6 × 31.6 ≈ 1,000).

How the Richter Magnitude Scale of Earthquakes is determined from a seismograph. (Credit: Benjamin J. Burger)

The innovation allowed scientists to compare earthquakes across different locations and time periods, significantly improving seismic measurement and research.

Once the Richter scale came into being, it not only changed how scientists described earthquakes, it changed how we all thought about them. Earthquakes were no longer defined only by damage or casualties, but by a single, authoritative number. And so by the 1960s and 1970s, “the Richter scale” had become standard language in news reports and scientific writing. Even today, long after researchers have moved to newer magnitude systems, you still occasionally see it in news reports.

Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Map (https://databasin.org)

The Richter Scale, and Richter himself, became so well known on campus, that one of Caltech’s great comic writers and performers, J. Kent Clark, actually wrote a song about them:

“When the first shock hit the seismo, everything worked fine. It measured:

One, two, on the Richter scale, a shabby little shiver.

One, two, on the Richter scale, a queasy little quiver.

Waves brushed the seismograph as if a fly had flicked her.

One, two, on the Richter scale, it hardly woke up Richter.”

Alas, Richter, according to Clark, was so “morbidly shy” that he never showed up to any of the performances. At first, he didn’t like the song, reportedly calling it an “insult to science”, but later in life he came to appreciate its good humor. There’s a YouTube reading of the song here.

Unfortunately for Richter, over time it became clear that the Richter scale had a fundamental flaw: it couldn’t measure the largest earthquakes accurately. Because it relies on seismic wave amplitude, very powerful quakes tend to “saturate” on the scale, making different events appear similar in size.

Since the 70s scientists have come up with another way to measure earthquakes called the Moment Magnitude Scale. Developed by Hiroo Kanamori and Thomas Hanks the Moment Magnitude Scale calculates how much energy an earthquake actually releases by examining the size of the fault that slipped, how far it moved, and the physical properties of the surrounding rock. The method works reliably for both small tremors and the planet’s largest earthquakes, which the original Richter scale struggled to do.

A striking view of the Palmdale roadcut, showcasing layers of exposed rock that tell the geological story of Southern California. Located just a short distance from the San Andreas Fault, this site provides a vivid snapshot of tectonic activity, where Earth’s shifting plates have shaped the landscape dramatically over millions of years. (Credit: Erik Olsen)

Of course, neither the Richter scale nor the Moment Magnitude Scale have done much to help us actually predict earthquakes. That remains an elusive dream. That said, ShakeAlert, the state’s early-warning system, doesn’t predict quakes, but it can detect them as they begin and send alerts before the worst shaking arrives. Those seconds can be enough to drop to the ground, slow trains, or shut down sensitive systems. The system has also had misfires and missed alerts, so we’re not there yet.

Dr. Lucy Jones, who helped champion early earthquake warning in California, has said that ShakeAlert usually works exactly as intended. It is “tuned” to avoid sending alerts for minor shaking, because otherwise people would be getting notifications all the time, creating a kind of Chicken Little problem where warnings start to lose their impact.

According to experts involved with the system, ShakeAlert is designed to send alerts for earthquakes in L.A. County with a magnitude of at least 5.0, or for quakes anywhere that are strong enough to produce “light” shaking in the Los Angeles area. But according to news reports, that sometimes leaves people feeling disappointed or confused. During the 2019 Ridgecrest quakes, for example, Los Angeles didn’t receive a public alert because the shaking there was below the warning threshold, although many people felt it. Jones has said the real challenge isn’t just the technology, but making sure alerts are communicated in a way people understand and trust.

If there is ever a “Big One,” and scientists say it’s a matter of time, we can only hope we’ll get even a small amount of early notice.

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Ancient and Poisonous Cycads Are the Prehistoric Plants of Southern California

Cycad at Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
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If there’s one thing our increasingly digital world has pushed me toward, it’s a desire to reconnect with the natural one. At a moment when AI, deepfakes, and synthetic media blur the line between real and artificial, I find myself drawn more strongly to things that are undeniably, stubbornly real. So I spend a lot of time turning away from screens and paying closer attention to the world around me, searching for things in nature that are touchable, tangible, and timeless.

It turns out California is full of those opportunities, and I want to call your attention to just one: a plant.

Thermal image of a male cone of the cycad Zamia furfuracea during pollen release. (Photo by Wendy Valencia-Montoya)

The New York Times ran a fascinating piece recently about a type of plant that is both ancient and highly unusual, and one that I suspect most people know very little about: cycads. Many cycads resemble palm trees at first glance, but that’s misleading. Cycads are only distantly related to palms, belonging instead to one of the oldest surviving lineages of seed plants on Earth, the gymnosperms. Palms, by contrast, are angiosperms, or flowering plants, making them evolutionary newcomers compared to cycads, which were already thriving long before flowers existed at all. In fact, cycads and palms diverged from a common ancestor approximately 300 to 350 million years ago. Their apparent similarity in form is not a sign of close kinship but a classic case of convergent evolution, in which unrelated organisms independently arrived at a similar form because of adaptation in similar environments. 

Cycad cone (Dioon edule) at Descanso Gardens. Built for an ancient world: Cycad cones are among the largest and oldest seed structures on Earth, evolving long before the first flower bloomed. Their rugged design helped cycads thrive alongside dinosaurs — and survive into the modern day. (Erik Olsen)

I have always found cycads really cool, in part because they are some of the closest living things we have to connect us to the era of the dinosaurs, and because they just look — and feel — incredibly bizarre compared to most other plants. And the Times piece made clear that we are still actively learning how they work, which I find fascinating. 

The Times piece explains that cycads attract insect pollinators not through color or flowers, but by heating their cones at dusk and emitting infrared radiation. The process is known as thermogenesis and its rare in plants. (It turns out the female Skunk Cabbage, for example, warms up to melt away snow in the winter.) Specialized beetles, equipped with infrared-sensing antennae, detect this warmth and are guided from male cones to female cones (more on this in a sec) in a precisely timed sequence that ensures pollination. The relationship is so ancient, stretching back hundreds of millions of years, that some researchers now suspect heat-based signaling may lie at the very foundation of pollination, long before flowers evolved petals, color, and scent. However, this is controversial.

A Zamia cycad, one of roughly 66 cycad species growing at Descanso Gardens. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Fascinating, right? That’s just the beginning. 

My interest in cycads grew out of the many visits I have made to two major botanical gardens in Southern California that I return to again and again: Descanso Gardens and the Huntington. While The Huntington features a world-renowned, massive scientific collection of over 1,500 plants sprawling across a specialized hillside Cycad Walk, Descanso Gardens offers a boutique, immersive “Ancient Forest” experience that replicates a prehistoric Jurassic environment beneath a canopy of redwoods. Both are really excellent to walk through. And these collections, unlike most museum encounters you might encounter with ancient life (i.e. dinosaur bones), consist of live plants you can actually walk among and touch. 

Cycad leaves are thick and very rigid, much different from most other plants. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

One of the most remarkable features of cycads is the toughness of their leaves. They are much stiffer and heavier than other plants. Almost plastic and fake. It turns out cycads invest in a thick, waxy cuticle that has some key benefits: it reduces water loss, reflects harsh sunlight, and protects them against insects and grazing animals. In other words, they are both survivors and a difficult meal, offering a key evolutionary advantage during a time when giant plant-eating dinosaurs roamed the Earth. 

(That said, there is evidence that some dinosaurs actually did feed on cycads. There are telltale signs of cycad cellular material in dinosaur coprolites, or fossilized poop, but scientists don’t think it was common.) 

And then there are the cones. 

A cycad in full cone, displaying one of the largest and most unusual reproductive structures in the plant world. These massive cones can weigh many pounds, grow for months or even years, and play an active role in pollination, sometimes heating up and releasing strong odors to attract specialized insects. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Cycad cones are among the strangest reproductive structures in the plant world. They are often massive, sometimes weighing many pounds, tightly packed, and so symmetrical they look almost engineered, as if they were 3D printed. They are also unusual because each individual cycad plant is strictly male or female, a condition known as dioecy. A male cycad will only ever produce pollen-bearing cones, while a female will only produce seed-bearing cones. Pines and firs, which are also gymnosperms, typically produce both male and female cones on the same plant. Cycads do not. There is no overlap between the sexes, no ability to self-fertilize, and no natural fallback mechanism if a partner is missing. (Cycads can be “bred” using off-shoots or pups, which is how many of the plants in these gardens came to be.)

That odd rigidity is on display at The Huntington in San Marino, which has one of the earth’s few specimens of Encephalartos woodii, often called “the loneliest plant in the world”. Only a single wild male was ever found, in South Africa in the late 1800s, and no female has ever been discovered (although scientists are using drones and AI to find one). There are a few other specimens alive today outside the Huntington, but they are all clones propagated from that one original plant. There’s a great Instagram from the Huntington on this.

Male cones of Encephalartos woodii at the Huntington (Photo: The Huntington)

So, the male cycad cones produce pollen and the female cycads make seeds. In several species of cycad, those seeds are big and glossy and plump and bright red or orange. They look temptingly like fruit, although remember that true fruits didn’t evolve until much later, with flowering plants. They do have a fleshy outer layer called a sarcotesta that looks and feels fruit-like, but it’s not. That’s weird. 

In another bizarre twist, those seeds are loaded with potent toxins that are very dangerous to animals, including humans. They can damage the liver and the nervous system, and even kill. (So even though I urged you to touch the leaves, maybe don’t handle the seeds…or at least wash your hands afterwards, and certainly don’t try to cook and eat them.) 

Cycad with large cone at Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Why make a seed dressed in bright, attractive colors if it’s toxic? That question has long puzzled scientists. Bright colors usually signal an edible reward, but in cycads the fleshy outer layer of the seed, the sarcotesta, is not toxic and does contain nutrients. The toxins are concentrated deeper inside the seed, suggesting the sarcotesta may have served as a non-fruit mechanism for seed dispersal, encouraging animals to handle or partially consume the seed while the embryo itself remained protected.

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Cycads are not indigenous to California. In nature, they are found almost entirely in tropical and subtropical regions, growing in parts of Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas, often in warm, stable landscapes that long predate California’s modern climate. That said, Southern California turns out to be an unusually good place to grow cycads. We have mild winters, dry summers, and a long growing season, which mimic the conditions in which cycads evolved across Africa, Australia, and parts of the Americas. That made the region attractive to collectors early on in the 20th century, when botanical gardens were expanding their missions from display to preservation.

“We are in a actually in a biodiversity hot spot here in California,” Sean C. Lahmeyer Associate Director, Botanical Collections, Conservation and Research at the Huntington told me. “Because of our climate in California we’re able to grow so many different types of plants. If you were to compare this garden to, say, one in England or at Kew, they have to grow things inside of greenhouses.”

A cycad in the genus Dioon, an ancient seed plant often mistaken for a palm. Its stiff, feather-like leaves and armored trunk reflect a lineage that dates back more than 250 million years, long before flowers. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

At The Huntington, cycads arrived largely through early plant collecting and exchange. Henry Huntington’s gardeners were building a world-class botanical collection at the same time as explorers and botanists were (controversially) bringing rare plants back from around the globe. Over decades, the Huntington expanded its cycad holdings, recognizing both their horticultural appeal and their scientific importance. Today, it houses one of the most significant cycad collections anywhere, including that famous Encephalartos woodii.

Descanso Gardens’ story, meanwhile, is more personal and more recent. In 2014, local residents in La Canada Flintridge, Katia and Frederick Elsea donated their private cycad collection, more than 180 plants representing dozens of species, to the garden. Many were rare, endangered, or extinct in the wild. Descanso said yes, of course, and built the Ancient Forest around them, and suddenly one of the most important cycad collections in the country was open to the public in La Cañada Flintridge. 

A mature cycad, its trunk layered with old leaf bases and topped by a crown of stiff, palm-like fronds. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Cycads are not all rare. You may even notice certain common specimens growing in people’s yards around California. But precisely because they are so ancient and so different from most plants we’re used to, I’d urge you to see them in person at places like Descanso Gardens and The Huntington. Touch the leaves. Study the symmetry. Marvel at the massive cones. (Just don’t put anything in your mouth.) Take a moment to consider just how unusual these plants are. And if you feel the need to pull out your phone to learn more, go ahead, but then put it away and spend a little time with the plants themselves.

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California’s Two-Spot Octopus is the Alien Mind Off Shore

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I have a deep passion for octopuses. I have made several short documentaries about them and even traveled twice to Indonesia with one of the world’s leading octopus scientists to film them in their natural habitat. My home office is packed with octopus imagery and iconography, and years ago I made a personal vow never to eat octopus. Squid and other mollusks still get a pass in my book. If you want to debate the ethics of this, fine.

The octopus is a singularly unique creature in the animal kingdom. They are essentially related to clams and abalone and snails, yet they possess an intelligence (let alone a body form) that is so strange and alien, it is unsurprising that sci-fi movies like Arrival feature creatures that are both very intelligent and octopus-like. If you have ever spent an hour alone on the seafloor with an octopus (as I have….just looking eye to eye), you know that they are something different. While most other fish swim away, an octopus will often linger and even engage in what might be considered play.

In fact, we’ve learned that octopuses rely heavily on learning rather than instinct. Unlike many animals that follow hardwired behavioral scripts, octopuses explore, test, and improvise. For that reason and others, it’s hard not to think of them more like other familiar mammals, like a dog or a dolphin.

And then you consider evolution and it gets really weird.

The common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) in Indonesia. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

That’s the thing. When we talk about smart animals, we tend to think of vertebrates: dolphins, whales, dogs, horses, elephants. They all share a long evolutionary lineage with us, shaped by natural selection into social, communicative, problem-solving creatures whose minds we recognize because they work in ways familiar to our own. But octopuses are not like that. They diverged from our lineage hundreds of millions of years ago. The last common ancestor humans share with an octopus was a simple wormlike creature. From that fork in the tree of life, vertebrates developed one path toward cognition while invertebrates followed others, some of them evolving remarkable abilities (spiders anyone?!), but rarely what we traditionally call intelligence.

Somehow, the octopus broke that pattern. It built a mind through a completely different architecture, with neurons spread throughout its arms, distributed processing, and behaviors that suggest curiosity, play, memory, strategy. They’ve developed these complex behaviors because they are essentially large blobs of protein moving about the seafloor. When exposed, they are very vulnerable, and so millions of years of evolutionary pressure have compelled them to become, well, smart. What makes this even stranger is how short their lives are…usually just a year or two. All of that intelligence compressed into what, in the grand scheme of things, is just a brief flash of existence.

Seeing eye to eye with an octopus in Indonesia (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Alongside them, their closest cousins, the cuttlefish, have evolved similarly striking cognitive abilities, but they don’t quite equate with the octopus. Still, together they show that intelligence is not a single climb up one evolutionary ladder but something nature can shape in entirely different ways. Convergent evolution.

So, if you were searching for meaning and purpose and trying to understand the process of intelligence itself, you could hardly find a better creature to study than the octopus. Short of discovering another intelligent life form somewhere in the universe, the octopus is one of our best bets to grasp what intelligence is and how it evolves.

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Scientists are doing precisely that right now. And there is one species they turn to the most: our own California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides), one of the most remarkable animals on the planet. (They get their name, obviously, from the attractive blue spots on their sides.) The California two-spot octopus spends its days tucked into small crevices and hunting right off our shores. You can see them up and down the coast. I have only encountered a few in the wild, but each time it’s special, like a Christmas gift.

California two-spot octopus in a lab (Photo: Erik Olsen)

What’s especially cool is that the California two-spot octopus has gone from a coastal curiosity — an animal long seen, admired, and loved by divers — to a full-fledged scientific model, teaching us new things about neuroscience, genomics, and behavior. In 2015, researchers published the first complete genome sequence of the California two-spot octopus, and it marked a watershed moment in the study of cognition. For the first time, scientists could look directly at the genetic architecture behind an intelligence built on an evolutionary branch completely separate from our own. The two-spot became the go-to organism for this work because it is abundant in local waters, manageable in laboratory settings, and displays a level of problem solving that can be tested and observed in controlled conditions. I guess they make great pets, too, because several folks on Instagram have them and make pretty entertaining videos with them.

The genome of the two-spot octopus turned out to carry a treasure trove of evolutionary surprises. One of the most striking discoveries was the massive expansion of protocadherin genes, which guide how neurons connect and communicate. Vertebrates like humans have them, too, but octopuses have many more. This genetic abundance appears tailored to their unusual nervous system. Roughly two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are not in its central brain but distributed throughout its arms. Each arm can process sensory information and make decisions locally, while still coordinating with the rest of the animal.

According to Roger Hanlon, who I have worked with, octopuses are colorblind, and yet they have this remarkable ability to change color to fit their surroundings. It may be the most remarkable camouflage ability in the animal world, and yet we still understand surprisingly little about how it works. In addition to neurons, their skin and arms appear to contain opsins, light-detecting cells, raising the possibility that octopuses do not just see with their eyes, but with their bodies as well.

I mean, does it get more alien than that? That’s the stuff of serious sci-fi.

The author filming a cuttlefish in Indonesia. (Photo: Hergen Spalink)

The genome also revealed a wide set of genes involved in learning, neural flexibility, and sensory perception. Many of the same kinds of genes that support cognition in vertebrates appear in octopuses too, but they have been expanded and reworked, suggesting that evolution arrived at intelligence using a very different blueprint.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery is the octopus’s heavy reliance on RNA editing. RNA editing is the process by which cells deliberately alter RNA after it has been copied from DNA. If DNA is the master blueprint, RNA is the working set of instructions, and in octopuses that working copy can be extensively rewritten, especially in the nervous system. While other animals can do this on a small scale, this unusual molecular flexibility in the octopus may help their nervous systems adapt and respond with a level of speed and sophistication that maybe helps explain their problem-solving abilities and behavioral creativity, even if scientists are still working out exactly how it all works.

We’re really at the beginning of an effort to better understand this animal’s remarkable abilities and how it compares with our own unique intelligence. What we have learned so far is that octopus intelligence is real, measurable, and deeply unusual. In experiments, octopuses can solve puzzles, open jars, navigate mazes, remember solutions over time, and learn by watching others. Stories of octopuses escaping their tanks, squirting water at people they recognize, or slipping away from handlers they seem to dislike are surprisingly common. When I was a summer docent at the National Museum in Washington D.C. many years ago, there was an octopus that would greet me by draping an arm over the edge of the glass whenever I came in. Walking up to the tank felt less like approaching an exhibit and more like being welcomed by a friend.

Yes, I know, there is real danger in anthropomorphizing animals.

California two-spot octopus in a lab (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Many of my friends who are aware of my love for these animals beseeched me to watch My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-winning documentary film. I’ve seen it twice, and I have to say that while I love many of the shots and scenes in the film, I feel like the movie goes way overboard making these animals seem like they have human emotions. I’m not sure they do. Something else is going on, I’m just not sure what it is.

If you’d like a good book on the subject, I’d recommend Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. It’s got more actual science in it than Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, which, like My Octopus Teacher, kind of annoyed me.

All of this is to say that we are blessed here in California to have such an amazing species in our local waters. The California two-spot octopus is more than an interesting coastal species; it is a window into how minds can form in ways we never imagined. Its genome offers clues to the very nature of intelligence, demonstrating that cognition can arise from wholly different evolutionary routes. In that sense, studying this unassuming little animal on our shoreline may be the closest we come to understanding an alien mind without ever leaving Earth.

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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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