Dreamworks

“Farewell, Promised Land,” a collaboration between photographer Robert Dawson and geographer Gray Brechin, impressively adds to the recent books (among them, Greg Hise’s “Magnetic Los Angeles,” Norman Klein’s “The History of Forgetting” and William Fulton’s “The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles”) that reconsider the condition of our lives in California, 150 years after American conquest and statehood. By mingling history, environmental reporting, photojournalism and a tragic poetry of place, Dawson and Brechin expose California as the epicenter of all ruined paradises and, as a consequence, now fully our home.

The book began as a 1995 tour the writer and photographer took through the landscape of their regret, mostly in Northern California and the Central Valley. It’s not so much a waking from any sort of dream they found but a sobering up after a century and a half of California intoxication.

For the nation as for Californians, it was an epic bender, engineered largely from San Francisco (to the discomfort of Los Angeles provincials). It was fueled by gold, timber, cattle, wheat, oil, cotton, bungalow houses and a marketing campaign of seductive power. And now, please, let it be over.

Hardly anyone bothers to remember--as Brechin and Dawson require us--how the events of 1849 set the arc for our state’s story. We are, as “Farewell, Promised Land” reveals, the inheritors of the Gold Rush to our wonder and dismay.

The rest of the nation gained a gilded illusion of promise, just for the taking. That fantasy marred the whole history of the West. We Californians inherited both the illusion and the landscapes it poisoned--places like New Alamaden, once the world’s largest mercury mine. Mercury was used to amalgamate the gold flecks dredged from riverbeds or sluiced from the foothills of the Sierra. We inherited the square miles of sterile bad lands produced by industrial-scale mining. More than 100 years later, erosion from the badlands still chokes salmon streams and silts up dams. We inherited the toxic seepage from literally uncounted hard-rock mines. The abandoned mines are uncounted because state water and environmental protection agencies have no money to count them. (The California Department of Conservation now pleads with hikers to tell them where the old mines are and gives them a toll-free number to call.)

The poisoned tailings of the Gold Rush are more than a permanent feature of California’s physical landscape. Far worse, they include habits of seeing the land that began with the first claim staked on the American River and that continue each time a house lot here changes hands.

A miner named Thomas Swain wrote in 1851, “Large cities have sprung into existence almost in a day. . . . The people have been to each other as strangers in a strange land. . . . Their hearts have been left at home.” Fifty years later, the speculators in Frank Norris’ “The Octopus” still had no heart for their home in California. “They had no love for the land,” Norris wrote. “They were not attached to the soil. They worked their ranches as a quarter of a century before they had worked their mines. To get all there was out of the land, to squeeze it dry, to exhaust it, seemed their policy. . . . They did not care.”

Nearly 100 years after Norris, Californians who control the land still do not care. As Brechin notes: “For all the bravado about California’s leading industry, farming is on the way out, as the rising value of the soil produces more in lot sales than in cotton, cattle or almonds. New cities of hundreds of thousands are slated for the dry west side of the San Joaquin [Valley] . . . fed by Interstate 5 and the California Aqueduct and owned by some of the largest corporations and wealthiest families of California.”

Brechin outlines the story that came from seeing California this way: First, clear-cut the forest to make ranch land until it no longer bears enough forage for cattle, then sell the ranch for wheat farming until the soil is exhausted, and sell the land for irrigated farms until salt in the irrigation water inevitably kills the last crop, and then sell the contaminated land for suburban house lots.

At every stage, some newcomer is persuaded to buy what’s left of whatever boom has lately gone bust. California’s large landholders have made fortunes on marketing their tailings to the next wave of the hopelessly infatuated. This pyramid racket is the California Dream. To make it work efficiently as a sales pitch, memories, people and entire places must be continually erased.

Lured to the state’s archipelago of exploitable and unforgiving ecologies, ordinary Californians have clung to the endless self-definition that erasure on this scale permits. California is a promised land for them--promised in Sunset magazine to be a landscape of “health, wealth, and happiness in the sunshine.” But it often is a place where communities are on the periphery and very far from what many would call home.

The merchandise of romantic grandeur has often filled the need for meaning in those drunk on the dream. For nearly 150 years, California has produced sublime and misleading nature photography, from William Henry Jackson in the 1870s, through Ansel Adams in the 1950s, to the latest Sierra Club calendar. Beautifully composed photographs of the Yosemite Valley hang over the state like a glowing billboard, promoting the view that an untouched and redemptive wildness is the real California.

None of Dawson’s photographs aspires to be consoling in that way. Dawson’s humility before the circumstance of ordinary people may seem eerie at times, but only to those who will not move beyond irony. The photographs are best at showing labor-stained hands and manicured hands holding a map of pollution-related illness in an East Los Angeles neighborhood or the faces of inner-city gardeners in Oakland. These pictures have a feeling for Brechin’s stories.

The photographs--and the stories--are least convincing from the air. Like Antaeus in the Greek myth, they grow weaker when they’re not touching at least one foot to the ground. Only from the air, for example, can Brechin mistake downtown L.A. for the capital of the Los Angeles plain. It isn’t. The centers here are many, and they assemble communities that have never looked to downtown.

The risk in picturing California from 1,000 feet is accepting an aesthetic privilege that leaves no room for the rest of us, with our tangled lack of abstraction and our resistance to the grid of ideology.

Brechin and Dawson find hope at the grass-roots, in neighborhood and regional organizations reclaiming the wastage of the state’s frantic development by making parks, nature preserves and farms that are not rural factories. The bond between living soil and the grass-roots, Brechin observes, is so intimate that even with a powerful microscope it is impossible to distinguish where the roots end and soil begins.

Brechin and Dawson see more hopeful signs in the creation of the Coastal Commission in 1972, the 1983 state Supreme Court ruling on Mono Lake water rights and the successful fight in 1994 to begin restoration of the lake’s remnant. They might have added President Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order on Environmental Justice, which offers a framework for confronting another California habit--also learned in the Gold Rush--of making racism permanent through local land-use decisions.

It’s possible to change your faith, your community and your family in California whenever you want. You can’t so easily change the location of a flood control channel, a landfill, a freeway or a suburb.

Brechin implies that the choice for Californians after 1849 was not between the wild and the despoiled but how the terms of our encounter with the natural landscape would be framed. John Muir, a founder of the Sierra Club, gave nature a privileged autonomy; he made it a kind of green divinity. Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, conceded that nature in California could never be autonomous. It would inevitably be enmeshed in the community of people living here.

Brechin describes Olmsted’s struggle for a word to name the tie between a place and its people. Olmstead settled on “communitiveness.” It’s an awkward word for something that tries to define both civility to one’s neighbors and trusteeship of the land. In the 1970s, the philosopher Ivan Illich tried a radical formulation of the limits communities should impose on exploitation of the landscape. Illich called it “conviviality.” Neither term is exactly right, and like Brechin, we have to be content with a humble metaphor. The word Brechin picks is “gardening.” Brechin says that when the mining is over, in all the ways the California landscape has been mined, then gardening begins as our permanent act of complicity with this place.

Near the end of “Farewell, Promised Land” is a two-page panorama of the Gerbode Valley north of San Francisco. Its significance to Dawson is what’s missing from it--the rows of houses that were to have been built there until environmentalists forced the state to preserve the valley as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

When I gaze at the undulating hills, the short grass sweeping up to their summits, the meander of the dirt road on the page, I see what’s there--ground, every foot of which has been shaped by human intention over the last 150 years, perhaps (for all I know) not by greed but by love. The significance of the photograph is not that nature triumphs, but that a community has made this a place for its use. For the houses to remain absent, the valley will forever require the presence of such people on its periphery.

In another photograph, a backhoe is raking through the muck of a streambed while an overseer looks on. This is where our California story began, if you look past the machinery. Without the caption you cannot tell if this is the rape of the stream or its redemption. It happens to be a picture of redemption. But not being able to know for sure is the moral burden of being a gardener.

The California we oversee is as heterogeneous as this remarkable book of words and pictures. It’s a garden that would have made both Muir and Olmsted, secure in their Anglo ascendancy, uneasy about who will be in charge one day. Unfortunately Brechin and Dawson do not deal with the debate within the Sierra Club last year to limit immigration as a means to limit California’s growth. The question of who belongs here was asked in 1849 as well, and the answer then was Anglo violence against the state’s existing communities.

Ecologist Wes Jackson, one of the founders of The Land Institute, insisted in 1991 that Americans had not yet become “native” to their country. For Californians, becoming fully native to this place will require a fearful transformation because it requires that we become a mixed breed, a creole of colors and divided allegiances of the heart. I only want to make a place in which my Irish and American and Mexican and American goddaughters can have a home.

I selfishly abandoned my suburban yard this spring. Weeds took over the beds. The roses were left unpruned. After reading “Farewell Promised Land,” I got a shovel and a hoe and began to cultivate my own garden.