A Reminder That We’re Killing What We Love Best

Everybody loves a party. nobody loves a party pooper, particularly not this party, and particularly not this breed of party poopers. Myself excepted, which is why you are reading this now.

If, in the premature din about the global millennium, you haven’t received your invitation, here it is: Come join the festive season for California, celebrating 150 years since the Gold Rush and statehood! Yahoo, bully for us!

Into this jolly sesquicentennial year comes a solemn account from two men of serious purpose. It, too, is the story of 150 years of California, of the consequences to this state of the dispiriting embrace of ballyhoo and boosterism. It is a California that makes me think, so sadly, of the line from Oscar Wilde, that each man kills the thing he loves.

It took about five years for photographer Robert Dawson and writer Gray Brechin, Californians both, to finish “Farewell, Promised Land: Waking From the California Dream,” a coffee-table book in size, not in spirit.

Between its covers are hard truths about the state of the state of California, and hard truths can be the hardest sell: UC Press, which published it, told the pair at one point that if they wanted the pictures printed in color, they’d have to raise the money themselves.

Their California was beautiful and bountiful. But the men who rushed here came not to preserve and cherish the last, but to snatch it and strip it bare. That California has become not unlike one of its fabled oranges: plucked and wrung dry of juice and pulp and tossed aside for more and more, without caring about the end of more. So perhaps, unlike the Oscar Wilde lament, they did indeed kill it, but they never loved it in the first place.

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The chapter titles are seven in number, like the mythic golden cities of Cibola that the conquistadors lusted after; all but one lays out the promise of this place and discloses the betrayal of it.

“The Image of Health,” for one, charts the state’s decline from its robust past to a sump-heap of fetid waterways and pesticide-infused soil. “Coerced Cornucopia” follows the flow of water squeezed from its natural courses, leaving desiccated what had been fertile as it is sent off to make habitable places where crops and cities had no business growing.

But no chapter title caught me more than the first, “The Absence of Things.” What we see around us may look lavish, but in contrast to the abundance of recent history, it is a landscape emptied successively of Indians, of waterways, of open spaces, of wetlands, and now even of bugs to splatter on the windshield, and the bio-bounty they once implied.

Across a landscape once so infinitely and infinitesimally varied, there now lies a Xerox-copy replication of houses/fast food/pocket park/multiplex mall, as if in defiance of how different each place had been from the next.

I paged through the book’s bleak beauties, and I thought, if hope is truly the thing with feathers, we are all grounded.

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The men who took the pictures and wrote the prose saw something more.

Dawson witnessed the Sacramento farmlands of his boyhood fill in with red tile and Cape Cod stucco, and where it did not, there was the “incredible rain of pesticides all around me.” There was a hunger for land, yes, but for land as a cash crop, cut into neat squares like cubes of Spam on a cocktail skewer. No part of the book conveys this bloodlessness better than the 60-year-old words of an agri-businessman: “We are not husbandmen. We are not farmers. We are producing a product to sell.”

Gray Brechin, a near-native (he came to the Santa Clara Valley at age 5) carries “the most vivid memories” of “the orchards crashing down around us; they would drag all the apricot trees into huge piles and set them on fire. There was the stink of the bay as it became more and more polluted. Then what they did to the creeks--encased them in concrete, put cyclone fences around them--created a lethal environment that was held up as an ideal.”

So why this book? Who needs another bound-volume polemic of California wailings and lamentations? Don’t New Yorkers and Mike Davis crowd that part of the map already?

Because they are more sanguine than that. Without hopelessness but without flinching, Brechin says, people are ready to hear this. Yes, the cities can be hideous and much of what’s left of the natural landscape ravaged and overrun, but “if people do see them for what they are, they can see them for what they might be and do something about it.”

Chapter 7 is the to-the-rescue accounts of men and women like Aurora Castillo, who co-founded Mothers of East L.A., and of Californians who build gardens in slums and stop bulldozers from ruining waterways and ride herd on toxic dumpers and wetlands despoilers.

Says Brechin, “What Bob and I believe is that a landscape is a text, like a book, and what we’re trying to do with our book is help people to be able to read the landscape. A landscape can also tell you about power . . . . We want people who read this text to be literate to what California is all about, so we can begin to develop cities that are humanly fulfilling.”

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison @latimes.com