Читать книгу The Atlas of California - Suresh K. Lodha - Страница 10

where new ideas are most likely to blossom and bear fruit. Indeed, today the very largest metropolitan regions are outgrowing smaller cities around the world. As shown in Chapter 4, Los Angeles set the pace throughout the 20th century, and greater LA has never stopped growing, swallowing everything in its path. San Francisco had a meteoric rise of its own in the 19th century, dominating the Pacific Coast, and the Bay Area remains one of the country’s largest urban regions. San Diego and Sacramento are major cities in their own right, but one can hardly tell any more where one urban area ends and the next begins along the South Coast or Central California. California’s infrastructure, from highways to electrical grids, is another of its great achievements, and one that marks the landscape so strongly that it merits extended treatment in Chapters 4 and 5. Energy supply is the crux of the matter, a foundation for economic and urban growth and deeply implicated in potential disasters to come from rampant climate change. Cities and buildings, highways and ships, water supply and farms are the major arenas of energy use, and hence key targets for California’s efforts to develop new energy policies and technologies to cope with global warming. The state will not be able come to grips with climate change, however, without altering profoundly Californians’ ways of doing things, from driving to drinking, and these changes are likely to demand a radical reworking of California’s infrastructure and the landscape depicted in this atlas. California’s success is about more than innovation and industry, of course. It is a political achievement in which people have fought for their principles and their well-being, for better and more helpful government programs, and to keep the doors open to new generations and new ideas. Politics and government appear here in Chapter 2, but matters of political concern, public policy, and government run through all the chapters of this volume. Politically, California owes much of its success to popular movements that changed the face of the state, and ultimately shaped its people, economy, and geography. These movements include struggles by workers and unions to maintain good pay and benefits; by suffragists to open up democratic participation, and by women for comparable-worth wages; by Chinese and Japanese protective organizations to resist anti-Asian racism and cruelty; by African American and Chicano civil rights campaigners to end school, housing, and employment segregation; by the disabled and homosexuals to liberate society from ancient prejudices; and by too many others to recount here. Even though this is not an historical atlas, it does provide some key background facts that explain how California has come to be what it is today. Because of the efforts of its people to carve out political and geographic space for everyone to live more fruitful lives, California became a more civilized place. It went from a raw and bleeding frontier to a civilization of a special kind: one that sought to provide a good education for all, a fair shake for working people, a decent retirement and healthcare for everyone, a racially impartial society, and much more. California became a model of enlightened governance in the postwar era, known for its social liberalism as compared with most of the Cold War United States. It still stands out in some regards today, as in the striking majorities won by President Obama in 2008 and 2012, as noted in Chapter 2; or in the rapid adoption of ObamaCare provisions by the state and its forward-looking treatment of preschoolers, as discussed in Chapter 7. But the political history of California is by no means entirely a shining tale of progress and justice. On the contrary, there is a dark side to the state’s history, full of failure, suffering, conflict, murder, even genocide. This is why perpetuating the myth of the California Dream does more than mislead us as to the origins of California’s success; it does serious harm by obscuring the damage done to the land, the people and the commonweal by those without scruples, social controls, or thought for tomorrow. The brutal face of California is first revealed in the terrible fate of the Native Peoples, discussed in Chapter 1. It continues through such nasty epochs as Chinese exclusion, alien land laws, and Philippine conquest,

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