Joe Matos closing... sigh....

It's been some years since I last visited the Matos cheese factory in Santa Rosa... I'd been meaning to return, but it's too late now. It remains one of my favorite experiences in California. The last time I was there, Santa Rosa's sprawl was already encroaching on their farm. It's hard to begrudge people the desire to live in beautiful Sonoma County, notwithstanding some concerns about wildfires, and if the Matos family sells off the land, I hope they get a good price and enjoy a well deserved respite from the hard work of dairying and cheesemaking. They were damn good at both.

Don't forget to vote!

After hours of research and agonizing over the choice, I decided to vote NO on the recall of Gavin Newsom. Well, actually, that part was easy, but what about the 46 replacement options? The Democrats are telling us to leave that second part blank, but my take is different. California's Republicans are incapable of fielding a single candidate who would be even remotely competitive with Newsom in a head-to-head contest. So instead, their objective seems to be to make the state into a sad, ungovernable joke by wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on a recall, hoping that exhausted, scared, and angry Californians will stay away from the polls, and the recall will slip through on the votes of the dedicated GOP crackpots. In a rare show of bipartisanship, I've decided that if it works, and Newsom is turned out, I'd like to help with the goal of making the state and its GOP a laughing stock. But so many to choose from. I ended up going with Angelyne, Billboard Queen. One problem: she's not actually a Republican. Another: She'd probably do a better job than Larry Elder, the GOP frontrunner.

So difficult being a responsible voter these days.

Lindley's blazing star

I have only ever seen this beauty (Mentzelia lindleyi) at Sierra Vista Open Space Preserve, above east San Jose. It is blooming in abundance right now on the slopes high above Alum Rock Canyon, alongside patches of California poppy (similar from a distance) and purple owl's clover. The flower is altogether a joy to behold, with its day-glo color and five sculpted petals, but the abundant, graceful stamens are the highlight.

Do Re Mi

 Shorter Ezra Klein.

Springtime in Foothills Park

While the rest of the country shivers and digs out, we are enjoying what amounts to early spring in the Bay Area: The magnolias and pear trees are in bloom, if you like that kind of thing (I do!), and up in the foothills the earliest bloomers are out, including the uncommon western leatherwood, Henderson's shooting stars, warrior's plume, and milk maids (easy to take for granted). The buckeye leaves have sprung too– flowers to follow soon. Ferns in abundance, greening up as best they can in this year's dry wet season.

Grant Park lichens

In addition to plenty of birds, oaks, and vistas... lichens! Not the best lichen spot in the region by a long shot, but an interesting rock outcropping here and there...

Busy acorn woodpeckers

 Grant Park, east of San Jose.

Woodrat project, vol. 5

Oh, the woodrats in Wilder Ranch State Park are very very busy. Click on the pictures to appreciate the craftsratship in higher resolution.

Kamala

I think Biden's VP choice is probably second-order in terms of the election outcome. Certainly Kamala checks a number of boxes in terms of gender, ethnicity, and ideology. To me, more than anything she seems like... a Californian! That's a good thing.

Also, her dad taught me neo-Ricardian economics. I don't suppose that will come in handy, but you never know.

The Koda family grows rice

Given California's water problems, it probably doesn't make sense to grow rice in the San Joaquin Valley, but if someone is going to do it, I'm glad it's Koda Farms. Founded in the 1920s by Keisaburo Koda, who had managed to slip around the Gentlemen's Agreement and arrived in California in 1908, the family company suffered a setback with the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, but they returned to the business after the War and made a go of it. They produce various varieties of rice, some of which they sell at my local farmer's market. May I say that the organic short-grain rice is just about the best rice I have ever had? It is the starchy kind that benefits from a couple of rinses before being simmered (5:4 water:rice ratio) for 12 minutes after reaching a boil. Then let it rest a few before fluffing. They don't give it away, but trust me you'll be happy to pay.

Our buckeye

Right now our California buckeye is covered in fragrant blossoms, each a confusion of stamens. But the bees don't seem confused– just a little dazed at the abundance. This part of the show will all be over within days, when the flowers will be replaced by swelling, pendulant nuts that pull down the slender branches and contribute to the tree's spreading, horizontal architecture. A beautiful plant for all seasons.

California state animals and plants: proposed updates

California is a great state, and the California poppy is one of the best things about it. Keep the poppy.

I nominate the dark-eyed junco for new state bird. It is found everywhere you go– city, suburbs, farmland, chaparral, forests– and is even more ubiquitous than the admittedly appealing California quail, the current office holder. If it weren't so damn common, we'd find the junco more lovely and charming. Now it is true that our subspecies of dark-eyed junco used to be called the Oregon junco, which may be off-putting to some chauvinistic Californians. But Oregon's state bird is the western meadowlark; I see no big problem here. We'd also be the first state to have a variety of sparrow as state bird.

The current state reptile is the desert tortoise. I've never seen one outside a zoo, and frankly, there's a better option here: the western fence lizard. Not only are they everywhere, brightening your day as they scurry off the trail or fencepost right in front of you, but they offer all of us protection against Lyme disease by killing the bacteria when ticks feed on their blood. Well, it's a nice story anyway, even if it ain't necessarily so. The Pacific rattlesnake would be an excellent alternative.

The incumbent state tree is the coast redwood. I like the redwood just fine, but overall it is not a particularly beautiful tree, selected presumably for its age and stature. Its cousin, the giant sequoia, is a much more charismatic tree, but its range is very restricted and it may not survive climate change.

My nomination is the valley oak, a glorious tree: the largest North American oak, it is endemic to California and widespread in the central valley. Leave it to Wikipedia to offer us a poetic description: "The branches have an irregular, spreading and arching appearance that produce a profound leafless silhouette in the clear winter sky. During Autumn leaves turn a yellow to light orange color but become brown during mid to late fall. In advancing age the branches assume a drooping characteristic. Its pewter-colored rippled bark adds to the attractive aesthetic of this species." Exactly so.

The state mammal, the grizzly bear, is extinct in California, which makes it a sad joke, and, Cal Bears notwithstanding, it ought to be replaced. The black bear would be a good choice, or of course the mule deer, tule elk, coyote, or mountain lion. These are all excellent, charismatic critters, but a little unoriginal. I would go with the dusky-footed woodrat, an industrious if retiring animal, and super-cute.

Maps

I've always liked maps, and I still prefer paper. Exploiting the creases of a big map to fold it down to just the area you need is a unique pleasure. But there's no denying the power and pure usefulness of interactive digital maps. The digitization of spatial data has revolutionized many fields of study– though at this point I sometimes wonder whether the ease of making beautiful and informative maps has led to overemphasizing spatial variation at the expense of variation along other dimensions.

Regardless, the latest issue of Bay Nature includes a couple of outstanding map displays. Before I go any further... you will subscribe, won't you? And now, the maps...

In the lower left panel, darker areas are both relatively intact (less degraded) and less protected... targets of conservation opportunity! You may note a particularly dark double-blob southeast of the Bay Area: the Diablo Range.

You can read more about this wild and rugged part of our fine state in the aforementioned current issue of Bay Nature. Here's a cool diptych that will give some idea just how wild... bring your telescope and leave your phone at home.

Bush poppies

Dendromecon rigida. A late winter treat in our foothills.

I'm lichen it

You too? Coyote Hills.

Yosemite in December

What can you say?

This is something that happens

Thanks, Bay Nature! Kinda gross, but with regard to biblical plagues of this kind, I like young Stanley's attitude (see below).

Mount Hamilton

We drove over it the other day after olive picking, and of course the view is spectacular. If you go, make sure to check out the talk in the dome of the Great Lick Refractor telescope. It's an impressive piece of late 19th Century technology built in an unlikely spot and housed in a grand building. Mr. Lick himself is entombed right under the scope.

Would Non-Profit Utilities Cure What Ails California Electricity?

That is the title of Severin Borenstein's typically insightful and fair-minded overview of the issues on the Berkeley-Haas Energy Institute blog. He summarizes various more or less convincing arguments for preferring a publicly or cooperatively owned non-profit utility to a regulated private monopoly such as PG&E. His bottom line is well-hedged: "What’s clear to me is that converting PG&E to a public or cooperatively-owned utility would not be the silver bullet that creates a more efficient, reliable and safety-oriented electricity provider for Northern California. It would at best be just the beginning of a long road to re-invent the utility."

One important point he makes, which I had not thought much about, is that there is a serious risk of rich, urban service areas peeling off parts of PG&E to form local public providers, shifting the bulk of the fire risk onto more rural, poorer areas:

It’s not a coincidence that the first area to advocate for making their part of PG&E territory into a public entity has been the city of San Francisco, an urban area in which the power lines pose very little wildfire risk. It is possible that PG&E is too big, and the best solution is to break it up, but it is certain that carving off the low-fire-risk areas will leave the more wooded and rural — and, on average, poorer — parts of its service territory where the fire risk is highest. No one is going to want to be the public (or investor-owned) power provider for those areas unless someone else covers the wildfire liability. Without a holistic plan to provide power in all of PG&E’s service territory, cherry picking what are now the low-cost areas will just create massive wealth transfers and exacerbate inequality.

He also points out that the dividing line between public and private is not so clear when an investor-owned firm is publicly regulated. In his view, justified skepticism about the quality of regulatory oversight under the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) ought to raise similar questions about the ability of a purely governmental entity to run the whole system safely and effectively:

In fact, many advocates for public or customer ownership are also the most outspoken critics of the CPUC. If they think that the CPUC, a state agency, is such a failure, why are they so confident that a government agency (or a non-profit coop) running the utility will be a success?

I take his point, snarky as it is, but there is a potentially important factor differentiating government-regulated from government-owned: the potential for "capture" of the regulators by the regulated. "Capture" is one word that one cannot find in Borenstein's post. I don't know enough about the CPUC to know whether its apparent failures in regulating PG&E are a function of incompetence, under-resourcing, bad luck, regulatory capture by the regulated entities, or some combination. But transferring ownership from rich investors with powerful interests potentially at odds with the interests of the public could improve things. On the other hand, capture of a state-owned enterprise by powerful stakeholders who are similarly conflicted cannot be ruled out...

Autumn color in Foothills Park

Oh, it's no Vermont, you say? True enough. We learn to appreciate dusty shades of sage and ochre here, punctuated by the occasional fallen madrone berry or poison oak leaf. Thankful that our subtly beautiful hills are not (yet) burning.