My answer: In the same place everyone should—the backyard.

My little shrine’s location honors one of contemporary California’s crazier contradictions. Even as state government regulates more and more of our lives and livelihoods—even the straws through which we drink—it has embraced a historic deregulation of the spaces behind our homes. And even as Newsom has intruded more deeply into daily realities than any previous governor, he has become, improbably, the great liberator of our lots.

That’s the man-bites-dog context behind the governor’s recent signing of a package of bills including SB 9, the California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency (HOME) Act. By allowing most homeowners to build a second home in their backyard, or turn their lot into a duplex, the HOME Act may spell the end of single-family zoning in California.

SB 9’s approval comes on top of 2019 legislation that Newsom signed to give homeowners more freedom to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs), or granny flats, in their backyards, and in place of garages.

What explains the transformation of our ruling San Francisco technocrat into our very own Backyard Bolívar?

The short answer is that the horrors of the housing crisis, with ever-escalating real estate prices and a resulting surge in homelessness, has overwhelmed longstanding opposition to housing from environmentalists and NIMBY groups. Building backyard housing is cheaper than other forms of affordable housing (construction for an ADU often runs between $100,000 and $150,000, versus more than $400,000 for a new affordable unit in an apartment building in urban California). And because homeowners rather than taxpayers bear the building costs, it’s an attractive way to create desperately needed units.

The longer answer is about the special power of the backyard in the California imagination.

The idea of a patio or backyard space for living has its roots in our Spanish past, and the haciendas that included shaded outdoor spaces to keep interiors cool. The California backyard also owes a debt to the 20th-century designer Cliff May, who is considered the father of ranch house. The California dream became associated with homes that linked the indoors and the outdoors, creating patio, pool, and backyard spaces where we spend most of our time.

There was an irony in California’s rapid adoption of this mode of living. Local governments approved the building of these homes with large outdoor spaces—but limited what you could build in those spaces. Guest houses, granny flats, and additions were often banned, particularly on smaller lots. The stated justifications for such limits often involved parking and traffic; the unstated justifications were to keep out the sort of people—poorer or non-white—who might be more likely to rent your guest house.

Today’s backyard liberation sweeps aside those restrictions on building. This particular mode of deregulation has won some progressive support because it uses private space to a solve a public problem—our lack of housing.

But in this shift lies a new irony: freeing homeowners to build in their backyards also threatens the very existence of the backyard. If people seize this opportunity to build out back, it could change California’s culture and landscape forever.

To the bad, some of our pool parties and barbecues will become things of the past. To the good, it’s healthier and safer for elderly Californians to live out their days in granny flats in their kids’ suburban backyards than in exurban cabins in the path of wildfires. Plus, denser living can be more energy-efficient, and fewer backyards means less outdoor watering.

More important, an embrace of backyard building could produce more housing. If one out of eight California homeowners used their new backyard freedom, we’d have more than 1 million additional housing units. But this new housing won’t necessarily make our divided state more equal.

Backyard freedom benefits those of us lucky enough to have backyards. It makes our single-family homes more valuable, since we now have the right to build more. And it’s already creating more opportunities for builders and fledgling modular home companies. But it also provides openings for financial institutions (and even internet companies) to buy up large groups of homes, add units they can lease, and gain even more control over the state’s rental market.

As a homeowner, I’m one of the potential winners. But I don’t have the cash to build my own ADU, and there are as yet no common financing instruments for such projects. When I called the out-of-state firm that holds my mortgage to ask about how to do an ADU, they had no idea what I was talking about. And even if I could borrow the money, I don’t have the time or skills to manage such a project. Surveys suggest most California homeowners can’t or won’t build an ADU.

But it sure would be nice to have rental income to help with the mortgage, especially since journalism is a less than sturdy profession. And an ADU might save money if it could become a home for my elderly parents or disabled relatives.

For now, I mostly enjoy looking at my small backyard and imagining what I might build some day, if I ever got my act together.

I also like how backyard freedom has put my own small city in its place. A few years ago, a city planning staffer responded with suspicion and hostility when I asked if I could replace my decrepit garage with a shed or small house. But, just last week, the city sent homeowners a letter offering to legalize any previously unpermitted guest houses or additions, and providing a link to the virtual planning desk for anyone with backyard building ambitions.

So, yes, I’m not ashamed to say that I put together a small shrine to the governor in my backyard—and not just because the neighbors can’t see it there. It has a couple of photos from his 2019 signing of the ADU bills, the text of SB 9, and a copy of his jargon-filled 2014 book, Citizenville.

Now I’d like to add a small bust of the governor (though those are harder to find than a cheap California house) and some candles (the battery-operated kind, of course), which I’d happily light in gratitude to Newsom and the rest of our backyard gods.

The post Will Granny Flats Replace Green Lawns in California’s Backyards? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Can the arts save California?

On every public policy challenge other than climate change regulations, the state seems stuck. We can’t transform our underfunded and underperforming education system to meet the needs of our diverse people, expand our universities to prepare for future economic requirements, or build nearly enough affordable housing. Silicon Valley, which still bills itself as savior of California and the world, has revealed itself to be more interested in grabbing our data and selling us ads than in making society better. And the vast majority of Californians don’t even bother to vote, much less engage in civic and neighborhood life. Too many of us are lonely and disconnected.

The state’s arts sector is wrestling with all these same challenges: invasive technology, diversifying demography, fading engagement, stagnant education, scarce public resources, economic inequality. Over the past 18 months (after being assigned to edit a series on arts and society), I stepped out of my usual civic-governmental comfort zone to embark on a crash course in how arts organizations are trying to engage us not only with the arts, but also with each other as citizens and community members.

The experience has left me uncharacteristically optimistic. While the arts can sometimes mirror the state’s larger dysfunction, the arts also may be the sector of California best positioned to lead us out of this dark time.

Today, the arts—both in practice and institutionally—retain credibility that other human pursuits such as mass media, politics, medicine, and big business have lost. In surveys, the biggest complaint that Californians voice about the arts is that they don’t have time to enjoy all their state’s many artistic offerings. And the arts are a particular California strength, given that they combine our people’s deep interests in self-expression and self-improvement. What’s more, the arts are vital institutions even in our smaller cities: Visalia has its own smart symphony and risk-taking opera, and Modesto has California’s best community band. (Don’t believe me? Check out its Thursday night performance next week at the Mancini Bowl).

And while technology can leave us feeling isolated in our separate virtual realities, the arts connect us, and give us a sense of meaning, accomplishment, and even happiness. Researchers have shown that people who participate in arts and culture are more likely to vote, belong to social and civic organizations, know their neighbors, and do charitable work.

Eastside Community Festival with Self Help Graphics. Photo courtesy of the Riverside Art Museum.

The arts, in other words, encourage us to be sociable. And sociability is becoming a lost (and thus more valuable) art in itself, given how our lives are dominated by screens.

In fact, I’d like to propose that the arts could be the secret sauce of a revival in California’s civic culture. If participating in politics gets you down (and it does), why not skip that city council meeting to take in a local concert or paint with your neighbors? Those are activities that offer the opportunity to exercise creativity, imagination, and empathy—all of which we’ll need to solve society’s most complicated problems.

What’s the secret of the success of the arts?

I’ve been struck by just how much healthy self-criticism there is in the arts. Talk to arts leaders or read the reports they produce, and you’ll hear all kinds of talk about failures—especially about the gap between the level of service the public needs from the arts and what our arts organizations currently give. Part of that shortfall is about money: Everyone fears becoming a “zombie organization,” whose only real mission is to scrounge up enough money to survive. But part is about a lack of ambition and imagination; more arts organizations, especially those that are tax-exempt non-profits, should be putting service to the public over their own institutional needs.

California, however, is fortunate: Across our state, you can find ambitious efforts to use the arts to serve community. Our arts organizations experiment and take chances to tell local stories, and many have figured out how to be a space for tackling polarizing political issues in a sophisticated way. Take the Cornerstone Theater’s six-year series of nine plays on food and equity, The Hunger Cycle. Or witness the Oakland Museum of California’s exhibit “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50,” which risked criticism both of cultural appropriation and of celebrating a movement associated with violence and separatism. (The bet paid off, as the exhibition drew an unexpectedly large—and young—audience.)

California is home to many powerful experiments in breaking down walls between the arts and people. The Riverside Art Museum sends staffers to all kinds of community events, from block parties to neighborhood festivals, curating work it supports and conducting surveys on local arts needs. Inside the museum, Riverside makes room for local people to make and display their own work, collaborates with community groups on exhibitions and events, and engaged University of Redlands students to put together an online map of community artists.

The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History has prioritized the work of “social bridging”—intentionally bringing together people from different races, classes, ages, and walks of life. The museum’s executive director, Nina Simon, a leading voice nationally on arts engagement, writes that this involves matching “unlikely partners—opera singers and ukulele players, welders and knitters, Guggenheim winners and backyard artists. Our goal in doing this work is to bring people together across differences and build a more cohesive community.”

When is the last time you saw institutions outside the arts promote that kind of outreach?

These days, businesses, unions, pressure groups, and politicians rarely try to make converts–they instead focus their resources on developing repeat customers, turning out their core supporters, and monetizing every single contact they have. But many of California’s top arts institutions make their events and exhibits free, especially for kids. (Our pro sports teams and theme parks can’t say the same.)

And the arts could do even more for California.

So many industries and organizations are trying to reach the young. But the arts actually do it; when it comes to the making of art, 18- to 24-year-olds are the age cohort most likely to participate. And, amidst a stressful deluge of digital distractions, arts organizations are models of how to filter, so that we see what deserves attention. (It helps that you have to silence your cellphone and resist texting while attending a play or an indoor jazz concert, at least for a couple hours.) Infusing more arts into politics could revive the latter, possibly convincing more young Californians to actually vote in local elections.

The arts also could be an antidote to the antisocial attitudes of Silicon Valley that have trickled into governance. The arts are a case study in the importance of giving people what they need, and the folly of giving them what they want. Scholars have shown how technology and sophisticated audience research can be self-defeating; web sites that give us what we want give us too much of the same thing, thus constraining creativity and artistry, and ultimately disappointing audiences. The arts stand as a direct rebuttal to this data obsession because great art, and the feelings it inspires in us, can’t be quantified, or justified, by audience numbers or by dollar-for-dollar economic studies—even in those cities that chase art as an economic development strategy.

All this is an awful lot to ask of the arts, particularly at a moment when arts funding is hard to come by in California and the Trump administration is trying to zero out the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. But our arts organizations provide us with one of the few hopeful templates for pulling together broad networks of people and imagining very different realities in California. Which is why we need the arts now, more than ever.

The post The Arts Can Do for California What Politics and Big Business Can’t appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If California is going to transition successfully to full legalization of cannabis, our state is going to need its own cartel.

For the record (and to reassure my friends in federal law enforcement), I am not smoking anything. And I am not suggesting that California encourage a criminal syndicate like the Zetas or the Sinaloa Cartel for weed. The California cartel actually would need to be a legal corporate oligopoly. The cartel members would be a small number of companies with the size and resources necessary to control the distribution of cannabis so that our state can properly track, regulate, price, and tax America’s largest marijuana market.

Yes, oligopolies have their drawbacks. But without a powerful force to wrangle the many motley cannabis players who operate in remote corners of the state, California marijuana could quickly spawn yet another convoluted unaccountable regulatory mess for which our state is famous.

A new market, like the one California needs to develop for cannabis, must be carefully designed. But the early attempts to design regulation around cannabis are worrying.

For starters, instead of designing one system to cover all forms of cannabis, regulation is moving right now on two separate tracts. Regulatory work is underway on a new system for medical marijuana, which has been largely unregulated at the state level since it was made legal in 1996. At the same time, voters are considering whether to approve Prop 64, which legalizes, and proposes regulation of, marijuana’s recreational use.

Hopefully, the two would be combined into a single regulatory system with Prop 64. But even then, things might get convoluted. Prop 64, at 62 pages, is the longest initiative on the November ballot. And it outlines so many different priorities and rules, from protecting everyone from children to today’s outlaw growers, that a regulatory system based on them would be highly complicated and difficult to manage.

How to bring order to the potential chaos? A cartel is by far the best answer.

For one thing, it’s proven. Alcohol has worked this way since the end of Prohibition; it’s managed by a three-tier system, with a middle tier of powerful distributors connecting a diverse array of brewers with all the various places that sell beer. For another, having a big centralized cartel makes it possible to protect the existing small growers and small marijuana retailers. Some larger entity is needed to connect them, and to do many costly time-consuming things — transporting the product, keeping it fresh, bearing the brunt of regulatory compliance and taxation — that smaller players can’t easily do themselves.

Having a powerful distributing cartel, as with alcohol, allows for ownership and accountability in the system. The cartel must buy the product from the growers, and thus provide a check on supplies and quality and licensing. And the cartel then must sell to the retailer, thus providing a check on the amounts of sales, and the quality of the product sold. And by tying together the system, they provide the natural vehicle for taxing all three tiers of the system—the suppliers, the distributors themselves, and the retailers.

The cartel has another important role: Keeping the price high enough to protect small players. Without a choke point in the industry, legalization of recreational cannabis in California will likely produce a big drop in price. That’s because demand is unlikely to spike after legalization; most of those who use cannabis in large amounts already have access to it, via medical marijuana and the ubiquity of the black market. But legalization is all but certain to increase supplies significantly, as growers can move out of the shadows, expand their operations and thus make their once illegal businesses vastly more productive.

That combination—a big increase in supply, while demand stays relatively flat —could produce a dangerous drop in prices. Such a price drop might encourage more people, particularly young people, to use marijuana. And it could put pressure on smaller producers to consolidate.

Distributors, as middlemen, would by their existence make prices higher. And there would have to be serious checks on the distributors. They would have to be barred from playing favorites with growers or retailers. It would have to be illegal for distributors to purchase exclusive rights to shelf space, or offer special pricing to some retailers but not others.

Still, as a business model with this oversight, a distributor oligopoly would be able to attract investment into the industry at a scale that individual small players can’t. (To quote Warren Buffett: “The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”) The cartel would thus be powerful enough to defend the industry. For example, governments tend to raise sin taxes in the name of raising revenues, but high taxes can keep black markets alive. A distributor cartel would be a force for keeping taxes reasonable, and the black market in check. (Colorado recently lowered its cannabis tax for this reason).

And this cartel would have the money to fight the federal government to overturn rules and laws that make it difficult for people in the industry to have bank accounts or pay federal taxes.

Encouraging such a cartel poses a political challenge; many growers and dispensary owners oppose Prop 64 and other regulations because they fear such a corporate entity. But, in a regulated and legal market, some bigness may be inevitable and its virtues outweigh its potential problems.

“Corporatization … brings advantages in terms of public accountability and regulatory compliance, product safety and reliability, market stability, and business professionalism,” said a Brookings Institution report on legalizing cannabis in California. “Attempts to block corporatization are likely to backfire or fail. For policymakers, the concern should be bad marijuana, not big marijuana.”

So, what sort of person could assemble such a cartel?

My own choice would be someone like Eric Spitz, who has already publicly raised his hand as a person interested in shaping the future of pot in California. I got to know him a few years ago when he and a partner purchased The Orange County Register and made a game, if unsuccessful attempt, to give the paper a brighter future by hiring journalists and expanding its offerings.

Spitz, who has an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, ran a brewing company and founded a “fast-casual” food chain. He talks messianically about how those experiences, along with the newspaper investment that brought him to California, make him the right man to help the state design a new regulatory regime and structure for the industry. “I was meant for this moment,” he says.

Spitz’s goal? To help shape the system and eventually become a distributor. Spitz is now advising local governments about how to regulate cannabis businesses and he’s been talking with former state Attorney General Bill Lockyer. “It’s great fun to see how he thinks,” says Lockyer.

Spitz says the question is not whether such a cartel (which is my term; he uses the word “consortium”) arises, but when, and how it’s structured. Will it have only a couple of distributors or many? And will such a distribution system be divided up into regions, or be truly statewide? He says that it should start statewide and then become regional as the number of outlets proliferates and retailers transform themselves from marijuana-focused dispensaries to restaurants or clubs that offer cannabis in the same style that bars offer alcohol.

“We have a responsibility to do it right, not only to make sure our system works, but because we know how California is going to tilt the scales for the rest of the country,” Spitz says.

And how will you know if the system is working? My own view: When people in the marijuana business stop complaining about all the uncertainty and chaos as their industry emerges from prohibition—and start complaining about the decisions of a quasi-monopoly that’s in charge.

The post Why California Will Need Its Own Weed Cartel appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California is a disaster-prone state, and when calamity strikes, diversity—of all kinds—keeps bad times from becoming even worse.

The central insight into diversity as protection is biological: a diverse eco-system is more resilient. Why? Because when you have different kinds of living things in an ecosystem, it has a much broader variety of ways to respond to stress and calamity. This insight applies not only in your local forest but also in your neighborhood or state government or industry.

When an ecosystem loses its diversity, when the variety of trees and shrubs and other species narrows, you get disasters that are more damaging than those we’ve seen before. That’s the story behind the mega-wildfires—like the Soberanes Fire in the Big Sur area—that have burned so much of California this year. Instead of allowing smaller fires to thin and renew our lands, keeping them diverse, we’ve suppressed fires for decades and as a result lost the diversity of tree and plant life. And so now, when the calamities of climate change and drought and an epidemic of tree death are upon us, our lands lack protection. The result: bigger, hotter fires like 2013’s Rim Fire in the Sierra Nevada, which wiped out seeds and nutrients needed for a forest to rebuild.

Something similar can happen when disasters strike neighborhoods. The most resilient communities are ones with the most diversity. They have people of different ages, levels of education, and backgrounds. Neighbors work in a wide variety of industries. Their financial burdens also vary widely, notably with regard to their homes. Some owe big on new mortgages, while others have paid their homes off, and still others rent.

When the housing and foreclosure crisis struck California and sparked the Great Recession a decade ago, communities across the state got hurt. But, Federal Reserve and academic research show, the hardest hit were newer low- and middle-income communities inland whose residents conformed to a similar socio-economic profile.

The people in such places had bought into developments at the same time, tended to be of similar ages, had typically relied on sub-prime mortgage financing to buy their homes, and worked in similar industries (often construction and services). Such tracts were all but wiped out by foreclosures, while neighborhoods that mixed retirees with families and younger single people were more likely to struggle through.

At the same time the housing crisis hit, a lack of diversity was making the economic catastrophe even worse in my own profession: the media. Economic and technological changes (especially the rise of the internet) were going to do damage to established newspapers and TV stations no matter what. But media outlets made things worse, by professionalizing standards in ways that led to the hiring of too many of the same kinds of people.

The near absence of racial and ethnic diversity in newsrooms (which to this day remain overwhelmingly white even in majority-minority California) meant that media outlets lacked community allies willing to support them when times got rough. (Newspaper ethics, which required journalists to refrain from involvement in civic and political affairs, also created a distance between media and community that has fueled the disastrous media retrenchment). At the papers where I spent my youth—the Baltimore Sun and the L.A. Times—editors almost exclusively hired people with journalistic training, and were wary of technologists. (The LA Times had its reporters working on dumb terminals, unconnected to the internet even after the turn of the millennium). So these vital civic institutions didn’t have the diversity of expertise and connection to protect against technological change.

When you think about all the ways a lack of diversity leaves us exposed to danger, the lesson should hit home. Diversity is not something to be celebrated or embraced as a virtuous luxury. It must be sought out, encouraged, and developed as a core strategy for success—and survival.

Unfortunately, California is so diverse that we’ve come to take our diversity for granted. We don’t recognize that the state’s diversity today is not our own; it’s a legacy of our parents and grandparents, who brought with them very different cultures and experiences. Today’s Californians are majority homegrown, so, despite our different shades, we are more homogenous than ever before, growing up in the same places, attending the same schools (with standardized curriculums), and speaking the same language. With immigration levels to California declining to near modern lows, we need to think about renewing our population, by attracting more people from around the world to study and settle here, particularly from places like sub-Saharan Africa whose diasporas haven’t reached here in large numbers.

In our old-line neighborhoods, we need to stop fighting affordable housing and new developments that bring badly needed diversity. At the same time, we have to stop doing the same redevelopments, with all the same coffee shops and antique stores, in our downtowns. And we need to stop obsessing about income inequality—which is really just diversity of income—and instead make sure that people with different incomes can afford to stay in California, and live and work productively together.

We must stop protecting our highly centralized system of state government, in which Sacramento makes regulatory and tax decisions for us all, and return real control to local governments so they can embrace very different destinies. And we should fight back against those who demand ideological purity in our politics and parties; our labor unions and environmental organizations should stop purging the Democratic party of anyone who dissents from their line. Those who create political monocultures are making it possible for dangerous people to invade and take over political institutions (Ask your Republican friends—they’ll know what I’m talking about).

Biologists will tell you that the healthiest eco-systems often have gradual borders of transition, where forests slowly become grasslands. California communities need such spaces too. If your town is divided by a big highway or railroad tracks, build big parks or restaurants or grocery stores over these divides, to attract people from both sides.

So get out there and become part of our diversity. Make new friends not like you, move to a different neighborhood, and ignore all your like-minded friends on Facebook. You’re not just turning over a new leaf. You’re protecting the forest from a bigger fire.

The post In California, Diversity Keeps Bad Times From Becoming Even Worse appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m so famous for keeping a low profile that some people doubt my existence. So I’m here to tell my fellow Californians that I’m proudly one of you.

I travel widely in California (Bigfoot sightings have been reported in every county of this state), and as I do, my fears have grown about our home state. My anxiety is not because of all the strange California characters who are always claiming to have seen me (I made my peace with my celebrity stalkers decades before TMZ came along) but because I’m seeing far too much of all of you.

Now, you may have noticed that, as a 21st century Sasquatch, I’m a global figure, and have been spotted in almost every U.S. state and in foreign places from Congo to Indonesia to Siberia. And it’s true that there have been a few more sightings of me in Washington state (about 450, according to Bigfoot trackers online and in books) than in California (about 400), but I must confess that my trips to the Pacific Northwest are really just a tax dodge; those Prop 30 rates are monstrous, and Washington state doesn’t have a personal income tax.

But let me be clear: every hair on my body calls California home. The most famous pictures of me (the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967) were taken in the Golden state. And I’ve always been proud of the way I bring its disparate regions together, from the Bigfoot-themed bars in L.A. and San Francisco to the terrific Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I bridge Hollywood (which made me famous through TV and movies) and Silicon Valley (Did you see those ads I did for Google’s photo storage service during the Rio Olympics?).

I spend most of my time in the far north of the state—there’s a reason Siskiyou, Del Norte, and Humboldt counties boast the most sightings of yours truly. I’m particularly loyal to the tiny Humboldt town of Willow Creek, the world’s unofficial Bigfoot capital. This Labor Day weekend, as usual, I’ll ride down Willow Creek’s Main Street in the parade for the annual Bigfoot Days celebration, check in on my personal artifacts at the Bigfoot Collection at the China Flat Museum, and cheer on the competitors in the lawn mower race, the hirsute’s answer to the Grand Prix.

A road sign in Humboldt County, CA, home to the world’s unofficial Bigfoot capital.

Seeing old friends in the Bigfoot community—the folks who study and obsess over me—will be fun. But I also have to confess that at times I miss the solitude and quiet I used to enjoy when I had California’s wilder areas mostly to myself.

These days, I’m encountering so many people in our state’s once-remote precincts that I can hardly get a moment’s peace. The marijuana-industrial complex is relentlessly pushing into the lightly populated regions I favor; the noise of their trucks—bringing in soil, shipping out the finished product—disturbs my sleep. And the epidemic of NIMBYism preventing Californians from building sufficient housing in urban regions is forcing more and more people to build in places near my remote haunts. Some days, the traffic on State Route 299, the main artery for those of us who haunt the lands between Redding and Arcata, can be bumper-to-bumper.

Then there’s the homelessness problem, which everyone except Gov. Jerry Brown thinks is an emergency. The homeless issue isn’t just in the middle of big cities or under freeways. I can’t walk a ridge or wade through a creek in state or federal lands without running into a new homeless encampment. People are pitching tents and trying to survive anywhere camping is legal, and quite a few places where it isn’t.

The presence of more people on hillsides and forests is adding to the risk of giant wildfires at a dangerous time. The drought has dried up waterways and turned brush and trees into kindling. And while I’m more of a coastal guy, I do enjoy roaming the western Sierra, especially in the Oroville area, but the death of millions of trees there—from beetles and drought and climate change—has made some familiar landscapes almost unrecognizable. The erosion is extreme in many wild places, including Bluff Creek, where that video was shot of me nearly 50 years ago. Californians are now running roughshod over the neck of my woods.

I find these intrusions on my wild existence so depressing that lately I’ve been cheering myself up by spending more time intruding on your cities, particularly in settings where I fit in. I caught a number of Bernie Sanders rallies in the East Bay and Central Valley earlier this year. And men are so allergic to shaving in the hipster havens of San Francisco and Los Angeles that I’ve found that, if I wear a beanie hat, skinny jeans, and custom-made sneakers, no one pays me any attention.

My urban forays have led me to wonder if the incursions into my once-quiet wilderness are my fault, at least in part. Californians used to be scared of the woods and wild things like me. I showed up in horror films. “In the ‘70s, Bigfoot was frigging terrifying—he was a monster who killed people,” says my friend Bobby Green, designer of the Bigfoot Lodges in Culver City and Atwater Village in Los Angeles. “When I went skiing as a kid, I was scared to death.”

But then a more accessible, even cuddly, me showed up in cartoons, funny commercials, and comedies like John Lithgow’s Harry and the Hendersons. “Bigfoot has been sugarcoated a lot over the last couple decades,” says Green. “Harry and the Hendersons was cute and funny, and now he’s selling beef jerky.” And he’s right: I’ve become a cousin to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. And that makes me passé, compared to more visceral mythology like Harry Potter or even “Pokemon Go.”

Michael Rugg, who has studied me since before he was a Stanford student and who now runs the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton, California, has written that we seek Bigfoot at three levels: at the level of myth; at the level of actual biology, as we look to confirm reports of the living thing out there; and at the level of the paranormal, in our search for forces and things that exist but that we’re not yet capable of seeing.

That third, paranormal level can be the hardest to take seriously, but it may be the most important. One of the things that has always motivated me to keep roaming in my elusive way is the knowledge that I can help people recognize that the most important things in our world may be those things that we don’t understand, that we can’t quite see or prove. And so we must be careful to acknowledge and respect unknown places—and hold to a healthy fear that keeps us from treading too heavily where we do not belong.

I used to create that fear. I used to be scary; but these days, not so much. Now I’m running scared.

The post I, Bigfoot, Am One Frightened Californian appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You keep saying that marijuana is supposed to help manage anxiety. But those of you who work in or partake of the cannabis industry sound like the most stressed-out people in California.

And that leaves me wondering what’s in your bongs, especially since 2016 is supposed to be a year of great triumph for you. Cannabis is booming in California; the limits on profits and the number of plants you can grow are being lifted. New regulations on medical marijuana are coming together, and a November ballot initiative to legalize recreational use seems likely to pass. California is thus well on its way to becoming Mary Jane’s global capital, and a national model for how to pull cannabis out of the black market shadows and into the legal light.

If the future looks so dank (that’s stoner-speak for awesome), why do you all look so wrecked?

Did you get some bad schwag or something?

In recent weeks, I’ve posed these questions to people on farms and in dispensaries and I keep hearing two big reasons why cannabis people seem so cashed (reduced to ash). The first involves all the necessary pressure you’re putting on yourselves. The second reason is about all the unnecessary pressure the rest of us are putting on you.

A bottle of “Chongwater,” a flavored hemp drink marketed by comedian and marijuana icon Tommy Chong.

Let’s start with the self-pressure. Cannabis is not just an industry, it’s a movement to end prohibition, and the hardest times for movements can come right when they are on the verge of winning what they want. Your movement’s victory—the end of cannabis prohibition—requires a difficult transition that is stressful and scary.

In California, by one estimate, there are as many as 10,000 cannabis-related businesses—only a couple hundred of which have the proper zoning and licenses to operate a medical marijuana business. That leaves thousands of you trying to work out your futures very quickly—at least before 2018, when regulations for medical marijuana (including a state marijuana czar) and for recreational use (assuming the ballot initiative passes) are supposed to be in place.

Some of you, particularly weed boutiques that operated outside the law, are preparing to shut down. But others of you are engulfed in the difficult, expensive process of making your businesses legal quickly, but not so quickly that you run afoul of the authorities. In the process, you’re learning that while managing an illegal business has its perils, it may be even more dangerous to run a legal capitalist enterprise in the Regulatory Republic of California, and not run afoul of its dizzying array of licensing, workplace, and environmental rules.

A number of you are taking on outside investors; there’s even a new private equity firm making “strategic investments” in cannabis. Those kinds of big-money decisions raise new anxieties, even as you still have to operate semi-underground. Some local governments don’t want marijuana operations and are sending the police on raids of your facilities. And the federal government, by maintaining that your businesses are illegal no matter what state law says, has made it difficult for you to use banks and pay taxes.

On top of all this stress comes the burden of being a political cause. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to build a gubernatorial campaign by backing the ballot initiative to legalize recreational use. At the local level, there are competing initiatives that sometimes divide the cannabis industry. And the presidential race creates uncertainty about federal intentions. A Trump presidency might bring Attorney General Chris Christie, who wants to wipe out medical marijuana. Some of you fear Hillary Clinton would turn the industry over to her rich donors in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

“All of this creates a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety for people,” says Derek Peterson, CEO of Terra Tech Corp, a publicly traded “cannabis-focused” agriculture company. “This is going to be an entirely different animal than anyone is used to. A lot is being born right now.”

Of course, such pressure is inescapable, given the realities of ending prohibition. What can make this moment unbearable for all of you are the outside demands that this transition has brought from what cinematic stoner Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski called “The Square Community.”

In other words, California leaders have gotten way too high on the possibilities of fully legal marijuana. Today you hear rhetoric from politicians and media that legal cannabis in California will end the drug war, rationalize our prison and court systems, create new jobs and economic opportunities in poorer and rural areas of the state, save agricultural businesses and lands, and replenish strained local and state budgets with new taxes on weed.

All this amounts to Bogarting weed for our selfish priorities. Los Angeles County recently debated a plan to “solve” homelessness—it has the largest homeless population of any American county—with a marijuana tax. Environmentalists have been talking about how marijuana, which requires considerable water to grow, can pioneer water-saving practices to mitigate the state drought. And no small number of musicians—chief among them Snoop Dogg, the wizard of “weed wellness,” and Tommy Chong, the “godfather of ganga”—seem to think that by licensing their names to marijuana products, they can replace the revenues that music used to provide before iTunes and Spotify.

Rapper Snoop Dogg, the “wizard of weed wellness,” performing in Cancun in 2014.

Cannabis has come to be seen by its most zealous champions as a substance that can alter California realities—in ways reminiscent of our craze for gold in 1849 or for oil in the early 20th century. Broader legalization of marijuana will bring opportunities, but there are just too many expectations riding on this one plant.

Before exploiting legal marijuana for all manner of schemes, California governments need to get this transition right. The tax system for cannabis should be comprehensible and not so extortionate that it drives out small players (or creates incentives to keep the black market alive). The regulatory regimes for medical marijuana and recreational use should fit together, and be transparent enough that California cannabis goes forward as a competitive market, not a state monopoly. To ease the transition, state government needs to do everything it can to help you—growers, processors, dispensary operators, and customers—negotiate these changes, including protecting you from the feds and the banks.

If California gets this right, maybe some of the biggest dreams for marijuana can come true. At the very least, cannabis could be a thriving and well-regulated industry.

But for now, as the marijuana-friendly rap group Cypress Hill like to say, you gots to chill. These are stressful enough times for stoners already.

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I can’t point to one album or one artist that made me want to be a singer, I was just raised singing. We were taught timing, melody, and pitch. I was never trying to sound like someone else; my ambition was always to sing strong and be a part of our church’s a capella four-part harmony. I knew what joy I got from singing.

Now I’m one of the house singers at Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace. One weekend a month, I sing my heart out at the music hall that the country legend opened in Bakersfield in 1996. During the day, I work to market the Central Valley to bring in new businesses to our region as executive director of California Central Valley Economic Development Corporation.

I’ve lived in the Central Valley for most of my life. My dad moved my pregnant mom, brother, and two sisters from Fort Worth, Texas, when he got work in the oilfields of Taft, California. After my first birthday, we moved about 40 miles northeast to Bakersfield. My parents never lost their Texas twang. As a kid, we listened to a lot of old time country music like Hank Snow and Jim Reeves. Three days a week, I sang ‘alto’ in church. Starting in the fourth grade, I played the flute.

Jennifer Keel Faughn with Buckaroos, Jim Shaw and Doyle Curtsinger.

I thought I’d make a career in music and was anxious to leave home. I got a scholarship and went to California State University Northridge, which had a spectacular music program. But after a year, I didn’t see a future for myself playing or teaching the flute. I also missed my home. So I returned to Bakersfield and enrolled in the business school at Cal State Bakersfield.

While I was in college, I worked at a commercial real estate firm. Later, I earned a degree from Cal State Bakersfield in Business Marketing. Meanwhile, I was singing in Bakersfield’s live music scene and early on met a country and western band called the Dooley Brothers, a talented trio of brothers originally from Alabama, with whom I sang for a decade.

In the late ’80s, I was the Southern California winner of the Wrangler Country Showdown, a national talent contest that ends in Nashville. I competed in Eureka, California, for the Western States championship where I finished second by one point. That is where I met the great Tammy Wynette, the headliner of a show that night. During that year, I recorded an album and had some national airplay of my song, “Someone Else.”

Jennifer Keel Faughn singing at Tim Dooley’s memorial.

Later, I had my own band, Jennifer Keel and Branded, and we opened for big shows that came through the Central Valley at venues such as the Mesa Marin Raceway and Fox Theater with acts like Dwight Yoakam, John Anderson, and Chris LeDoux. To me it seemed we had Nashville right here in Bakersfield. I had the opportunity to see behind the scenes and behind the glamour. One night after singing with David Frizzell, he said, “With a college degree, why in the world would you want to sing for a living? I had to sing for my dinner!”

Buck Owens opened the Crystal Palace in 1996. Along with a bar, restaurant, and performance space, the Palace has a museum with memorabilia about Buck Owens and the Bakersfield Sound, made famous by songs like “I Got A Tiger By The Tail,” “Together Again,” and “Streets of Bakersfield.” My band was one of the original house bands. Every once in awhile, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos needed a fill-in for their “Buckarette,” and they called me. My times singing with Buck were priceless, his last words to me a week before he passed were “you sing harmony just like my mama,” which I took as the highest compliment.

My professional work outside of singing shifted from real estate to economic development in the 1990s when the real estate market crashed. I was recruited by the local economic development agency, which works closely with realtors to help businesses relocate or expand. It was a good match for me. I had a background in real estate and a degree in business administration, which made this a natural fit. In 2000, I furthered my endeavors into economic development by starting my own consulting firm and have done contract work in many communities throughout California.

Monty Byrom and Jennifer Keel Faughn.

After Buck died in 2007, the Crystal Palace started using two new front men: Buddy Owens (Buck’s son) and Monty Byrom. One night in 2007, I filled in with Monty Byrom and the Buckaroos. Monty and I hit it off musically and we’ve been singing together at the Palace ever since. I feel complete joy when I am singing that doesn’t come from anywhere else. I especially like to sing Tammy Wynette’s “’Til I can Make it on My Own” and “Stand By Your Man.” Her songs go from soft to dramatic and back again.

Every time I walk onstage at the Palace to sing, I look up to the balcony and see Buck Owens’ name in lights. It gives me a sense of pride and reminds me of the times I stood beside Buck and sang harmony. Those memories are sweetened by other memories of famous musicians who I met at the Palace over the years—many of whom I got to sing with like Loretta Lynn, Keith Urban, John Berry, Darryl Worley, and so many others.

It’s not easy to juggle music, work, and family but I feel very blessed. Music is a major part of me and actually provides a stress release to all that juggling. I leave all my worries and cares offstage. And I really enjoy the camaraderie that I have with members of the band.

The Crystal Palace is a one-of-a-kind showplace, where people can bring their friends and families to enjoy great music and history. These days, I don’t do much performing other than at the Palace, but it is more than enough for me. Musicians from all over the country, famous and not, can’t wait to play at the Palace. And I get to sing there. Talk about living a dream.

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