Then start hiking the High Sierra.

That’s the inescapable conclusion of a surprising new memoir from California’s greatest living science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, about how he has structured his life around backpacking in his state’s great mountain range.

The High Sierra: A Love Story is as sprawling and full of ups-and-downs as the Sierra Nevada themselves, those majestic mountains defending more than 250 miles of California’s eastern flank. The 560-page memoir offers fast-paced and highly readable explorations of Sierra history, people, geography, geology, and the ways that the range’s rocks can shift your mind.

“I knew that this granite world, holding me in its cupped hands as I lay on it, glowing luminously in the moonlight, was a magic place,” he writes of one of his regular Sierra trips, which began when he was a UC San Diego student in 1973 and continue today, from his home in Davis.

To hike into the range’s highest places was to enter an “open immense space unlike anything in my life below: an escape, a trudge up and into a higher realm. It was mind-boggling. It was as if I could choose to visit heaven.”

But the book is most powerful for demonstrating how a mountain range, and its history, can inspire visions of the future.

Robinson’s science fiction novels and stories are acclaimed for their political and environmental plausibility, their scientific grounding, their literary polish, and their optimism (even in describing future planetary catastrophes).

Reading his memoir, then, feels a bit like hearing a magician’s secrets. The mountain range, as a world apart, has a lot in common with future worlds, and how they change with the climate.

The emotional sustenance and inspiration Robinson finds in his Sierra walks clearly informed the characters in his Three Californias trilogy of novels (about three different futures of Orange County, where he grew up). Those characters are repaired and changed by their own travel to Sierra settings, from Dragon Pass to Dusy Basin.

The clearest connection between Robinson the hiker and Robinson the writer is through climate change, a focus of his 2020 masterpiece, The Ministry for the Future, about the leader of an imagined U.N. agency that is supposed to represent future generations, and an eco-terrorist who survives a heat wave in India that kills more than 20 million people.

His 2013 novel, Shaman, which imagines how people live in an ice age, owes a debt to his snow-shoeing trips in the range during winters. His 2007 novel, Sixty Days and Counting, about a president battling environmental catastrophe (including a deep freeze in Washington), imagines characters visiting the Sierra’s high meadows after they have been desiccated by climate change. His account of an attempted settlement on the moon in 2015’s Aurora is inspired by Sierra landscapes, as are some of the scenes Robinson imagines in the 2012 novel, 2312, when human society has colonized other planets in the solar system.

In the memoir, he also cops to lifting accounts of walks in his famous Mars trilogy—novels chronicling the settlement of the red planet over 200 years—from notes he’d taken in the Sierra.

“In describing the Martian landscape as if it were the High Sierra, I was really fudging it, because only by terraforming Mars could I make that cold poisonous planet into a place anything like the Sierra,” Robinson confesses. “Reviewers who wrote things like, ‘It almost seems as if Robinson has been to Mars,’ always made me laugh.”

In The High Sierra, Robinson writes about the changing of the Sierra climate, the melting of its glaciers, and the way the Arizona monsoon season has changed the summer climate of the mountain range. At one moment in the book, this utopian writer confesses to despair.

“Higher temperatures are here already, and the Sierra glaciers will soon be gone. The high country will dry out. Back home, I found myself stricken by this realization. Of course people die; I myself will die, but not the Sierras! Not the Sierras. It was too much to bear. Anguish filled my mind like smoke.” Later, a friend recounts the resilience of the Sierra, and Robinson, reassured, learns to see the mountains’ future with “fearful joy.”

Robinson, 70, expresses impatience with today’s cultural and political arguments around the preservation of land and nature. He is especially critical of the now-fashionable idea among progressives that the concept of “wilderness”—and policies to preserve “untouched” spaces like national parks—are just imperialist or colonial attempts to erase Indigenous cultures.

“The bad timing of this attack on wilderness is not a coincidence; it both displaces our historical culpability, and it shrinks our present responsibility,” he writes.

Pushing back against this current perspective, Robinson argues for the long view—and for expanding those areas designated as wilderness.

The preservation of the Sierra—and especially the unbroken wilderness from Tioga to the far south of the range—is the sort of achievement that must be emulated, at a global scale, he writes. Near the book’s conclusion, he embraces movements for leaving a big portion of the Earth’s surface free of human impacts—including the late biologist E.O. Wilson’s proposal to leave half the earth empty of human beings. It’s the only way, argues Robinson, to save animals and plants and our own human descendants, “who otherwise might be given a world wrecked by our ecocide.”

In the future, California’s great novelist of the future imagines, the Sierra could be a big, early link “in the habitat corridors that eventually will stretch from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, as part of a worldwide network of protected land that will help to keep innumerable species from extinction—this is beautiful.”

The post Hike the High Sierra, See the Future Unfold appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In California’s Miracle Country.

Miracle Country is the title of Kendra Atleework’s new and magical memoir about her life in the Eastern Sierra. The book begins with the 2015 fire that decimated her 200-person hometown, Swall Meadows, north of Bishop and 7,000 feet above sea level (“marking the border between desert and sky”). And it is full of unforgettable stories about how disaster shaped and reshaped the Eastern Sierra broadly, and the Owens Valley in particular.

Atleework, in prose as beautiful as any writing ever devoted to our state, shows that fire and disaster aren’t the end. Apocalyptic events, in her telling, are really beginnings that can ground us, protect us, and even nurture us. Her oft-devastated home region, on California’s eastern edge, offers a preview of a post-apocalyptic life full of great beauty, deep meaning, and engrossing mysteries.

“I wondered what it meant to go to smoke,” she writes of the aftermath of that fire in Swall Meadows. “This land demands that you consider—makes you think you’ll find an answer, but you never can. And where do we turn after everything burns? What light do we find, or not find, just over the summit?”

Atleework’s life, and book, toggle between Swall Meadows, where she was raised, and Bishop, where she lives now. Bishop (population 4,000 in the city), is the only incorporated place in Inyo County, which covers an area larger than New Jersey. But her true subject is the high desert that is the Owens Valley, in her words “a long brown sliver of sagebrush and bitterbrush cupped between ranges—to the west, the stark granite escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, casting its rain shadow across our towns; to the east, the Whites and Inyos, those ancient desert mountains.”

She weaves stories of her family’s life navigating the Eastern Sierra’s climate extremes (from the dry valley up to snowbound Mammoth) with its two great apocalypses. The first was the taking of the region from its first indigenous inhabitants, the Paiutes, who called the valley “Payahuunadü” or land of flowing water. The second was the taking of that water, through the deceptions of William Mulholland, to serve Los Angeles, leaving Owens Valley and its 25,000 people with a dry lake bed of arsenic and mining chemicals that produces some of the world’s most hazardous dust storms.

Most accounts of the Owens Valley start and end with that crime and its resulting, ongoing legal fights. But Atleework, while unforgiving of the water theft (as a young adult in L.A., she counts the private swimming pools on Mulholland Drive and seeks out Mulholland’s grave at Forest Lawn), is more interested in appreciating the wonders of the valley left behind. “When the water went away, growth occurred someplace else,” she writes. “With water, Owens Valley might not be the country that drew my parents together for love of its strangeness.”

She appreciates the hiking and beauty of the mountains, but also the absence of people and enterprises—the kind of emptiness that is rare in California. She frequently quotes turn-of-the-century novelist and homesteader Mary Austin, who lived in the Valley and found it “forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.” Atleework even conveys an affection for the fires, droughts, floods, volcano-inspired earthquakes, and blizzards that often visit the Eastern Sierra, and have taught its people that this world is full of giant forces “from which we cannot protect ourselves or each other.” The best you can do is hold on tight to the nearby rocks.

“To be made careful is to be made grateful,” she writes. “Loss highlights all you have, just as absence in the desert highlights presence, until what little water we harbor glows.”

The most memorable character of this story, other than Atleework’s pilot-father and her late educator-mother, is a wind, the Sierra Wave, which gusts above 60 miles an hour and routinely knocks over big-rigs and pushes airplanes into mountains. Reading Miracle Country’s description of California as “this windy place that seems to be on fire half the time” felt fitting these past few weeks.

“On the beaches of the Pacific, gusts arrive laden with salt spray, whooshing with enough force to make your eyes water, a persistence perfect for launching kites,” Atleework writes of this wind that connects California. “By the time that breeze reaches Owens Valley, it has raced over the coastal range, up the western, windward flank of the Sierra Nevada, and it has turned powerful.”

While hiking, Atleework leans “into a gale so strong it negates the work of gravity and I can almost lie down on air.” So strong that the wind might be proof of the divine. “If God is ever present, if God can get in through the frames of our doors and the pores in our skin,” she writes, “then on this obsidian edge of California, God is the wind and the dust it carries.”

Looking down on our state from on-high, Atleework, now 31, zeroes in on its central paradox: “California is strange country, country of dearth—go there now, to almost any town or city, and find not enough water, of course, but also not enough jobs, not enough housing, not enough room in the jails and schools—yet California is known the world over as a place of excess in lifestyles, ideas, and dreams.”

She also has glimpsed its future, since climate change has shadowed her whole life, with the Eastern Sierra’s winters growing warmer, its fires bigger, its seasons more alike. As California lives through new apocalypse after new apocalypse, we’ll have to learn to go on and rebuild, as the Eastern Sierra already has, over and over.

Despite all the disasters, Atleework, after stints in Minnesota and Old Town San Diego, returns to the Eastern Sierra, and buys a house in Bishop. For all her fear of fire, she will keep wandering into the dry brush. The past, she concludes, has not entirely poisoned the future.

“Some who love this valley remember its first name: the land of flowing waters. Now we see it washed in fire,” she writes near the end of a book that might be the only truly wonderful thing about 2020. “We live in a landscape damaged beyond repair, and we see our loss magnified the world over. We are here regardless, learning how to keep an eye on mystery and miracle, where they flicker beside disaster.”

The post California’s Eastern Sierra Reminds Us There’s Life After Disaster appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Thanks to the ample snows that usually fall, the Sierras have been California’s most efficient water storage system. In normal years, the mountain range’s snowpack provides 30 percent of the state’s water. It is the primary source for reservoirs that supply drinking water, agriculture, and hydroelectric power. But this year, the snowpack was at just 5 percent of its 50-year average. This statistic, which was announced by the California Department of Water Resources on April 1, became the poster child for the extreme drought conditions that have plagued California for the last four years. When California Gov. Jerry Brown declared the first-ever mandatory state-wide water restriction, he chose a Sierra Nevada snow-measurement station as his backdrop. For the first time in 75 years, that station was surrounded only by dirt.

For me, Brown’s announcement worked as a call for action. After my time in the Sierras, I had realized that my main research interest—the interaction between climate and forest ecosystems—could best be pursued amidst the majestic landscapes of the American West, so in 2011, I became a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where I now lead a team that uncovers the past climate of California by studying its trees. I knew my research could put this year’s 2015 snow drought in a much longer context.

While there are no written documents about the climate in California from centuries ago that anyone knows of, nature itself has been writing the story of its past in many places—caves, shells, lakes, and, of course, trees. My job as a paleoclimatologist is to decipher this story. Trees are remarkable creatures: In California’s Mediterranean climate, they form a growth ring every year, and the width of that ring depends, to a large extent, on that year’s climate. After a wet winter, the ring that forms is relatively wide; after a dry winter, the ring is narrow. By measuring the widths of these rings in trees that have lived for centuries, my team can “read” what the climate was like in each year over that time span. And we can extend this outlook even further by collecting older dead wood.

The amount of snow on the ground at the end of the snowy season in the Sierras is largely determined by two climate components: how much precipitation fell during winter, and how warm or cold the winter was. Temperature determines how much of the precipitation that fell was rain versus snow, and affects the speed of snowmelt. We put two tree-ring data sets together to represent precipitation and temperature over the last 500 years. By measuring the width of the rings of more than 1,500 blue oak trees in central California, some of the most climate-sensitive trees on the planet, we were able to reliably trace Pacific Ocean storms that have traveled east over central California and brought precipitation to the Sierra Nevada. We complemented this data with a 500-year-long winter temperature record derived from tree-ring data from a variety of trees throughout the American West, which was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

By comparing these two data sets to Sierra Nevada snowpack records dating back to the 1930s, we were able to reconstruct the history of snowpack in the region all the way back to the year 1500. The results, which we published last week, made national headlines: The mountain range’s 2015 snowpack level is the lowest it has been in the last 500 years.

To put that in perspective, this means this winter has been the worst since the first European explorer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, explored California in the 1540s—about 230 years before the first mission was established. When my team started our work, we thought this year’s snow drought would be extreme, but we did not expect it to be the absolute lowest.

Sadly, while this research sheds light on the past, it’s actually not a very good barometer for the future. It very likely will not take another 500 years to reach the next record snowpack low. California temperatures are only projected to rise over the coming century. Even if the projected strong El Niño in the Pacific dumps loads of rain on southern California this year, chances are that the Sierra Nevada snowpack will be a less reliable water source for the state going forward. This means fish and wildlife communities will suffer and, of course, California’s growing population of farmers, gardeners, skiers, and residents are only going to keep wanting more, much more.

As I write this, the summer monsoon is rolling in over Tucson, and I am reminded that it brings a chance of redemption after a dry winter in Arizona. But California doesn’t have monsoons. Instead, in the last few days, my Twitter feed has been filled with pictures and stories of the Butte and Rough fires that are raging through the region. To me, they demonstrate the well-studied link between low snowpack, earlier spring snowmelt, and the increased risk of wildfire.

Now the ancient Giant Sequoia trees that left me in awe when I first saw them are at risk of being felled by drought, and even under the immediate threat of the Rough fire. To a tree-ring scientist, these 3,000-year-old trees are the enigmatic face of the power and resilience of nature. They have doubtless survived many threats and disturbances that we are not even aware of. To walk amongst these giants for the first time was a dream come true. Little did I realize then that I’d be keeping my fingers crossed for their survival less than a decade later.

The post How We Discovered the Sierra Nevada Snowpack Is at a 500-Year Low appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.