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Author: Howard R. Plank
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1456827111
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 551
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Book Description
After describing the Central Valley of California the book focuses on the flood plain of the Sacramento River where most of the lands adjoining the river were a series of Mexican Land Grants. These grants were broken into private holdings after statehood and the challenging effort to reclaim the overflow lands began. The book covers the political and natural challenges in reclaiming these lands together with the introduction of a new crop, rice, and the development of new machines, primarily the Caterpillar tractor, that aided significantly in making the reclamation efforts successful.
Author: Howard R. Plank
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1456827111
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 551
Get Book Here
Book Description
After describing the Central Valley of California the book focuses on the flood plain of the Sacramento River where most of the lands adjoining the river were a series of Mexican Land Grants. These grants were broken into private holdings after statehood and the challenging effort to reclaim the overflow lands began. The book covers the political and natural challenges in reclaiming these lands together with the introduction of a new crop, rice, and the development of new machines, primarily the Caterpillar tractor, that aided significantly in making the reclamation efforts successful.
Author: Philip Garone
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520355571
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive environmental history of California’s Great Central Valley, where extensive freshwater and tidal wetlands once provided critical habitat for tens of millions of migratory waterfowl. Weaving together ecology, grassroots politics, and public policy, Philip Garone tells how California’s wetlands were nearly obliterated by vast irrigation and reclamation projects, but have been brought back from the brink of total destruction by the organized efforts of duck hunters, whistle-blowing scientists, and a broad coalition of conservationists. Garone examines the many demands that have been made on the Valley’s natural resources, especially by large-scale agriculture, and traces the unforeseen ecological consequences of our unrestrained manipulation of nature. He also investigates changing public and scientific attitudes that are now ushering in an era of unprecedented protection for wildlife and wetlands in California and the nation.
Author: Christopher J. Castaneda
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822979187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
Often referred to as “the Big Tomato,” Sacramento is a city whose makeup is significantly more complex than its agriculture-based sobriquet implies. In River City and Valley Life, seventeen contributors reveal the major transformations to the natural and built environment that have shaped Sacramento and its suburbs, residents, politics, and economics throughout its history. The site that would become Sacramento was settled in 1839, when Johann Augustus Sutter attempted to convert his Mexican land grant into New Helvetia (or “New Switzerland”). It was at Sutter’s sawmill fifty miles to the east that gold was first discovered, leading to the California Gold Rush of 1849. Nearly overnight, Sacramento became a boomtown, and cityhood followed in 1850. Ideally situated at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers, the city was connected by waterway to San Francisco and the surrounding region. Combined with the area’s warm and sunny climate, the rivers provided the necessary water supply for agriculture to flourish. The devastation wrought by floods and cholera, however, took a huge toll on early populations and led to the construction of an extensive levee system that raised the downtown street level to combat flooding. Great fortune came when local entrepreneurs built the Central Pacific Railroad, and in 1869 it connected with the Union Pacific Railroad to form the first transcontinental passage. Sacramento soon became an industrial hub and major food-processing center. By 1879, it was named the state capital and seat of government. In the twentieth century, the Sacramento area benefitted from the federal government’s major investment in the construction and operation of three military bases and other regional public works projects. Rapid suburbanization followed along with the building of highways, bridges, schools, parks, hydroelectric dams, and the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, which activists would later shut down. Today, several tribal gaming resorts attract patrons to the area, while “Old Sacramento” revitalizes the original downtown as it celebrates Sacramento’s pioneering past. This environmental history of Sacramento provides a compelling case study of urban and suburban development in California and the American West. As the contributors show, Sacramento has seen its landscape both ravaged and reborn. As blighted areas, rail yards, and riverfronts have been reclaimed, and parks and green spaces created and expanded, Sacramento’s identity continues to evolve. As it moves beyond its Gold Rush, Transcontinental Railroad, and government-town heritage, Sacramento remains a city and region deeply rooted in its natural environment.
Author: Mark Arax
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101875216
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 577
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Book Description
A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers—the nut king, grape king and citrus queen—tell their story here for the first time. Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.
Author: Stan Yogi
Publisher: Great Valley Books
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 594
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Book Description
From the myths of the Yokuts Indians, to stories and poems by famous contemporary writers, this anthology showcases the best literature of Californias Great Central Valley, and provides a rich view of the regions physical and emotional landscape
Author: G. L. Bertoldi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Groundwater
Languages : en
Pages : 56
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Book Description
See journals under US Geological survey. Prof. paper 1401-A.
Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706026
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.
Author: Paul C. Trimble
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738530529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
The Sacramento Northern Railway was once a critical interurban link between California's northern Central Valley communities, the state capital, and the Bay Area. Running through orchards, farmland, swamps, and cities, this electric railway began its life in 1905. Service eventually ran from Chico to Oakland, but after the Bay Bridge opened in 1939, the 186-mile route started in San Francisco's Financial District, crossed the bridge on the lower deck, ran through Contra Costa County towns like Moraga, Lafayette, and Pittsburg, across the Suisun straits on the massive rail ferry Ramon (which could hold an entire train), and into Sacramento, the halfway point. From there, the train continued through rolling hills and farms on to Marysville, and finally to Chico before making its return journey. The Sacramento Northern soldiered on until World War II, but eventually the growing car culture, along with competing diesel railroads, undid this splendid line. Interurban passenger service ended in 1941, and the various lines were gradually abandoned or dieselized. Today a 22-mile segment of the route remains in operation at the Bay Area Electric Railway Museum in Solano County.
Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307763293
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this "arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline” (The Baltimore Sun), Didion—a native Californian—reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California's ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons. Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and this book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.
Author: Daniel Airola
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578709925
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
The book describes results of 20 years of study of the ecology and management of Sacramento's bridge-nesting Purple Martin population. This is the last population of this California Species of Special Concern that remains in the state's Central Valley. Contents include population status, habitat requirements, and evaluation of management actions taken on behalf of the species. Various factors that could be responsible for the dramatic 88% population decline are evaluated in detail. A population model uses information on population size and survival estimates from banding studies to identify the cause of decline as inadequate reproduction, which is tied to the dramatic increase in use of neonicotinoid insecticides in surrounding urban and agricultural lands. The document identifies needed conservation measures and detailed land use planning guidelines for planning, design, environmental analysis, and construction to prevent disturbance of nesting martins and degradation of their habitat by urban development projects. The book also includes a number of accessible and entertaining sidebar explorations on how this long-term research project was conducted, how Western Purple Martins differ from their more abundance eastern counterparts, why martins are nest in colonies, and other topics of general reader interest.
