Great God Pan

Although William Bronson penned How To Kill A Golden State nearly thirty years ago, his ominous predictions and dark visions still hover ominously above us. Many have come true. The “beautiful” California of our past has become the “ugly” one of his predictions.

“Ugliness,” writes Bronson, “like heat and noise, works a great hardship on man, and the tensions that rise in a hostile environment produce an incalculable loss manifested in in mental illness, alcoholism, divorce, malingering, juvenile delinquency, and the like.”

Not to mention it’s just plain unpleasant to see quiet, tree-lined streets transformed into condominium-walled canyons, our grass-blanketed inland hills and valleys succumb to salmon-colored housing tracts (Curt Gentry wrote in his own doomsday epic, The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California, “If Southern California had a symbol, it was the bulldozer.”).

“The ruination of California is the result of population impact on limited resources of land, air, and water in the absence of adequate public policy, planning and controls,” wrote Bronson in 1968. True, and its lessons are still not heeded. If in 1999, the Newhall Ranch Company can get the go-ahead to smother the Santa Clara River valley with a development the size of Irvine with just a few well-placed “donations” to our elected Los Angeles council members, than what chance do we have? We are in, Bronson claimed, “the Age of Paid Liars”

If at the time of How To Kill A Golden State’s issuance California as a whole was losing its innocence, then thirty years on it is its southern counties—Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange—with a combined population of 15 million—that have sustained irreperable damage.

In the years between 1980 and 1990, the population of Riverside county grew by nearly 80%—the fastest-growing county in the state. Over one and a half million people now reside within its 7,000-plus square miles of, what its boosters claim are, “fertile river valleys, low deserts, mountains, foothills and rolling plains.” If you’ve driven through Riverside county you will see the the people do not live in “fertile valleys” or “grassy plains,” they reside in sequestered stucco “communities” with colorful Hispano-mediterranean names and common walls. Scraped out of hillsides by earth-moving equipment and violently landscaped, the planners of these villas and townhomes have not only ignored their natural surroundings, they have assaulted them.

Puny Orange County, at only 798 square miles, manages to cram more than 2.5 million people between its borders. Its secret? When older communities like Anaheim and Santa Ana become too dense with immigrants, the well-to-do head south into the canyons to new “master-planned” cities like Lake Forest and Aliso Viejo. Giant stairsteps sliced into the coastal mountain—at the current rate of four acres a day—will provide more than ample foundation for the masses to come. According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, a mere 62% of the county has been developed. There’s plenty left

Bronson conveniently separates Man’s modern follies into two distinct sections, Pollution and Destruction, the former encompassing noise, smog and advertising, the latter everything from logging our state’s last remaining redwoods to polluted harbors and the paving over of our farmlands. With chapters detailing billboard eyesores (Hard Sell in the Sky) and Northern California’s “skyscraping joy center” (Tahoe Tomorrow), How To Kill A Golden State is a self-described “moral tract, fearless and unyielding, certain of its purpose.”

And to what purpose? Hopes of halting, or at least recognizing, the damage that has been done to our environment. Look at the pictures that accompany the scathing text–hills stripped of their ancient forests, smoke belching from automobiles on sterile freeways that bisect hideous, cookiecutter neighborhoods. Sure these are worst case scenarios, but they are the reality of an ever-growing and burgeoning menace. We as indiscriminate consumers are at fault, as are those among us whose only drive is greed, the satisfaction of a fat pocketbook outweighing the reassurance of a clean conscience and a bright tomorrow.

“As long as we depend upon the developers, the real-estate hustlers, the bankers and the savings-and-loan folks to guide our development, we will see more of the same sad monotony and Disney-inspired sham that marks too much of our urban landscape.” Bronson, like more of us should, in these self-absorbed times where a quick internet server is of higher consequence than unsellable commodities like compassion and natural beauty, questions our modern society’s need for what he calls “an ever-higher standard of living,” extracted roughly from our fair lands “at the price of clean air, sweet water, songbirds, uncluttered skylines, shaded streets, unspoiled landscape, and indeed our very health.”

So which California do its inhabitants see? The beautiful Golden State of myth, or the overburdened reality? Curious, I asked a neighbor if she thought her state was “the beautiful” or “the ugly.”

“There are palm trees everywhere,” she gushed, “You can’t help but to see them silhouetted against a sunset”

“But for the powerlines,” I said.

“They’re moving them underground,” she retorted. And they are, Upper eschalon-communities statewide are busy putting their tax dollars to work burying their unsightly cables in order to preserve some beauty, not to mention property values.

“The air is so bad, I can’t see the mountains,” said a friend as we sped down the 110 freeway.

“But they say the air quality has improved.” I recalled an article I had read recently. “Remember the smog alerts in the 70s, when we weren’t allowed to go outside for recess and a thick orange cloud hung above the ocean all day?”

“I would not raise a family here,” he declared rather matter-of-factly, stroking his upper lip.

“Where then?” I asked, “Have you seen the traffic in the Gold Country? The wineries stripping the hills of the central coast? The skyrocketing rents of San Francisco?”

“There is somewhere better.”

And so Bronson’s warnings go unheeded as How To Kill A Golden State’s predictions come true before our eyes. A recent study showed that outlying suburbs are growing at four times the rate of their inner city counterparts. “The compulsion to move on to something better, to one more promise of the good life, stirs in the Californian’s breast,” wrote Bronson from Berkeley in 1968, and here in California in 1999, they are still moving out to where there’s plenty of room.