California State University Monterey Bay

SBS 385 *Environmental History of California*

California: A History (Starr 2005) Chapter Notes on the themes of
Science and Technology, Art and Lifestyle

**Chapter 10 O Brave New World!: Seeking Utopia Through Science and
Technology**

The development of mining technology led to the Pelton turbine, a
California invention, which in turn brought **hydroelectricity**, which
in turn made possible an industrial infrastructure. In California,
**aviation** was adopted and perfected, by the 1920s scientists took the
lead in **vacuum tube technology**, making possible **radio** and
**television**, and the 1930s were smashing the **atom**, the 1950s
through the **semiconductor**, the digital revolution, then came
**biotechnology**.

In each instance, the specific **scientific, engineering, or
technological advance** emerging from California was linked to the
effort to **discover a truth**, **solve a problem**, **make a profit**,
make **productive use of one’s time**, and, in the process, make the
world **a better and more interesting place**. Open, flexible,
entrepreneurial, unembarrassed by the profit motive, California emerged
as a society friendly to the **search for utopia through science and
technology**. The **California Academy of Sciences** goal would be the
“systematic survey of every portion of the state and the collection of a
cabinet of rare and rich productions”.

A group of Californians led by Frederick Law Olmsted, the noted traveler
and landscape architect, lobbied through Congress a bill setting aside
under the protection of the state a huge tract of Sierra land that
included the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees. Camping trips
became a rite of passage and celebration for Californians eager to
define to themselves just exactly what California was all about.

John Muir encountered Yosemite and the mountains of California that gave
rise to a lifetime vocation. He served as the first president of the
Sierra Club, founded in 1892, and in 1903 camped out in Yosemite with
President Theodore Roosevelt. He ceaselessly advocated the creation of a
national park system.

**Geology, mining, astronomy, aviation**: here were some basic
stimulants to scientific creativity in California. New inventions in
Palo Alto would soon be making an entirely new world of
**transcontinental phone calls, radio, television, and high-speed
electronics** possible. In the first three decades of the 20^th^
century, Stanford University developed a special expertise in
**electrical engineering**. Across the Bay in Berkeley, meanwhile, a
contribution was being made to the most important scientific and
technological feat of the 20^th^ century: releasing the power of the
atom, making Berkeley a center for **nuclear research**. Palo Alto had
become the epicenter of **high-tech venture capitalism**, serving
Silicon Valley start-ups.

Silicon Valley, as the region triangulated by Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, and
San Jose soon came to be called, was a place, a culture, a center of
invention and manufacture that revolutionized society itself by taking
to new levels the way people communicated, stored and retrieved
information, analyzed problems, and increasingly, thought. It was as if
a new neural network had been created for the human race: a digital and
silicon-based circuitry that extended the capacity of the individual
human being by linking him or her to a vast ocean of data and to
software applications capable of driving a myriad of programs for
navigating that ocean. The introduction to the public in 1983 of the
**Internet** – in the invention of which California-based scientists
played key roles – compounded this collective nooshphere (to use the
terminology of the Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin), this shared and
integrated community of information. No wonder Silicon Valley companies
were so different in their organizational structure, so nonhierarchical,
so quick to cluster talent for specific purposes, then reassemble it for
another task! **Their very product represented an** **evolutionary step
forward for the human race**.

Yet so fervent had become this faith in science that 59% of the
Californians voting in the November 2004 election passed Proposition 71
authorizing the sale of \$3 billion in bonds over a ten-year period to
finance state-monitored programs of stem cell research. Bypassing the
National Institutes of Health, which had been sponsoring biological
research at the federal level for 117 years, Proposition 71 asserted
California as a nation-state enamored – beyond considerations of
theology and/or fiscal prudence in the midst of a continuing budget
crisis – of seeking utopia through science and technology, which had
become a way of life.

**Chapter 11 An Imagine Place: Art and Life on the Coast of Dreams**

The 20^th^ century witnessed the debut of **three entertainment media**
– film, radio, and television – dependent upon electronic technologies
developed in California. California continued to energize the arts as
matrix, occasion, and subject, the **arts defined and redefined
California as an imagined place**.

Robinson **Jeffers** (poet who lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea) took the
fundamental aesthetic premise of California since the mid-nineteenth
century, **nature**, and make of it **a lifestyle, a philosophy, and a
poetic practice**.

John **Steinbeck** (raised in Salinas and studied biology at Stanford)
saw human life more elemental terms: biologically, that is, as living
organisms in a landscape, and collectively as “group-man” held together
by biological linkages.

William **Saroyan** (writer of Fresno and San Francisco) sought to fill
the void – in his case, the suspected emptiness of the universe itself –
with his version of that perennial concern of California writers,
bohemianism, which is to say, the shoring up of threatened identities
through art and “hanging out.”

Aldous **Huxley’s** *After Many a Summer Dies the Swan* (1939) – which
some consider the best Los Angeles novel ever – satirizes California’s
fake promise of youth through the figure of an aging tycoon based on
William Randolph Hearst. It ends apocalyptically.

This sense of California’s promise betrayed and doom impending provides
a leitmotif of writing in the postwar period, most notably by
Sacramento-born Joan Didion. She more than implied that both her
personal California, in terms of the myths she had absorbed as a child,
and the larger California experiment contained what she believed to be a
crippling level of deceit and self-deception.

The **Beats** of the 1950s agreed, with San Francisco becoming the
epicenter of the movement for City Lights bookstore founder and poet
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and writer Jack Kerouac (*On The Road*, *Dharma
Bums*, *Big Sur*). Allan Ginsberg’s poem *Howl*, the poetic manifesto of
the Beat movement, evoked the anguish of a postwar generation oppressed
by the soulless materialism of corporate America and took refuge in sex,
rebellion, and drugs, often to their own destruction. Theirs was a
style, a posture, an attitude – as much political as literary – toward
postwar America, which they believed had become corporate, right-wing,
cold, and conformist.

Gary **Snyder** (poet and UC Davis professor of English) ultimately
eschewed politics in favor of a **nature-oriented mysticism** that had
been a persistent theme of imaginative writing in California since the
frontier. Snyder had from the beginning the ambience of a seeker. He
spent twelve years studying Zen Buddhism in Japan and also visited India
in search of enlightenment. As artist, Gary Snyder was the greatest of
the Beats, a notable American poet of any school, and, in his nature
orientation and environmentalism, the example *par excellence* of the
California tradition he represented and fulfilled.

The **Outdoor Life** characterized the California lifestyle since the
19^th^ century. If California has made any contribution to sport on a
national level, it is in the democratization of pursuits that were
previously the prerogatives of elites, **thanks to recreational policies
of Progressivism**.

Surfing would become an affordable, widespread pursuit, an icon of the
California lifestyle, celebrated in song, film, advertising, and other
media, where everyone is forever young and looked great. Mountaineering,
skiing, rock climbing, windsurfing, hang gliding – at the interface of
nature and science further reinforced the “DNA code” of California.