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The Soul of California

Let them share.....That's the goal. Let the leading thinkers, writers, academics, artists and activists talk about their work and the influence of California on that work. In these podcasts, I hope to bring out the myth and the ethos that is not only a leading administrative entity in the United States, but also the world. No commercials, just content. Feed your soul. Keep listening.
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Oct 6, 2015

UC Berkeley Professor Dr. Gray Brechin gives a history lesson of San Francisco's "Imperial Dreams", drawing on the model of Ancient Rome. He discusses the immense environmental impacts that mining and logging had on the city's contado (Italian for hinterland). He argues that the technological advancements in mining played a key role in warfare and of all things the skyscraper, and that thanks to fracking California's attitude to new energy less resembles leadership and more one-foot-on-the-accelerator-one-foot-on-the-brake. 

Dr. Brechin shares the large and uncomfortable role that UC Berkeley (and the wider UC Regents) had and still has in the development and delivery systems of nuclear weapons, lifting Ernest Lawrence to heroic status, while largely ignoring the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer. 

His three wishes include Prop. 13 reform, investing in public education and that the digital generation puts down their devices long enough to see what's really going on. 

He closes this first part with the real danger under which Californians place themselves in their built environment, sharing among others, the real risk of fire in the next big earthquake, repeating San Francisco's catastrophic experience of 1906. 

Part two, to be aired later this month, will include Mono Lake's near-death experience and how Dr. Brechin and his colleagues used the public interest doctrine in the early 1980s to save it. Other themes include the West's water wars, the dismantling of large projects, Governor Pat and Jerry Brown's legacies, bullet trains and his favourite place.

Gray Brechin is the author of Imperial Dreams: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin and Farewell, Promised Land - Waking from the California Dream, both published by UC Press. 

www.graybrechin.net

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