Yet another excellent book in the California Natural History Guide series edited by the admirable Phyllis Faber. I read it over the weekend before the author joined us for a UPB Conversation — an unusually rambunctious one as the subject of energy generates plenty of passion.  This is an introduction by a skilled writer who brings together the history, geology, innovations, disasters, problems, and variety of future opportunities for energy in our amazing state. William McClung, UPB partner.

We surely have all had the experience of driving with a passenger, riding with a driver, or being stuck in traffic behind someone with a very different driving philosophy.  And we all have opinions on the traffic calming measures that are popular in Bay Area cities, as well as various CalTrans decisions about highways.  Tom Vanderbilt drove, rode with local drivers, and interviewed psychologists and traffic engineers all over the world.  The resulting book is full of insights, many of them counterintuitive.  It gives the reader a greater appreciation for the complexities of traffic engineering and for other drivers’ differing viewpoints. It might even make us all safer drivers.  As for me, I’d still rather take public transit, where I can just sit and read.  Sorayya Carr, UPB partner.

This book has sold 73 copies at UPB since publication. Talk about a mind on fire! Kat Anderson has written a white-hot study on the land use practices of California Indians after decades of deep research at Berkeley and among indigenous people around the state.  The familiar history of dispossession, genocide, and assimilation is told in new detail and horror. More important is the remarkable range of examples and perspective Anderson presents on the ways California Indians managed and lived in our landscapes. They harvested and used many of the plants we value in the Berkeley Hills today — willow, elderberry, oaks, hazelnut, soaproot, yampah, miner’s lettuce, mugwort, bunch grasses, etc. – and they understood what kinds of disturbances help rather than hurt these beneficial plants. Yes, they burned frequently, but often very specifically.  And their methods of irrigating, pruning and coppicing, sowing, tilling, transplanting, and weeding add up to a land-use sophistication far beyond our modern understandings of how to preserve and to protect our wild lands. William McClung, UPB, East Bay Hills land steward.