This Week at the Bill Lane Center

Dear colleagues,

We start this week with an exciting new development in our California Constitutional Reform project — an initiative of students, by students, and for students engaging in the governance challenges confronting our state. We welcome a new visiting journalism fellow to the Center — Verlyn Klinkenborg from The New York Times. Our visiting scholar from Italy, Marco Armiero, presents his work on migration and the environment in our western scholars discussion series. Two students — Carrie Denning and Bill Anderegg — and I travel to southern California to present our research at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. And we wish a "bon voyage" to Richard White, who is off to France for a series of programs over the next couple of weeks celebrating the new translation of his landmark book Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815.

A student-led initiative within our California Constitutional Reform project gets underway today when visiting professor Thad Kousser, the director of our project, and Tammy Frisby meet with a group of students at a lunch hosted by Stanford in Government at noon in the Donald Kennedy room of the Haas Center for Public Service. Thad and Tammy will share insights from the conference that we hosted in Sacramento last month that brought close to 400 scholars, policy advocates, legislators, and journalists together to examine avenues for reform — from a constitutional convention to a revision commission and other initiatives. This is just the first step in an exciting plan hatched by research assistants Koree Blyleven, William Treseder,) and Ali Guio to engage Stanford students in these crucial decisions about California's future.

Our regular North American West Scholars Discussion Series continues on Tuesday at noon in Y2E2 155 with a conversation about a new emerging field in the study of immigration in the American West. Marco Armiero, a visiting scholar from Naples who is researching Italian immigrants and the environment in the West, will be discussing his essay "Migration and the Environment" from On the Move: The Encyclopedia of Immigration, Migration, and Nativism in United States History.

And this week we welcome Verlyn Klinkenborg, an editorial writer for The New York Times, to the Center as a visiting journalism fellow. Tom Brokaw, a member of the Center's Advisory Council, has called Verlyn "our modern Thoreau," in recognition of Verlyn's fine, wry, double-edged observations of people and nature. Verlyn will be giving a talk on "Wild Things: Nature, Language and Perception" on Tuesday at 7:30pm in Geology Corner (Bldg 320) Room 105. On Wednesday evening, Verlyn and I will also be participating in a discussion at the David Brower Center in Berkeley entitled "What Does a Million Acres of the West Taste Like?" The real answer to that question will come in a tasting of local food and wines, and grass-fed, organic, "wolf-friendly" lamb from Lava Lake Lamb, a ranch that runs sheep across more than a million acres of public lands in not-so-wolf-friendly Idaho. The conversation will be joined by Mike Stevens, a conservation biologist and ranch manager at Lava Lake, Janet Brown, owner of Allstar Organics, and Bettina Ring, director of the Bay Area Open Space Council.

On Thursday and Friday, Carrie Denning, Bill Anderegg, and I will be presenting our research at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association in Long Beach. Carrie is a recent Stanford graduate who worked with me researching 20th century patterns of conservation and development in the Silicon Valley. She is now a Lorry I. Lokey fellow at Environmental Defense Fund. Bill Anderegg is a graduate student in biology. Bill and I have worked together for the past year with a large multidisciplinary group of graduate students examining historical botanical specimen records to understand the impact of climate change in the Sierra Nevada. I will also be presenting my own research on the checkered history of the Bay checkerspot butterfly, the science and practices of conservation, and pragmatic prospects for reintroducing endangered species and restoring critical habitat in a changing world. All of our work uses new approaches to data visualization and spatial analysis in environmental history, so we're very excited that Janet Fireman, editor of the journal California History, will be providing comments on our panel "Visualizing California: Case Studies of Land Use and Environmental Change, 1750 to 2000."

As always, I hope you'll let me know if you have news I can share with the rest of our crew here at the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

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November 1, 2009

Dear colleagues,
This week we've got several events taking place that show, each in its own way, the work that we do with faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, journalists, policymakers, and the public. A visiting scholar is training scientists how to be effective legislative staffers in Sacramento. A faculty member is engaging graduate students in an intensive western history seminar with colleagues at U.C. Davis. A visiting journalism fellow is speaking at two events that promise to be wildly popular and tasty! And we're celebrating Bill Lane's 90th birthday and the internship program that is so close to his heart because it sends students to do real work in the western national parks.

In Sacramento this week,Thad Kousser, the director of our California Constitutional Reform project, is running a boot camp for the California Science and Technology Policy Fellows — 10 professional scientists and engineers who are taking up yearlong positions as staffers in the California State Legislature. The fellows will be working on developing solutions to some of the most complex scientific and technical challenges facing California today, from climate change to overstretched water resources, green technology, public health, bioinformatics, food systems, invasive species, mobile location sharing technologies, GIS, and voting and elections. Thad will be giving the scientists the inside scoop on how to really get things done in the capitol.

Richard White and nine graduate students are headed to Davis this Saturday to participate in our annual Western history seminar with faculty and graduate students at U.C. Davis. Each fall we rotate between the two campuses and one faculty member and one graduate student from each university circulates in advance a work-in-progress for the group to discuss. This year, Richard is circulating a chapter from his forthcoming book Train Wreck, and Brenda Frink will be getting comments on a chapter from her dissertation entitled "Old Spanish Days: The California Landmarks League and Mission Nostalgia." Alan Taylor is sharing a chapter from his forthcoming book The Civil War of 1812, and Chad Anderson is circulating a chapter from his dissertation on "History and Memory on the Early American Frontier." If you would like to join this incredibly rich day of intense discussion about new western history scholarship, please let me know.

On Tuesday, November 3, from 7-9pm, we're co-sponsoring a talk and film showing by our visiting scholars, Italian environmental historians Dr. Marco Armiero and Simon Murano, entitled "The Struggles for Environmental Justice in Italy: Power, Garbage and Mobilization in Naples." The event includes a screening of "Una montagna di balle (Wasting Naples)." La Casa Italiana, 562 Mayfield Ave, Stanford University. Visit our events page for more details.

On Thursday, we'll be celebrating Bill Lane's 90th birthday with a reception for our interns and research assistants at the Center from 4 to 6pm. Each summer we offer around a dozen internships at national parks and conservation and media organizations in the West. We also collaborate with other internship programs to link students to research and professional opportunities around the American West. On Thursday, seven former interns will tell us about their work, and we'll also hear from Steve Haller, an internship mentor at Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and Justine Lai, a former intern at GGNRA who now works there. And we're hoping we can persuade Bill to "call down the firefall" once again in the Y2E2 atrium, just as he did for so many years at Camp Curry in Yosemite. If you'd like to join us for this celebration, please e-mail Julie Martinez, the Center's internship coordinator.

And heads up, because beginning next week, Verlyn Klinkenborg, an editorial writer for The New York Times, will be at the Center as a visiting journalism fellow, and he'll be speaking at a couple of public events that promise to be wildly popular. Verlyn writes about agriculture and the environment in editorials and in his well-loved "Rural Life" column. On Tuesday, November 10, at 7:30pm, in Geology Corner (Bldg 320) Room 105, Verlyn will be giving a talk on "Wild Things: Nature, Language and Perception." I suggest securing a seat early. Then the next evening, Verlyn and I will be participating in a public discussion at the David Brower Center in Berkeley entitled "What Does a Million Acres of the West Taste Like?" The real answer to that question will come in a public tasting of local food and wines, and grass-fed, organic, "wolf-friendly" lamb from Lava Lake Lamb, a ranch that runs sheep across more than a million acres of public lands in not-so-wolf-friendly Idaho. The conversation will be joined by Mike Stevens, a conservation biologist and ranch manager at Lava Lake, and Jane Brown, owner of Allstar Organics. If you'd like a taste of a million acres of the West, Click here to RSVP to this evite ASAP as I suspect this free event will fill up real fast.

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October 19, 2009

Dear colleagues,

We've only got one event at the Bill Lane Center this week, but I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce you to a few new western undergraduate research assistants, say "Happy Birthday!" to our colleagues and collaborators in the Woods Institute for the Environment, and give you a heads up about a special event with Bill Lane coming up next week.

Our one event this week is an alumni homecoming reunion reprise of Walking the Farm, our annual springtime walk of more than 20 miles around Stanford's 8,200-acre campus. On Friday from 3:15 to 4:45pm, David Kennedy and I will be leading an alumni group on a very short reprise of last spring's walk, which focused on habitat and biodiversity. We'll be joined by biologist Carol Boggs. We conceive of our annual walk as a moving seminar exploring Stanford lands as a microcosm of the West. Coming up this spring Walking the Farm will focus on climate change.

Our new undergraduate research assistants are Travis Koch, William Treseder, and Ali Guio. Please join me in welcoming them to the Center.

Travis is a senior history major interested in the late 19th and early 20th century American West — especially religion, environmental rhetoric, and land use and value. Before transferring to Stanford last year, Travis lived and worked in Montana as a bowyer and building contractor. His future goals include writing and teaching history at the university level. He will be working on our Rural West Initiative.

William is a California native and senior undergraduate majoring in Science, Technology, and Society. He earned his AA in Liberal Arts at West Valley College and then transferred to Stanford in 2008, delaying his entrance for one year in order to deploy to Al-Anbar Province in Iraq with the First Marine Expeditionary Force. He will be working on our California Constitutional Reform Project.

Ali is originally from Big Piney, Wyoming. She is a political science major and is writing an honors thesis on bureaucratic decision-making regarding reintroduction and recovery of the Rocky Mountain gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act. Ali will be new to some of you this year, but she is actually an old hand at the Center. She has worked with the Center for the past three years as a research assistant, Yellowstone archeology summer intern, and administrative intern. She will be working as a utility player this quarter moving from research with the constitutional reform project to the rural West and our Water in the West project.

And please join me in congratulating the Woods Institute for the Environment on its fifth anniversary! The Institute celebrates the occasion this Wednesday with an afternoon symposium and reception. The Woods Institute has made a major mark at Stanford and way beyond in five very productive years, and has been a very generous and constant collaborator with the Bill Lane Center for the American West. As the title of a talk by the Institute's co-director Buzz Thompson puts it, the Woods Institute works on "practical solutions for people and the planet," which is congruent with our mission, focused on the West, looking outward to the rest of the world. We're currently working together on our project on Water in the West. So to "Happy birthday!" we wholeheartedly add, "And many, many more!"

Last but not least, mark your calendars for a special event next Monday evening, October 26 at 6:30pm: "Bill Lane Remembers Sunset" at the Museum of American Heritage, 31 Homer Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. The Lane family molded the character of Sunset Magazine and western lifestyles from the Depression through the 20th century. And you can hear Bill's insider perspective on the changes, influences, and personalities that created Sunset and shaped the lives of generations of westerners, and peruse the museum's delightful exhibit on Sunset, all in one evening. For more information, see www.moah.org.

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October 12, 2009

Dear colleagues,

This is a big week for us. Hundreds of participants are expected at our conference on "Getting to Reform: Avenues for Constitutional Change" in Sacramento on Wednesday. The conference and issues are attracting widespread media attention — from KQED Radio (listen here) to The New York Times (link to the article). Thad Kousser, a visiting scholar at the Bill Lane Center this year and director of our California Constitutional Reform Project, has an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. Check our web site our web site — to find the latest news about the project as it breaks this week and to read policy papers on constitutional reform prepared by Thad, visiting graduate students Vladimir Kogan and Mike Binder, and Hoover Institution Research Fellow and Political Science Lecturer Tammy Frisby.

This year's first visiting journalism fellow at the Bill Lane Center, John Daley, arrives today for a two-week stay with us. John is a reporter for KSL-TV in Salt Lake City. He also teaches journalism at the University of Utah. He'll be working out of our "bullpen" for visiting scholars, journalists, graduate students, and undergraduate research assistants, so poke your head in and say "howdy" sometime. John specializes in political, environmental, and investigative reporting. He was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2007-2008 studying "Leadership in the Age of Global Warming." While with us at the Center, John will be researching and writing about the impact of a different crisis — the financial meltdown in the business of journalism — on media coverage and public understanding of global warming and other critical environmental issues in the West.

The Bill Lane Center's North American West Scholars Discussion Series organized by history graduate student Nick Viles gets underway this Tuesday from noon to 1pm in Y2E2 room 155. This is a bring-your-own-brown-bag-lunch discussion series. The food is DYI — do it yourself. But the series depends on and brings together a great community — of graduate students and faculty studying the American West — to read and debate some of the most important and exciting new scholarly developments in western history. This Tuesday the group will discuss the emerging field of "Pacific World" studies — scholarship that builds upon the enormously productive "Atlantic World" scholarship from that other American coast to understand the Pacific World that preceded the United States and continues to shape the North American West. If you would like to participate in the discussion, please let me know and I'll put you in touch with Nick so that you can get on his mailing list for advance readings.

As our understanding of the American West here at the Bill Lane Center embraces both western Canada and Mexico, and faces the Pacific with open arms, this expansive view of western scholarship is a welcome development at the heart of our mission. And it is already opening up exciting new paths for our own teaching, research, and public engagement.

Thanks!
And happy trails,
Jon

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October 5, 2009

Dear colleagues,
Events taking place this week provide a good illustration of the breadth and depth of our work at the Bill Lane Center for the American West — from developing novel ways of visualizing western history to collaborating on environmental research with direct policy implications. I also have a reminder about an important event coming up next week — our conference on "Getting to Reform: Avenues to Constitutional Reform in California" in Sacramento on October 14 — and a preview of other upcoming events that I hope you will add to your calendars.

First, please join me in extending congratulations to Dan Chang and Yuankai Ge! Dan and Yuankai are traveling to Sacramento this week to accept the 2009 Prize in the Interactive Map Category from the North American Cartographic Information Society's student web mapping competition. This is a great recognition for Dan and Yuankai, graduate student computer scientists who are working with Michael De Alessi, Krissy Clark, and Rebecca LaGrandeur on our Rural West Project, and with me on other visualization and mapping research with the Spatial History Project. As NACIS recognizes, "the World Wide Web has revolutionized how cartographers manage, conceptualize, and present map information." Dan and Yuankai are being recognized for a very cool, beautiful, revealing interactive map they created with their colleague Shiwei Song, which visualizes the Republic of Letters, the intellectual correspondence network of the Enlightenment Era. This work was supported by the Spatial History Project's "Tooling Up for Digital Histories" grant from the Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities at Stanford. Erik Steiner and other staff in the Spatial History Lab will also be going to the NACIS conference, which is the premier annual meeting for people interested in innovative information mapping. To see Dan, Yuankai, and Shiwei's "Visualization of the Republic of Letters," visit: http://www.stanford.edu/group/toolingup/rplviz/

David Kennedy and I will be participating in the Woods Institute's Environmental Ventures Program Forum on Wednesday, October 7. The EVP provides seed funding to Stanford faculty for interdisciplinary research leading to sustainable solutions to global environmental challenges, and here at the Center we have been been involved in a number of these innovative grants, including "From Bangalore to the Bay Area," a comparative study of the urban growth patterns around the Pacific Rim, and "Decision making in recycled water project implementation," a study of the relationship between scientific uncertain and policy decisions in California water systems. David Kennedy will participate in a panel discussion on interdisciplinary teamwork at the forum, and I will be presenting a poster on the EVP "Feasibility Study for Re-introduction of the Bay Checkerspot Butterfly to Stanford University Lands." For more information, visit the EVP web site: http://woods.stanford.edu/ideas/evp-forum.html

Later in the week, Richard White and I will be in Denver for the annual meeting of the Western History Association. We will each be presenting our research in a roundtable discussion entitled "Spatial History: Rewiring the Western Past." Richard will show his work on railroads in the 19th century American West, and I will show my work on critical habitat for threatened species in a changing world. We'll be joined by Matthew Booker, who was a visiting scholar here at the Center with the Spatial History Project last year. Matthew will show his work on the history of the tidelands of the San Francisco Bay. Richard will also participate in a roundtable discussion on "Expert Testimony in Tribal Litigation." And in the tradition of the Rocky Mountain fur traders, we will be hosting an informal rendezvous to share perspectives and news with other centers of the West from Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, California, and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Finally, Bill Lane tells me that due to popular demand the exhibit on "California Living the Sunset Way," which I wrote about last week, has been extended for another month at the Museum of American Heritage, 351 Homer Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. The museum is open Friday through Sunday, 11am-4pm, admission is free, and I highly recommend taking it in.

And please take note of these other upcoming events:
October 13, October 27, and November 10 at noon — North American West Scholars Discussion Series coordinated by Nick Viles.
October 14 — Conference on "Getting to Reform: Avenues to Constitutional Change in California." See http://igs.berkeley.edu/events/reform2010.html
October 23, 3:15-4:45pm — Walking the Farm, a reprise of our annual walk led by David Kennedy and me during the Stanford Alumni Homecoming Reunion. If you'd like to join us, please let me know.
November 10, 7:30pm — An evening with Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times editorial writer and visiting journalist at the Bill Lane Center for the American West.
January 27 — Risser Prize for Environmental Journalism presentation, discussion and reception.

You can find information about all of these events on our web site. And as always, please let me know if there are any events or other items you would like to share with the rest of us.

Thanks!
And happy trails,

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September 28, 2009

Dear colleagues,

This week we're hearing some great field reports from students just back from summer internships around the West, David Kennedy is off to Washington, D.C., Leslie Berlin is helping the "Real Revolutionaries," and I have a recommendation for a local museum exhibit that will give you a fun and informative view of an important part of our own history: "California Living the Sunset Way."

The Bill Lane Center for the American West sponsors summer internships for Stanford students in national parks, conservation organizations, and news organizations around the West. And our internship coordinator, Julie Martinez, has been getting some great reports from students in recent days about their experiences. Annemarie Golz spent her summer tagging trout and studying water quality for the Henry's Fork Foundation in eastern Idaho, an internship suggested by Nelson Ishiyama, a member of our Advisory Council. Annemarie also learned some practical western skills, such as how to drive with a trailer and be safe around bears. "It was one of the best summers that I have ever had," she reports, echoing the sentiment of many of our interns, including John Kyed. At the Heritage and Research Center in Yellowstone National Park, John cataloged photographs taken by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and '40s, and created an exhibit of the history of Yellowstone from early explorations to the founding of the National Park Service in 1916. "Between the scenery, fishing, people, and pace of life, this entire experience was heaven," John says. Meanwhile, Travis Koch was in Missoula, Montana, reporting on the region for New West, an online publication covering culture, economy, politics, and environment in the Rocky Mountains. Koch published 18 stories, including two analytical pieces, one profile, and 15 local news stories. He also discovered some research topics — including how land appraisal methods have changed over time as people valued different things about the same piece of land — that he will continue to explore with us now that he is back on campus.

David Kennedy is off to the nation's capital to participate in the Washington Ideas Forum at the end of this week. The Forum, entitled "First Draft of History," is sponsored by The Atlantic, the Aspen Institute, and the Newseum. It brings together government officials, journalists, thought-leaders, and historians to explore the historical context of current events, and to discuss how future historians might write about this era. Other participants include Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, former Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, PBS News Hour anchor Jim Lehrer, New York Times columnist David Brooks, US Central Command Commander General David Petraeus, and, in addition to Kennedy, historians Niall Ferguson, Douglas Brinkley, and Adam Green. We'll look forward to a report on how our times might go down in history when he gets back to The Farm.

"In a place that is always looking to the future," Leslie Berlin says her job "is to ensure that the past is preserved." Leslie is the project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford — a position supported by the Bill Lane Center and Stanford University Libraries. Leslie cultivates connections to collect papers, memos, speeches, lab books, videos, and other sources crucial for understanding the creation and growth of Silicon Valley. The archives include materials on Fairchild Semiconductor, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and many other important companies, as well as the papers of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and other key players in the valley. Leslie also works with students, faculty, journalists, and documentary filmmakers interested in using the collection — including the makers of "Real Revolutionaries," a much-anticipated documentary due out soon. Stay tuned.

This weekend is your last chance to see "California Living the Sunset Way," a very nice down-home exhibit at the Museum of American Heritage, 351 Homer Avenue in downtown Palo Alto between Waverly and Bryant. Celebrating the 80th anniversary of the acquisition of Sunset magazine by Lawrence and Ruth Bell Lane — Bill Lane's father and mother — this exhibit offers a leisurely stroll through the history of the Lane family, Sunset magazine, and California and the West from the 1930s to the present. The exhibit closes after October 4, and the museum is only open Friday through Sunday, 11am-4pm, but admission is free. So I highly recommend taking in the exhibit and the museum's lovely garden if you have time this weekend.

The exhibit reminded me of something Bill Lane told us when we had lunch together last week: The hardships of the 1930s and shortages and rationing during World War II forced Sunset magazine's staff and readers to figure out how "to do well with less," a philosophy Bill told us we would do well to follow in our own times of necessary belt-tightening. One of the powerful creative results, Bill said, and the exhibit shows this, was the mid-century modern architectural aesthetic of unpretentious simplicity and a western lifestyle that blends homes with their environments.

Sunset as a magazine "for the West" and not just "about the West." That too is a fitting description of our own vision for the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.
Happy trails,
Jon

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September 21, 2009

Dear colleagues,

A lot of what we do at the Bill Lane Center faces outward from our interdisciplinary perch in Y2E2 toward the rest of the American West through projects that engage the public through policy and the media. But we also face inward to the rest of the university through teaching and research that engage faculty and students.

And there's nothing like the first day of a new school year to remind us all of that! So this week I want to highlight students and courses at Stanford focused on the West.

I recently spent a few days going through the university Bulletin compiling a list of nearly 100 courses being offered on the American West this year at Stanford. Although I've been at Stanford for seven years now, I was still astonished by the breadth and depth of courses that deal with the West in important ways, taking on significant western subjects and issues, engaging directly with westerners and western places, and connecting the region to larger themes in very practical, as well as theoretical ways. You can find the entire list on our web site at: http://west.stanford.edu/courses/current.html.

I hope you will point interested students to this list. Now that the university Bulletin can only be found online — and I can tell you, alas, it is not easy to navigate in its new form —  guides like this will become increasingly important and useful for students and their advisers. And I want to thank Sue Purdy Pelosi for her dedication to pulling this catalog of western courses together in time for students to use it as they shop for classes in this new year.

Students are also deeply engaged in research at the Center. And I hope you will join me in welcoming back returning student researchers and welcoming some new research assistants to the Center. Koree Blyleven, a student in our Sophomore College course on Water in the West last year is joining us this year as a research fellow working on our project on California Constitutional Reform, while also preparing to apply to law school. Rebecca LaGrandeur is also interested in western water and the law. She worked with iMapData last year examining the rich West and poor West, and is returning to work on our project on the Rural West. Rebecca brings her own experience to these issues too, having grown up in Salinas. Moritz Sudhof, who hails from Texas, is also continuing to work with me in the Spatial History Lab, where he is analyzing historical botanical specimen records from across California dating back to 1840 to understand the history of introduced and invasive species and how knowledge of our environment was constructed over time and space. Melissa Runsten, a Lane Center RA supported by a VPUE stipend this summer, is also continuing on this fall in the Spatial History Lab, where she is analyzing conservation and development patterns across the western United States. And two new graduate research assistants will be working with all of us this fall. Dan Chang and Yuankai Ge are computer scientists who specialize in creating dynamic visualizations of data. Supported by a grant from the Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities for "Tooling Up for Digital Histories," they will be helping to create visualizations for our project on the Rural West as well as other research efforts in the Spatial History Lab.

A couple more quick notes:

Our project on Water in the West, a collaboration between the Bill Lane Center and the Woods Institute, continues to percolate like a productive artesian well. We are deep into finalizing an exciting proposal for important, pragmatic research to inform public policy on one of the most critical issues for people and the environment in the West. This research will involve a wide range of collaborators from around the university and outside, and the lessons we learn here will be applicable in many places around the world. We also expect that it will inspire new teaching, in addition to the great courses already offered on water in the West at Stanford. So stay tuned.

In other news this week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to become the only governor in the 108-year history of California's state parks system to ever close parks to balance the budget, Paul Rogers reported in the San Jose Mercury News. Any day now, California state parks officials are expected to release a list of up to 100 state parks that will be closed to save money. If the plan goes through, one other prominent casualty may be the governor's environmental legacy. "It has an element of weariness like he has given up, like he is taking the path of least resistance," David Kennedy, faculty co-director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, told Rogers. "It's not going to go down well in history."

You can find a link to this story and other news on our web site: west.stanford.edu.

We often post updates to the front page of our web site throughout the week. So check back in from time to time, and let us know if you have any news from around Stanford and the West.

Happy trails,
Jon

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September 14, 2009

Dear colleagues,
I used to think this last summer lull in September before the academic year begins was a surprising gift of repose — or a reprieve for a last ditch summer escape — before the storm. But here at the Bill Lane Center for the American West, dust devils are already rising from whirlwinds of activity as we head into the fall.

This year, we are pleased to have exciting projects proceeding in each of our core areas of interest: politics and public policy, the environment, and society and culture in the American West. Last week I reported on our society and culture project on the Rural West. And next week, I'll bring you up-to-date on developments in our environmental project: Water in the West.

Our project on politics and public policy this year is a high profile, high stakes venture — making a pragmatic contribution to reforming California's badly strained constitution. And registration is now open for the first step in this process: a public conference that we're co-sponsoring in Sacramento on October 14. While debate already rages about particular solutions, "Getting to Reform: Avenues to Constitutional Change in California" will step back to urge thoughtful consideration of the promises and perils that each of these paths present given a careful study of the history of constitutional reform in California and other states. You can find registration information on our web site. At a follow-up event here on campus in the spring we'll push the dialogue further toward politically viable solutions. This project is supported by a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Here at the Center, our mission includes research, teaching, and reporting on the American West. And last week we announced the winners of the 2009 Risser Prize for Environmental Journalism, a $5,000 prize co-sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the James S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford. And the winners are: Hal Bernton, Justin Mayo and Steve Ringman, for their series, "Logging and Landslides: What Went Wrong" in the Seattle Times. Using innovative computer-assisted reporting and geospatial analysis, this exemplary team — a photographer, a traditional reporter/writer, and a computational journalist/data analyst — showed how heavy logging in southwestern Washington accounted for a significant proportion of landslides in the region. You'll find a link to the series on our web site. And stay tuned for the prize presentation and forum we're planning with the journalists early in the new year.

Speaking of journalists, please extend a warm welcome to Krissy Clark, a new Knight Fellow who will be working closely with us this year. As a Knight Fellow, Krissy will focus this year on geographically aware journalism, creating and sharing tools that journalists can use to harness geospatial mapping technology to provide a greater sense of place. We're looking forward to collaborating with Krissy in our new project on the Rural West. Krissy earned her radio spurs covering the economy and culture of the western United States for Radio High Country News based in Paonia, Colo., and has earned numerous awards for her radio stories, including an audio documentary about nuclear weapons development in the American West. She has a B.A. in the Humanities from Yale — where she also learned the fine art of Bulgarian folk singing, including the glottal yip. We're hoping to hear her coyote yodel too!

Speaking of Yale, Kathryn Gin, poked her head in briefly last week. Kathryn is a visiting scholar with us this year on a fellowship from our compadres at the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale. Kathryn is examining the concept of damnation in the 19th century American West. Diaries of emigrants on the Overland Trail are one of the great sources of lay people's ideas — along with Civil War diaries — in the 19th century, Kathryn says. And she is mining those diaries in the Special Collections Library to understand how encounters in the American West shaped people's ideas at the intersection of religion, race, and identity. Kathryn will also be spending time at the Bancroft and Huntington Libraries while here on the West Coast, but she has promised to give a talk for us on damnation — and salvation — in the West in the new year.

I hope this last week of preparation for fall is as inspiring for you as it is for us — whether you are enjoying a last summer lull or busy gearing up for the year ahead.

Happy trails,
Jon

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September 9, 2009

Dear colleagues,
Things are hopping around the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Here's this week's heads up:

Our long-anticipated project on "The Rural West" is reaching take-off velocity this week. Michael De Alessi is joining us as the project director for this innovative and creative effort to use iMapData and other digital and spatial data sources to map and analyze historical changes in the rural West, and work with journalists and academic collaborators to light a fire under scholarly and public discussion of important issues affecting the rural West, from health and health care, to education and the environment. The baseline for this study is the Report of the Country Life Commission that Teddy Roosevelt transmitted to Congress in 1909 — this year marks the centennial. Michael completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management at UC Berkeley this year, with a dissertation examining the environmental history, politics, and economics of fisheries policy in New Zealand. He also has an M.A. in Marine Policy from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami, as well as an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering and a B.A. in Economics from Stanford. He'll be taking up residence in room 339 at the Bill Lane Center. Poke your head in sometime and welcome him back to Stanford.

Please also join me in welcoming back visiting scholar Marco Armiero, who spent some time at the Center last summer. Marco is a Senior Researcher at the National Research Council in Italy. Marco has been awarded a joint grant from the National Endowment for Humanities and the Italian Research Council to continue his research on the environmental effects of mass migrations. While here at the Center, Marco is examining how Italian immigrants in the American West reacted to and shaped the new landscapes they found themselves in. Simon Maurano, a Ph.D. student in Geography of Development at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale," is joining Marco this time around. Simon's work focuses on waste management and environmental conflicts in Naples. While with us this fall, Simon will be researching the larger context of these local conflicts in the field of environmental justice. Marco and Simon will be working out of our "bullpen" for visiting scholars and journalists in room 337.

Visiting scholar Kevin Hearle is also returning to the Center for another tour of duty this year. Kevin is continuing research and beginning to outline chapters for his book "Of Race and Men: Race, Ethnicity and Eugenics in the Life and Works of John Steinbeck." Kevin is a regular visitor to the "bullpen" too, but can most often be found deep in the Steinbeck papers in the Special Collections Library. And later this year, he will present work from his book in progress.

The Spatial History Project has posted major new developments on its website. Spatial History Lab director Erik Steiner writes: "A few highlights on the website are the significantly expanded gallery section and a major technical publication for the Shaping the West project, an exemplary interactive publication and geocoding tool from the Terrain of History team, several student-led publications from the Critical Habitat group, and an independent student paper on the Between the Tides project. And the website only reflects a portion of the work that has gone into this summer’s accomplishments." Check it all out at http://spatialhistory.stanford.edu, particularly the expanded "Gallery" and the new section, "Publications," which reflects a significant and decisive move toward peer-reviewed online publication of "born digital" scholarship in spatial history.

Finally, this week we bid "happy trails" to two summer graduate student research assistants — but just for their end-of-summer breaks, because we hope to see them both around and expect that they will continue to collaborate with us in the future!

Alex McInturff, a Master's student in Earth Systems, is already well-known for his spring trek retracing John Muir's 1868 walk from Oakland to Yosemite. This summer he has been working to create an online narrative and spatial analysis of his "California Transect," in conjunction with his Master's thesis. Look for news of the launch of that site soon. In the meantime, Audubon magazine has just published an interview with Alex here: http://www.audubonmagazine.org/web/burns/index.html#muir

And Amanda Cravens, when not off running rivers around the West, will be moving on to begin her Ph.D. research in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford. Amanda has been engaged in a wide range of research with me this summer, from collaborating on our study of conservation patterns in the American West with undergraduate research assistant Melissa Runsten, to helping to develop emerging collaborations with the Historical Ecology Program in the San Francisco Estuary Institute, where three former research assistants and interns from the Bill Lane Center are now working full-time, and a recent graduate, Alec Norton, has just begun his internship.

We've got a lot going on. If you know of anything that I should include in these weekly missives, please be sure to send it my way so that I can keep everyone posted.

Thanks!
Yours truly,
Jon

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