Rekindling California's capacity to dream

Hand crafted artisanal musings

I wrote a book on the pioneering spirit that makes California awesome. The cover was a mash up of the state water project, one of the few pieces of public works visible from space, and Big Sur, by wide acclaim the most amazing confluence of land and sea on this pale blue dot.

I recently had the privilege to take an aerial tour of Southern California's water infrastructure and other major public works. It’s very different looking out the window of a low flying, slow moving prop plane. Magic really. There I was able to see the State Water Project winding between pump stations and highways.

When we took a break in Bakersfield, the conversation turned to California’s lost mojo, its forgotten ability to build bold big infrastructure. The high speed rail project languishing in purgatory is case in point. The state’s history provides deeper perspective on projects today, some of which languish for half a century plus.

William Hammond Hall, California’s first state X, largely envisioned what we now know as the State Water Project and Central Valley Project in 18xx, more than half a century before it would be completed in 196Y.

Before anything is built, someone must dare to dream that things might be different.

California’s most visionary public works proceeded from a clear eyed assessment of future needs and dared to dream of what might be. In the early days of California’s high speed rail project, I remember asking several of the Sacramento set why the state didn’t advance the hyperloop. The response was really lame: that it wasn’t proper for the state to be in the business of building something so new and untested.

If you read the original plans for California’s tri-partite system of higher education or highway system or water works, the goal was to be the best in the world, unafraid to pioneer the new and untested on that route if necessary. What is required, what the world demands, not what is safe and convenient. Today we live in turbulent times, an era where the future is clouded.

The Anthropocene began in 1950. That’s a somewhat arbitrary date though reflects the era where human action accelerated planetary scale processes that used to operate on a geologic time scale. Today we are living through the first terraforming of our home planet. The urgent question is whether that transformation will enable human flourishing in the future.

Flying over Southern California, you could still see the burn scars not just recently in places like Altadena but also burned trees over the grapevine. The interconnected nature of these basic systems becomes clear as you see access roads branching out from highways to pump stations, power lines, transformers and other infrastructure.

Part of the challenge today is that past infrastructure was so successful that Southern California civilization has been able to coast off those past investments for decades. Another part of the challenge is that replacing or developing something new in the already built environment presents challenges. Just consider the micro example of rewiring a house and layer on the complications of living through that remodel.

An obvious part of the answer involves leveraging those physical systems in new and creative ways, particularly leveraging the precise coordination at scale that cybernetic systems afford.

Autonomous vehicles, thoughtfully deployed, offer the opportunity end traffic as we know it. Imagine caravans of pods traveling high speeds, platooning like cars on a train to reduce wind drag, operating like a flowing conveyor belts. Of course, if AVs are just luxury robots for single or zero occupancy vehicles picking up people’s dry cleaning or whatever they could exacerbate traffic. My dad did his graduate thesis on people living in camper vans as their commute took multiple days.

Some opportunities can be low tech. In a past job at my hometown water utility, we built the first stormwater recharge project in the history of the district. That’s a fancy way of saying we dug a ditch to slow down water and let it soak into the ground. Oh and we planted some plants to help the dirt keep shape. It’s simple and awesome. Have a look. There are active efforts to use data tools and AI to accelerate those types of projects from idea to implementation.

Or consider how prescribed burns might operate. Humanity has managed fire for millennia. Today it is technically possible to coordinate burns across jurisdictions using real-time weather models, satellite imagery, and smoke dispersion forecasts. Fire will come regardless. The question is whether we manage it thoughtfully or let it manage us. The intelligence layer doesn't replace the ancient practice of burning; it makes that practice possible at the scale and complexity our transformed landscape demands.

The pattern repeats across domains: virtual power plants orchestrating thousands of home batteries and rooftop solar panels as unified grid resources or performance-based building codes that adapt to new climate data rather than fighting yesterday's risks. In each case, the underlying physical infrastructure may be distributed, low-tech, even ancient but a digital coordination layer unlocks capabilities impossible through centralized command-and-control alone. This is how we terraform thoughtfully: not by replacing what works, but by weaving together independent actions into coherent response at the scale of the challenges we face.

One big little idea, an obvious no regrets path involves getting our public sector back in shape. Building big, bold projects requires a muscular, capable state.

Climate adaptation demands infrastructure at scale and speed, both physical and digital, centralized and distributed, ancient practice coordinated by modern intelligence. California once possessed both vision and delivery capacity. What's needed is the discipline to restore operational excellence and rebuild the administrative foundations on which ambitious public works rest.

The administrative apparatus that built California's great public works was forged in the Progressive Era. The New York Bureau of Municipal Research sent students to study actual operations such as tuberculosis clinics, water departments, election machinery. Not theory, but the practical how-tos of efficient government. They understood that ambitious policy required equally ambitious operational capacity. The machinery of government mattered as much as the vision.

That machinery has decayed. Procedures accrete exceptions. Requirements multiply without simplification. Ambiguity compounds as institutional memory erodes. The soft costs of navigating procedural sludge now dwarf the hard costs of construction. Every president tries to fix this and fails because the dysfunction is operational, embedded in protocols themselves, resistant to executive orders.

Where is the 21rst century equivalent of the BMR? Think tanks, consultants, academics and other parts of the “blob” as far as the eye can see and yet… the problem of tying ourselves in procedural pretzels remains intractable.

Tackling that challenge will require courage. The willingness to disregard what doesn’t work. California has accreted countless public institutions, many of which were created for an agrarian sparsely populated state rapidly formed in the wake of the gold rush. Modern California bears little resemblance. What endures, however, is the pioneering spirit to venture forth and make the dream a reality.

Writing this makes me want to ride Disney's soaring over California again. Been a few years...

I wrote a book on the pioneering spirit that makes California awesome. The cover was a mash up of the state water project, one of the few pieces of public works visible from space, and Big Sur, by wide acclaim the most amazing confluence of land and sea on this pale blue dot.

I recently had the privilege to take an aerial tour of Southern California's water infrastructure and other major public works. It’s very different looking out the window of a low flying, slow moving prop plane. Magic really. There I was able to see the State Water Project winding between pump stations and highways.

When we took a break in Bakersfield, the conversation turned to California’s lost mojo, its forgotten ability to build bold big infrastructure. The high speed rail project languishing in purgatory is case in point. The state’s history provides deeper perspective on projects today, some of which languish for half a century plus.

William Hammond Hall, California’s first state X, largely envisioned what we now know as the State Water Project and Central Valley Project in 18xx, more than half a century before it would be completed in 196Y.

Before anything is built, someone must dare to dream that things might be different.

California’s most visionary public works proceeded from a clear eyed assessment of future needs and dared to dream of what might be. In the early days of California’s high speed rail project, I remember asking several of the Sacramento set why the state didn’t advance the hyperloop. The response was really lame: that it wasn’t proper for the state to be in the business of building something so new and untested.

If you read the original plans for California’s tri-partite system of higher education or highway system or water works, the goal was to be the best in the world, unafraid to pioneer the new and untested on that route if necessary. What is required, what the world demands, not what is safe and convenient. Today we live in turbulent times, an era where the future is clouded.

The Anthropocene began in 1950. That’s a somewhat arbitrary date though reflects the era where human action accelerated planetary scale processes that used to operate on a geologic time scale. Today we are living through the first terraforming of our home planet. The urgent question is whether that transformation will enable human flourishing in the future.

Flying over Southern California, you could still see the burn scars not just recently in places like Altadena but also burned trees over the grapevine. The interconnected nature of these basic systems becomes clear as you see access roads branching out from highways to pump stations, power lines, transformers and other infrastructure.

Part of the challenge today is that past infrastructure was so successful that Southern California civilization has been able to coast off those past investments for decades. Another part of the challenge is that replacing or developing something new in the already built environment presents challenges. Just consider the micro example of rewiring a house and layer on the complications of living through that remodel.

An obvious part of the answer involves leveraging those physical systems in new and creative ways, particularly leveraging the precise coordination at scale that cybernetic systems afford.

Autonomous vehicles, thoughtfully deployed, offer the opportunity end traffic as we know it. Imagine caravans of pods traveling high speeds, platooning like cars on a train to reduce wind drag, operating like a flowing conveyor belts. Of course, if AVs are just luxury robots for single or zero occupancy vehicles picking up people’s dry cleaning or whatever they could exacerbate traffic. My dad did his graduate thesis on people living in camper vans as their commute took multiple days.

Some opportunities can be low tech. In a past job at my hometown water utility, we built the first stormwater recharge project in the history of the district. That’s a fancy way of saying we dug a ditch to slow down water and let it soak into the ground. Oh and we planted some plants to help the dirt keep shape. It’s simple and awesome. Have a look. There are active efforts to use data tools and AI to accelerate those types of projects from idea to implementation.

Or consider how prescribed burns might operate. Humanity has managed fire for millennia. Today it is technically possible to coordinate burns across jurisdictions using real-time weather models, satellite imagery, and smoke dispersion forecasts. Fire will come regardless. The question is whether we manage it thoughtfully or let it manage us. The intelligence layer doesn't replace the ancient practice of burning; it makes that practice possible at the scale and complexity our transformed landscape demands.

The pattern repeats across domains: virtual power plants orchestrating thousands of home batteries and rooftop solar panels as unified grid resources or performance-based building codes that adapt to new climate data rather than fighting yesterday's risks. In each case, the underlying physical infrastructure may be distributed, low-tech, even ancient but a digital coordination layer unlocks capabilities impossible through centralized command-and-control alone. This is how we terraform thoughtfully: not by replacing what works, but by weaving together independent actions into coherent response at the scale of the challenges we face.

One big little idea, an obvious no regrets path involves getting our public sector back in shape. Building big, bold projects requires a muscular, capable state.

Climate adaptation demands infrastructure at scale and speed, both physical and digital, centralized and distributed, ancient practice coordinated by modern intelligence. California once possessed both vision and delivery capacity. What's needed is the discipline to restore operational excellence and rebuild the administrative foundations on which ambitious public works rest.

The administrative apparatus that built California's great public works was forged in the Progressive Era. The New York Bureau of Municipal Research sent students to study actual operations such as tuberculosis clinics, water departments, election machinery. Not theory, but the practical how-tos of efficient government. They understood that ambitious policy required equally ambitious operational capacity. The machinery of government mattered as much as the vision.

That machinery has decayed. Procedures accrete exceptions. Requirements multiply without simplification. Ambiguity compounds as institutional memory erodes. The soft costs of navigating procedural sludge now dwarf the hard costs of construction. Every president tries to fix this and fails because the dysfunction is operational, embedded in protocols themselves, resistant to executive orders.

Where is the 21rst century equivalent of the BMR? Think tanks, consultants, academics and other parts of the “blob” as far as the eye can see and yet… the problem of tying ourselves in procedural pretzels remains intractable.

Tackling that challenge will require courage. The willingness to disregard what doesn’t work. California has accreted countless public institutions, many of which were created for an agrarian sparsely populated state rapidly formed in the wake of the gold rush. Modern California bears little resemblance. What endures, however, is the pioneering spirit to venture forth and make the dream a reality.

Writing this makes me want to ride Disney's soaring over California again. Been a few years...