Lian Hurst Mann, AIA, From the Editor, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992 p. 2, pre-1769, Foreward and Back
"After all, as McPhee theorizes, "For an extremely long percentage of the history of the world, there was no California. Then, a piece at a time . . . parts began to assemble. An island arc here, a piece of continent there . . . came crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered."
"When the ice melted, the sea came up and drowned innumerable, river valleys-drowned the Sacramento-San Joaquin from the Golden Gate through the Coastal Ranges and into the Great Central Valley, filling the Bay Area's bays." So the story goes, describing the change that has shaped the California landscape for centuries and continues today, as told by John McPhee in his recent installment of Annals of the Former World in The New Yorker. Then came homo sapiens inhabitation, the Spanish, Mexican, then U.S. waves of colonization, the rush for gold, the fight for water, and at each stage the growth of the population, the built environment, and the imperative for "the control of nature." The control of nature is now so pervasive that only the artifice of a second socially-constructed 'Nature' is known to us-except when history's forces of necessity wrench us out of self-certain self-centeredness: earthquake, fire, flood, or civil insurrection.