Blog hiatus: Greetings from Los Angeles.

It’s been quite a long time since the last update here on the Garden. I got swamped and simply didn’t have time to dash off an article before leaving on a trip to Los Angeles—my second this month, following my strange History Channel experience—to film a video for my YouTube channel. It’s going to be an in-depth look at the environmental history of L.A., the sordid story that involves not only how the city got its water, which many people know from the classic film Chinatown, but numerous other aspects of the city’s history stretching back to Spanish colonization and even before. This is a pretty massive project and it’s taken almost all my time for the past week, so that’s why there have been no updates.

Having been here now at least a little while, I find Los Angeles a conundrum. It’s a magnificent city full of amazing things, but there’s a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that it should not exist, that it’s sort of artificial and contrary to nature. That’s not just in my imagination. For the first century of its history L.A. was a sleepy little settlement on the edge of a desert, fed by a thin trickle of water that was the only watercourse that ran year-round. That was before Frederick Eaton and William Mulholland figured out a way to divert the endless streams of fresh water from the Sierras, which flowed to Owens Valley. In my video you’ll hear that story and many more, and you’ll see the gargantuan, traffic-choked morass—interrupted with small pockets of paradise—that Los Angeles has become in the century since.

I’ll be back sometime in the first week of October. In the meantime, to quote one of my favorite YouTubers in his usual sign-off, be sure to drink plenty of water to stay hydrated. That advice is especially apposite down here amidst the freeways and palm trees.

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