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Policy responses to the challenges associated with environmental change, including more frequent and severe climatic events, have interlinked environmental and social impacts. Less attention has been afforded to the latter, and specifically to the question of not just whether but how such responses create or entrench inequality. This paper examines policy responses to drought events in California, United States, and the Western Cape Province, South Africa, in terms of their effects on inequality, revealed in relationships to water access networks. We use concepts of water justice and hydraulic citizenship to evaluate how and why these policy responses reproduced water injustices in the two settings. We focus particularly on two mechanisms linking responses to widened inequalities: values‐reinforcement and strategic communication. Using interviews, policy documents, and media reports, we employ process tracing methods to illustrate these mechanisms through which drought policy impacts hydraulic citizenship experiences, manifesting water injustice. We contribute to emerging examinations of environmental policy responses and maladaptation by demonstrating how concepts of hydraulic citizenship and an emphasis on mechanisms can help us better understand and identify experiences of water injustice. We note policy implications and areas for future research, highlighting droughts as consequential policy sites for advancing social and environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water reuse with Advanced Water Treatment (AWT) is increasingly appealing for urban areas seeking water supply reliability. In cities facing water scarcity, how can large-scale reuse support reliability and how do reuse operations affect water quality, energy use, and water conservation? This paper presents a systems analysis of metropolitan-scale water reuse and its effects on water supply and quality. For the case study of Los Angeles County, California, USA, hydroeconomic modeling is used to evaluate reuse as a contributor to water supply given urban water conservation, drought-induced water scarcity, and costs and benefits for supply and demand. Results indicate that AWT can be a viable source of supply especially when coupled with conservation. Across modeled scenarios, reuse provides as much as 30% of regional supplies. New water reuse with AWT becomes viable when imported water availability is 50% or less of historic values. Existing indirect potable reuse operations in the county remain important. Systemwide energy intensity of operations increases with greater reuse in the absence of water conservation. Modeled influent flow rates to wastewater treatment plants resemble historical values, but extreme flow events could pose risks. The paper offers a holistic framework to evaluate water reuse as a component of urban water management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the shifting fortunes of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California to better understand how asset owners are dealing with an increasingly-significant problem in changing energy landscapes: the devaluation of large fixed capital assets. In 2016, Pacific Gas and Electric Company announced a Joint Proposal to retire the Diablo Canyon plant by 2025, the result of a negotiated compromise with labor unions, environmental and community groups. Heralded by many commentators as a model for "just transitions" in the energy sector, this agreement has lately been called into question as new subsidies and political coalitions have emerged to support for the plant's continued operation. This paper investigates the political and economic conditions for the Joint Proposal as an example of "negotiated devaluation," aiming to understand why and how this strategy took shape, and what lessons it offers for other transition processes. Linking literatures on just transitions and devaluation in the energy sector, we show how negotiated devaluation may offer an emerging strategy for owners of energy assets to manage decline in a changing energy landscape. The case also demonstrates the political contingency of these coalitions and the transitions they subtend, and the limited dimensions of justice that might be affirmed in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For persons serving life-without-parole (LWOP) sentences in California, a commutation usually offers them the sole glimpse of hope for release from prison. While governors were reluctant to consider any sentence reductions from 1975 to 2016, commutations—including those for LWOP—have become a more frequent occurrence since. Yet, little is still known about how governors have justified reducing a sentence that initially offered no prospect of release from prison. Given the apparent change in practice, themes emerging from the content of 177 gubernatorial commutation summaries granted to persons serving LWOP sentences between 2017 and 2021 are analyzed in this paper. Through open coding, rehabilitative indicators (programming and institutional conduct) emerged as necessary preconditions for a commutation, while retributive factors (a reassessment of the nature of the crime and the prerogative to adjust excessive prison sentences or to correct sentencing errors) complemented sentence reductions. The findings expose the ethical issues that arise from an LWOP sentence and the subsequent commutation. More specifically, they shed light on the commitment offenses underlying commuted LWOP sentences and raise questions regarding the penal objectives that are supposed to be accomplished with permanent imprisonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In California, wildfires caused by electrical infrastructure have left the state's investor-owned power utilities with major and growing liabilities. But even in such an incendiary environment, the financial industry has demonstrated that it can profit from disaster. This paper uses the 2019-2020 bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric to explain how. In it, I show how "risk" in California's electricity industry is legally constituted, mediated, and allocated. First, I explain how financial perceptions of wildfire risk in California's electricity industry are shaped by the state's legal and regulatory environment, and how the law is used to manage this risk. I then turn to PG&E's bankruptcy to show how litigation functions as a financial strategy. In court, risk is endogenous to legal-financial practice. I develop the concepts of "legal arbitrage" and "leverage" to explain how law mediates the relationship between risk and finance. I adapt the concept of legal arbitrage to show how financial assets (like those in a utility with unprecedented wildfire liabilities) can possess both legal and market value, which can and often do diverge in circumstances of distress. I use the term leverage to refer to a particular kind of legal-financial power which enables actors to transfer risk away from themselves and onto others. In working through these concepts, I argue that that mainstream perceptions of risk in the financial industry are inadequate, especially in an era of increasing climate insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracing the story of beaver restoration across California, this paper investigates the emerging discourse of 'working with nature' through the lens of animal work and labour, exploring possibilities for, multispecies collaboration. At the intersection of animal geographies, environmental anthropology, and geographies of conservation, this paper finds three concurrent modes of working with beaver: beaver as labourer, beaver as coworker, and beaver as community. Beaver as labourer emerges as a mode where beavers go from material resource to low‐wage labourer, their liveliness predicated on their ability to be working for humans. Beaver as coworker transitions beavers from labourers to workers, respected for their skills as ecosystem engineers to be working with. Beaver as community emerges as a mode in which beavers and humans live with each other as kin, amidst wider multispecies assemblages. This mode sets the foundation to theorise the concept of multispecies collaboration, a term often used in the literature without definition. This paper explores the concept through theories of animal work and labour, challenging the premise of work altogether, while situating multispecies collaboration as an in‐between, a both/and space of working and living with 'nature'. This paper serves as an reflection on the ways in which humans 'work with nature', in a time where various nonhumans are being made to be 'workers'. It presents and analyses these relations, ruminates on implications for governance of these multispecies spaces, and develops the concept of multispecies collaboration as a critical consideration for Nature‐based Solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adjoint waveform tomography (AWT) sits at the cutting edge of seismic tomography on local, regional, and global scales. However, the choice in starting model may have a significant impact on the final inversion results. In this paper, we present 3 AWT models of California that are based on different starting models. We chose three models that were inverted at different scales: SPiRaL, a global travel‐time tomography model (Simmons et al., 2021, 10.1093/gji/ggab277), CSEM_NA, a regional adjoint tomography model of North America and the North Atlantic (Krischer et al., 2018, 10.1029/2017JB015289), and WUS256, a regional adjoint tomography model of the western US (Rodgers et al., 2022, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022JB024549). We then inverted three AWT models using the same source and receiver set. We ran each model over three period bands: 30–100 s, 25–100 s, and 20–80 s. Once the iterations were finalized, we used five methods of testing model similarity in both the model and data space. We conclude that the choice of starting model has a minimal impact on long wavelength models if an appropriate multi‐scale inversion approach is used. Plain Language Summary: Seismic tomography uses earthquake records to resolve three‐dimensional models of seismic wavespeeds below Earth's surface. Full waveform inversion seeks to model the physics of wave propagation to create models that can most accurately reproduce the waveform data that are observed from recorded events. In this paper, we sought to study the effect of the choice of starting model on final inversion results in California using AWT, a type of Full waveform inversion technique; to our knowledge, this type of experiment has not been carried out before with real data at this scale. We began with three starting models that were created on different scales with different datasets. We then used five methods to compare the final model results. We focused on comparisons of the visual similarity of the models, the tectonic structures the models resolve, and how well the synthetic waveforms match the observed data. We find that the choice of starting model does not have a large impact when the model domain has azimuthally distributed events and stations over long length‐scales. Key Points: We present three adjoint waveform tomography models of California that each begin with a different starting modelThe three final models are compared using five metrics that span both the model space and data spaceBased on a conservative multi‐scale inversion approach, we conclude that the choice of starting model has minimal effect on the final model [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The California mission system linked Spanish Catholic and political institutions. To secure land and convert Indigenous peoples, the Spanish built 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma in the 18th and 19th centuries. These missions were sites of disease, violence, and mass death. They were also places built by Native people, on Native lands, where they lived, prayed, and were buried. As a result, missions are fundamentally Indigenous places and important touchstones for descendants today. This article examines such meanings in the lives of several Ohlone peoples, Indigenous peoples of the San Francisco-Monterey region. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Ohlone tribes, I argue that we can understand relationships they sustain with California missions by considering such places as Indigenous cemeteries, Indigenous churches, and especially both. While dominant narratives restrict "missionized" Indigenous peoples to an irrecoverable past, this paper theorizes California mission as sites of violence, survival, and belonging to homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the primary gatekeeper to secure financial aid for college. The federal government instituted two changes to the process in 2017, commonly known as "prior-prior year" FAFSA: (1) an earlier start date that lengthens the filing period and (2) the ability to use completed taxes from the prior calendar year. This paper uses descriptive statistics to examine resulting changes in application filing behavior in California. Students submitted their FAFSA substantially earlier and refiling rates increased among independent students in the policy year. Although these changes may have reduced the burden of applying, the earlier submissions did not appear to substantially alter state aid receipt or postsecondary attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water affordability is determined by the percentage of income households that must allocate to municipal water services, while factoring in essential or basic needs water use. With the rise in water prices reported in most areas of the country along with somewhat stagnant income growth—a combination that suggests ceteris paribus—more of a household's disposable income is being spent on water services. This paper adds to the discussion in three ways. First, given the lack of a consistent definition for "affordability" and the subjective connotation associated with such a term, we develop and compare five different water expenditure ratios, including two different measures of water for essential needs, as well as measures for indoor, efficient, and actual water use. Second, because of the granularity of our data, we illustrate how such "affordability" measures can vary significantly within a water district and thus highlight how using district‐ or county‐level income measures can mask the degree to which affordability is an issue for households living in low‐income block groups. Our results indicate that the choice of income measure and type of water service use can influence affordability measures substantially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to show how Californian libraries deliver value, by taking a preliminary value framework previously developed from a study of academic literature, and applying it to the public library landscape in California. A "bricolage" approach was used to develop an evidence-based framework of value and subsequently to gather data about Californians' use of and attitudes about public libraries. The framework was developed through an extended literature review and applied across data gathered through a survey of residents, interviews with library stakeholders, a review of statistics on library usage, and a review of the outcomes of grant-funded programs in California public libraries. The most significant outcome of our project is a unique value proposition for California's public libraries. These libraries deliver value for individuals, families, groups, communities, and society as a whole. They provide opportunities and support for learning and knowledge development, health and wellbeing, community development, and economic development. Value is delivered through a unique combination of resources, people, and space. California's public libraries are largely offering services that are valued by the public; however, public awareness of the range and nature of services offered remains lower than desired. Practitioners can use the evidence-based framework and the unique value proposition to better understand the aspects of their library services that offer most value to their communities, and to make more persuasive cases for library support. This paper is the first to use an evidence-based framework of value in assessing the impact of California's public libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

California has experienced one of the most intense and prolonged droughts in its history in the last decade, prompting the state government to undertake a series of policy responses. This paper compares the impact of the 2015 urban water-use reduction mandate with respect to pre-policy voluntary conservation efforts and post-policy water consumption trends by examining utility-level water demand dynamics of the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California. The findings overall indicate that despite voluntary measures resulting in a gradual decline in urban water-use, the introduction of the regulatory stick achieved swift reduction targets that remained even after removal of the mandatory policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the phenomenon of film location maps in California. These unusual maps, popular in the 1930s and associated with Paramount Studios, presented those locations within California that could plausibly substitute for another world location onscreen (e.g., the Sierra Nevada mountain range could stand in for the Alps as a background in a film). In this article, I analyze a sequence of these maps, arguing that the global juxtapositions and cinematic superimpositions that they create were only possible within a specific historical context, namely (1) the formalization of the role of the location manager as that profession evolved within the studio system and location shooting in California; (2) a particular form of place-based tourist marketing for California that claimed a global variety of geographies within the state; (3) the importance of the idea of place to Paramount Studios in these years, and how this related to a contemporaneous boom in California place-naming; and (4) the simultaneous rise of pictorial maps, a kind of cartography that joined illustration and caricature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imperial Valley, California is called 'America's winter salad bowl' as the agricultural sector produces 2/3 of the winter vegetables eaten in the U.S. However, there is little understanding of the interplay of policy, environmental conditions, and economic components of the agricultural system producers face in the valley. Using a resilience approach, this study asks the research question of how producers in the Imperial Valley perceive and are adapting to changing conditions. Through interviews with eight agricultural producers, this paper identifies current challenges and strategies producers employ to navigate a changing agricultural system and build resilience for the future. Results highlight the critical role of government policies in the establishment of agriculture in the Valley, while producers see recent policies, such as labor and food safety regulations, as increasing their operation costs. Producers face economic challenges including losing contracts to Mexico, market price fluctuations, land leasing, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Maintaining access to water resources and investing in mechanization and technological innovations are two strategies producers use to maintain resilience and navigate change. Understanding how producers remain resilient given ongoing, and often accelerating, political, environmental, and economic change is critical to maintain agricultural systems in California and beyond. [Display omitted] • Explores producer perspectives to understand policy, environmental, and economic change within an agricultural system. • Government policy has negative and positive impacts on producer resilience, depending on the policy and context. • Labor and food safety regulations are major policy drivers of change, increasing operating costs. • Producers secure water access and invest in mechanization to build resilience to future change. • Understanding how producers navigate change is critical to maintaining agricultural systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant shocks to U.S. food systems at multiple scales. While disturbances to long-distance supply chains received substantial attention in national media, local supply chains experienced mixed impacts. As broad closures of schools, restaurants, and other businesses sourcing from local farmers removed key marketing channels for many direct market farmers, consumer interest in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), farmers markets, and on-farm and online direct farm sales increased. In this paper, we examine the resilience and vulnerability of farmers during the March 2020 through December 2020 period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on California farmers and ranchers engaged in direct market sales. Through a widely disseminated survey, we collected responses from 364 farmers and used these data to answer the following questions about direct market farmers in California: 1) What were direct market farmers' experiences of the pandemic from March 2020 through December 2020? 2) Which factors (e.g., relationships, institutions, market channels) did farmers report enhanced their resilience during the pandemic? 3) Which individual and operational factors were significantly associated with resilience during the pandemic? And finally, 4) how do the farmer-reported factors compare to the statistically significant factors associated with resilience? We created three dependent variables—ability to respond to the pandemic, concern about pandemic impacts, and change in profitability—to operationalize several aspects of resilience and examine their association with individual and operational characteristics through a series of ordered logistic regression models. Across both the quantitative models and the farmer reported factors, we found that farmers who increased their use of online sales and marketing during the first year of the pandemic, had larger-scale farms, and had more on-farm crop and livestock diversity were more resilient to the shocks of the pandemic. We also found that greater use of non-direct-to-consumer market channels was associated with less resilience. The characteristics of the farming operations played a relatively larger role in predicting resilience compared to the individual characteristics of the farmers surveyed. This study gives a detailed picture of how California direct market farmers fared during the pandemic and the characteristics associated with greater resilience. As short and long-term disruptions become increasingly common in agriculture, policies and programs can leverage support to direct market farmers, particularly direct-to-consumer farmers, as a strategy to strengthen farmer resilience. [Display omitted] • We surveyed 364 direct market farmers in California to assess their resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. • Farmers that increased their use of online sales and marketing were more resilient to the impacts of the pandemic. • Farmers with larger-scale farms and more on-farm crop and livestock diversity were also more resilient. • Greater use of non-direct-to-consumer market channels (e.g., wholesale) was associated with less resilience to the pandemic. • Policies and programs can help direct market farmers, especially direct-to-consumer farmers, strengthen resilience to crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Fe-EC was field-tested for its arsenic removal suitability in rural California. • Arsenic in groundwater was reduced from 150 µg/L to below 10 µg/L in all experiments. • Adding H 2 O 2 externally in the Fe-EC process shortened electrolysis time by 28 fold. • Waste was characterized per California regulations for planning waste management. • Increasing current density to eliminate electrode cleaning, needs further research. Small, low-income, and rural communities across the United States are disproportionately exposed to arsenic contaminated drinking water because existing treatment solutions are too expensive and difficult to operate. This paper describes efforts to overcome some barriers and limitations of conventional iron electrocoagulation (Fe-EC) to enable its use in the rural Californian (U.S.) context. Barriers and limitations of Fe-EC's application in rural California considered in this work include: 1) Frequent labor intensive electrode cleaning is required to overcome rust accumulation, 2) Electrolysis durations are long, reducing throughput for a given system size, and 3) Waste needs compliance with California standards. We report results from an investigation for overcoming these limitations via a field trial on a farm in Allensworth, a small, low-income, rural community in California. Our strategies to overcome each of the above barriers and limitations are respectively, 1) operating the Fe-EC reactor at high current density to result in sustained Fe production, 2) operating at high charge dosage rate with external H 2 O 2 , and 3) characterization of the arsenic-laden waste, and are discussed further in the paper. Main findings are: (1) Fe-EC removed arsenic consistently below the federal (and state) standard of 10 µg/L, (2) high current density failed to sustain Fe production whereas low current density did not, (3) electrolysis time decreased from > 1 hour to < 2 min with H 2 O 2 dosing of 5 mg/L at higher charge dosage rates, (4) dilution of As-sludge is required to comply with State's non-hazardous waste status, and (5) discrepancies were observed between lab and field results in using current density to overcome labor-intensive electrode cleanings. Finally, implications of overcoming limitations to scale-up of Fe-EC in relevant California communities are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A sample of projectile points from colonial missions in central California is analyzed. • Results show persistence of Indigenous lithic traditions in colonial contexts. • Native artisans eschewed local cherts for imported obsidian as well as colonial glass and porcelain. • Regional trends in colonial-era projectile point manufacture and use are examined. • Native resistance to the Spanish mission system occurred across various scales. Archaeological excavations at California mission sites have revealed diverse projectile points manufactured and used by Indigenous people. Through the examination of assemblages from four central California missions—San José, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and San Carlos—this paper considers the potential of lithic technologies to illuminate the interrelated issues of tradition and resistance. Based on our case study, and a comparative discussion of similar projectile points from other missions in Alta and Baja California, we argue that these artifacts offer an opportunity to move beyond the idea that the persistence of cultural traditions equals passive resistance in colonial settings. In addition to strong continuities of arrow point types from precontact times into the colonial period, the data from California also demonstrate that Native people incorporated new materials into their lithic technologies and perhaps even created new point types after the Spanish invasion. These patterns speak to the dynamic nature of tradition as well as the varied ways that Indigenous people sought to repudiate the values of colonialism in their daily lives. Taken together, the projectile points from California mission sites encourage archaeologists to consider how lithic technologies may reflect the capacity (realized or not) for Indigenous autonomy and active refusal of colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

California has set two ambitious targets aimed at achieving a high level of decarbonization in the coming decades, namely (i) to generate 60% and 100% of its electricity using renewable energy (RE) technologies, respectively, by 2030 and by 2045, and (ii) introducing at least 5 million zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) by 2030, as a first step towards all new vehicles being ZEVs by 2035. In addition, in California, photovoltaics (PVs) coupled with lithium-ion battery (LIB) storage and battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are, respectively, the most promising candidates for new RE installations and new ZEVs, respectively. However, concerns have been voiced about how meeting both targets at the same time could potentially negatively affect the electricity grid's stability, and hence also its overall energy and carbon performance. This paper addresses those concerns by presenting a thorough life-cycle carbon emission and energy analysis based on an original grid balancing model that uses a combination of historical hourly dispatch and demand data and future projections of hourly demand for BEV charging. Five different scenarios are assessed, and the results unequivocally indicate that a future 80% RE grid mix in California is not only able to cope with the increased demand caused by BEVs, but it can do so with low carbon emissions (<110 g CO2-eq/kWh) and satisfactory net energy returns (EROIPE-eq = 12–16). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]