The future of California's "cap-and-trade"program, deep sea exploration and more

Most of the time we ride during the day. This morning was a special morning because we were riding through Death Valley, so we actually woke up at 3 a.m. this morning and were on the road ... and we only had about 60 miles to ride today, so most of it was downhill so we all made it by 10 a.m.

Yes, we have been blown away by the generosity of all our hosts. So we partner with a lot of churches and community centers along the way ... they house us and feed us and find a place for us to shower, whether that’s in their church at the local community center, or just a hose outside. We’re happy with anything.

You have a lot of adrenaline, a lot of great people to keep you pumped up along the way, a lot of naps. But yeah, [we’re] definitely tired but it’s definitely worth it; seeing the country and being able to spread the word about affordable housing and its need is just something that we really enjoy, so it’s worth it. And we can sleep in two weeks. 

There are ancient shorelines (submerged below the sea) that we're able to access with our gear which are mapping systems.... They look different than the shorelines that you and I walk on on the coastline. A lot of times they become partially, or entirely lithified – that means made into rock  – so, you can see shelves and fragments of old organisms. But we can also see features like caves. In fact it's pretty incredible to see the caves above water and then map, and eventually put the remotely operated vehicles with video cameras on caves that are just below the surface of the water, see the similarities and then note the differences.    

Ancient paleo-shoreline off Santa Barbara.

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Courtesy of the Ocean Exploration Trust

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We've discovered new species here. We've been amazed by the amount of biodiversity. It's an upwelling area so that means there's lots of nutrients in the water that bring a lot of organisms to the area. As well as a geologically very exciting area because of the sea level change that's happened through tens of thousands of years. And also tectonics which have causes the islands and the whole area to either uplift (become higher out of the water), or subside (sink lower into the seas). 

Scientists examine coral, a crab and a brittle star in the "wet lab"

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Julye Newlin

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We have a multi-beam eco-sounder on the exploration vessel Nautilus and that's capable of mapping ocean depths from about 50 to 6,000 meters– so most of the ocean. When we want to map that shallower bit, especially because of the mission being such a shallow water oriented mission, we brought out new technology which is is an autonomous surface vessel. This is a remote controlled boat that we set on a mission to map areas that are about from 150 meters all the way to the coastline. So, we're able to get complete coverage of the sea floor and understand with very good detail, what features there are in these area.

R.O.V. Argus, Nautilus Expedition, 2017

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ALEX DECICCIO

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We also have remotely operated vehicles equipped with HD videocameras, an arm so that we can take samples, and other oceanographic equipment like salinity, temperature, and dissolved oxygen sensors. We also have capability and will be using the mapping systems that are on the robot itself to map even higher resolution down to a centimeter level of detail of some of the features we find.     

Control, Nautilus Expedition 2017

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Julye Newlin

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Christopher Isherwood was an Englishmen, went as a young man to Berlin where he found his first great urban material. And he wrote the stories on which Cabaret was based.

Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood

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Flickr Creative Commons

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Isherwood has a rather pivotal role to play in history because of his role as an out gay man decades before anybody else was really that ‘far out’. He made no secret of the fact that he was living with the great Southern Californian, Don Bachardy whom he met at Santa Monica Beach and with whom became a lifelong love story in their house on Adelaide overlooking Santa Monica Canyon. 

Isherwood came to Southern California in 1939 because Berlin was fast becoming an inhospitable place on the eve of war. And also I think, he was looking for a kind of freedom as a gay man that he couldn't count on where he grew up. There's a wonderful moment in the diary where he talks about attending the first Gay Pride parade in West Hollywood. And being acclaimed – slightly uncomfortably for him – as a hero. 



Lots of gay writers have talked about Isherwood as an inspiration, as a pathbreaker. Certainly, he's all that but he's also much more, just as a prose artist. Had he not been gay, we would certainly be reading him today just for the sheer sentence by sentence loveliness of his fiction and these diaries. 

But of course he did travel in Hollywood circles because he was a screenwriter. Isherwood's home in Santa Monica Canyon became a kind of watering hole not just for his friends locally, but also for friends from out of town, many of them gay figures like Stephen Spender. There's a wonderful diary entry of Isherwood on his balcony watching a party he was presumably one of the hosts. But also hanging back and talking about how the writer is both a participant and an observer. And of course, as a diarist, he's the quintessential observer. And he's very, very funny. And sometimes very cutting. He will take people apart including some of his collaborators in the film business. He could say things that he was not going to say in public or anywhere else because these diaries were not published until he had died. 

Diarizing has always been a kind of refuge for people who have secrets to keep, or who are deferential professionally to other people. Somebody like Isherwood who loved the love that dared not speak its name in the middle of the century, even in Los Angeles, was writing about his life with Don Bachardy and in the Southern California scene that you could never publish in a million years. He wasn't furtive. He was proudly who he was but this was not something he was going to write about in the LA Times. 

I have a particular affection for the first volume because it starts in 1939 and then runs up to 1960. And the city, of course, is changing changing quite a bit over those years. And his first impressions of the city are amazing. Isherwood looked at Southern California from the west, from the coast. He settled in Santa Monica Canyon and adored it. Isherwood spent a lot of time at the beach where he met his lifelong companion. He wrote really lovingly about the natural landscape. Not just the ocean, not just the beach, but the mountains. He is a great example of somebody who got here and with is eyes open - this was a guy who has written the story on which Cabaret is based and called it ‘I am a Camera’. Well, he is a camera and so you get really, an almost cinematic description of what the place was like. This is a camera with its shutter open for almost 40 years.

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Flickr Creative Commons

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As a Southern Californian, I can't think where else you can find a description of the place that is at once factual, and lyrical, and describes a city that is still around us. Maybe you have to look a little more closely. But its the portrait of a city growing up and Isherwood growing up with it. And the two of the together is almost as great a love story as he and Don Bachardy.