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Land speculation, tamed into what we unironically call “real estate”—for what could be less real than an earth emptied of all but monetary value?—would remain one of the state’s dominant economic motors. It is not hard to draw a straight line from the settler hustles of early statehood to the inequ…

Five years earlier, when organized groups of Anglo settlers first began to trickle in over the Sierra Nevada mountains, scholars estimate that fewer than four hundred “foreigners” were living in what was still the Mexican state of Alta California. The newcomers, who in the eyes of the Mexican autho…

But what is killing the state is not overdevelopment or lousy public planning or even climate change. It is the persistence of certain ghosts. If California-in-flames is at the forefront of the Anthropocene, which by one scholarly definition is the age in which “humans in their attempt to conquer n…