Behind the headline catastrophes of wildfires and floods lies California’s history of bending nature to human purpose.
The immense waters of Tulare Lake were repurposed long ago for irrigation of industrial farms, leaving a dry expanse. But wet years conjure the ghost of the lake, and recent atmospheric rivers have flooded nearly 100,000 acres of rich farmland. The Eaton fire, the Oroville Dam failure, depleted aquifers, land subsidence, megadroughts that bring contaminated wells—all are legacies of California’s attempts to reengineer nature. With global warming, the state’s immense infrastructure, built across centuries to remedy its natural deficiencies and dangers, has itself become a threat.

Finishing nature was originally a Jeffersonian idea of improvement adopted by a California horticulturists. But with industrial growth, improvement became control as the attempt to reorganize nature exploded in scale and ambition. From a leading historian, Finishing Nature is a story of hubris, Gilded Age corruption, good intentions gone awry, and a California that has become the victim of its own success.