Today we’re bringing you the second episode of Breaking History, our brand-new podcast, in which I go back in time—to make sense of the present. The first episode was about the seventh president, the 47th president, and America’s occasional craving for an anti-elite elite. In this episode, we travel to San Francisco in the 1970s, when a new, radical set of leaders took over the West Coast. This is when progressives first took root in California, where they remain supreme to this day—even though their policies have burned the state more than once.
You can listen to the episode below, or keep scrolling to read a print adaptation of it. If you enjoy either, follow Breaking History on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When I think about the recent tragedy of the California fires—and the questions we all have about what went wrong—there is one story I keep coming back to.
A few years ago, an amateur botanist was hiking above the Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles when he noticed several shrubs had been flattened by construction work. What he had stumbled across was an effort by the LA Department of Water and Power to replace the wooden poles of power lines with steel ones. The old ones, you see, were a fire hazard.
But the hiker was more worried about those flattened shrubs, which turned out to be a rare plant called Braunton’s milk vetch. And so he rallied environmental groups—which ensured that the fire safety project got put on pause.