The Orange County or Three Californias trilogy offers radically different histories of Southern California in the mid twenty-first century. In The Wild Shore, the survivors of a neutron-bomb attack live like post-apocalyptic, pioneers, foraging among the ruins of destroyed California cities, while Tom Barnard, a survivor from the twentieth century, preserves his own vision of a pre-apocalyptic past, shot through with myths, tall tales, and quickly vanishing knowledge. The Gold Coast depicts a quasi-dystopian future of cheap, cookie-cutter condominiums and sprawling, triple-decker freeways. In trying to recover California’s socioecological history, Jim McPherson struggles, as a writer and an activist, to imagine how a more just and sustainable society might emerge. Pacific Edge envisions a utopian society that has transformed the landscape of Orange County by its commitment to social, economic, and environmental justice. In a solar and wind-powered future, the land is not a passive backdrop but an active force in Kevin Clairborne’s fight to sustain the principles and practices of socioeconomic justice.
Paleontology and stratigraphy of the Miocene Saddleback Valley limestone, Orange County, Southern California
