Gray Brechin, Ph.D.

Historical Geographer & Author

Berkeley, California

About Dr. Gray Brechin

I GREW UP IN AND WITNESSED FIRSTHAND the conversion of California's Santa Clara Valley from carbon- to silicon-based life forms. That epic transformation required historical amnesia among residents and promoters alike in order to keep the speculative bubble inflating, as well as to deaden the pain that might be occasioned by recalling what Silicon Valley replaced in the course of its triumph. Witnessing that change from the organic community of soil to the commodity value of real estate there and beyond imbued me with a lasting concern for the environmental costs of perpetual and heedless urban growth.

Although I did not know it at the time, when I came to Berkeley in 1967 I had arrived at my appointed place. I received a B.A. in geography and history (1971), an M.A. in art history (1976), and a Ph.D. in geography (1999), all from the University of California in that town. Between 1978 and 1992, I worked as an architectural historian, critic, and television producer in San Francisco where I continued to develop my ideas on how humans use and abuse the earth. In 1978, I co-founded the Mono Lake Committee to save a dying desert lake that I’d come to love and in 1984-5 helped to break the story of the poisoned Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge in the San Joaquin Valley while working at KQED-TV. At that PBS affiliate, I witnessed from the inside the commercialization of public broadcasting — a transformation as dramatic in its way as that of the Santa Clara Valley. I then worked as urban design critic at KRON-TV’s “Weekend Extra,” the only such position in the country.

During a winter sojourn in Venice in 1985-6, I began to think systematically about the parasitism common to all great cities throughout history. I returned to the U.C. Berkeley Geography Department in 1992 to write a dissertation that would use San Francisco as a paradigm of how cities historically use remote control technology, military force, and thought control to exploit far-flung hinterlands. The University of California Press published Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin in 1999. The book spent sixteen weeks on the San Francisco Chronicle's best-seller list and is now a classic. Gary Snyder called it "a great gift" and Jan Morris "one of the very best books I have ever read about a place."

As co-recipient of the 1992 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize given by the Center for Documentary Studies, I simultaneously collaborated with photographer Robert Dawson during the 90s on a project documenting the environmental and social health of California. Also published by the University of California Press in 1999, Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream served as the basis of a three-year traveling exhibition of Dawson's photographs sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities.

I received a Bancroft Fellowship in 1995 and a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1998-9.

Seeking a way out of the gloom occasioned by my earlier writings as well as the related environmental, political, and spiritual crises accelerating in the 21st century, I began in 2003 to study the nearly invisible legacy of public works left us from President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. That study led beyond the physical objects themselves to the humanistic vision, compassion, and projected courage of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and of those whom they gathered around themselves to alleviate the terror of the last Great Depression (livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu). In their example — and especially in FDR’s enunciation of an international “second bill of rights” as the only way to stop war in his 1944 address to Congress — I found a viable alternative to the gathering catastrophes of free market fundamentalism. I am currently vice president of the National New Deal Preservation Association (newdeallegacy.org) and a visiting scholar at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography where I am writing a book. Another World Was Possible will remind those who have forgotten what government at its best can do to promote peace, education, and the common good.

I came late to a meeting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but when I did so, I found among the many qualities I admired in our 32nd president that of his affinity for land. Eleanor Roosevelt claimed that from her husband she had learned to observe from train windows:“He would watch the crops, notice how people dressed, how many cars there were and in what condition, and even look at the wash on the clothes lines.” Yet he was no passive observer, she said: “When the CCC was set up, he knew, though he never made a note, exactly where work of various kinds was needed,” thus (with the WPA, PWA, and CWA as well as CCC) setting millions of destitute men, women, and youth to productive work redeeming past mistakes to the land as well as those of an economic nature for which they were not to blame. “Franklin saw geography clearly,” concluded Eleanor. A geographer such as myself can appreciate such vision as I strive with others to see the geography that FDR and my countrymen made and from which we all today benefit.

— Gray Brechin, 2008