A valuable background on 150 years of California's political and environmental history. It presents primers on a number of the most pressing natural resource issues... [and] offers some practical, challenging and timely ideas about how Californians can do a better job in the future.

This is a book of far-ranging interpretation and proscription; it is far more than a mere history of land use and development. Stephanie S. Pincetl... weaves a compelling historical narrative to bolster her case for a basic restructuring of California government and a redefinition of the meaning of citizenship.

[Pincetl] has brought together in one place, pieced together from a rather huge and disparate literature, a thorough, even exhaustive indictment. All of us who care about California can only hope the book will be noticed and read.

The author has mined a vast literature, her central thesis is original and provocative, and she makes many wise and perceptive observations. Transforming California will prove of great value to historians of twentieth-century America.

A thought-provoking work for environmental, urban, social, state, and regional historians.

Stephanie Pincetl's Transforming California covers the previously neglected terrain of California's environmental history―a story which has been absolutely central to the narrative of resource exploitation in America and of some of the most far-sighted attempts to resist it. This is an extraordinarily useful and important book.

Stephanie Pincetl has written a timely book. Transforming California provides important background to the current, untenable state of affairs in land use planning, not only in California but across the American West. Pincetl's work leads her to issue a call for renewed civic attention to the perils of environmental and landscape degradation.

Stephanie S. Pincetl is a research associate professor with the Sustainable Cities Program at the University of Southern California, where she also teaches classes in environmental studies. She has received Fulbright awards to work in France and has been a visiting scholar at the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. She also serves as president of the board of Communities for a Better Environment, a nonprofit urban environmental justice organization in California.