California

Even as my plane was landing in Jinan, the capital of China's heavily industrialized Shandong province, I could see cranes. By the time I got to the city center I'd counted 76 more construction cranes along the way. There were probably more, but in the city proper the smog was so thick I couldn't see any farther than the sidewalk. When I visited, just a few weeks before last summer's Olympic extravaganza kicked off, Shandong had just been named to the Chinese EPA's "green blacklist" for its terrible air quality.

Venture capitalists are not known to haunt Sproul Plaza, with its drummers and dreamers, but last spring Silicon Valley’s financiers showed up in force. On March 21 they filed across the flagstones and into the Student Union auditorium to hear such scintillating discussions as “Carbon Regulation and the Impact on Innovation,” and “Energy Storage: Hydrogen, Batteries, and Beyond.” The draw was not the topics, but rather the 400 people sitting in the folding chairs.

Even if you’re only the slightest bit familiar with California’s $30 billion-plus farm economy, you may have heard the lament: urban development is steamrolling the state’s agricultural belt. Every day, bountiful fields surrender to big-box stores, fast-food restaurants, and residential sprawl. More than 100,000 acres were paved over in the Central Valley alone in the 1990s, and experts estimate that nearly 1 million more could vanish within a generation. Today’s Country Mouse is tomorrow’s City Mouse (or, more likely, a critter skittering across a cookiecutter suburban subdivision).

Early one November evening, 1973: Gasoline supplies have been cut by the month-old Arab Oil Embargo and people wait in long lines to buy gas. Inside Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, particle physicist Art Rosenfeld’s office is lit by 12 dazzling 60-watt fluorescent lights, which allows him to make a startling calculation.