In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency announced a groundbreaking photo project designed as a "visual baseline” against which to measure progress on cleaning up our air, land, and water. Over the next six years, about 100 freelance photographers fanned out across all 50 states for the Documerica series, capturing the environmental toll of rapid development but also everyday American life. 

Fifty years later, the archive offers a vivid documentary portrait of the way we were in early 1970s. Roughly 15,000 of the strongest Documerica pictures have been digitized by the National Archive and posted online. The California Sun combed through the roughly 900 California images to bring you these 26 favorites.

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Mike McPhate

The Documerica project captured the environmental toll of rapid development but also everyday American life.

A photographic trip to 1970s California

Christopher Hall's photos of parked cars around San Francisco seem drawn from some dreamy bygone era.  

But the scenes — a moody 1960s Ford Mustang parked outside a warehouse, a Rolls Royce in front of "Don Ramon's" Mexican restaurant — were captured squarely in the age of Twitter and Facebook. 

They are not staged. Hall, 60, who works in mental health care by day, heads out early mornings with a medium format film camera in search of vintage cars on the street. Sometimes, he said, he gets lucky, stumbling upon a perfect arrangement of color, texture, and nostalgia. Often though, a Tesla or Amazon delivery truck intrudes on the picture, forcing him to come back until it's lined up the way he wants it. 

"Ideally," Hall said, "I'm trying to find a scene where you have to question, 'Is this 1958 or is this 2021?'"

The resulting body of work captures a sort of echo from San Francisco's past, faded by time but still embedded in the landscape. 

Below, see a selection of Hall's images, and many more in his "Streets of San Francisco" Flickr album.

Christopher Hall's photos of parked cars around San Francisco seem drawn from some dreamy bygone past.

Photographer Christopher Hall reveals vintage San Francisco in found street scenes

A California airline used to operate a fleet of planes with smiley faces on their noses. They called them the Grinningbirds. 

Pacific Southwest Airlines, based in San Diego, was the first large discount carrier in the U.S., growing into an industry leader of intrastate flight in the 1960s and 1970s and paving the way for copycats like Southwest Airlines. 

The smiles grew out of a playful corporate culture reflected in the carrier's slogan: “The World's Friendliest Airline.” PSA pilots were encouraged to joke with passengers. Stewardesses wore go-go boots and hot pink miniskirts. Martinis, at $1 each, flowed freely.

The fun-in-the-sky approach won a loyal clientele. Unimaginable today, PSA made it possible to love an airline, the L.A. Times once wrote. It "summed up everything that was groovy and freewheeling about California."

By the 1980s, rising competition began eating into PSA's bottom line. A trend of airline consolidation finally came for the company in 1988, when it was swallowed up by US Airways. The smiles faded away. From time to time, however, a mischievous mechanic has been known to add a smile to a plane in a nod to the good old days.

Below, a few more finds from the PSA photo archive:

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Pacific Southwest Airlines, based in San Diego, was the first large discount carrier in the U.S.

Pilots telling jokes. Stewardesses in go-go boots. $1 martinis. The 'world's friendliest airline' started in California.

A single pine in the middle of the Mojave Desert. 

Palm trees adorned with strange red beacons. 

A trio of cacti with green hues that seem just a little bit off. 

Since the 1990s, disguised cell phone towers have become a staple of America's urban environment. Unlike power and landline companies, cell phone providers cannot resort to eminent domain. Camouflage became a tool to persuade reluctant land owners to allow the use of their property. Over time, the disguises have become more elaborate, with church crosses, water towers, and flagpoles now a part of the cell tower repertoire.

Between 2015 and 2020, the Bay Area photographer Annette LeMay Burke set out across the American West in search of those landscapes where something seems amiss. The result is presented in her beautiful new book, “Fauxliage." 

Many Americans tolerate the cellular masquerade as a price of living in the digital age. But it also conceals a creeping surveillance of our movements and behavior by government and Big Tech, Burke wrote. In this context, she added, "the kitschy tower costumes seem more nefarious."

Annette LeMay Burke from "Fauxliage," published by Daylight Books

The Bay Area photographer Annette LeMay Burke's new photography book “Fauxliage” spotlights landscapes where something seems amiss. 

The masquerading cell towers of the American West

The familiar story of the Donner Party is one of misfortune, madness, and profound isolation. But archaeologists have come to believe that the Midwestern migrants who became trapped in the northern Sierra during the winter of 1846-47 were not alone.

While October snowfall represented a catastrophe for the pioneers' wagon train as they crossed the mountains, it would have been wholly ordinary to members of the local Washoe tribe, whose way of life had been adapted to the Lake Tahoe region for thousands of years.

During the warm months, the natives gathered stores of pine nuts, roots, and dried rabbit meat. In the winters, they wore cloaks of rabbit fur, ice fished, and huddled in willow huts with central fire pits. Three winters before the arrival of the Donner Party, the frontiersman John Fremont recorded an encounter with the Washoe. As his men struggled through deep snow, he wrote, three natives were seen, “circling around us on snow-shoes and skimming along like birds.” The tribesmen returned later with an offering of pine nuts.

According to Indigenous histories, Washoe scouts kept close track of strangers in their territory. The migrants, among the few whites they had ever seen, would have aroused intense interest. But Donner testimonies mentioned only a few encounters. In one, William Eddy, a carriage maker from Illinois, fatally shot a Washoe man who had fired arrows into their oxen. In another, a tribesman emerged from the wilderness and offered the foreigners a handful of edible roots.

But those almost certainly weren’t the only encounters. The 2011 book “An Archaeology of Desperation” introduced historical accounts overlooked in the popular telling of the Donner story: those passed down to the great-great-grandchildren of Washoe members present during the Donner encounters.

Numerous times, according to the oral histories, Washoe scouts brought the stranded migrants food — including a deer carcass, fish, and wild potatoes — but were met with hostility. On one occasion, an offering of fish was refused. On at least three others, the Washoe approached the Donner camps with food only to be met by gunshots, leaving one man dead.

When a scout saw the white people cannibalizing their dead, the tribe was said to retreat, afraid they too might be killed and eaten. From then on, the Washoe referred to the migrants as “not people.”

Of roughly 80 pioneers who set out for California from Missouri, only half survived. Their apparent distrust of the Sierra natives, even as starvation loomed, likely came from their experiences on the trail, historians say. During the three weeks before their arrival in Washoe country, members of the migrant train reported being shot at and robbed of horses and cattle. But native histories, supported by archaeological evidence, suggest the Washoe tried to help them, wrote Julie Schablitsky, an archaeologist who performed excavations at the Donner site in the early 2000s.

Once the migrant camps were deserted, tribal members returned to burn and bury objects left behind in a bid to drive away unwelcome spirits. But the Donner Party was only a harbinger of what was to come. Gold was discovered down the mountain range a year later. Before long the region was swarmed by prospectors, and the Washoes' way of life was put on a path toward oblivion.

As the snowbound migrants succumbed to starvation in the Sierra in 1847, they were not alone. The Washoe people were watching, and they had tried to help.

Native Americans tried to help the starving Donner Party, research shows. They faced gunshots.

Lockdowns, mask mandates, defiance from churches, anti-mask protests, hotels requisitioned for the poor, a devastating winter surge.

California's coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has been, in many ways, eerily similar to the influenza pandemic of 1918.

As the state's Covid-19 cases and deaths plummet, many journalists and academics have been predicting that the similarities will persist in the post-pandemic period, with a return of the exuberance that characterized the Roaring Twenties. 

The waning of the 1918 pandemic coincided with the end of World War I, and Californians were determined to make up for lost time. Los Angeles’s population grew by more than 200% in the 1920s to more than 1.2 million people. The city’s Mexican population tripled. The film industry exploded. 

San Francisco, one of the American cities hardest hit by the flu, experienced a cultural resurgence with several new theaters and a proliferation of speakeasies in defiance of Prohibition. It was a period, according to a KRON documentary on San Francisco in the 1920s, “when hemlines got higher, morals got lower, and the party never stopped.”

A year after the coronavirus roared into California, signs are now mounting of a return of ordinary pleasures, like dinner parties and hugs for grandma. A recent outlook by economists at UCLA predicted that 2021 would be one of the strongest years of growth in 60 years. “With a vaccine and the release of pent-up demand, the next few years will be roaring,” wrote Leo Feler, a senior economist with the forecast.

The California Sun spoke to two experts, Dr. Shira Shafir, an associate professor of epidemiology at UCLA Fielding School, and Pieter M. O’Leary, author of “The 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic in Los Angeles” in Southern California Quarterly, for their insights. Our conversation, below, has been edited for clarity and brevity.

California Sun: Is there a pattern for what happens after a pandemic?

Shafir: We can go all the way back to the Black Death of the 14th century and we can see there is a pattern of those who survive. There is a tremendous sense of, “I’ve made it through.” In the Middle Ages, it was very much about debauchery. In the United States, post-influenza pandemic, it was about the Roaring Twenties. I think we're even now starting to see little snippets of what things may be. You see people starting to travel, posting on social media, that they're having these indoor parties, that they're ready to get back to life as normal. So I think we already have small hints that once people are vaccinated, they feel that they themselves are protected, that they are ready for their own Roaring Twenties.

Sun: How long do you think this post-pandemic celebration will last? 

O’Leary: I think that maybe it will be two years of this kind of buoyancy and happiness, maybe not even that long. But I think some of those things that pre-existed the pandemic are going to come back and may be exacerbated by that. There's also this growing sense of the disparities, the racial disparities and the impacts on health. I think there's a lot that's going to be done to try and address that. I also think there's going to be a lot to celebrate science. And I hope that occurs, just to realize that science is really what saved us. 

Sun: What were the key drivers in getting back to normal in San Francisco and Los Angeles after the 1918 flu pandemic? 

Shafir: It's really important to note that in 1918, when there was no vaccine, they were able to control the pandemic with the other measures that we have been putting forward. So mask, wearing, social distancing, hand hygiene, etiquette, all of those things together, or as we sometimes call the Swiss cheese model of respiratory virus defense. All of those things together, helped them control the pandemic. So will it be more efficient now? Absolutely. But is a vaccine the only tool or the only path forward? No, it's not.

Sun: What do you think people should understand at this moment in the pandemic? 

O’Leary: Covid and the Spanish flu were natural things. Disease outbreaks occur and we as human beings are not separate and apart from nature. We can control them a little better now than we could in 1918 with vaccinations, more effective masking, and improvements in medicine, but we're still part of nature and anybody who thinks that we're not or that we've conquered nature is wrong. And all they have to do is go back and look at what's happened in the last year. 

Shafir: The biggest thing I hope people will understand is that the reason we are now in a good place is because of the work that we have all been doing. Transmission decreases because of a combination of things: No. 1, because of vaccination; No. 2 because of mask wearing; No. 3, social distancing, and No. 4, sort of all the rest. So we absolutely should be optimistic. Now is the time for us to begin looking to the future and thinking about what it will be like when we are all vaccinated.

But it's also the time to remember, we're not all vaccinated. And we do still have massive equity issues, particularly in the county of Los Angeles, where we see individuals who are white are way more likely to have been vaccinated than individuals who are Black or Latinx. So we need to be and we should be and we deserve to be able to be optimistic, but that needs to be balanced with continuing to act communally. 

Noah Smith

The California Sun asked experts what history tells us about life after a pandemic. 

Signs point to a roaring 2020s in post-pandemic California

Half of Californians live below this red line. 👇

That may be hard to believe, but it's more or less accurate, demographers say: Roughly 20 million people reside north of a line running through Los Angeles, and the other 20 million are squished underneath it.

In the second half of the 19th century, the majority of the state’s residents lived in Northern California, where the Gold Rush city of San Francisco hosted the largest urban population on the West Coast. So what happened?

The shift began with the oil and citrus booms of the 1890s. “Los Angeles and Southern California have one of the largest oil reserves of any region in the country. And agriculture made it an attractive place for land speculators, especially as major aqueduct projects brought water to the region,” said Justin Levitt, an adjunct political science professor at California State University, Long Beach.

Then came Hollywood’s entertainment boom in the 1920s, the WWII defense boom that sprouted industrial factories as well as a sizable military presence in San Diego, and the Southern California aerospace boom of the 1940s and '50s. The population exploded, with Los Angeles County growing from about 170,000 in 1900 to 10 million today, a full quarter of California’s people.

The San Francisco Bay was once considered the state's most important harbor, but Southern California stole that distinction away too. The ports at Long Beach and Los Angeles are now the busiest in the United States. 

“L.A. spent a lot of resources in the first two decades of the 20th century building the groundwork of what would become a major harbor,” said Levitt. “Over time, ships became deeper and needed deeper water and different kinds of berthing. The shallower San Francisco Bay waters weren't set up as well for new ships, especially after WWII.”

There are signs that California's slackening growth in recent years — a consequence of curtailed immigration, housing shortages, and high cost of living — might be nudging the dividing line back north, said Dowell Myers, a demographer at USC.

At last check, about five years ago, the halfway mark was near Hollywood Burbank Airport, he said. “But since then population growth has really stalled in the state. If anything, growth is shrinking in the southern counties. This weak growth must be moving the halfway line slightly upward geographically.”

John Metcalfe

How it happened that half of California's population was squeezed into the lower portion of the state.

The curiously lopsided population of California

The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti once likened San Francisco to a place that “drifts anchorless upon the ocean.”

The metaphor comes to life with the city’s signature fog, which pours over the hills in slow-motion waves of white. On the ground, the experience can be dreary, “like living inside a great gray pearl,” as Herb Caen once put it. But viewed from above, the fog resembles the sea itself, upon which bits of the skyline appear like lighthouses or ship masts.

Below, six views of San Francisco submerged.

Viewed from above, the city's signature fog makes bits of the skyline appear like lighthouses or ship masts.

San Francisco submerged

The Oakland painter and poet Obi Kaufmann calls to mind a tatted-up, modern day John Muir, only with half of the beard and serious watercolor skills. Like the 19-century Scotsman, Kaufmann has become recognized for his explorations of California’s natural world in so-called "field atlases" that blend graceful prose with paintings of maps and wildlife. 

His first book, “The California Field Atlas,” published in 2017, surprised even Kaufmann with its commercial success, winning book awards and selling so many printings that publisher Heyday Books commissioned four more field atlases. One about water came out last year. 

After the publication of his latest volume, “The Forests of California,” in September, the California Sun posed an unreasonable challenge to Kaufmann. In a state covered by 33 million acres of forestland, give us your top five destinations. Below, in his own words, are his choices. 

5. The coastal redwood forest — from just south of Big Sur, north to just across the border of Oregon, the kingdom of Sequoia sempervirens, the tallest tree species in the world extends in a mosaic of old-growth and second-growth forest, providing habitat for a precious array of endemic biodiversity that can only exist among these big trees. Only 5% of the old-growth forest still exists, and it is in these ancient spaces that the most endangered species live. These trees still survive. It is very hard to kill a redwood, but once you chop it down, its regrown form finds itself in a broken system that has largely forgotten its old-growth functionality. The only way to really kill a redwood is to heat up the atmosphere and remove the now endangered phenomenon of coastal fog that supplies the nutrient moisture this majestic forest needs.

4. The Los Padres National Forest — extending from Monterey to Santa Barbara, the two sections of the national forest (divided near San Luis Obispo) harbor a portfolio of arboreal diversity that rivals anywhere on the globe for sheer beauty and variety. In the wilder backcountry, California’s largest predators stalk prey across verdant wildflower fields, through lilac chaparral, in watersheds that once supported large runs of trout and salmon; which if we are wise enough to make way for, could once again.

3. The sky-island forests of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts — pockets of relict habitat from a time when California was a colder and wetter place, the mountain top forests of the desert seem to be out of place and time. Hike from sand to snow, Palm Springs to the top of San Jacinto and marvel at how old pine trees make their home in this place of extraordinary, physiographic diversity. These delicate places are shrinking, running upslope — it has been measured that the San Bernardino Forests has retreated by two hundred feet in the last fifty years — an incredibly fast pace for an ancient ecosystem.    

2. The montane forests of the Sierra Nevada — from the Plumas National Forest south 400 miles to the Sequoia National Forest, across the west slope of the longest, continuous mountain range in the lower 48, the forests of the Sierra Nevada are at least as intrinsically valuable as they are wealthy in the natural resources they provide. On the long list of their invaluable holdings, these forests shelter the largest trees on the planet and work as a water tower, making human civilization possible in this otherwise arid state.

1. The California floristic province — the whole enchilada! The botanical region west of the Sierra Nevada, reaches from the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon, down to the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Isolated from the rest of the continent by the Sierra, the tallest mountain range in the lower 48, the process of natural selection has invented here, a stunning, world-class assemblage of biodiversity. The measure of a forest's health is rooted in the quality of its connectivity and its diversity. Understanding the measure of this necessity is the key to not only defending the integrity of forest health but is intimately tied to the quality of our continued residency in this beautiful place we call home.

Ashley Harrell

Obi Kaufmann has released a new book, “The Forests of California,” that blends graceful prose with paintings of maps and wildlife.

California's 5 most wondrous forests, according to "field atlas" author Obi Kaufmann

Along the slopes of the Sierra west of Lake Tahoe, several oddly symmetrical groups of trees rise from the middle of the forest. Shaped like wagon wheels, they are known as nelder plots and were planted in the 1990s as part of a study at the Blodgett Forest Research Station.

The aim was to glean insights into resource competition among trees, said John A. Helms, a silviculturist involved in the project. "It's a little bit like putting rats in a cage or people in a tight suburban environment," he told the Sun. "People behave differently when they're jammed together."

To visitors viewing the plots at ground level, the trees appear little different than the surrounding forest. Send up a drone, however, and their full magnificence comes into view.

A few more pictures. 👉 I Love the Sierra 

Also, a great drone's-eye view rising up from a plot. 👉 @mirandaleconte 

Along the slopes of the Sierra west of Lake Tahoe, groups of trees shaped like wagon wheels rise from the middle of the forest. 