| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Development. By Stephanie S. Pincetl. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xix + 372 pp. Illustrations, maps, chart, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $45.)

For better or worse, California is often seen as the heart of the modern American West. Stephanie Pincetl describes a California, and by implication a West, where resource development has been guided by a technocratic elite working hand in hand with business interests at the same time that the democratic masses have been alienated from the decision-making process. Pincetl's academic training is in anthropology and urban planning rather than history, and her book needs to be understood in that light. What Pincetl tries to do is trace the development of a political order that created "political paralysis, environmental degradation, and economic inequality" (p. xi). Of particular concern to Pincetl is that decisions about resource allocation and developments are made by "shadow governments," composed of commissions and boards staffed by bureaucrats friendly to pro-development interests that operate with little accountability to a public that is increasingly cynical about government's role as an advocate for the people in natural resource decisions (p. 236). Hence, Pincetl's book is foremost an indictment of that system, and secondarily a history of its development and its negative effects on the shaping of California as a place. . . .

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