20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JULY 23-29, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com It’s one of the things that’s particularly strange. Often because a lot of the way American history is thought of, it’s a kind of westward movement across the land. It’s very tempting to look at California looking from the East. So then the agriculture and terrain of that becomes much more central to the picture, whereas one of the things I didn’t know and I found interesting was looking at California as the frontier of the Pacific world, almost a border of China or the extension of Russia coming down, looking at it from another angle, from a different perspective. The opening to Chapter 1 on otters—the first commodity that, as you explain, launched California into world trade—is quite bold and haunting. Why did you want the reader to understand from the beginning how they were nearly hunted to extinction? Giving you a sense of the violence behind the early settling in California and moving into how European nations moved into the territory I felt was very important, and twinning the ecological violence and then the human violence. It felt quite important to me to bring that up to the front. You also write that the otter massacre and the European invasion it engendered would become California’s original sin, with the aftereffects still rippling though to this day. What are the ripples we’re seeing? There’s this strange self-interlocking thing where sea otters are now trapped in the Central California coast, then they can’t go north and they can’t go south because of the sharks. What I was coming across in research was scientists saying this is because kelp forests have died off and so sea otters are too exposed and young sharks will take a bite out of them, trying to work out what they are. The reason the kelp forests are all gone is—not exclusively, but in large part—because the otter population was wiped out and they play this very specific role of keeping sea urchin numbers down. When sea urchins get out of control, they graze off all the kelp and then there’s no kelp forests, and so you get these kinds of hard switches. It was interesting how in the book, you categorize the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and racism becoming ecological factors. One of the things that I was very interested in was this idea that the coast became a kind of haven or safe place for communities, particularly in Monterey, particularly for Chinese. It was a place where there was less competition. So for quite a long time, it was a place of safety and freedom and liberal prosperity and liberation. Then it was a sort of twin thing, as anti-Chinese sentiment on the West Coast got stronger and stronger in the years after the Gold Rush, and at the same time there was a development of tourist interest in abalone; previously European Americans weren’t interested in that sort of thing. As it became a tourist attraction and became something that was valued, they started looking for ways to crack down on and basically to exclude Chinese fishermen from what had been a refuge. They were using the weapons they had, which at that time was conservation, which was coming into fashion at that time. It was interesting to rethink conservation as a use of power—and that’s not to disparage it or knock it—but the decision to conserve something or to regulate it, is a display of power, and power can get used for all kinds of things. You spend some time explaining how the future of abalone was endangered by Carmel’s so-called “King of the Bohemians,” George Sterling, with the “Abalone Song,” and Ernest “Pop” Doelter in Monterey, who popularized abalone as a dish. They’re easy to write about. They’re fun characters. But one of the things I was trying to get a sense of was giving a bit more of a holistic picture of how the coast was being used and exploited. In a lot of ways I was thinking of a picture of how power was used in the California ocean and how different forms of power—the kind of cultural power of Sterling and Doelter—was actually a very important one. Sometimes it can be overlooked [and] it’s often industry versus nature. Bringing in the idea that there was a cultural aspect—a lot of the industry was downstream of the cultural power, and George Sterling was, in his own strange way, a very sort of culturally powerful person. The end of the book is quite poignant, illustrating how what was once wild and abundant thanks to the California Current is now behind glass at the Aquarium. Do you see a way in which the humans can restore the previous give and take we had with the current? Or is it too late? That was the question I was grappling with quite a lot while I was writing it. I don’t think we can sort of rewind and say we’ll be back to where it was, but I think there’s a way of being honest about what it is, what kind of relationship you want to have with the ocean, and nature. I think there is space for maybe even just pockets of that kind of relationship. Joseph Ogilvy speaks 1-3pm Saturday, July 25 at Japanese American Citizens League Hall, 424 Adams St., Monterey. Free. (831) 648-8830. He will also appear at the Monterey Abalone Festival on Saturday, Aug. 1. Abalone were once plentiful along the California coastline. Over-harvesting in the early 20th century led to a decline. Today, the Monterey Abalone Company underneath Municipal Wharf 2 in Monterey raises abalone for sale to restaurants. Rock cod are native to Monterey Bay, one of many species caught by modern fishers. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS A sea otter with her baby munches on her latest catch underneath Wharf 2. Otters were the first global export from California in the 1800s for their fur, leading to the near extinction of the species. Once found up and down the state, today they are mostly confined to the Central Coast. DANIEL DREIFUSS
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