181 - Dr. Daniel Rivers, California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations

The grizzly on California's flag has been gone for a century — hunted to extinction in the very state that made it a symbol. What does it mean to build a mythology of abundance on top of a landscape of loss?

In this episode, host Jordan Mattox sits down with Dr. Daniel Lanza Rivers of San José State University to dig beneath the Golden State's story of endless plenty. A scholar of environmental history, California studies, and settler colonialism, Rivers traces how a century and a half of promises about California's "natural" bounty shaped everything from Central Valley agribusiness to the state's long history of extraction, dispossession, and resistance.

Their conversation follows the throughline at the heart of Rivers's new book, California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations (Duke University Press) — out August 18th. The book traces a single powerful thread across the state, from the eradication of the grizzly to the making of Central Valley agriculture, the historic dam removals on the Klamath River, and the unhoused encampments of Oakland. Along the way, Rivers asks a hopeful question: what would it take to build a more just and livable California, one rooted in returning land and in the movements that have never stopped fighting for it?

It's a conversation about loss — but just as much, it's one about hope.

In this episode:

• Why the state's founding symbol is an animal it drove to extinction
• How agriculture remade the Central Valley — and who paid the price
• The Klamath dam removals and the movement for Indigenous land return
• What "decolonial" means when we talk about land, water, and history
• Reading California's landscape as an archive of both harm and hope

Dr. Daniel Lanza Rivers (they/them) teaches in American Studies at San José State University. Their new book, California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations, is available August 18th from Duke University Press.