 The desert, the land of little rain, but infinite potential. What's up to all my environmental lit fans out there? It's your boy Ian and I'm here today to do a book review on Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, which is an awesome piece of environmental literature. It was first released in 1903, or that's when the essays were first read in and compiled, and it takes place in eastern California, in the desert of eastern California. Mary Austin is a really cool figure because she is the real John Muir or Henry David Thoreau, because if we think of Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pong, he was right next to the city. He could just trot into the city or to Boston in a very small amount of time. If we look at John Muir, he would spend time in the Sierras and out of nature, but he also had a life he moved around a lot. But Mary Austin lived for decades out in the Owens Valley, which is in this part of California. So it's southeast of the Bay Area, northeast of Los Angeles, and kind of west, northwest of Las Vegas, and it's west of Death Valley. And she is such an influential figure because in the early 1900s, there was something called the California Water Wars, where up here in Mono Lake and up here Los Angeles basically stole all the water, used corruption, a guy named Mahalan, if you guys ever saw the David Lynch movie, Mahalan Drive or have been to Los Angeles and been on Mahalan Drive. He, they stole all the land from all the lakes and all the rivers up there, and it caused a huge controversy. There was violence, there was uproars, you know, there were uproars. It's a pretty cool history once you look into it because, you know, a ton of people in Los Angeles move people up there to get on boards and for corruption, pay people off, and it's, and if you are an environmentalist, you know that, look how far of a journey that is, that if you take water from an area that's already a desert, if you take water from a desert, what's that going to do to an ecosystem? And I've spent a ton of time in this ecosystem because growing up in Las Vegas, I went skiing out in Mammoth Lakes, which is, you know, in the Owens Valley, and, you know, camped out here, hiked out here, spent a bunch of time out in this area. It's one of my favorite areas in the country. I'm actually sad there is, it's very undeveloped. So Mary Oliver was living a rugged lifestyle as a female and as a writer and as a creator for decades out in the Owens Valley before, while, you know, the other transcendentalists, the nature poets and the nature writers of the time in England and around the world weren't living this rugged of a lifestyle. She was one of the first and I was reading some stuff and people are calling her an eco-feminist. I'm like, she didn't know any of that. She was an naturalist and an equal spiritual ecologist, an environmentalist, a person who lived alongside the Shoshone tribes and the Paiute tribes out there. And it's a very admirable thing. And this book, is this book as good as Walden? Is this book as good as my first summer in the Sierra? Sierra? Absolutely not. It's probably only 30% as good. This is a, if I rated this on an objective level, like reading this today, if this was released today, I would give this a two out of a ten. But, well, I'll take that back. I would give it a six out of a ten. But some of the nature writing in here, for those who live in the desert, who have experienced the desert or want to understand the desert, is some of the best writing available. For sure, Mary Austin has this Victorian style. It's this weird Victorian style, the very educated Victorian style, that suddenly meets the desert, the uninhabited Owens Valley desert. Which, and if you guys go to the Owens Valley today, Big Pine, Lone Pine, Mammoth, Mammoth will develop, Bishop Californian. It's really undeveloped still. There's probably only less than 10,000 people living there now. So, back in the day, it's absolutely deserted. So, this book has some of the best nature writing around. And so, I would, so, what she captures, and this area is so unique, and I would recommend people go and check this area out, because if you go down to Tucson and Phoenix and Arizona, right, there's desert down there that is kind of green, there's saguaros and you can farm down there. And if you kind of start going north, then you hit the Mojave Desert, you know, Las Vegas, and you know, the Grand, not the Grand Canyon, but you know, it's part of the desert in Utah. And it's almost unlivable. There's very little water, there's very little plant life. But then as you move up into the Sierras, into, you know, Central, Central East California, Central Nevada, you kind of get this mix of desert, that Mojave Desert, then like high desert. And it's really cool because it's really uninhabited. So this is me out at Convict Lake. So the other cool thing is the Sierra Mountains. When we think of, when I say the Sierra Mountains, you think Yosemite, or maybe even Lake Tahoe, right? But the Sierras, when they first start, so when you, like, when you first see the Sierras, like when I would drive from Las Vegas over something called West Guard Pass, when the Sierras are so pointy, they're almost like the Tetons in Wyoming, that they are very pointy and very sharp, very dynamic, and they have snow. But then right down below them is this desert-y type of area. And, you know, this day when I was out here, it wasn't the land of little rain. It was the land of lots of rain, lots of cold, lots of snow, lots of wind. This was in May, if you could believe it. This was like May 31st. I went skiing. I was powder skiing in Mammoth. It was pretty insane. This area is so great. And Mary Oliver, I'm not Mary Oliver, I'm sorry, excuse me, not the poet. Mary Austin really captures that because she, some of her best essays is when she talks about, I mean, they're at the start. So if you guys want to read through this or get a copy online, of course, read The Land of Little Rain. That's an essay. The Pocket Hunter. The Scavengers. And My Neighbor's Field because she gives depictions of the deer and of, and of the coyotes and the bird life and all this fauna that was there, that isn't there anymore because of Mahauland, because of the water wars that happened in California, all the water that was taken. And she actually had a meeting with Mahauland. She called him out. She said, I know what you're going to do. You're not just going to take a little, you're going to take it all. You're going to come in here. You're going to take it all. And there's a transcript that says that when she left, he told his assistant, oh my God, she's onto us. She knows, she's the first person that actually knows what we're trying to pull here. And still to this day, they are stealing water from this land. They were hurting the fauna and the animal life to fuel Los Angeles. And Los Angeles is an absolute joke. Crime, homelessness, that everyone living without a purpose, everyone living for a status of 70 degrees and sunny every single day is unsustainable living. Just as living in Las Vegas is unsustainable living. It is a sad place, you know, and that is stealing to fuel this, to fuel Los Angeles, to fuel the tens of millions of people that live in Southern California. The water doesn't come from the ocean, everybody. The electricity and everything that they get doesn't come from the ocean. It doesn't come from Mount Baldy and the mountains behind Los Angeles, to the east of Los Angeles. No, it comes from other places. And it's really sad. And even though California is shrinking right now because of their, you know, crazy politics, it will grow. Eventually, California will get more people again. Things will, you know, things, things will progress. And California one day will have 50 million people. Where are they going to get the water? Where are they going to get these things? And who are they, what are they taking from? It's very sad, like, you know, in California you hear about all these environmentalists and green, green energy. But their, the history of California and what they've done to this environment is really sad. And this Mary, Mary Austin really shows us what that life is before. And in this text she talks about, she confronts people who live out here, who work out here, the sheep herders, the hunters, the vagabonds, the recluses. She talks about some of these people. It's really cool. So another cool fact, maybe it's not in this photo. Well, let's see. We're out here to see this little, let me blow this up full screen for you guys. If you guys look at this little green area right here, that area right there is the most prestigious college in the United States. Yes, you've heard of me, the most prestigious college in the United States. It's called, oops, look at the sets looking pretty fire. It's called Deep Springs College, everybody. And Deep Springs College is a two year college and it's men's only. And if you get in it has, so what I mean by the prestigious has the lowest acceptance rate. You know, you look at Harvard or whatever, they have an 8% acceptance rate. I think this one has less than a 1% acceptance rate. For sure, because the routine out there is that you, there's no technology. Maybe you can use computers on their supervision, but you can't bring a phone. You can't bring these things. And you live out with your professors. So you live in these little houses and your professors live with you, but your professors are Ivy League scholars, very good scholars who are probably just trying to take a sabbatical. So you wake up and you go outside and there is your professor living there with you. And all the kids around you are some of the most gifted and gifted students in the country also. So you're living with a ton of brainiacs and you have to do daily chores. You have to do daily chores with working with animals and working on the land and farming. And it's kind of this really wholesome lifestyle. Obviously I would have loved to go there. Anyone would have loved to go there. I remember a kid, one of the students I used to teach applied for it. His dad was, he was, you know, a rich kid. His dad was Obama's environment. Speaking of, he was an environmental lawyer. He worked under the Obama administration as an environmental lawyer, like the head of that for the lawyers. But I don't think he got in out here, which says a lot that he had a 4.0 and was very smart, went to prestigious private schools before he came to school while I was out, obviously. So this book in this area is really cool. And this is, there's Deep Stream College out there and there's a Raven that I saw. So I would recommend, yeah, here's some just photos. I'm going to take you guys through the slideshow. I would recommend that you guys read this book. I would 100% recommend this book for everybody. There are so many different things. The writing is beautiful. Some, like I said, some of the sketches of the coyotes and stuff are great. So that's it. This is just a short review. This is just a short review of Mary Austin's book. I just wanted to highlight this and this whole area. Here's me doing some yoga out of the lake. Oh, yeah. There's a nice shot. It's sad I didn't have a better camera. This Raven was literally right in front of us, but all I had was an old iPhone 6 of this Raven flying around on this really kind area. Here's me out at Mammoth Skiing. This is in August, actually. These photos are from August. These are from all different types. Look at the snow. This is August 31st. We were skiing up there on that little patch of snow. There's my dad. There's my dad skiing. Here's me out of the lake. It was really sad, actually, if you look at this last photo of us, but there was a deer right there. We were at this lake. This was another lake. There were so many people from, I assume, Los Angeles. There were just hundreds of people. There's water in this little forest right here. Then once you leave this little area, then it's just desert. It's like there's this deer right here. It kind of felt bad that I was taking a pee out right next to the lake. I had to take this pee on this hike around the lake, and I almost fell upon a deer, which was absolutely crazy. Anyway, everybody, this is the end of the review of Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain. We talked about, let me know what you guys think about the California Water War, what you guys think about this book. This is a very good book, and I would recommend it for everybody.