When I was an undergraduate at Chico State my sensible, down-to-earth biology professors—Doug Alexander, Wes Dempsey, Roger Lederer, Tom Rodgers, and Rob Schlising, among others—were baffled by the amount of time I spent at the student newspaper, the genuinely wild Wildcat, when I should have been studying. Twice a week I would drag myself, bleary-eyed, into an early morning genetics, botany, or field biology class after having stayed up all night finishing stories and laying out the paper with the rest of the Wildcatters.
But my journalism co-workers at the Wildcat never understood why I tortured myself with such challenging and time-consuming coursework, which left me so little time to write and cover local news.
No one was too surprised when I spent a summer studying field biology at Eagle Lake Field Station near Susanville just as I was also preparing to become the Wildcat’s managing editor. That wild school year turned out to be the newspaper’s last, due to a serious First Amendment conflict with the California State University system’s trustees. But the newspaper survived the trustees’ consternation—and the complex negotiations that led that year to its independence and transformation into the Chico News & Review, a much-needed community newspaper that still thrives today.
As my early years demonstrate, I never could choose between engaging the natural world—through ecology and botany in particular—and my need to write. I have spent much of my adult life trying to find other ways to combine the two.
Experimenting with Unexpected Yet Useful Combinations
A notable personal experiment in writing both natural and cultural histories came with a series of environmentally focused California travel guides—the first mainstream guidebooks of their kind. These books included Moon Handbooks Northern California, MH Southern California, MH Coastal California, and MH Monterey & Carmel, all published by Avalon Travel Publishing (originally Moon Publications), now the largest independent travel publisher based in the U.S. and an imprint of Perseus Books, the Publishers Weekly 2007 Publisher of the Year. The San Francisco Chronicle kindly called bestselling Northern California Handbook, the first book in the series, “that rarest of travel books—both a practical guide to the region and a map of its soul.”
Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin allowed me to borrow her essay “World-Making” to use as a foreword for Northern California Handbook. What Le Guin says there about the need to “make” California was quite relevant to what I wanted to accomplish as a travel writer:
“To make something is to invent it, to discover it, to uncover it, like Michelangelo cutting away the marble that hid the statue. Perhaps we think less often of the proposition reversed, thus: To discover something is to make it. As Julius Caesar said, ‘The existence of Britain was uncertain until I went there.’ We can safely assume that the ancient Britons were perfectly certain of the existence of Britain, down to such details as where to go for the best woad. But, as Einstein said, it all depends on how you look at it, and as far as Rome, not Britain, was concerned, Caesar invented (invenire, ‘to come into, to come upon’) Britain. He made it be, for the rest of the world.
“Alexander the Great sat down and cried, somewhere in the middle of India, I think, because there were no more new worlds to conquer. What a silly man he was. There he sits, sniveling, halfway to China! A conqueror. Conquistadores, always running into new worlds, and quickly running out of them. Conquest is not finding, and it is not making. Our culture, which conquered what is called the New World, and which sees the world of nature as an adversary to be conquered: look at us now, running out of everything.
“ . . . Whether our ancestors came seeking gold, or freedom, or as slaves, we are the conquerors, we who live here now, in possession, in the New World. We are inhabitants of a Lost World. It is utterly lost. Even the names are lost.”
But we conquerors, we inhabitants of this lost world, may yet succeed in making our world, Le Guin says, starting with whatever useful fragments of the old world that remain:
“To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost.”
Lost we are. But not entirely.
Le Guin’s metaphor of lost and found worlds clearly fits our world, the one we fitfully inhabit now, complete with its immense sustainability and survival challenges. Just as clearly it points to the possibility of making a new, more feasible world out of what is not yet lost.
Almost as an inevitable extension of my travel writing I’ve become quite passionate about the world-making possibilities of Up the Road, a new sustainability education/public interest media hybrid.
Other Experience & Interests
I am a lifelong Butte County resident, and a graduate of Chico public schools. Since 1991 I have been a member of the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW), “the preeminent professional organization of travel communicators” internationally. I have also worked as a freelance writer. My essay on domestic ecotourism was collected in 1993’s American Express International Review of Travel. I also contributed to the British Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia. Based on my local reporting for the Chico News & Review I was selected 1980 Media Person of the Year by the Butte County Barristers Association, following in the footsteps of the E-R’s Nick Ellena.
Over the years I also served as communications director for the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges (FACCC), headquartered in Sacramento, and production editor for Scholars Press, a scholarly publishing company associated with the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature that produced 100-plus titles per year. I have worked as a freelance editor and developed the long-running EOPS Press newsletter for the Butte College Extended Opportunity Program and Services (EOPS).
In recent years I have enjoyed co-chairing the Chico Sustainability Group with Elizabeth Devereaux. I have also worked with CSU, Chico’s Concrete Industry Management Program and The Institute for Sustainable Development, and was project coordinator for the university’s Toward A New Village Green Environmental Creativity Research Grant.
Recent local media work includes several radio specials with Lorraine Dechter for Northstate Public Radio, including “Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health,” about Northern California’s water crisis; “Befriending Fire: How Native Knowledge is Improving California Fire Management”; and a Halloween special on “The Rocks that Fell from the Sky” in Chico.
I served on the Bidwell Park and Playground Commission, appointed by the Chico City Council, starting in 1973—becoming the youngest commissioner in city history. With no city funding and virtually no staff assistance, that park commission developed and wrote the very first Bidwell Park management plan. More recently I helped repaint and restore the historic Chico Grange Hall, and I am also a former president and member of the Blue Room Theatre board of directors. I love American traditional music and sing in the gospel choir at Bidwell Presbyterian Church.
Country girl that I am, one day soon I hope to raise pygora goats and other fiber-producing critters.
Kim Weir
