I didn’t set out to become a geographer.

In fact, I started out wanting to be a journalist. I earned an associate’s degree in media journalism, wrote a few stories, and quickly discovered one of the less romantic truths about the profession: I loved the work considerably more than I loved the paycheck.

So life took a few turns.

I spent time as a computer programmer, until the dot-com collapse and the economic aftermath of 9/11 brought that chapter to an end. Eventually, I landed in California, still trying to figure out exactly where I was headed.

At the time, I thought I might finish a bachelor’s degree in communications. I had also been kicking around an idea for a documentary about the Santa Monica Mountains. While researching the project, I began talking with geographers, and one of them made an observation that changed the direction of my life.

Maybe filmmaking wasn’t really the thing I was most interested in.

Maybe it was the landscapes?

The mountains, neighborhoods, roads, climate, history, people, and stories written across the land were what kept pulling me in. Someone suggested I take a geography class. I needed electives anyway, so I figured, why not?

That was pretty much it.

I was hooked.

One class became a bachelor’s degree in geography, then a master’s degree, a GIS certificate, and eventually a career teaching geography at the college level.

And in a strange way, I had come full circle. Geography gave me a way to combine many of the things I had been interested in all along: storytelling, maps, technology, history, science, travel, landscapes, and the endless question of why things are where they are.

Golden State Journal grows out of that curiosity.

California is the starting point, but it isn’t really the boundary.

Few places offer a better laboratory for exploring geography. Within one state you can move from foggy redwood forests to scorching deserts, from alpine peaks to Mediterranean coastlines, from some of the richest agricultural land on Earth to one of the world's largest urban regions. California contains extraordinary cultural diversity, dramatic environmental contrasts, immense wealth, deep inequality, technological innovation, water scarcity, earthquakes, wildfires, migration, agriculture, suburban sprawl, global trade, and just about every other geographic story you can imagine.

In that sense, California becomes a lens.

By looking closely at this one place, we can begin to understand processes happening across the rest of the world. And by looking outward at the world, we can better understand California.

That is what I hope to explore here.

Some stories will be about landscapes. Others will be about cities, climate, culture, water, transportation, history, geology, migration, or the changing relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. There will be maps, photographs, field observations, conversations, and probably a few roadside detours when something interesting appears over the next hill.

I’ve spent much of my career teaching geography in classrooms. Golden State Journal is my attempt to take that classroom outside.

Consider it part field journal, part geography lesson, part road trip.

California is where we begin.

From there, we can go just about anywhere.

Rob O'Keefe

rob.okeefe@csun.edu