Deep Oakland

5 questions with geologist and writer Andrew Alden.

Consider the ground beneath your feet. We take it as a given that the hills, shores, and canyons are, from the perspective of our lifetimes, the fixed canvas of the world. This stability, even in seismically active places, is the orienting basis for our lives on the surface, flitting along with the mundane business of the everyday.

Take a long enough view, however, and these fixed landforms become fluid. Geology reveals a deep history of far longer epochs in which the earth is active and alive, moving and colliding into itself. The world we see around us is actually a work in progress.

My brother is a geologist, and his way of seeing the world is fundamentally different from my own. When I see a chunk of ground carved from a hillside, I see a sheaf of rock. If I’m in a thoughtful mood, I might wonder what machine chopped up the land and to what purpose. But my brother sees a deeper picture. The divot exposes vast forces playing out over millions of years through the earth. There’s a story in the rock face—seismic drama from pressure, heat, and motion, roiling through the universe’s basic elements.

Andrew Alden unites both views—the human and the geologic. Alden is a geologist and writer who brings wide-ranging curiosity to the world around and beneath him, connecting recent lived history with deep geological processes.

In his recent book Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City, Alden explores the geology of the San Francisco East Bay, arguing that the region’s unique geology played an active role in the city’s vibrant municipal history. The book is an evolution of his blog Oakland Geology, an ongoing exploration of the city, filled with pictures and reflections. I’m delighted he’s joined our 5-question interview series, and I hope you enjoy this small conversation.

Available from Heyday Books.

BC: As the title of your book Deep Oakland suggests, you bring us a "deeper" understanding of the city of Oakland, both literally and figuratively. What sort of perspective does one gain by looking at the world like a geologist?

Alden: Geologists learn in their bones that the world, at every level, is active and dynamic, and that nothing is permanent, neither human constructions nor the landscape itself. Most people think the world is a static, passive backdrop on which we work our will, and that earthquakes, floods, landslides and the like are accidents and interruptions. We need to treat geologic processes instead as inevitabilities to be met with respect. That awareness underlies everything in Deep Oakland.

Many of your observations come from walking around the geological formation that you're studying. How does walking inform your understanding of geology? What access does it give you?

When it comes to geology, there’s no substitute for walking the land attentively. I also have to see the land from all sides, the way you turn a stone over in your hand, so I love to tilt and swivel the landscape using online 3D maps. And I love using digital elevation models, made from lidar surveys, to see the ground surface beneath its vegetation and human crust. But walking is where it begins and ends for me, spotting the details of topography and outcrops that are the basis of geology. I’ve always been fond of peeking between houses and through trees and venturing off trails. It helps a lot to have a vehicle to get there, though.

As I was reading, I kept thinking how geology was more than an environment that humans act upon—more than terrain or resources—but something that actively shaped how humans acted over time. How do you think about human relationships with geological processes?

There’s the trivial sense in which the presence of earth resources, like ores and oil and water, governs human geography. What intrigued me as I set out to write Deep Oakland was the more subtle ways the geological setting of a piece of territory could be seen, like the erased scripts in a palimpsest, in its influence on the human overprint.

Another aspect of this topic is how humans have spread over Oakland’s territory, especially the hills, as if it were just pure land and then faced consequences, like costly landslide mitigation and road repairs, that geologists can readily foresee. More broadly on the worldwide scale, the earth is in a dialog with us, but policymakers aren’t listening. As they squabble and dither, the earth has started to raise its voice.

Let’s focus on one particular chapter in the book: the exploration of Indian Gulch, now a subdivision east of Lake Merritt along Trestle Glen Road. I was surprised to learn the city of Oakland tried multiple times to develop this stretch of land into a park or open space. Instead, the land was parceled out and sold as single-family homes. You refer to this as "landslaughter." What do you mean by that term?

I introduced the word as a shorthand for everything people have done since the Ohlones lived in that hospitable little valley, from the Spanish abduction to American-style land development: “a living, inhabited landscape killed like a steer and its life blood drained; its hide and tallow rendered into money; its flesh surveyed and cut into parcels, marketed in tranches and laid out for sale on the courthouse steps.”

In denoting the impact we make on the world to support our lives, “landslaughter” partakes of two metaphors: the charged one of a crime—manslaughter—and the more neutral one of animal-based agriculture. My chapter leans toward the latter, but I also mourn the tragic loss of the direct, integrated relationship that people once had with our landscape. I hope the reader will come to perceive and appreciate that landscape for itself, which is still here—as are the Ohlones.

Finally, what are two books you recommend?

My book sits in a cross-disciplinary field; it leads toward history, toward politics and toward science. All three fields are themselves cross-disciplines that resist easy summation in keystone books. Since working on Deep Oakland, I’ve gotten to appreciate histories of large infrastructure projects: how policymakers and engineers have engaged with nature, each other, and society at large on the stage that geology has prepared for us. Two of these hybrids on my shelf are the Port of Oakland’s self-published history, Pacific Gateway (2000, out of print), and the water company’s 1970 history Its Name Was M.U.D.: A Story of Water, updated in 1999.

A new book in a similar hybrid genre is Rosanna Xia’s California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline (Heyday, 2023). She adds a reporter’s color and vivid detailing to an inventory of our wonderful tectonic coast and the ways we’ve been putting it, and ourselves, into a lot of serious trouble. A vital book.

Find Andrew Alden’s “Deep Oakland” at local bookstores around the East Bay and online at Heyday Books. Bookmark his blog Oakland Geology for intriguing new posts every couple weeks. You can support his work here.

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