Lawrence Culver

@lawrencecphd.bsky.social

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Historian of environment/climate/disaster/cities/culture. Also public history & urban/enviro/recreation public policy. UCLA Bruin. Book: The Frontier of Leisure: SoCal and the Shaping of Modern America; writing on climate & history in US & North America.

In a scene from “Paris, Texas,” a 1984 film by Wim Wenders, actor Harry Dean Stanton talks on the phone facing away from a see-through mirror, behind which actress Natasha Kinski listens to and responds to the story he tells.
Promotional image for the city of Duluth, Minnesota, with a view of a bridge and a vast lake at sunset, and the slogan “the most-climate proof city in America.”
Carrie Nation of the WCTU is shown in a photograph holding her trademark Bible and hatchet to combat the sale of alcohol.
A black-and-white photograph of film director Martin Scorsese saying, “This is cinema.”
“Pearblossom Highway,” 1986. This collage composed of small photographs depicts an intersection on a California highway that traverses the high desert Mojave on the northern fringes of metropolitan Los Angeles. The background of the picture is dominated by blue sky and Yuccas, but the foreground is dominated by highway signs and abandoned beer and oil cans. Unlike some of his earlier work, this is not an idealized depiction of Southern California, and is a response to a long tradition in US landscape painting and photography that depicted idealized landscapes as embodiment of human values or “untouched” wilderness, rather than depictions of actual places and how humans have changed them.
David Hockney’s painting “A Bigger Splash” (1967), depicting the splash (but not the diver who would’ve created it) at the end of a diving board in the backyard swimming pool of a peach-colored mid-century Modernist house with a flat blue sky and palm trees in the background. An appealing but strangely uninhabited image of Southern California’s culture of privatized leisure.
Bright orange and red eroded pinnacles and hoodoos in Cedar Breaks National Monument.
A Mexican cypress planted more than 150 years ago shades the meandering waters at the Kuruvungna Sacred Springs, on the grounds of University High School near Barrington Avenue in Westside Los Angeles. A sacred and historic site for the Tongva, the spring can be visited on the first Saturday of each month.
In this National Park Service image, a Torrey Pine grows high above the curving coastline of Santa Rosa Island off the coast of Southern California. This tree grows only in two small groves, one on Santa Rosa, and the other near San Diego.
Huge AI center visualized as a Death Star looming over the Salt Lake Valley.
When taken together, these kinds of "strategic" moves look like a playbook: a new president arrives and uses their vision to shake up mandates at the school. They take on massive levels of debt through a series of poor decisions, which might include increasing administrative bloat, building more buildings, or investing in shiny but costly new programs. The hope, presumably, is that these actions will attract donors and students. At the same time, faculty are pushed to the periphery of the strategic plan and globalized initiatives are encouraged alongside innovative entrepreneurship. But higher education is not a business in the way that many of these MBA-influenced academic executives assume it to be.
Thursday, 11:00 AM-12:30 PM Climate Histories of the United States: A Roundtable The scholars on this roundtable will discuss how U.S. historians are integrating climate frameworks into their research and teaching, and how historians can provide historical perspective on climate policy debates. Chair: John Brooke, Ohio State University Panelists: • Leila Blackbird, Brown University • Lawrence Culver, Utah State University • Katherine Grandjean, Wellesley College • Eric Herschthal, University of Utah • Emily Pawley, Environmental History, Dickinson College
The red worm NASA logo on the side of the Artemis spacecraft.
The Chicago School’s famous map of Chicago, a simplified radial circle diagram indicating various neighborhoods, racial and ethnic groups, and socioeconomic classifications.
“He who controls the spice controls the universe.” Quote from the 1984 version of Dune, directed by David Lynch, with an image of Kyle McLachlan as Paul Atreides. Seems applicable to our present moment!!!
Image of Gonzo the Muppet from a Muppet Christmas Carol Jonathan the Tortoise, who did NOT die! Jonathan the Tortoise is alive and well • He's ~193 years old - the longest-living land animal on Earth • A suspected crypto scammer went viral on April Fools Day pretending to be his vet
Conflicting information about the status of Jonathan. The governor of Saint Helena may have just gone to check on him and found that he is in fact alive. However, this remains unverified. Schrödinger's tortoise!
Strange plinth in the SLC airport showing the logo for the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and Paralympics. The whole thing is gray, with an ugly, almost unreadable font, a map of the rapidly shrinking Great Salt Lake completely full, circa 1980s, and three strange curving shapes. Are they dry lakebed arsenic dust blowing in the wind? Who knows? These have also been christened the “Utah” Olympics, because the Republican legislature hates Democratic Salt Lake City.
Pantropical spotted dolphin leaping 15 feet above the ocean surface. If it starts singing “Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish!” we’re screwed.
A third stage guild navigator arrives to interrogate the emperor in David Lynch’s “Dune,” 1984.
Vintage Floyd Dominy, Director of the Bureau of Reclamation 1959-1969, speaking in the opening scene of the excellent PBS documentary Cadillac Desert, based on Mark Reisner’s landmark book. (He indeed had no apologies.)
The Cathedral of the Desert. Utah slick rock at its most sublime, loved by authors Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner, and the few other non-Indigenous people who knew it. When it disappeared beneath the waters of the lake, it was assumed no one would ever see it again.
A view of the Dominy Formation, in what was once the northern end of Lake Powell. The lake last reached full capacity in 1983. As of early 2026, it is only 25% full.
Surfers waiting their turn on the endless wave.
Aerial view of the park, with the river visible. Multiple channels carry part of its waters through the park, once a dangerous floodplain.
Cathedral towers and other historic landmarks of central Munich, seen from the English Garden.
Bison fall to their deaths down a cliff face in a black and white poster for the film Eddington.
Albert Einstein sticks his tongue out at the tech bro who tried to name an AI cheat machine for him.
A large military vehicle taps its bumper against a Ford Pinto in the movie Top Secret. Then Pinto go kaboom
Grandpa Simpson enters . . . and exits.
Illustration showing the hydropower and river outlets for Glen Canyon Dam. These are far above the bottom of Lake Powell, and as the lake level dwindles, may soon be above the lake’s surface, rendering them inoperable, and reducing the lake to a functionally useless “dead pool.”
Donald Trump stands at a podium with the presidential seal. Behind him is a fireplace with books and golden urns on the mantle. Above that is a portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt on horseback.
A romantic illustration of what appears to be a California Spanish mission surrounded by tropical flowers and foliage advertising Morning Sun brand Sunkist lemons from San Fernando.
Bad Bunny strides with a Puerto Rican flag beneath power poles and utility workers symbolizing the electricity crisis in Puerto Rico, made exponentially worse by Hurricane Maria striking the island in 2017.
A chart listing the lowest winter snow accumulations in Salt Lake City. The previous record low was the winter of 1933-34, when Salt Lake recorded 14.3 inches of snow. The new record is this winter, 2025-2026. Total recorded snowfall is 0.1 inches.
“Melania review - Trump film is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest”
Map of the Arid Region of the United States, in John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, 1878.
In 1969, Mr. Rogers tells segregationists to take their whites only pools and shove it Mr. Rogers and Officer Clemmons share a moment in a children’s plastic wading pool. This scene drew criticism from some white viewers at a moment when municipalities were closing public pools rather than integrating them.
Endangered Cahaba lilies growing in the Cahaba River, also home to 69 other endangered species. Despite significant losses—and the disinterest of most of Alabama’s political and economic leaders—the Cahaba, one of the last free-flowing rivers in the southeast, still maintains a nationally and continentally distinctive ecosystem.
A sign posted in the front yard of a home destroyed in the fire: “Altadena West of Lake: We Saved Ourselves!” Residents in West Altadena, a historically redlined community, did not receive warnings until hours after the fire had arrived.
A group of humans and Muppets standing and seated on the stairs of an apartment building in an integrated, working class neighborhood in New York City. The actors comprised the original cast when the show premiered in 1969.
Classical Greek Revival female statue, holding aloft a metal insect. The statue and its pedestal also function as a light fixture and a water feature (because why not?!?). The Bowl Weevil Monument, erected in 1919 in Entrprise, Alabama to commemorate the region’s transition away from sole reliance on cotton agriculture. It was agricultural scientist and professor George Washington Carver of the Tuskegee Institute who was most responsible for introducing new crops and agricultural products in the region, but in the Jim Crow South, no one was erecting a statue in honor of of an African American, so they erected a statue of an invasive agricultural pest instead.
Bugs Bunny, having just woken up and believing he is still in his burrow, is alarmed to discover he is in fact riding in a rocket hurtling away from earth.
Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood Regional Branch Library. Rebuilt after an arson fire, critics, most notably Mike Davis, criticized the fortresslike fence and looming architectural profile of a public building.
Gehry’s home in Santa Monica. Neighbors were initially nonplussed, but it became a civic landmark.
Shimmering metal exterior of Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles.
In the courtyard of the Inn Miller replanted what was purported to be the first navel orange tree in Southern California, the progenitor of the region's entire citrus industry. Oranges, like limes, lemons, olives, and vineyard grapes, were in fact an important legacy of the missions-Mediterranean crops, already in production, which Anglos found profitable in an initially exotic agricultural environment. No less a personage than President Theodore Roosevelt arrived to help plant the venerable tree. When told of its prodigious output and numerous progeny, Roosevelt replied that he was glad to see that the tree showed "no signs of race suicide." 20 Yet if Miller helped create a new and regionally distinctive form of tour-ism, he also played a central role in developing a place that served as the setting for rituals that encapsulated and preserved the ideology of tourists in the late Victorian era of Amy Bridges. This was Mount Rubidoux, a rocky hill that rose immediately west of Riverside. Mission Inn guest Jacob Riis, the muckraking journalist whose writings and photographs had done so much to highlight the woes of eastern cities, suggested to Miller that the hill would be an excellent setting for an Easter sunrise service. With money from real-estate and commuter-train magnate Henry Huntington, and engineering assistance from Hiram Chittenden, a former superintendent of Yellowstone who had overseen the development of roads in the national park, Miller supervised the construction of a road to the top of the hill and the construction of large cross dedicated to Father Junipero Serra. While the cross might have been dedicated to the founder of the California missions, it served entirely Anglo-American purposes. Each Easter morning, residents and tourists alike sometimes totaling a crowd of more than ten thousand congregants ascended to the summit. They enacted rituals that connected Riv-
Peacocks and a fairy tale cottage (because why not?!?) on a citrus crate label.
All the states in the Colorado River Compact depicted as passengers unhappily crammed in a too-small car. (All the states are unhappy in real life! Also not pictured: Mexico!) The compact, devised on river flow in high water years, has been unrealistic for decades, but climate change-related droughts and dwindling snowfall are pushing all the states towards a crisis, still unresolved. Editorial cartoon by Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune.
Donald Trump posing with a hurricane forecast map edited with a black sharpie pen to reflect his erroneous statements about its forecasted path.
View of one of the early homes built at Smoke Tree Ranch, begun in the 1930s. Image is from the resort and residential community’s website: https://smoketreeranch.com/history
The Nature Friends Clubhouse, soon after its construction in 1924. A group of people gathered in front of and around a Bavarian Alpine lodge-style building in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills in Southern California.