California

C

Plants and Animals

No state approaches the plant variety of California: approximately 40 per cent of species found naturally in the United States are indigenous to California.

Trees include redwoods, the world’s tallest trees, Douglas fir, and ponderosa pine. The world’s oldest known living tree, a Great Basin bristlecone pine, which is more than 4,000 years old, is found in eastern California. Stands of sierra redwood, or giant sequoia—many up to 2,000 years old—are found in the Sierra Nevada. California is also well known for its spring-blooming wildflowers; California poppy and lupine are among the most common. In the coastal areas south of San Francisco Bay, coast sage and grasslands are typical, replaced inland by chaparral, consisting of drought-tolerant evergreen shrubs. Indigo bushes, various species of cacti and shrubs, creosote bushes, and the Joshua tree—a giant lily with white flowers—are found in the south-eastern deserts.

California’s diversity of vegetation provides habitats for many different animals, including coyotes, deer, rattlesnakes, skunks, and foxes. Larger mammals, found principally in the north and in mountainous areas, are bear, elk, and pronghorn antelope.

D

Resources, Products, and Industries

Despite depletion of reserves of gold, oil, natural gas, and mercury, California remains an important storehouse of minerals. Tungsten, borates, salt, oil, and natural gas are all present in significant quantities.

In 2000 California led all other states in agricultural output with farm sales of US$27.2 billion. Leading crops are grapes, hay, cotton, sugar beet, potatoes, and rice. Livestock and livestock products such as dairy products, beef cattle, eggs, and chickens are also significant. California accounts for about one tenth of the nation’s total production of timber. The state is also a major national producer of fish, supplying about 4 per cent of the value of the national catch.

Goods manufactured in the state include aircraft and other transport equipment, electronics, industrial machinery, scientific instruments, printed items, food, and manufactured metal goods. Several leading software and computer components manufacturing corporations, including Borland International, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Company, Intel Corporation, Netscape Communications, Oracle Corporation, and Sun Microsystems, Inc., have their headquarters in the state. Tourism and the film industry are also significant sources of income; major film studios and production companies based in California include 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, Paramount, and Universal. The economy suffered a recession in the early 1990s, fuelled by cutbacks in aerospace and other military-related industries, coupled with a slowdown in housing construction.

III

Population

The population of California is 36,553,215 (2007 estimate), an increase of 13.8 per cent since 1990. The state’s major cities are Sacramento, the state capital (population, 2006, 453,781); Los Angeles, the largest city (population, 2006, 3,849,378); San Diego (population, 2006, 1,256,951); San Francisco (population, 2006, 1,256,951); San Jose (population, 2006, 929,936); Long Beach (population, 2006, 472,494); and Oakland (population, 2006, 397,067).

California was the most populous state in the United States in 2001, when its average population density was 90 people per sq km (234 per sq mi). A major component of California’s population, especially in the south, is of Latino (mainly Mexican) background.

A

Education

Although the state constitution of 1849 provided for a state school system, it was not until 1866 that free state schools were actually established in California. State support was extended in 1903 to secondary schools and then in 1917 to junior colleges.

In the late 1990s California had some 383 institutions of higher education, including one of the largest systems of state colleges and universities in the United States. Combined enrolment in all institutions of higher education was about 2,109,000 students. The nine campuses of the University of California alone provided higher education for more than 187,000 students each year; the California State University system has 23 campuses, including the San Francisco State University, and the California Community College system has more than 100. Other important seats of learning in the state include the California Institute of Technology (including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory operated by NASA), Stanford University, and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

B

Places of Interest

Main attractions, apart from the southern California beaches, are Disneyland, Hollywood, Palm Springs, Lake Tahoe and the vicinity, the wine country of the Napa and Sonoma valleys, and Yosemite and Sequoia national parks. There are also many historical sites commemorating early Spanish settlements and the pioneering, gold rush days. Located in the state are Spanish missions that belong to a system established in the 18th century by Father Junípero Serra; one of the most notable of these, Mission San Carlos Borromeo (1770), is located in Carmel. Other sites of particular interest are Pioneer Village in Bakersfield, El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park in Los Angeles, the Old Customs House in Monterey, and Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento.

California’s support of the arts has made it one of the major cultural centres of the United States. Among the most notable cultural institutions are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Los Angeles; the J. Paul Getty Museum, also in Los Angeles, which houses an extensive collection of antiquities and European art; its sister institution, the Getty Villa in Malibu, a replica of an ornate Roman villa that on completion of renovation work will showcase other artworks in the Getty collection of antiquities in a thematic way; the Hearst-San Simeon State Historical Monument in San Simeon; and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, the oldest and largest municipal museum in the West.

Also of note are the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Griffith Observatory and Planetarium, both in Los Angeles; the Palomar Observatory, 80 km (50 mi) north-east of San Diego; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Huntington Library in San Marino has an important collection of rare American and English books. The Mount Wilson Observatory and the Lick Observatory are important centres for astronomical research.