Brendan Borrell on Paddling Through the Heart of California

Join us on Oct. 16th in the Multipurpose Rm. of the Student Community Center at UC Davis from 4:30 to 6 pm for Brendan Borrell's seminar on "Paddling Through the Heart of California".

California’s latest drought was broken in the winter of 2022, when a string of atmospheric rivers dumped fifty-two feet of snow in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Soon, Los Angeles-based writer Brendan Borrell, learned that the historic Tulare Lake was coming back to life.

Brendan had long heard stories of a vast and unparalleled wetlands that once existed in the water-starved San Joaquin Valley — long before it was dyked, dammed, and taken over to industrial agriculture. Once the largest body of water in the west, Tulare Lake had steelhead trout in its waters, while the surrounding grasslands were home to beaver, Tule Elk, and Grizzly bear.

Packing two weeks of food and supplies, he and adventure photographer Tom Fowlks, took pedal-powered kayaks more than 230 miles through flooded farmland and forests along the Kings and San Joaquin Rivers from Tulare Lake to the delta region of the San Francisco Bay. They witnessed the devastation of the floods, including multi-million dollar almond plantations that were now nothing but tax write-offs, but they also saw the unheralded natural beauty of the valley, including the squawking rookeries of egrets and cormorants.

Brendan’s story about the trip was published last year in Outside magazine. During his talk, he will present photos and video from the harrowing trip and what he learned about the timely and important story of water in the San Joaquin Valley.

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BRENDAN BORRELL has long explored the intersection of science, health, and the natural world through articles appearing in The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, National Geographic, the New York Times, and Outside magazine. A native of Texas, Brendan received a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at Berkeley before turning full-time to journalism. His first book, The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine was published in 2021 by Mariner Books.

Host or Publisher UC Davis Institute of the Environment