In a recorded talk complementing the exhibition Lands of Promise and Peril: Geographies of California, two UC Berkeley geographers, Richard Walker and Seth Lunine, discuss timely themes from the exhibition, which was organized by Lunine’s students. The topics of their conversation include mining and environmentalism, agriculture and immigration, suburbanization and segregation, and Black power and policing.

Richard Walker is professor emeritus and former chair of the geography department at UC Berkeley, where he taught for almost forty years. A renowned cultural, human, and urban geographer, he is the author of many articles and several major books on California—among them a history of agribusiness, a social atlas, a history of conservation, and, most recently, Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Seth Lunine, a lecturer in geography at UC Berkeley—where he received his doctorate and studied with Walker—is a human geographer with broad interests in urban cultures and economies in California and the West. A recent National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and Chancellor’s Public Scholar, he is active in the UC Berkeley American Cultures Engaged Scholarship program.