The California Field Atlas is a 2017 book written and illustrated by Obi Kaufmann. It was published by Heyday Books, a Berkeley-based nonprofit small press. Through passages of nature writing and hundreds of watercolor paintings, the book details California's ecology and geography. Kaufmann, an artist and outdoorsman, was born in California and currently resides in Oakland. He prepared the book over the course of a year, drawing from a lifetime of experience hiking thousands of miles of California wilderness. With the California Field Atlas, he intended to foster geological literacy and conservation of the state's natural environment.
The book contains ten chapters spanning more than 500 pages in total. The first eight chapters examine California's ecological system, the ninth chapter is an overview of nature throughout the state's 58 counties, and the final chapter covers the topic of rewilding. Rather than focusing on already-famous natural landmarks such as Yosemite, Kaufmann sought to present a comprehensive overview of the state that included detailed surveys of lesser-known regions.
The title combines the phrases field guide and atlas, but the book differs in purpose and function from both categories as traditionally conceived. The term "field atlas" was coined by the author to describe a new genre of nature writing with elements of deep ecology and systems thinking. According to Kaufmann, a traditional field guide describes the what, and an atlas describes the where, of the natural world. On the other hand, the "field atlas" analyzes how aspects of nature interact and function as a whole.
Upon release, the book became a surprise commercial success that exceeded the expectations of its author and publisher. It sold out several printings—the first on pre-orders alone—and became a bestseller throughout California. Critics gave it generally enthusiastic reviews and it won several regional book awards. Following its success, Kaufmann signed with Heyday to publish four follow-up books about California's water, forests, coast, and deserts, respectively.
Background
Obi Kaufmann was born in Southern California on March 23, 1973. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was five years old, living in the East Bay town of Danville. He spent much of his childhood exploring Mount Diablo, drawing maps and making up names for its trails.; .
In adulthood he settled in Oakland, California, where he worked as an artist, gallery owner, and advocate for the conservation movement. He provided nature illustrations for magazines and land trust organizations. In 2015, Lindsie Bear of the Berkeley nonprofit publisher Heyday Books expressed interest in publishing his work.; ("December"); . Kaufmann replied that he had been waiting for the opportunity to pitch an idea he had envisioned for 20 years and estimated that the project could be completed with a year of full-time work. He presented a full proposal a week later and impressed Heyday's editors, who saw the book as a once-in-a-decade "unicorn" project.
Kaufmann worked on the Field Atlas throughout 2016. He spent 4,200 man-hours on the book, working from 5a.m. until 10p.m. on an almost daily basis. Kaufmann painted every day, sometimes out on hikes. The majority of the paintings were drawn in his studio in Downtown Oakland. While outdoors, he painted natural objects ranging from flowers to mountains by sight. He used photographic models for reference when painting animals. The project was a culmination of Kaufmann's lifetime of observations hiking across thousands of miles of Californian land. Some of the artwork dates back to a decade prior to publication. The initial draft of the book ran over 1,000 pages.
Kaufmann took inspiration from literary naturalists who endeavored "to see things as they are", saying "it may be unexpected" that he drew more inspiration from writers than from his "fellow painters." In particular, he cited the nature writings of David Douglas, John Muir, Wallace Stegner, Gary Snyder, and Joan Didion. He met Snyder, a fellow Californian, in May 2016. After reviewing Kaufmann's work in progress, Snyder asked, "But Obi, what is California?" Kaufmann replied that, speaking for himself in that moment, California felt like both heaven and hell.In recollections of the exchange, Kaufmann has quoted himself with slight variations in wording (albeit substantially the same meaning): "Gary, for me, right now it is certainly a thousand heavens and a thousand hells" (). "I am glad that I had a modicum of wits about me when I could only reply after taking a deep breath 'well, to me Gary, right now California is both Heaven and Hell'" (). Greg Sarris's short story collection How a Mountain Was Made(2017) was a source for Kaufmann's depictions of Sonoma Mountain. J. R. R. Tolkien's painted maps were his primary artistic inspiration. Kaufmann declared "California is my Middle Earth" and said he hoped his maps portrayed the state's real environment in much the same way Tolkien had mapped his imagined fantasy realm.; . Tom Killion, a Bay Area printmaker, was another influence on his art.
In preparation for mapmaking, he researched indigenous names of geographical landmarks and, in the process, learned that the Junipero Serra Peak in the Santa Lucia Range was named after Junípero Serra, the founder of the Spanish missions in California. In Kaufmann's view, Serra was responsible for acts of genocide against the indigenous peoples of California. To express his objection to the mountain's formal name, Kaufmann planned to refer to it by its Salinan name, Pimkolam, instead. However, he was persuaded that such a change would be beyond the scope of his project. He ultimately labeled the mountain with the name Santa Lucia Peak, which had once been in use before it became more commonly known as Junipero Serra Peak.; .
Contents The book contains about 600 of Kaufmann's paintings, divided between maps and wildlife paintings. His watercolors and texts spread across 10 chapters and more than 500 pages. The first eight chapters, with titles like "Of Earth and Mountains" and "Of Fire and Forests", describe an ecological system.; . The ninth chapter is an overview of the 58 counties of California using geographical markers rather than human-built markers like roads. The final chapter presents a case for ecological restoration and conservation of California through rewilding. Kaufmann sought to depict areas of natural beauty across the entire state, even in comparatively under-studied areas such as Colusa, San Joaquin, and San Benito, while avoiding undue focus on well-known tourist settings.; ; ; .
Artwork Kaufmann's renderings of animals are mostly realistic but incorporate expressionistic flourishes—particularly in his choices of color palette—and thus do not adhere to the more literalistic standards of accuracy that would be expected from a conventional field guide. His wildlife paintings are meant to capture "the spirit of the subject" above all, and he acknowledged that his approach sometimes resulted in conspicuous differences between his art and an animal's literal appearance. As an example, he has often noted that the book includes a painting of a purple coyote, even though the animal is not actually purple in the wild.; ; . However, he explained that "coyotes aren't purple unless you're looking at them in the high desert sagebrush at sunset," and the subjective impression of the animal's appearance that can occur in that rare setting is what he sought to capture in his painting.
The book's maps include surveys of a wide variety of subjects, like the habitats of wild pigs, the state's various fir trees, areas prone to wildfire, wildflowers gardens, and many others. Each map is indexed with a unique four-digit number. Kaufmann said much of the book is "data-driven", in that the maps and their data are sourced from scientific governmental agencies including the California Department of Water Resources, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States Department of Energy (USDOE) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
Although the source maps were freely available online, they were often buried in remote corners of government websites and hard to access. These maps were often low-resolution and in his words "sterile", i.e. used for a single purpose and thus devoid of any richer meaningfulness or context. Kaufmann "reverse-engineered" his maps from these various online sources to make the information more accessible and educationally useful, calling his final product a "reference book for the 21st century".
Conveyance of proper scale was his foremost challenge in preparing the maps. Kaufmann noted that most modern readers are acclimated to online maps like Google Maps that allow users to easily zoom in and out, which is impossible to achieve with paint on paper.; . In order to present an "easily digested, unified vision" with a homogeneous sense of scale, Kaufmann used one simplified legend across all maps. For convenience and uniformity, the legend's symbols flatten some of the differences between certain features. For example, an identical icon is used to describe both a campground on one map and the much larger Fort Irwin National Training Center—with a total area of about –on a second, larger map.
Given his medium of watercolor, Kaufmann acknowledged the possible presence of errors in declination and small mistakes like inadvertent smudges. Nonetheless, he wrote in the introduction that he believed any imprecisions in the work would fall within a reasonable margin of error, while reminding the reader that the maps were intended first and foremost as "expressive" works and that some of them had been prepared outdoors in uncontrolled conditions.
Genre and themes
Kaufmann has said the Field Atlas is not a field guide and, while it is a book of maps, both the author and several commentators have suggested it is not an atlas in the conventional sense. ("It is not a travel guide. It is not a field guide. It is not an ecological treatise. These maps cover the entire state, but they don't really work to get you from point A to point B"); ("It is clear what this book is not ... it most definitely is not a wildlife guide. The maps in the Field Atlas put trails front and center, but lack the detail to help a backpacker recover from a missed turn"); ("Kaufmann's Field Atlas is a new take on the standard atlas"); ("It's not so much an atlas as it is an adventure companion, a trusty guide to making the most out of any California backcountry exploration"). Instead, Kaufmann employed the term "field atlas" to incorporate elements of systems thinking he saw as missing from contemporary nature writing.; . He explained:
He saw the Field Atlas as having two main purposes: a scientific agenda to foster geographic literacy, and an artistic agenda to promote the cause of conservation—the latter of which also has political dimensions.; . He told the website 7x7 that the "whole book—this whole endeavor—is an exercise in how we can continue our human residency in California not only over the next 100 years, for example, but over the next 10,000 years." On the other hand, Kaufmann sought to avoid any overt political argumentation in the book, and he has expressed frustration with partisan approaches to conservation. Mike Sonksen identified the book—particularly its ecological perspective and sense of "geographic literacy"—with the ideas of deep ecology and bioregionalism as articulated by Kaufmann's influence Gary Snyder in such works as Turtle Island(1974) and A Place in Space(1995).