Imperial/Coast: Southern California Environmental Geographies Robert Oxford I spent the last year exploring my new home state of California along the border with a camera. I found a terraformed desert environmental sacrifice zones, harsh borderlands, a disappearing coastline, and sites of evacuated capital in rural Southeast California. Working as an anthropologist and photographer I documented this moment in the long transformation of the California Myth into conflagration of social and cultural reactions to the decline of these myths in the age of Anthropocene. Culturally, I discovered places in near active revolt. I found places that attracted arsonists, where human-caused brush fires were a regular occurrence. I found suburban oases in the middle of a brutal, dusty summer. I found a literal shit’s creek that served as an open sewer for human, animal, and industrial waste in Mexico and the United States that traverses an industrial agricultural hub. I saw repurposed buildings, oil spills, and the shadow of death and dying nearly everywhere I turned. The necropolitics of nature and life along the borderlands is now more dangerous because of the effects of climate change and the increasing numbers of climate refugees. I saw my subjects as an outsider but came to quickly identify many of the same themes from my previous home state of Texas. The surreal relationships between vast geographies and cultural meaning-making appeared as stark vortexes of rural life in the middle of dramatic landscapes. It is as if culture must make itself known in the most brutal ways possible to compete with the land. These modes of territoriality can include brutal levels of poverty, the evacuation of capital (if there was any to begin with), environmental degradation, militarized border surveillance, the opulence, and entrenched fortresses of the well-off, and fossil fuel outposts, all laden with the signs and symbols of the California (and American) Myths of freedom, consumption, the military, and the beautiful spaces to enjoy what was advertised as the Good Life. California is in the middle of a rapid transformation that has left many in precarious places and spaces of the state more prone to the effects of global climate change. The desert, ironically, provides a bountiful harvest year-round from massive purchases of irrigation water from the Colorado River from a human-caused environmental disaster over a hundred years ago. The migrant laborers who tend these fields, I was told, live more precarious lives as industrial agriculture here operates on “lean” production cycles, like just-in-time manufacturing. This practice requires fewer laborers and labor hours and depreciate wages, leaving many destitute. The California Myth is easy to dispel but it’s much harder to articulate the many complex, intersectional, and uneven ways the social and cultural buttresses of the state interact with the geography and the people who live there. Photography has been a way for me to explore these complexities. I submit this portfolio for the Nature, Environment and Perspectives and Anthropology and Territories categories as I feel my work overlaps with many of these themes.