As an entry in the vast Earth(TM) Encyclopedia, the geologically adolescent land east of the California coast has a chapter all its own, with multiple sidebars: the hills as fertile pasture, where cows and sheep can roam and graze year round; flowers in the spring, golden grass in the summertime, green sod in January. Home to indigenous wildlife that threatens livestock, a place of American wineries, of sleeping volcanoes and winding old roads, the story told of oak groves and endless golden acres has enticed many a reader to its pages.

But the essence of place, its "value", radically changes from creature to creature. A different reader, looking up the same hills, sees them not as naturally productive and helpful to her bottom line, but as an unfinished canvas, as the ground for her work. She alters the land and builds, layer upon layer, as investor and developer who suffers a parodoxical obsession with transforming paradise. Each stunning ridgeline presents engineering, legal, social and marketing puzzles worth billions if solved in a certain way. The real becomes illusion.

A third person, anachronistic as the Chumash, might find in the pages of this listing an aesthetic and sometimes spiritual escapism. He may view the open space as sanctuary, as friend, as a land still alive. He may wonder why others skip this section of Earth(TM)'s book altogether, why they speed-read the pastoral vista toward a cityscape of integrated developments, rooftops, driveways, intersections and traffic. The difference may not even register to these disinterested people, as they head home, focused more on destination than journey: a nice big house in the suburbs, nestled somewhere in these hills, or somewhere beyond them.

Having read and reread it, I may need to put down the book myself, just to spare myself the horror of knowing.