Everything is fresh, clean and cheap. The facades, ugly, harsh and barren like the communities it surrounds. This place is a testament to Los Angeles and the future; that culture is dynamic, it changes and pulsates new life. It also hints at the future of America, and how we are becoming a compendium of international ideas - a global culture. Los Angeles' trend is being followed from Des Moines to St. Louis to Tucson. It is a wonderful and frightening transformation; a new world where choices abound, ideas mix, where citizens of each city may have little in common with their fellow citizens; but are somehow more a part of a greater global community. Lonely people in an efficient, cold world.

This place is an affront to composition, to ordinary respect which mankind should give himself. This is out of reach of the Angeleno, who knows not aestheticism from a tract-home. Aesthetics is at the heart of environmentalism, it is the parallel which is often put aside by the larger issues of resource scarcity and bioecological threats. Aesthetics is not rooted in tradition or culture, it is as dynamic a concept as the cultures, which promote or deny it. It is the subtle difference between class and trash, leather and rubber, wood and aluminum siding. It is everything that Los Angeles is not. This place is, in the words of Robert Kaplan, the "aesthetic abyss."

Great Basin Escalante Desert Going solo in the lonely canyons of Escalante The Loneliest Road A journey across the Nevada's Great Basin and the Loneliest Road in America. We follow the struggle between off-roaders, Great Basin Indians and conservationists over the fate of a blue butterfly. Summer Lake Part II of a conversation about travel writing, this episode continues into the southern Oregon Desert. Rachel, Nevada and Area 51 Area 51 is a dusty set of hangars at the bottom of a dry lake bed. The Owyhee River Part I of the Oregon Testament.Follow us to Leslie Gulch, where we stumble upon a yet undiscovered Native American site. The Alvord Desert Part II of the Oregon Testament. Fishing under the Steens Mountains, and wandering the alkali flats of Alvord Lake. Mono Lake They are twisted, trollish, ungodly, like a woman turned to stone East Oregon High Desert Wandering the High Desert of Eastern Oregon The White Mountains By the accidents of geologic history, this land has remained relatively unchanged. Zion Canyon Zion Canyon as a launching point for discussion on the politics of sin. Glen Canyon What Creatures will Roam Glen Canyon? It's the question I had to ask, even as I rolled into America's most lurid town.

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