Before his son was born, Berkeley playwright Steve Lyons started writing a comedy, Conception, about his anxieties over being a father. In it, a husband spends the entire play neurotically debating his wife over the pros and cons of having a kid. (“I always come off as being the big, selfish monster, and you always come off as being the loving, selfless saint,” he complains early in the play. “I’ve noticed that too,” she says.) The conceit of the comedy is that time passes at two different speeds for the two characters. For him, it’s an hour. For her, nine months go by. At the end, he is still wringing his hands over whether to have the child when she hands it to him for a diaper change.

Call this phenomenon “implausible deniability.”

In our cover story, natural history writer Kenneth Brower looks into a more serious case of implausible deniability (page 14). Like Lyons’s fictive father’s fiddling, the national debate about climate change seems stuck, while the animals of the Sierra have already moved on. Or rather up. For several years now, field biologists from Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology have been collecting samples and painstakingly noting the steady march of nearly every vertebrate species toward higher elevations. Since relocation changes the animals’ ecological equations, such as what foliage or other animals are available to eat, it creates a problem for several species, especially those nearer the top. They have nowhere to go.

That we can know where the animals lived before is due to the astonishing foresight of biologist Joseph Grinnell, who created the museum a hundred years ago. He rigorously trained his students (many of whom went on to seed and lead other biology departments) in his collecting methodology, which in all its essentials is still used today. Grinnell was hardy, hiking many miles a day through Yosemite’s granite terrain. He was also disciplined and driven. The blue notebooks in which he and his trained successors recorded their finds, and just as importantly took detailed notes on the surroundings, line several shelves at the museum. His tome, Animal Life in the Yosemite, remains the most comprehensive guide to fauna in the park.

Journalism professor Michael Pollan locates another form of implausible deniability in the disconnect between the reassuring bucolic imagery evoked in product descriptions at his local Whole Foods store—he memorably entitles this artful prose “Supermarket Pastoral”—and the realities of large-scale organic farming (page 24).

Finally, as battles over immigration laws again heat up, Peter Schrag, the esteemed former editorial page director for the Sacramento Bee, diagnoses an acute case of implausible deniability in his excellent new book, California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment, which is adapted here (page 38). Schrag writes that while the cultural complexion of the state has undergone a fundamental change since 1980, due largely to immigration, the state’s institutions have failed to keep up. The predominant ideologies, left and right, have been locked in increasingly dysfunctional debates about how to prepare Californians for the massive changes still to come. And California voters, buffeted by increasing numbers of ballot initiatives, remain largely unaware of the long-lasting effects, many the opposite of those promised or intended, emanating from the tax cuts, term limits, and budgetary mandates they’ve passed.

Facing the effects of climate change, deadlocked government, and deteriorating public services, it would be easy for Californians to move from denial to despair. But that would be to ignore the reservoir of talent, good will, and creativity that also characterizes our state. The immigrant governor is proposing new and needed investment in California’s public infrastructure, especially its schools. And as wise old Joseph Grinnell might have advised, an essential step, and a gift to posterity, would be to make careful, honest, and sober assessments of what’s actually happening on the ground.

Kerry Tremain

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