To take a full, hard look at mankind’s broken relationship with nature, just YouTube the famous car race scene in the 1978 film Grease. 

John Travolta’s character smirks and flicks his gelled hair while striding his white steel Greased Lightning. He and his nemesis skid along a narrow stream of tarry water, under bridges and past expressways, while their fans cheer by the concrete banks.

The morning I became a U.S. citizen, I stood between a well-groomed Vietnamese woman and a rotund Mexican man. In front of me, an Armenian with a ponytail raised his point-and-shoot camera. Behind me, a Korean young lady in heels texted rapidly into her iPhone.

NILAND, Calif.—A large white cross perches on a brilliant mountain of bubble-gum pink, Grinch green, and candy red. It looks like a Christian hallucination of Dr. Seuss—but this colorful mirage sits in the middle of a seemingly endless California desert of parched sand and prickly shrubs near the town of Niland. Population: 1,006. 

When I was a little girl, my father always told me I was “the most beautiful girl in the world.”

I believed him with the kind of pure-hearted trust a daddy’s girl has for her father. And then I grew up.

After a long day, Mike Scott has something to look forward to. 

Often he sits back with a glass of wine in his 1920s Spanish-style home, watching eight chickens scuttle and peck around his verdant backyard while the sun sets over the hazy Los Angeles cityscape. The chickens’ routine is oddly comforting.

“It’s not just the children,” Scott said, gazing down at his flock. “The adults get mesmerized while watching the chickens, too.”

When I was in eighth grade, “girl talk” meant blushing cheeks and coy smiles over the latest crush. We passed heart-filled notes marked in glittery pens, agonized over whether the boy returned our affections, and strategized plans to sit next to him. “Being in a relationship” meant linking hands whenever the couple thought nobody was watching.

Jeanne Kelley has a big bowl of salad for dinner every night.

She lives across from a giant supermarket in Eagle Rock, a hill-studded neighborhood northeast of Los Angeles. But instead of driving to the store, she walks three minutes down the hill to a community garden called Rockdale, where she picks arugula, lettuce, snow peas, spinach, tomatoes or kale—whatever is in season and ready to harvest.