The California Field Atlas: A presentation by Obi Kaufmann

After completing the first phase of the California Field Atlas Series, author Obi Kaufmann introduces what comes next.

In an exclusive presentation, Obi pulls back the curtain on the strategies and processes that brought the first six books of the series into being over the past ten years and the trajectory for expanding the vision. Working now on the second California Lands Trilogy, Obi explores what is left to say and where there is space to explore in this work. Across and through habitat spaces and over ever-widening temporal horizons, Obi continues his unique journey into the evolutionary past and the unfolding futures of California’s unique positioning in the long history of the planet. Always making the case for the stewardship and celebration of California’s precious biodiversity, Obi’s books, packed as they are with science and art, have established themselves as critical and timely work in an increasingly chaotic world. Full of hope, visions of resiliency, and an appreciation for the adaptive systems of California’s more-than-human world, these books tell a story that is depthless as it is passionate and as beautiful as it is expansive.

Obi Kaufmann is an award-winning author of many best-selling books on California's ecology, biodiversity, and geography. Most famously, his 2017 book The California Field Atlas, currently in its seventh printing, re-contextualized popular ideas about what he calls “California’s more-than-human world.” Following his initial Field Atlas, his following books, THE STATE OF WATER; UNDERSTANDING CALIFORNIA’S MOST PRECIOUS RESOURCE and THE CALIFORNIA LANDS TRILOGY: THE FORESTS OF CALIFORNIA, THE COASTS OF CALIFORNIA and THE DESERTS OF CALIFORNIA present a comprehensive survey of California’s physiography and its biogeography in terms of its evolutionary past and its unfolding future. Recently, Obi was the 2023 artist-in-residence for the National Park Service at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, and shortly thereafter, The Deserts of California, won the 2024 Book Award for California Lifestyle from the California Independent Booksellers Association. You can catch him every month in conversation with author and tribal chairman Greg Sarris in their podcast called Place and Purpose.

His latest book, 2024’s THE STATE OF FIRE; WHY CALIFORNIA BURNS, is among his most popular and timely books to date. In 2025, Obi completed an artist residency at the Climate Farm School of Agroecology and his art has been installed at BART stations around the Bay Area as art of BART’s celebration of biodiversity. An avid conservationist, Obi Kaufmann regularly travels around the state, presenting his work and vision of ecological defense and reciprocation from the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildland Center to the Mojave Desert Land Trust. A lifelong resident of California, when he isn’t backpacking, Obi Kaufmann makes his home base in Oakland, where he is working on more Field Atlases to come. You can follow his work on Instagram at @coyotethunder.