Last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and British Prime Minister Tony Blair signed a mission statement to take "urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote low carbon technologies." Without mentioning specifics, the statement aligns California and the UK in their commitment to use market incentives to foster innovation in emissions trading and low carbon technologies, learn more about "the economics of climate change" and increase communication and collaboration among scientists and technological innovators. While the move sends an important message to President Bush, who has not acted aggressively on this issue, the pact itself is vague and non-binding. Is this just another empty gesture or does this partnership have what it takes to help save the planet?

When John Muir, a wilderness mystic and founder of the Sierra Club, wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” he was reflecting on his profound relationship with California’s pristine alpine wilderness. But Erik Davis posits something further. In his kaleidoscopic history of spiritual California, The Visionary State, Davis proposes that Muir was also making room for an innovative, new “rootless tradition.” California dreaming, it seems, has it own dream logic.

The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the hallways of some California high schools, where school cafeteria bans on junk food have created a black market for cookies and chips. Jennifer Obakhume, a senior at Inglewood High School in Los Angeles, reported on the trend for NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday.

Berkeley rolled out the red carpet for the green Prince last Monday when Charles and Camilla stopped by the Martin Luther King Jr. Edible Schoolyard, where kids grow organic vegetables and cook healthy meals under the auspices of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation.

Prince Charles, long an ally of sustainable agriculture, also took his newly minted missus to an organic farm and several farmers’markets in Marin County. Camilla deviated from the path of royal restraint, sampling everything from heirloom apples and wild salmon to organic cheese and wine.

A crumb of organic pizza on Camilla’s not-so-stiff upper lip had the British press clucking their collective tongue, but the Duchess clearly won herself a whole new set of fans on this side of the Atlantic. Diana called her the Rottweiler, but to the Californians she charmed, Camilla was nuthin’ but a chowhound.