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The California coast that Davidson and his fellow surveyors found in the middle of the 19th century is now utterly changed, as are human needs and priorities. In the 21st century, the value of watersheds is measured by their capacities for ecological services. Many areas of coastal California now are seen as hugely valuable harbors of refuge for steelhead and salmon if not humans, and as thoroughfares for migrating waterfowl and marine mammals. The patterns revealed by George Davidson and the Coast Survey in the 19th century are among the best templates for ecological restoration and coastal management in California in this new century. In this bicentennial year of the Survey of the Coast, those maps and charts are being brought back to life as digital images for contemporary use in restoration planning.

George Davidson's achievements are many. He persuaded the wealthy James Lick to endow the great telescope of the Lick Observatory, and also urged Anthony Chabot to endow the Chabot Observatory in Oakland, the first great public observatory on the West Coast, linking him firmly to California astronomy and very big telescopes. But the most important telescope Davidson ever looked through was the first one he set up in a cow pasture by Point Conception, the Point of the Beginning for much of the subsequent history of California and for its potential future.

John Cloud is a geographer who received his Ph.D. from U.C. Santa Barbara. He never saw the ocean until he was 18 years old, but is now making up for that with his Adirondack guideboat. He is currently working under contract with NOAA to write the history of the Coast and Geodetic Survey; for this he developed a scanning project to recover Coast Survey treasures now in the National Archives. Many of the original charts, like Kohklux's map of the terrain from Chilkat to the Yukon, had not been seen for more than a century.

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