Imagine a piece of technology the size of an aspirin. It can go anywhere, be embedded in anything and keep track of any action, movement or sound — imparting huge amounts of data, like tiny puzzle pieces that can be correctly fitted to form the picture of your life. It sounds Orwellian, the ability to monitor your habits at all times.

While we primarily talk about sustainability in terms of environmental impact, the principles of sustainability apply just as much to our social and economic ecology.

As West Sacramento’s mayor since 1998, Christopher Cabaldon has been an integral part of the city’s metamorphosis from a gritty industrial outpost to one of the region’s most up-and-coming locales. We recently sat down with him to talk about riverfront development, craft breweries and the impending “green rush” of legal marijuana.

Driving through the security-guard checkpoint to the massive 278,000-square-foot sleek building that emerges — not visible from the street — a visitor to the California Independent System Operator headquarters in Folsom would likely realize something important happens here before even stepping foot inside.

Cal-ISO is one of 38 system operators for the geographic area that covers everything west of the eastern boundaries of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. That compares with six system operators responsible for most of the rest of the country. “The divided operation of the western grid is not unlike having a bus with 38 drivers.”

When it comes to our country’s shift to renewable energy, there’s no turning back. Improved technology has made renewables more reliable and less expensive, and government policies have encouraged or required their use. But there’s always change happening in the industry sector, as you’ll read in one of our July features, “Will the Mega-Grid Get Built?” 

Imagine picking up your marriage license at the mall, or registering your baby’s birth at a kiosk near the escalators. Seems hard to imagine, right? It’s almost too convenient. But these are realities for one neighborhood in Nice, France, where locally-made Cisco technology is changing the way residents interact.

A technologically-savvy city is no longer fodder for fantasy film; it’s an expectation. We live in a time where technology can and should make our urban environments more efficient in terms of energy consumption, transportation, land use, citizen participation and government processes.

Innovation is understandably not something most people associate with government. More than most any place in society, government offices are thought of — accurately or not — as where innovation and cutting-edge thinking go to die. But it doesn’t have to be that way, nor is it that way everywhere.

Bright bursts of yellow flowers amid a sea of rolling green grass are an easy find in April at Mather Field. But just months ago, these dramatic swathes were completely swamped with water, and later this summer their beds will be bone-dry and baking hot.