Cindy Spring

This interview was conducted in May 2007 by Cindy Spring, who directs Close to Home: Living with Wildlife in the East Bay, a series of lectures and excursions designed to connect participants with the local environment.

The Keeper of the Waters

July 1, 2008 •  by

Gayle Ciardi, the first woman to serve as a watershed keeper for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, is the fourth-generation of her family to work on the SFPUC watershed.

A Force To Be Reckoned With

July 1, 2007 •  by

Barbara Salzman was “hooked on nature” after taking her young son on field trips with Elizabeth Terwilliger, Marin’s legendary environmental educator. Salzman is now president of the Marin Audubon Society (MAS), which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The organization … Read more

Sleuthing Sudden Oak Death

October 1, 2006 •  by

By the time that sudden oak death (SOD) began hitting North Bay oaks and tanoaks in the mid-1990s, Ted Swiecki and Elizabeth Bernhardt, husband-and-wife plant pathologists, had been studying oak diseases in California oak woodlands for many years in the … Read more

Don’t Call Them Bugs

July 1, 2006 •  by

Edward Ross has visited every continent except Antarctica in pursuit of his passion for studying, collecting, dissecting, classifying, naming, photographing, and deeply appreciating insects. In between his globe-trotting adventures, the 89-year old curator emeritus of entomology at the California Academy … Read more

Happy Trails

April 1, 2006 •  by

The single-track trail along the creek looks quite inviting: just wide enough for hiking, with no fallen limbs or nasty briars sticking out, a canopy overhead. It all seems so natural. But Melvin Johnson knows better. As operations coordinator for … Read more

Revitalizing Urban Creeks

January 1, 2005 •  by

Urban creek restoration involves more than removing nonnative plants and substituting local ones. Add to that: volunteer management skills and detailed knowledge of bird, amphibian, fish, and mammal habitats; flood plain control; water quality; government ordinances; and the right size … Read more

Saving El Palo Alto

July 1, 2004 •  by

Imagine a landmark so prominent that anyone looking south from San Francisco or north from San Jose could spot it. Spanish missionary Padre Pedro Font wrote in his diary in March 1776: “I beheld in the distance a tree of … Read more

Grazing for Change

April 1, 2004 •  by

When two hikers complained to state park rangers recently about an area severely trampled by grazing cows, they drew on a strong current of suspicion that many people feel toward ranchers. And why not? Past ranching and range-management practices, even … Read more