Dan Rademacher

Dan was editor of Bay Nature from 2004 until 2013, when he left to work for SF-based Stamen Design. He is now executive director of GreenInfo Network, a nonprofit mapmaking organization. A onetime professional cabinetmaker, he considers himself a lifelong maker of things and teller of stories. Dan has been working at the intersection of journalism and technology since, at age 16, he began learning reporting, page layout, and database design. His enduring interest in environmental issues crystallized into a career path in 1998 when he assisted former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass in a cross-disciplinary nature writing and ecology course at UC Berkeley, from which Dan received a Masters in English literature. In 1999, he became Associate Editor of Terrain, the erstwhile quarterly magazine of Berkeley's Ecology Center. In addition to editing and art-directing Bay Nature magazine, he was also Bay Nature’s chief technology strategist, fixer of broken things, and designer of databases and fancy spreadsheets. And he was even known to leave the office and actually hike outdoors.

Hey, who spruced up this place?

July 29, 2012 •  by

Welcome to the new BayNature.org! We’ve just relaunched this site in a big way, and we’re pretty excited about what you’ll find here: A brand-new interactive trailfinder with 100 trails and maps, photos, and basic information on more than 400 local parks. … Read more

The Otter and the Perch

April 11, 2012 •  by

River otters have been wildlife stars at Jewel Lake in Tilden Regional Park off and on over the last year. But did you know they’re chowing down on rare fish?

Foraging 101

April 10, 2012 •  by

Want to forage in a local park? Chances are it’s not allowed, but some parks do allow limited gathering of edible berries and mushrooms. In January 2012, we gathered up the rules from a couple of dozen agencies. But caveat emptor: they may have changed since then.

Beyond the Bounty at Food Landscape Forum

November 17, 2011 •  by

Panelists at a sold-out forum on November 16 talked about their farming and farm-education enterprises on the San Mateo Coast, San Francisco, West Marin, and Santa Rosa. From food sovereignty to occupying your foodshed, check out the highlights.

Book Review: Natural History of San Francisco Bay

October 1, 2011 •  by

By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto and Kathleen M. Wong, 2011, UC Press, 352 pages, $24.95 paperback, $65 hardcover. The latest installment of the UC Press Natural History series (number 102!) comes from frequent Bay Nature contributors Ariel Rubissow Okamoto and Kathleen … Read more

Ron Felzer’s Struggle to Stay in the Field

June 21, 2011 •  by

Longtime Merritt College teacher Ron Felzer helped blaze the trail of environmental education with hundreds of field seminars he’s taught since the 1970s. Felzer is semi-retired now, but he and other field educators at Merritt are facing the hardest budget struggles Felzer’s ever known, with fewer and fewer classes making it onto the college’s schedule.

State Park Officials Release Closure List

May 13, 2011 •  by

In what’s become an annual crisis, the California Department of Parks and Recreation today released a list of 70 parks across the state slated to be closed. This time, though, it looks like it’s for real.

The Subtleties of Knowland Park

May 5, 2011 •  by

Knowland Park might be the City of Oakland’s largest park–about 500 acres–but it’s mostly known as the home of the Oakland Zoo. We visit the park with some native plant advocates who have their own fine-tuned sense of Knowland’s beauty.

Crowd-sourcing the Weather

February 2, 2011 •  by

Today, the online weather forecasting site Weather Underground is launching a new crowd-sourced forecasting system that creates custom forecasts for thousands of personal weather stations across the country, including dozens in the Bay Area.