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.
Early in our work on each issue of the magazine, we send out a call for photos to more than 400 local photographers and artists. The idea is maybe they have some images on file that fit with stories we … Read more
It’s always a red-letter day at the Bay Nature office when we get a visit from Jack Laws (aka John Muir Laws, wildlife artist extraordinaire and the man behind the Naturalist’s Notebook in the back of every issue of Bay … Read more
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
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?
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.
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.
Photos by Stephen Joseph, text by Linda Rimac Colberg, Mount Diablo Interpretive Association, 2010, 266 pages, $50. Photographer Stephen Joseph has amassed a wide-ranging body of work–from a project to photograph Bay Area farms (see his photos in this issue) … Read more
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
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.
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.
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
