David Loeb was the co-founder and Executive Director of the Bay Nature Institute and the publisher of Bay Nature magazine. Now retired, he continues to roam the trails and waterways of the Bay Area and points beyond and contributes occasional articles to baynature.org.
It’s certainly not hard to apply words like “outrageous” and “appalling” to the current scandal surrounding $54 million dollars in funding for state parks that had gone unspent and undiscovered for over ten years. But it’s not going to do … Read more
Point Reyes, the spectacular park that turns 50 this year, is also the reason I decided to stay in the Bay Area after coming for a visit decades ago.
As I write this note at the beginning of March, we’re enjoying our sixth weekend in a row without rain, spanning a period that’s generally the height of the Bay Area’s rainy season. For those of us who work all … Read more
As I write this on Thanksgiving weekend, I have many things to be grateful for. For example: On Thanksgiving morning, I watched a huge raft of cormorants take off from the surface of the Bay in front of Angel Island. But behind such moments and places of great beauty, several dark clouds are gathering.
If it’s a Saturday morning, you’re more than likely to find me doing one of two things: visiting some wild place for nature-related recreation or biking to the Berkeley Farmers’ Market. The melee of colors and the medley of shapes … Read more
By Miles O. Hayes and Jacqueline Michel, Pandion Books, distributed by Heyday, 2010, 352 pages, $29.95. It’s hard to argue with the claim by the South Carolina-based authors of A Coast to Explore that “the shoreline of Central California is … Read more
In the 1970s, mother and peace activist Doris Sloan was working a nonprofit desk job in a basement office in San Francisco when she got into a UC Extension Sierra field class and fell in love with geology. The rest, as they say, is history. Over the subsequent three decades spent teaching, writing, and leading field trips, Sloan has done more than anyone to make the complex geology of California and the Bay Area comprehensible and fun for those of us without PhDs.
There’s nothing like getting out on the Bay at water level. And now that harbor porpoises are again venturing daily inside the Golden Gate, there’s never been a better time to grab a paddle and hit the water--or at least let Bay Nature take you there in your mind’s eye!
Surprise (almost) manzanita blossoms halfway up a mountain in Borneo.
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
