Human settlement in the San Francisco Bay Area dates back 10,000 years to early Native American settlements. Today, the region is a teeming metropolis of 7 million people that collectively challenge the health of the region’s ecosystems. How it got this way is a story that prompts a deeper understanding of our place in the landscape.
By a quiet picnic area in the Presidio, water gurgles out of the hillside, spills over brick walls, and disappears underground on its way north to Crissy Field and the Bay. This is El Polin Springs, celebrated by the Ohlone and the Spanish for bringing fertility to anyone who drank of it. Ambitious plans to uncover the watershed's stream channels are peeling back interwoven layers of human and natural history to reveal a complete urban watershed.
Lester Rowntree (1879-1979) was a self-taught botanist and independent spirit who spent half her life trekking up and down California observing, gathering, and photographing the state’s native flora. Born in England, Rowntree lived in Kansas, Southern California, and on the … Read more
Walk a few miles in Jack London's boots to see the landscape he declared more beautiful than any he'd seen in all his travels.
California’s Frontier Naturalists, by Richard G. Beidleman, UC Press, 2006, 484 pages, $39.95 www.ucpress.edu If you’ve ever taken a moment to imagine California’s landscape in its youth, you might have some inkling of the world you’ll enter when you pick … Read more
The open hills along the Carquinez Strait are home to working ranches and open space preserves that are meeting places for native species from both the coast and the Central Valley. Today's quiet pastoral landscape makes it hard to envision the violent formative flood that may have cut this critical waterway between the Bay and the Central Valley some half a million years ago.
With stunning views of the Bay and Marin, Richmond’s Point Molate has seen a lot of changes: It’s been a shrimp camp, a huge winery, and a Navy fuel depot. Now the site of a controversial casino proposal, this modest point of land is home to diverse wildlife and some of the East Bay’s last native coastal prairie.
At the turn of the 20th Century, the California Academy of Sciences was the oldest scientific society in the western United States. From its humble beginnings in 1853 as California’s de facto cabinet of curiosities stemming from “the systematic survey … Read more
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
”Karl Linn spent his lifetime bringing people together in community, in an urban setting, in nature,” says Carole Bennett-Simmons, project coordinator for the Peralta Community Gardens, one of five Berkeley projects built by the prominent landscape architect, social justice activist, … Read more
Some folks love their scent and shade; others resent them for crowding out natives; most of us know they came from Australia and found a niche here. But few know that the East Bay’s eucalypts owe their presence to one entrepreneur who thought the trees would make him rich. They didn’t, but now, love them or hate them, the trees are here to stay. Fortunately, some animals have profited from Mr. Havens’s mistake.
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
