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.
On Saturday, June 8, Big Basin Redwoods State Park kicks off its 100-day Centennial Celebration. Big Basin is California’s oldest state park, established under the leadership of photographer Andrew P. Hill and the Sempervirens Club as the 19th-century logging boom … Read more
Have you ever wondered what some familiar spots in San Francisco looked like 300 years ago? Environmental artist Mark Brest van Kempen did, so he went back in time and took some pictures.
Intrigued by a way of life that is “so remarkably different from that lived by the other six and a half million people in the Bay Area, one that has been passed down from one generation to the next, AND … Read more
It's small, it's restless, and it changes sex halfway through its life. Plus, the humble bay shrimp occupies a crucial niche in the complex food web of San Francisco Bay. It once played a significant role in the economy and culture of the local Chinese community. Today, both the shrimp and those who fish for it are still hanging on, but it hasn't been easy.
Numerous animals make their homes in burrows in the hills of this Santa Clara County park, but none dig as deep as the miners who hauled mercury-laden ore out of the ground for 125 years.
Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland. Trail: 33.1 mi, 524 ft elevation gain, loop
At the California Academy of Sciences’ new exhibit, “Russia’s Great Voyages to America: Science Under Sail 1728-1867,” viewers get a firsthand look at thousands of animal and plant specimens, artifacts, illustrations, and journal entries collected by the earliest explorers of … Read more
1854: U.S. coast survey map by Josh Collins.; 1897: U.S. coast survey map courtesy CA State Lands Commission; 1996: NASA infrared photo. www.stillhere.org
The return of endangered coho salmon to their ancestral spawning grounds in this west Marin watershed is an essential component of the connective tissue that holds a fragmented ecosystem together. Greeting the salmon tethers us to the landscape's seasonal rhythms and reawakens a lineage that goes back to the first inhabitants of this place.
Nestled in the hills southeast of Livermore, at the border between the San Joaquin Valley and the Bay Area, the old Tesla Mine townsite in Corral Hollow sustains a vibrant mix of inner south coast range plants and animals along with the traces of a rich human history. But a state proposal to create an off-road vehicle park in the hollow threatens to reopen old scars on this tranquil landscape.
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
