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.
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.
Words have always helped humans connect with nature, and the Sixth Annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival is all about celebrating that link. On Saturday, September 8 (11 a.m.-4 p.m.) in Berkeley’s Civic Center Park, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass … Read more
The vast expanse of rugged country east of high-tech Santa Clara Valley, crowned by the Bay Area's highest peak, has been a refuge for wild species—humans included—for a very long time.
Lake Merritt changed dramatically over the centuries, but it still supports estuarine habitat -- in addition to the recreation needs of a growing city.
San Francisco Bay presented a thrilling—yet possibly lethal—mystery to a young Spanish captain as he sailed up to probe the entry to the Golden Gate for the first time on the morning of August 5, 1775. Juan Manuel de Ayala … Read more
The air over Cullinan Ranch is cool and moist. Only the faintest gray line marks the location, south across San Pablo Bay, of the East Bay hills. The wetlands here, just north of Route 37, bear imprints of human use. … Read more
Bob Walker was a passionate defender of Bay Area open space and a brilliant landscape photographer with an amazing eye for light and shape. A former chair of the San Francisco Chapter of the Sierra Club, Bob was also a … Read more
For most of the nearly four years it has taken to turn BAY NATURE from an idea into the magazine you now hold in your hands, I worked out of my house in north Berkeley. Could be worse: there’s a … Read more
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
