Consider any single acre of land in the Bay Area today and all the lives it may have lived.
There were vast stretches of time when an acre would have experienced warmer climes and then cooler eras, shifted with geologically slow migrations, and been host to megafauna, like mastodons and the dire wolf. Just 18,000 years ago, it would have dried and warmed, or perhaps been submerged in the San Francisco Bay, as the last glacial period ended and waters rose.
When humans arrived, at least 10,000 years ago, an acre may have been tended, traversed, or burned by Ohlone. Later ranched, farmed, extracted from, built upon, and maybe polluted by the waves of newcomers. And then by the 1960s, an acre’s future, increasingly, potentially, included conservation and restoration.
In fact, since the ’60s some 1,364,000 acres of Bay Area land have been protected, according to data presented at the conservation community’s annual TOGETHER Bay Area conference this spring. When counting every one of the 1,668,761 acres protected here, it amounts to roughly 33 percent of all the land in the region’s nine counties. And the TOGETHER coalition’s goal is to protect 50 percent of the area, or 2.5 million acres, by the year 2050.
The concept is an extension of California’s efforts to protect 30 percent of the state’s land and waters by 2030, alongside a dozen or so other states. Some nations (unlike, now, the U.S.) are pursuing similar goals detailed in the Global Biodiversity Framework. So if you’re an acre, you may yet be protected and begin an era of rest.
How an acre becomes protected in the modern era is varied, the routes many. Among them is an approach to conservation called mitigation, very broadly defined as land approved for the development of human stuff in exchange for land conserved elsewhere for plants and animals. In conservation circles, it’s an approach that sparks debate, opinions, and mixed feelings.
In this issue, award-winning environmental journalist Mark Schapiro delves into a particularly esoteric and lucrative type of mitigation: the mitigation banking industry. His feature, Price-Tagging Nature, shows how this multibillion-dollar market operates and has conserved and restored more than 50,000 acres in California.
In this current period of rapid change—in the climate and our federal agencies—every acre matters.
—Victoria Schlesinger
Editor in chief
