Professor Walker, professor of Geology at UC Berkeley, gave us a quick introduction to the rich and complicated history of environmental leadership in the Bay Area. The bay area and its cities, he says, are a green quilt, a coat of many colors, a rich fabric of different types of landscape, all political spaces, constantly being fought over, but all-told preserving more open space than Yosemite does. Open space for which people STILL have to fight.
He walks through seven eras of the environmental movement in San Francisco: “the scenic wonders” and the creation of an ideology of preservation (with the likes of John Muir); “parks for the people,” where national parks are created, and the Redwood preservation league gets state parks going, where parks become popular recreation areas; “suburban revolt,” the first questioning of growth, as the Golden Gate Bridge is built from Marin, on into the freeways wars of San Francisco; “saving the bay,” how Save the Bay became the example for environmental membership organizations and brought the masses into the environmental fight; “greenbelt alliance,” the start of regional thinking and planning for the environment, and the unification of a lot of anti-growth groups; “land trusts,” started with the Trust for Public Land in Marin, preserving land in a new sort of way; and most recently, “brown environments,” environmental justice fights over toxic lands and brown fields.
One of the questions Professor Walker was interested in was what can we learn from all this time and effort. Here’s the highlights: upper class rebels have always been a part of the fight (tip your hats to the rich with a conscience); today the blocks of people who most vote for park bonds in order are: a) latinos, b) african-americans, c) asians, and last d) whites; women have been the backbone of local movements; the land has been put to use for the public, for the public good; the institutionalizing of organizations like Save the Bay keep the movement robust and keep a memory of what has already occurred.
All of this has lead to a political culture that is very deeply green, has saved us some amazing places, and still creating more.
You can read about all this more in depth in his book, the County and the City.
SF Natural History Series 