Country In The City

I heard a seminar today by Richard Walker, a geographer at UC Berkeley, on the environmental history of the Bay Area, following the lines of his recent book The Country In The City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. The tale of how so much of the Bay Area landscape came to be preserved as open space is a remarkable one of grass-roots politics, and Walker gives a good telling of it. The bit that cuts to the bone for me is how much of my own identity (I who roamed Tilden and Wildcat Canyon when young) has been shaped by the results of their efforts. His book now rides high on my reading list (soon to be joined, I suspect, by Grey Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco — Brechin is giving a seminar here in a couple of weeks.)