1. SF Environment job opportunity/Restore Hetch Hetchy Devleopment Director
2. Youth Stewardship Program has two available intern positions
3. Reclaim Market Street - Sidewalk Intervention - Saturday 8 October noon to 5 pm
4. Plans for Folsom St, 7th, 8th, and 16th Streets - meeting Wednesday 5 October
5. Acterra Stewardship's 5th Annual Habitat Restoration Workshop October 25
6. SF Planning Commission hearing Natural Areas Mgt Plan DEIR - October 6
7. LA Times story on forest restoration
8. English language loves a do-over
9. Friends of Sausal Creek native plant sale Oct 16
10. CNPS Fall Native Plant Sale, Los Altos Hills Oct 15/free talk on Success With Native Plants Oct 15
11. CNPS Fall Native Plant Sale, San Francisco Oct 22
12. Plethora of events in Claremont Canyon
13. Oldest Living Tree Tells All - heart-rending story of a bristlecone
14. Obituary: Wangari Maathai
15. At every crossroad be prepared to bump into wonder
16. Feedback
17. The Chance: we have a chance, briefly, to shine
18. Survivors: The Animals and plants that Time Has Left Behind
19. Freakonomics: Why crime continues to fall during a bad economy
1. SF Environment Job Opportunity: 5638 Environmental Assistant - Clean Air, Electric Vehicles
Applications for City and County of San Francisco jobs are being accepted through an online process. Visit http://www.jobaps.com/sf/sup/BulPreview.asp?R1=PEX&R2=5638&R3=058269
California pipevine and the pipevine swallowtail butterfly are the subject of an article in the East Bay Regional Parks Botanic Garden October 2011 newsletter: http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=01091d83e4aa193c78a888704&id=8b37cec9c0&e=dc1584429c
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Restore Hetch Hetchy Development Director - slightly revised job description
Salary Range: $65,000 - $80,000 + benefits
Overview of the Position
The Director of Development (DD) is a senior employee who is responsible for all aspects of the annual Development Plan and works closely with the Executive Director (ED) and the Board of Directors (BOD) to grow the organization's annual income and to diversify the organization's income sources. This will best be achieved through the development of a robust major gifts program and through the expansion of the organizations existing membership and grants program. Hence, the most qualified applicant will have a proven track record in major gift acquisition but is also experienced in other aspects of a diverse fundraising program.
Full information - http://www.hetchhetchy.org/news
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2. The Youth Stewardship Program, a free environmental service-learning program in San Francisco, has two available intern positions interviewing now. For more information see our listing at http://www.idealist.org/view/internship/65mCDJk3s2fP/
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3. Reclaim Market Street! Sidewalk Intervention
Join us: Saturday October 8, 12:00- 5:00 for 'Urban Hedgerow' at UN Plaza (Market St. & 7th, near the fountain)
Imagine, build and play with us! Let's create wild, unmanaged green veins throughout San Francisco made of hedges, sidewalk gardens, treetops and stream corridors -- thoroughfares for songbirds, pollinators and other urban wildlife.
www.art-ecology.com
“Poetry is in the streets.” -Situationists
How can we redefine the social life of the sidewalk? Amidst the hustle and bustle of commerce and business how do we slow to the pace of conversation, interaction or reflection? Can we create places to sit, make or play? This one-day event will explore these questions through a series of artists interventions along Market Street.
This event is part of the exhibition Reclaim Market Street! created by the Studio for Urban Projects and exhibited at SPUR. Please visit the exhibition at 654 Mission Street, San Francisco.
Acknowledgments: This project is made possible through the generous support of SPUR and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
photo: bumble bee pollinating & taking nectar from a mule's ear flower
The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to
reclaim a little more land. -- Thomas Huxley.
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4. logo_teeniest.gif Community meeting on Folsom, 7th, 8th, and 16th Streets
EN TRIPS community meeting about Folsom Street, 7/8th Streets, and 16th Street
Wednesday October 5, 6–8 pm
SoMa Gene Friend Recreation Center (270 Sixth Street @ Folsom)
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is hosting a community meeting to discuss plans for Folsom, 7th, and 8th streets in SoMa, and 16th Street in the Mission and Showplace Square / Potrero neighborhoods. Alternatives that include wider sidewalks, bicycle improvements, pedestrian amenities, transit priority, and options for two-way Folsom will be presented.
For more information about the project, visit the web site at www.sfmta.com/entrips. You may also e-mail the project at ENTRIPS@sfmta.com or contact Erin Miller, Project Manager at 415.701.5396.
Improving Folsom, 7th, 8th, and 16th Streets are priorities for Livable City's Complete Streets campaign. See our Complete Streets campaign page for more details.
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5. Acterra Stewardship's 5th Annual Habitat Restoration Workshop
Join restoration professionals, researchers and land stewards representing different organizations and agencies throughout the Bay Area to share good restoration practices and build community.
This year's focus will be on habitat restoration for our creeks and other riparian ecosystems.
Topics will include:
* Habitat rehabilitation for species of interest
* Typical riparian invasives and eradication techniques
* Natural erosion control practices
* Appropriate locally native plants suitable for restoration
* Examples of riparian restoration projects
There will be opportunities to meet other like-minded people and share experiences. We will also provide a tour of the Redwood Grove restoration project on Adobe Creek.
When: Tuesday, October 25th, 9:00 am - 4:00 pm
Where: Shoup Park, Los Altos [MAP]
Cost: $50 (general), $10 (student) [includes lunch] [REGISTER NOW]
For questions, please contact Alex Von Feldt at alexv*acterra.org
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6. The San Francisco Planning Commission is hearing the Significant Natural Resource Areas DEIR Thursday 6 October in City Hall, Room 400. The meeting begins at noon and this is the second item on the agenda.
The purpose of the hearing is strictly to see whether anything was overlooked in the environmental review. The hearing is not about the Management Plan itself (that will be much later), only about the adequacy of the issues identified and addressed. Despite that, count on many to troop to the microphone and either praise or bad-mouth the Program. They will be either admonished or ignored. There will be plenty of off-leash advocates and other forms of recreation inappropriate for a natural area. They will be out in force.
My personal opinion is that the Planning Dept did a good job--and it was a huge job. Public employees are so often criticized unfairly and they become scapegoats for a frustrated public. It is important to tell them when they do it right. I was unable to detect any substantial omissions. (The real action is when the Plan itself comes back for public comment.)
Thanks to Linda Shaffer for this:
Perhaps some or all of you have learned this elsewhere, but just in case: The discrepancy between the initial Summary and the Alternatives section of the DEIR with respect to identifying the Environmentally Superior Alternative is explained. The statement in the Summary, Section I.B, on pp. 1 & 2 of the document, that the Maximum Restoration Alternative is the Environmentally Superior Alternative, is a typo and is incorrect. The statement in section 7, on p. 526, that the Maintenance Alternative is the Environmentally Superior Alternative, is correct.
More helpful clarification: "Environmentally Superior Alternative" is a CEQA term. It means the alternative with the least potential environmental effects. Every EIR must identify an Environmentally Superior Alternative. THE ENVIRONMENTALLY SUPERIOR ALTERNATIVE IS NOT THE SAME AS THE PREFERRED ALTERNATIVE, nor is there a requirement that the Environmentally Superior Alternative be made the Preferred Alternative. The Project (in this case, the management plan) which RPD has submitted for an EIR is presumed to be the Preferred Alternative.
Source: Karen Mauney-Brodek, RPD Planning
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7.
65179036-03082642.jpg
Don Kelsen / Los Angeles Times
Weeding a forest, one plant at a time
By Louis Sahagun
Botanist Katie VinZant is leading a team in ripping out nonnative species that have multiplied in the 640,000-acre national forest since the 2009 Station fire. Video
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-weeds-20111003,0,441230.story
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8. "...The English language loves a do-over: remediation, reclamation, restoration, redevelopment, redemption. F. Scott Fitzgerald is frequently quoted on the dearth of second acts in American life, never mind American landscapes, but the quote is usually misunderstood. Second acts aren't synonymous with second chances. The second act--and Fitzgerald the screenwriter knew it--is the three-act play's meaty, messy middle, where quests become complicated and outcomes tarred with doubt before resolution finally parts the clouds in Act III. What Fitzgerald really meant, I bet, is that Americans have no patience for uncertainty and setback. Give us exciting incidents and cathartic climax. Hold the confusion."
Extracted from Brad Tyer's 'Lost Opportunity' in High Country News, 19.09.11
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9. The Friends of Sausal Creek (FOSC) will hold our fall Native Plant Sale on Sunday, October 16, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Joaquin Miller Native Plant Nursery. You can download a flyer at http://www.sausalcreek.org/pdf/FOSC_Plant-Sale-2011.pdf .
Native plant experts will be available all day to help shoppers pick appropriate plants for their specific planting areas.
This year’s plant sale will feature workshops and live music throughout the day, including:
-Native Bees and Your Garden
-Got Honey? The Ins and Outs of Urban Beekeeping
-Raptors and Owls of the Watershed
-Native Plant Propagation
-Planting a Native Garden
-Face Painting for Future Gardeners
-Music by Harlan James Bluegrass Band (Michael Thilgen and friends)
Bring your family, neighbors, and friends...and, if possible, a cardboard box to get your plants safely home with you.
For more information, please visit www.sausalcreek.org/plantsale.html , email coordinator@sausalcreek.org , or call (510) 501-3672.
To volunteer to help before or during the sale, contact nursery@sausalcreek.org or call (510) 325-9006.
Directions:
The nursery is located in Joaquin Miller Park on Sanborn Road. From Highway 13, go east on Joaquin Miller Road. Turn left on Sanborn Road and park near the community center. Follow signs to the nursery, about 1/4 mile.
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10. FALL NATIVE PLANT SALE. Scores of hard-to-find native plant species, seeds, and bulbs suitable for California gardens. Speak to experts about lawn alternatives such as native perennials, wildflowers, and grasses. Native plant books, posters, and note cards on sale. Organized by California Native Plant Society (Santa Clara Valley Chapter). Saturday, October 15, 2011, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Hidden Villa Ranch, CNPS Nursery, 26870 Moody Road, Los Altos Hills. 2 miles west of I-280. Free parking. Come early for the best selection; bring boxes in which to carry purchases home. Cash or check only. For more information, visit www.cnps-scv.org, email cnps_scv@yahoo.com, or call 650-260-3450.
Free Talk & Tour: 1-2pm
Success With Native Plants,
by Kevin Bryant
Native plants are drought resistant, so I don't need to water much, do I? Why did my young native plants die? For answers to these and other questions, come to this talk and learn the right way to care for young native plants. The talk will be followed by a short tour of the native garden around the Visitor Center. Kevin Bryant is a past president of the chapter, and a landscape designer. Hidden Villa Ranch Visitor Center, Moody Road, Los Altos Hills. (650) 260-3450. Saturday, April 16, 2011, 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Hidden Villa Ranch, Visitor Center, 26870 Moody Road, Los Altos Hills. Free admission, limited to 25 people, first come first served. For more information, visit www.cnps-scv.org, email cnps_scv@yahoo.com, or call 650-260-3450.
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11. Late fall is the best time to get those native plants in the ground, so don't forget about this great sale...
The Native Plant Sale is a chance to find local plant species that are not readily available at garden centers. Our focus and offerings, as always, will be native plants local to San Francisco and northern San Mateo County. These species are adapted to the local climate, soils, and habitats--and are also important to local fauna. This is the perfect time to select drought tolerant plants in preparation for planting during the winter rains.
Who: California Native Plant Society's Yerba Buena Chapter
When: October 22nd 2011 from 1pm to 5pm
Where: 350 O'Shaughnessy Blvd at Del Vale (Miraloma Park Improvement Club), San Francisco
Contact Ellen Edelson 415-531-2140 or e.edelson at sbcglobal.net
http://cnps-yerbabuena.org/gardens/plant_sales.html
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12. Lot of events in Claremont Canyon. Join them:
www.claremontcanyon.org
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13.
shim.gifcohen_title.gif
by Michael P. Cohen
A Skeleton Plot
During the summers of 1963 and 1964, Donald R. Currey, a graduate student in geography at the University of North Carolina, investigated east central Nevada’s Snake Range, on the flank of Wheeler Peak. He was one of many people seeking to develop chronologies of climatic change during the “Little Ice Age,” which at the time was defined in very general terms as a 400-year period when global temperatures dropped slightly, reaching a minimum in the early 1600s. He was looking for old bristlecones close to or on a glacial moraine which might register climatic conditions, and he found them. Bristlecone pines are the oldest living trees on Earth. And Currey has become famous for cutting down the oldest individual tree ever found. This is the story of what happened.
(First paragraph of a long and excellent article--incisive and probing. I recommend the whole article, although it is not for those just casually interested. There is drama and pain, as well as meticulous scholarly attention to detail. JS)
http://www.terrain.org/essays/14/cohen.htm
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14. Wangari Maathai obituary, by John Vidal (condensed) Guardian Weekly
Kenyan winner of the Nobel peace prize for environmental efforts to help the poorest
Wangari090.jpg
For a young Kikuyu girl growing up in the early 1940s, the small village of Ihithe, in the lush central highlands of Kenya, was next to perfect. There were no books or gadgets in the houses, but there were leopards and elephants in the thick forests around, clean water, rich soils, and food and work for everyone. "It was heaven. We wanted for nothing," Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel peace prize winner, who has died of cancer aged 71, told me when I saw her last in Nairobi. "Now the forests have come down, the land has been turned to commercial farming, the tea plantations keep everyone poor, and the economic system does not allow people to appreciate the beauty of where they live."
As it was, her family sent her away to a primary school run by Italian nuns, where she excelled. But her remarkable academic rise to become the first woman to run a university department in Kenya was due entirely to her closeness to nature. It was the land that showed her and taught her everything, she said.
After graduating in 1959, she won a scholarship to study in the US, as part of the "Kennedy airlift" in which 300 Kenyans – including Barack Obama's father – were chosen to study at American universities in 1960.
Her early work as a vet took her to some of Kenya's poorest areas, where she saw firsthand the degradation of the environment and the stress it put on the lives of women who produced most of the food. Kenya's forests were being cleared and replaced by commercial plantations. The result was more drought, loss of biodiversity and increased poverty. The experience, she said, made her determined to address the linked, root causes of poverty and environmental destruction.
It also coincided with her marriage to Mwangi Mathai, a young Kenyan politician who had also studied in the US. The union, she said later, was "a catastrophe", but it led to her championing the cause of women for the rest of her life: "I should have known that ambition and success were not to be expected in an African woman. An African woman should be a good African woman whose qualities should be coyness, shyness, submissiveness, incompetence and crippling dependency. A highly educated independent African woman is bound to be dominant, aggressive, uncontrollable, a bad influence."
Realisation that communities were destroying their own resources led her to work directly with the poorest. It was the women, she reasoned, who experienced the worst impact of a degraded environment. In 1977, she set up the Green Belt movement, more in hope than expectation that it would grow. "They lack wood fuel, water, food and fodder. They are poor, have no cash income and are confined to rural life," she told me. "They find themselves in a vicious cycle of debilitating poverty, lost self-confidence and a never-ending struggle to meet their most basic needs."
Initially, the Green Belt movement's tree-planting activities did not address issues of democracy and peace, but it soon became clear to her that responsible governance of the environment was impossible without democratic space. The tree became a symbol for the democratic struggle in Kenya and a way of challenging widespread abuses of power, corruption and environmental mismanagement. She and others planted trees in Uhuru park, Nairobi, to demand the release of prisoners of conscience and a peaceful transition to democracy.
But as she became more vocal in her criticism of Kenyan elites, she ran headfirst into the corruption and casual brutality that surrounded President Daniel arap Moi. There had been attempts before to dismiss her as mad or foolish, but she came to prominence in 1989 when she led a campaign to stop the construction of a multimillion-pound office development in Uhuru park, Nairobi's equivalent of Hyde park in London. The complex, backed by the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, was about to be built when Maathai and other pro-democracy individuals challenged Moi in the courts. The international campaign succeeded and the development was scuppered. Moi and the political establishment were furious.
In 1992, she found herself on a list of people targeted by the government for assassination. For protection, and as a defiant statement, she publicly barricaded herself in her home for three days before the police broke in to arrest her. She and others were charged with sedition and treason, and were only released after a campaign orchestrated by the Kennedys.
Maathai and the rest did not stop there. They took part in a hunger strike in Uhuru park, which they labelled Freedom Corner, to pressure the government to release political prisoners. After four days, she and three others were beaten up by the police. This time Moi called her "a mad woman" who was "a threat to the order and security of the country". For the next few years she lived in fear of her life, and was increasingly threatened and vilified by political leaders. In 1993, she was forced into hiding after Moi claimed she was responsible for leaflets inciting Kikuyus to attack Kalenjins.
As her political thinking developed, she became increasingly critical of worldwide governance. Her falling-out with politicians in Kenya reflected her deep disillusionment with the World Bank, the IMF, Britain and other former colonial powers. Increasingly she sided with the world's poorest people, becoming a hero of the worldwide ecological and African democracy movements.
"The elites have become predators, self-serving and only turning to people when they need them. We can never all be equal, but we can ensure we do not allow excessive poverty or wealth. Inequality breeds insecurity," she said.
In 2004, seemingly out of the blue, she was awarded the Nobel peace prize, to the consternation of many politicians and governments who still did not see the "peace" connection between human rights and the environment. It gave her an international profile and a strong platform to travel the world, pressing home the message that ecology and democracy were indivisible. In 2006, she led a Unep tree-planting scheme that has resulted in more than 7bn trees being planted across the planet.
In her last years, she took on the commercial palm plantations that have destroyed so much of Indonesia and Malaysia and badgered politicians to address climate change, which she said was hurting women the most.
"The tree is just a symbol for what happens to the environment. The act of planting one is a symbol of revitalising the community. Tree-planting is only the entry point into the wider debate about the environment. Everyone should plant a tree," she told me.
• Wangari Maathai, environmental activist and politician, born 1 April 1940; died 25 September 2011
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15.
Not dawdling
not doubting
intrepid all the way
walk toward clarity
with sharp eye
With sharpened sword
clearcut the path
to the lucent surprise
of enlightenment
At every crossroad
be prepared to bump into wonder
~ James Broughton ~
(Little Sermons of the Big Joy)
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16. Feedback
Bruce Grosjean:
> Jake - Since I know you are just as interested in overpopulation as I am, I thought you might also find this BBC Radio documentary valuable. It attempts to take on the thorny issue of western inspired bias and myopia as a way to decipher why the globe now has twice as many inhabitants as it did when Paul Ehrlich wrote his book.
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00k8trt/The_Documentary_Controlling_People_Episode_1/
Janet Gilles:
> Small is good.
>
> Whole world was rural til this century, til WW2 convinced us our destiny was industrial and the world, seeing the (momentary) wealth, followed suit.
>
> Followed by skyrocketing health costs, monstrous drug companies, and unemployment.
>
> Time to rethink.
>
> On Oct 1, 2011, at 2:50 PM, Jake Sigg wrote:
>> Notes & Queries: Communism sucks, capitalism sucks, economics sucks--what's left?
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17.
The Chance
The blue-black mountains are etched
with ice. I drive south in fading light.
The lights of my car set out before
me and disappear before my very eyes.
And as I approach thirty, the distances
are shorter than I guess? The mind
travels at the speed of light. But for
how many people are the passions
ironwood, ironwood that hardens and hardens?
Take the ex-musician, insurance salesman,
who sells himself a policy on his own life;
or the magician who has himself locked
in a chest and thrown into the sea,
only to discover he is caught in his own chains.
I want a passion that grows and grows.
To feel, think, act, and be defined
by your actions, thoughts, feelings.
As in the bones of a hand in an X-ray,
I want the clear white light to work
against the fuzzy blurred edges of the darkness:
even if the darkness precedes and follows
us, we have a chance, briefly, to shine.
~ Arthur Sze ~
(The Redshifting Web)
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18. Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time Has Left Behind, by Richard Fortey
Biology is the most complex of all the sciences and the one that touches us most closely; and natural history is half of it, observing what is, what's out there, and what it all does. Good naturalists are humble - awed by nature and always aware that life in the end is beyond our understanding. This is Richard Fortey's great strength. He is a paleontologist, a scholar of fossils, but he is, he tells us, "a naturalist first". His latest book is in the great tradition of natural history - that of the nature ramble, led by the authoritative, other-worldly sage. He leads us on a ramble that is not only global but takes us through aeons, to look at creatures that haven't changed much to look at for hundreds of millions and in some cases for billions of years. Worldwide, there's a surprising number of these ancient types: it's a mistake to assume that the creatures that evolved later necessarily supplanted the ones that came before. Natural selection may work just as efficiently to keep things the same as it so obviously does to change them.
(Opening paragraph of book review by Colin Tudge in Guardian Weekly 30.09.11
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19. From NPR's Marketplace
Freakonomics: Why crime continues to fall during a bad economy
Conventional wisdom says a bad economy leads to increased crime. But Freakonomics Radio's Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt tell us why that's not true.
(There are some surprising stats here, both presently and going way back in history--when we left the hunter-gatherer stage. JS) |