Plant Trees SF Events 2013 Archive: 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024

Event

 
http://naturenewssf.blogspot.com

California Native Plant Society meeting - free and open to the public
SEPTEMBER 5, THURSDAY, 7.30 pm
Highlights of White Mountains, Onion Valley, Bodie State Park, Sonora Pass and Alpine Lake
Speaker: Ted Kipping
San Francisco County Fair Bldg
9th Av & Lincoln Way in Golden Gate Park

The Eastern side of our Sierra Nevada and the eastern ranges of the Great Basin and Range area are full of interesting biota. Come take an arm-chair journey through a lovely cross-section of it.

Ted Kipping is a Life Member of CNPS as well as many other environmental, botanical and horticultural organizations. He was educated in Natural History at Columbia University and worked with Jake Sigg in Strybing Arboretum. Eventually he started a tree care concern called Tree Shapers.  He is a Certified and Consulting Arborist with over 40 years’ experience. He enjoys experiencing native flora in habitat and sharing his experiences photographically

Everyone is welcome to attend membership meetings in the Recreation Room of the San Francisco County Fair Building (SFCFB) at 9th Avenue and Lincoln Way in Golden Gate Park. The #71 and #44 buses stop at the building. The N-Judah, #6, #43, and #66 lines stop within 2 blocks.

(Anyone wanting to join us for dinner with Ted should contact me.  JS)

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Tigers on Market Street

September 8, 11:00 am-2:00 pm
Embarcadero in front of the Ferry Building
Please register with Eventbrite
SUGGESTED DONATION: $10-$20
Served by BART (Embarcadero station) and all MUNI lines. On-street bike parking available.

Market Street may seem like an unlikely habitat for butterflies but the corridor of London plane trees, canyon of tall buildings, and sources for water from urban fountains have created an unplanned riparian area that has become the home of Western Tiger Swallowtails. First noted by lepidopterist Harriet Reinhard in 1987, this phenomenon is an incredible story of wildlife adaptation within the heart of the city.

While the ecological footprint of cities is widely studied, we often overlook the efficacy of the collective ecosystem of our open spaces, shorelines, parks, and street plantings. What can we do to perpetuate and enhance nature’s presence in the city? How can we redesign Market Street to include habitat for the Swallowtail and other wildlife? How can better understanding this phenomenon help us to design our cities differently?

For the last two years, Amber Hasselbring and Liam O’Brien have studied theWestern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly on Market Street. Hasselbring is a San Francisco-based artist, naturalist and the Director of Nature in the City while Liam O’Brien is an illustrator, lepidopterist and conservationist. Together, they are working to find ways in which to support and expand Market Street as a habitat to this extraordinary butterfly. We invite you to join us on a walking tour with Amber and Liam exploring Market Street through the perspective of the swallowtail, helping to document this natural phenomenon and expand it. Please bring your camera.

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Artist reception for the show FUSIONS on September 12th from 5-8pm at the Reclaimed Room on the Building REsources' site.  

I have completed two short videos on the artists presenting work, Reddy Lieb and Roland Blandy.  Please check them out by clicking the link below and get an insider look at what you will experience at our next show.  

http://reclaimedroom.com/2013/08/22/fusions-artist-profiles/

Soumyaa Kapil Behrens 

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Saturday, September 7th, 2013 – 1:00PM – 2:00PM
“The Western Pond Turtle, Your Shy Neighbor”
JESSIE BUSHELL, San Francisco Zoo
 
Jessie Bushell from the San Francisco Zoo will introduce you to the shy and fascinating western pond turtle.  Come meet a turtle and learn about California’s only native freshwater aquatic turtle, the challenges that they are currently facing in California and throughout the western US, and how the Mountain Lake Project will help with conserving this special species.
 
Jessie has been working with reptiles and amphibians for over 18 years.  Through her work at the San Francisco Zoo, she is collaborating with Sonoma State University and the Oakland Zoo on a long term study of the western pond turtle to uncover important information about its reproductive physiology and nesting habits.  Jessie is also collaborating with the Presidio Trust on the restoration work at Mountain Lake specifically related to the reintroduction of the turtle.
 
FREE.  NO RESERVATIONS REQUIRED.
This event is not easily accessible for people in wheelchairs or with mobility issues, and presenters’ voices are not amplified.

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Loren Eiseley, born 3 September 1907

If we examine the living universe around us which was before man and may be after him, we find two ways in which that universe, with its inhabitants, differs from the world of man:  first, it is essentially a stable universe; second, its inhabitants are intensely concentrated upon their environment.  They respond to it totally, and without it, or rather when they relax from it, they merely sleep.  They reflect their environment but they do not alter it.  In Browning’s words, “It has them, not they it”.
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“It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned out in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the word’s heart, something demonic and no longer planned—escaped it may be—spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant’s game against its master."
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Loren Eiseley once wrote that man’s long adventure with knowledge has been “a climb up the heat ladder.  The creature that crept furred through the glitter of blue glacial nights, now lives surrounded by the hiss of steam and the roar of engines…and he is himself a flame, a great roaring furnace.”

Loren Eiseley, of the Odyssey:
"Odysseus' passage through the haunted waters of the eastern Mediterranean symbolizes, at the start of the Western intellectual tradition, the sufferings that the universe and his own nature impose upon homeward-yearning man.  In the restless atmosphere of today all the psychological elements of the Odyssey are present to excess:  the driving will toward achievement, the technological cleverness crudely manifest in the blinding of Cyclops, the fierce rejection of the sleepy Lotus Isles, the violence between man and man.  Yet, significantly, the ancient hero cries out in desperation, 'There is nothing worse for men than wandering.'"  (From Star Thrower?)

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Remembering Seamus Heaney

A shy soul

Aug 31st 2013, 13:00 by E.H. The Economist

WHEN Seamus Heaney began writing poetry, during his years studying to be a schoolteacher in the 1960s, he used the pen-name “Incertus”, meaning “uncertain”. Later, he would describe himself as “a shy soul fretting and all that”. As an older man with an illustrious career behind him his gentle voice could still be mistaken for shyness. When I saw him give a lecture at Cambridge University on the importance of peaty bogs in his work he stood tall yet slightly stooped over a lectern, quietly capturing the audience's attention with his self-deprecating dry humour. 

Yet there is little that is hesitant in his poems. “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” So opens “Digging”, the first poem in “Death of a Naturalist” (1966), his first, dazzling collection. The poem would go on to be studied in schools and endlessly quoted in articles about Heaney, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1995. Rightly so—in 31 lines Heaney confidently captures the mixture of lyrical observation and matter-of-factness that went on to characterise his work.

Heaney's language is spare and to the point, yet his poems are full with texture. He later wrote that “Digging” was the first poem “where I thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words.” It was this knack for conveying “the feel” of a thing that marks Heaney out as one of the major poets of the 20th century.  

Born in 1939 in County Derry in Northern Ireland Heaney grew up in a rural farmstead, his family crammed into three rooms. As he described it in his Nobel prize speech: “It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other”. The beauty of the Irish landscape recurs throughout his work. He watches his father till the earth and observes potato diggers stopping for their lunch-break. But life is not romanticised. Everyday harsh realities are turned into lyric poetry—farmers drown kittens and dead turkeys are slapped upon the cold marble slabs of a table.

Over 12 collections of poems this rustic upbringing is never far away. But the collection that made his name, “North” (1975) touches on another aspect of contemporary Ireland that has rarely been so well articulated. Describing the sectarian conflict of the 1970s and 1980s, poems such as “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” capture the impossibility of putting such violence into words: “The famous / Northern reticence, the tight gag of place / And times”. “Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us”, he writes. Few wrote so well and with such nuance about the Northern Irish Troubles.

Along with his poetry, Heaney was also an excellent translator (having studied Latin and Anglo-Saxon at Queen’s University in Belfast). His translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem “Beowulf” in 1995 brought it to a new audience, as did his 2009 version of the little-known, but brilliant medieval Scots poem by Robert Henryson, “The Testament of Cresseid”. His translations of Greek plays, such as “The Burial at Thebes” (adapted from Sophocles’s “Antigone”) and “The Cure at Troy” (a version of Sophocles's “Philoctetes”) subtly interwove differing voices, bridging the gap between poetry and plays. And as a lecturer at Harvard and Oxford (where he was Professor of Poetry from 1989 to 1994) he was a brilliant teacher. His criticism sparkles with the combination of plain speaking and acute observation so familiar in his poems.

Last year I heard Heaney speak again in London. Older, and slightly more frail, his muscular poems still shone out in the darkness of an auditorium. From his last collection, “Human Chain” (2010), he read a poem written in memory of his friend David Hammond. It begins: “The door was open and the house was dark / Wherefore I called his name, although I knew / The answer this time would be silence”. Although death has now silenced Heaney, his voice lives on.


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Crane Cove Park Design Review - September 9th

The Design Review meeting will be on September 9, beginning with a site tour at 4:30 at the corner of Mariposa and Illinois Streets followed by the design review meeting at 6:00 at the Pier 70 Noonan Building at the eastern foot of 20th Street. The link below provides details for the location and meeting agenda (notice/agenda).

Please note the special location, including the site visit, which will require participants to sign a release of liability.

Below is also a link to the Crane Cove Park web site, which includes a staff report describing the revised Crane Cove Park Master Plan.

This will be a joint meeting of San Francisco Bay Conservation Development Commission’s (BCDC) Design Review Board (DRB) and the City’s Waterfront Design Advisory Committee (WDAC). The Port and design consultants will present the most recent design modifications and there will be a public comment period before the Board or Committee advises on the project.
 
The revised Crane Cove Park Master Plan being presented and reviewed at the joint WDAC & DRB meeting is the result of an extensive community planning process that has been underway since the fall of 2011 and which is fully described in the staff report.
 
Crane Cove Park Web site: sfport.com/cranecovepark
Meeting Notice & Directions: http://www.sfport.com/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=6642
Release of Liability: http://www.sfport.com/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=6641
Staff Report: http://www.sfport.com/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=6646

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Eric Mills:

September 1, 2013
See article below, an interview with Alan Weisman (THE WORLD WITHOUT US), a discussion of perhaps THE major problem facing our planet:  human overpopulation.  Mr. Weisman even provides a few solutions to our dilemma, the (gasp!) worldwide education and empowerment of women, amongst them.  And Iran as a model for family planning.  Who'da thought?

ORION (a quarterly) is one of the very best publications out there, with provocative articles, poetry, interviews and beautiful photo essays (whales, this issue).  I would urge you to subscribe  And/or give a gift subscription to a friend.  Money well spent.

P.S. - It seems that CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY is the only major environmental organization giving much attention to the overpopulation issue.  If you're a member (or not) of AUDUBON, SIERRA CLUB, ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE, EARTH ISLAND INSTITUTE,  DEFENDERS OF WILDLIFE, GREENPEACE, et al., encourage them to run the enclosed Weisman article.  I think it deserves a mass readership.  Send it to your legislators and public policy-makers, too.
 
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7694

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From the archives:  Science News LTE, December 2009

Climate brouhaha
I feel compelled to write a comment in reference to Janet Raloff’s article on climate politics (“Climate might be right for a deal,” SN: 12/5/09, p. 16). I just wanted to say that I am eagerly awaiting her follow-up article regarding the revelation of data manipulation and destruction, the subordination of the peer-review process and overall unethical and unprofessional behavior of leading climatologists and other global warming advocates. Notice that “global warming” has now been replaced by “climate change”? Whoever the person(s) are that revealed such behavior and viewpoints in the e-mail, they have given the science community a chance to redeem themselves. I hope Science News will help.
James L. Fowler, via e-mail

Editor replies:  Several readers have questioned why Science News has not covered the unauthorized release of e-mails related to climate change. The short answer is that there was no new science to report. An exhaustive review of the e-mails by the Associated Press concluded that “the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.” The e-mails (as reported in Raloff’s Science & the Public blog, “‘Climate-gate’: Beyond the embarrassment,” SN Online: 12/12/09) revealed some intemperate language and bad behavior, but scientists’ personal shortcomings do not change the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere: The vibration frequencies of carbon dioxide molecules remain the same, and the measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations in the air have not been rescinded. The basic science underlying concerns about climate change has repeatedly been verified by various observations and measurements, experiments and theoretical analyses. Many uncertainties remain, but assertions that the world’s leading atmospheric scientists are perpetrating a hoax or conspiracy are without scientific merit, and Science News will continue to report on the science of climate change and its societal implications. — Tom Siegfried, editor

(JS:  On August 30 Channel 9 featured a program on the water situation in the Central Valley.  It showed several crops (eg, cherries, almonds, potatoes) in trouble because of water quantity and quality (mostly salt).  It was a new program, but it all looked very familiar, as if I had seen it several times--and I have; this was only an update on the evolution of a long-familiar problem.

Yet do nothing to come to terms with it.  What prevented us from acting while there was still time is the money and politics involved--that and out inbuilt refusal to admit that our ability to control nature has limits.  In this country optimism is de rigueur.  What makes this tragic is that we refuse to limit our numbers to what the land can sustain.  While predictions are perilous, it doesn't take imagination to see suffering on a scale so large that I am hesitant to state it.  These problems are happening around the world, and if the land, prompted by climate change, fails to sustain us, it is not overly dramatic to see destabilized regions of the world characterized by mass movements of people.  I shudder.

Perhaps it won't be that bad, and somehow either through choice or through circumstances we stabilize or even shrink our numbers.  [Don't ask me about those circumstances!])

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"Global warming and biological invasions are two major agents of the global changes affecting our planet; these human-induced phenomena often work in synergy to contribute to the ongoing decline of biological diversity."

-from "Wildlife in a Changing Climate," Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2012, p 51, www.fao.org/forestry
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JS:  In 1975, India has 600 million, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was trying to do something about it--ruthlessly.  She tried to sterilize poor people, and it cost her her job.  At that time, India was adding a Pennsylvania every year, experiencing sporadic failure of its monsoon season, and much starvation.  

The Green Revolution, reliable monsoons, and groundwater pumping allowed India to go back to sleep, ignoring the problem.  Population was alarmingly high then.  It has now doubled - from 600 million to 1.2 billion.  There seems to be no awareness of the need to control numbers, and its culture seems to favor large families.  In the meantime, Green Revolution has run its course and aquifers are becoming depleted.

All we need is for the monsoons to fail.  Given time they will, they will.

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Feedback

On Sep 3, 2013, at 10:05 AM, John Bosley wrote:
Hi Jake-
 Greetings from your fan on the shores of America's Great Eastern Estuary--the Chesapeake. Folks hereabouts should make common cause with all you out there who inhabit the shores of (one of the) Great Western Estuaries, the SF Bay, on matters like this. Tom Horton's a stand-up guy who writes beautifully about the Chesapeake region.  I thought you'd like this:  http://fw.to/Yy1SG8G

Immigration is an environmental issue 
What if they held an environmental crisis and no one cared?
Good to hear from the other coast, and from you, John.

I especially liked this opinion piece because it puts the finger precisely on the reasons why I am concerned about immigration, and why everyone should.  We know how sensitive the topic is, but if people were to think of what is at stake it should embolden them to speak out--in clear, precise terms.

On Aug 31, 2013, at 7:09 PM, Arnold Levine wrote:
Hi Jake,
Thanks for sending the nature news. I live up here in Sebastopol now and do a weekly show on KOWS 107.3fm community radio which also streams at www.kows.fm. From your news I got a very interesting interview with Matthew Booker on his new book "Down by the Bay". I attach a link.
http://tommysholidaycamp.com/mp3/MatthewBookerDownBay8-12-13%202.mp3

Thanks again, keep up the great work.
(Arnold is talking about my newsletter of July 18.)

On Sep 1, 2013, at 2:11 PM, Anna-Marie Bratton wrote:
Hi Jake,  RE: Light  One of my pet peeves about this time of year is folks who say that San Francisco has no true Autumn - they just don't recognize the subtle change in the light that happens but perhaps one has to be a City Native.
Being a City native has nothing to do with it - it only requires paying attention.  And winter light is different yet again.  There are light shows here year-round, and we’re having superlative ones daily right now, in this strange spell of weather.

Linda Salmon:
Thanks Jake 4 posting the last piece on economic thinking... It greatly affects our physical environment in most unfortunate ways... It's time folks began connecting the dots. 

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HISTORY OF RUSSIAN HILL, TELEGRAPH HILL & WATERFRONT BATTLES
Interesting history to share with your members/ newsletters---when Russian Hill residents fought the Fontana Towers (stopped five other towers) and fought for the waterfront 40-foot height limit.  Below are the 8-lane tunnels under Russian Hill that were never built.  Note the Art Institute’s tower in the picture.   See articles below. 

Below:  Proposed seven towers at Aquatic Park. The twin Fontana Towers were built. 
 
 
FOUND SF:  The Fontana Towers and Waterfront Battle. 
http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Height_Limit_Revolt_Saves_Waterfront_Vistas
Residents of Russian Hill and Casper Weinberger (a Republican conservationist) stopped towers along the waterfront.  A coalition fought for the waterfront 40-foot height limits.  Later, height limits were initiated on Russian Hill. 
FOUND SF:  The Freeway Battles
http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Freeway_Revolt   
For decades, Telegraph Hill Dwellers, San Francisco Tomorrow and many others fought the freeways. 
Over time, by tapering heights downward towards the waterfront, public vistas and San Francisco’s beauty will be preserved for everyone. 
Regards, Howard Wong, AIA

"Men are very fond of proving their steadfast adherence to nonsense."
	Edward Beale; inscription embedded on sidewalk on The Embarcadero at Beale Street

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Read the fine print on 8 Washington St.

By: Allan B. Jacobs | 05/27/13 7:47 PM
Special to The S.F. Examiner
The devil is in the details on 8 Washington St.

Over the next several weeks, San Franciscans will see dozens of paid petition-gatherers in front of grocery stores and on city streets asking them to sign a petition for a ballot initiative to “open up the waterfront.” Titled the 8 Washington Parks, Public Access and Housing Initiative, it excitedly proclaims it will transform an asphalt parking lot and chain-link fence into wonderful amenities such as “new housing, new waterfront public parks and open space.”

Throughout my eight years as San Francisco’s planning director, I learned time and time again that in any plan the details matter most after the promises fade. The proposal contains some 13,000-plus words. Here are a few of the details about the proposal that really matter:

Raises waterfront height limits
Words that matter most in the 8 Washington St. initiative are hidden deep inside the text and are nearly impossible to decipher. Section 4(a) makes amendments to the San Francisco general plan that revise the height and bulk classifications for Block 0201, Lot 012 from 84-E to 136-E. That would raise existing waterfront height limits from 84 feet to 136 feet to enable the construction of a tall condo tower that would be more than 50 feet higher than the torn-down Embarcadero Freeway that walled off this section of San Francisco’s waterfront for decades. By employing special-use district zoning to change the law and increase waterfront height limits for this project, the measure will open the door to proposals for tall towers on the waterfront from the Ferry Building to Fisherman’s Wharf.

Related...


San Francisco Democratic Party endorses measure against 8 Washington condo project

05/23/13 8:17 PM
Backers of a November referendum of the contentious 8 Washington St. condominium development on the waterfront picked up a key endorsement Wednesday from the local Democratic County Central Committee. An endorsement from the local Democratic Party is one of the most influential in San Francisco politics and is being celebrated by opponents of the 134-unit development. Read More
San Francisco’s now-famous urban design plan addressed issues of height and bulk of buildings citywide, very much including the waterfront. Those matters became law. The piecemeal game playing that is central to what we are being asked to approve is a terrible way to make public policy — all the more so because it benefits a few high-end developers.

Reduces public open space and recreation
The 8 Washington St. proponents claim that “more than half of the land in the proposed 8 Washington St. plan is dedicated to recreation and public open space.” A careful reading of the text reveals that most of that space would not be open to the general public but would be available only to residents of the condo complex or to members of a new high-end health club. 
Thousands of square feet of “open space” would actually come in the form of decks, terraces and common usable space for condo owners, and would be accessible only to them.

To add insult to injury, in their counting, they claim they are giving us walkways that are already public open space.

Creates zero affordable-housing units on-site
The initiative says it “will create much needed affordable housing in San Francisco.” The actual plan builds zero affordable-housing units at 8 Washington St. or on the waterfront while providing for 134 luxury housing units that will cost fortunes: not for you or me. The developer would have to contribute to The City’s affordable-housing fund. But voters should wonder why affordable-housing units were entirely left out of a plan that now purports to be a “housing initiative.”

It is more than the details of the 8 Washington St. initiative that are disturbing; it is basic substance. The Sierra Club, Affordable Housing Alliance and Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods are all urging a “no” vote on the 8 Washington St. height-limit increase that is already on the November ballot.

There’s much more to this measure than meets the eye. For sure, it’s time to revisit The City’s urban design plan, to see if it can be made better, but not through ballot-box planning in this terrible, piecemeal way that benefits one developer at the expense of all of us.


Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2013/05/read-fine-print-8-washington-st#ixzz2UomIfhn8

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On Aug 28, 2013, at 7:41 AM, Robert Hall wrote:
I got a call and a link to a slick website that advocates for more open space at 8 Washington. One would hardly know that there will be a condo complex on the site. You should check it out so you know what you're up against. Make sure you watch their video:
http://www.openupthewaterfront.org/

Yes, Bob, I heard about it, but seeing it is still shocking.  Especially when you have otherwise credible people speaking of “opening up the waterfront”, when it would do the opposite.  As if the parking lot is more than a temporary use.

One thing we have going for us is that voters can be easily confused when there are two conflicting propositions on the ballot.  However, our message is simple:  Vote No on both propositions.  Their message will be simple also:  vote Yes on both.  They will have lots more money to convince people, and I needn't remind you the power of money.  One would think that voters would laugh this one off the ballot, seeing who is beyond it and how detrimental it is to the city.   But after being bombarded with all those "increase affordable housing" "wouldn't you rather have a park than a parking lot?" and so forth, I wouldn't care to bet on who will win.

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McLaren Park electronic field guide - additional comment:

Ken McGary:  In my excitement to get the news out about the new field guide I see now that I didn't provide much background and context, so let me try again. This info is also now in the intro text for the field guide:

Please pass the word on this new resource! This electronic field guide is still in development and uses "unofficial" iNat guide features, so if the system occasionally burps or you see funny formatting here or there, don't despair, the iNat team is working on it. But in the mean time, the information just seems too useful to keep under wraps, so please enjoy it with this caveat in mind. 

Much of the species data was collected during an iNat-powered bioblitz in May 2013. Volunteers and visitors continue to record observations. We're also planning more McLaren bioblitzes in the future so watch this space or sign up for the Save McLaren Park newsletter to stay informed about upcoming nature-related events in the park. 

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Coastside Land Trust Gallery


Autumn's Bounty by Carol Szabo

24 local artists have embraced the Fall Season on the coastside, showcasing 39 original pieces in Coastside Land Trust Gallery's Fall Festival Show. You are invited to join us and the artists at the Opening and Artists' Reception on Sunday, September 8 from 11am - 3pm. The show will then run from September 8 – October 25. All art is for sale and mediums include oil, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, photography and clay. Coastside Land Trust Gallery is located at 788 Main Street in Half Moon Bay. 

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CLT stewardship volunteers recently removed 4,978 pounds of trash, recyclables, and invasive plants from the Railroad Right-of-Way conservation easement in Half Moon Bay. Thank you to all of the volunteers that came out to help restore this beautiful coastal prairie open space. Check out a photo of the workday by clicking here. Habitat restoration work will continue on the easement during Fall 2013, please look for our announcement. 

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Native plants are for sale at our office on Main Street. These are coastal varieties and will do well in your garden or open space. $5 each or 3 for $10. In stock: Aster, Bee Plant, Gowen Cypress, Hedge Nettle, Lupine, Strawberry, and Yarrow. Call 650.726.5056 for more information. 

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CLT ongoing and upcoming
Fall Festival Show - September 8 - October 25, Th, F 11-2, Sun 10-2
California Coastal Clean Up Day - September 21, 9-Noon
Pumpkin Festival - October 19-20
Raptorama™ - November 8-10

"The Coastside Land Trust is dedicated to the preservation, protection and enhancement of the open space environment, including the natural, scenic, recreational, cultural, historical, and agricultural resources of Half Moon Bay and the San Mateo County coast for present and future generations."
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Northern Harrier by Richard Pavek

Migrating raptors on the Pacific Flyway use the open spaces of coastal San Mateo County as critical feeding grounds during winter months, making the coastside a world renowned birding location for residents and visitors alike. This November 8, as the raptors arrive to the coastside, Coastside Land Trust Gallery will open its "California Raptor Show". 

We invite you, and the artists you know, to submit to the show. The submission period is September 23 – September 30 and the show will run from November 8 – January 10. All media is invited to be considered. Please see the link below for complete details on how to apply.

California Raptor Show Application

We look forward to your submissions. Please contact Eric with any questions at 650-726-5056 or eric@coastsidelandtrust.org

You can also visit our gallery page here for more general gallery information.

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Toxic Gas, a Lifesaver

Key concepts:
* The body manufactures tiny quantities of the poisonous gas hydrogen sulfide (H2S).
* Mounting evidence indicates that the gas plays a beneficial role in the health of the cardiovascular system and other parts of the body.
* Based on these findings, researchers are developing H2S-based therapies for conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease to irritable bowel syndrome.

Sidebox:  Why garlic is good for you:
Studies suggest that garlic can soften blood vessel walls, prevent blood platelets from clumping together and lower blood pressure, thus lowering the risk of heart attack, stroke and kidney disease.  Research has also linked eating garlic to improved immune system function and reduced risk of some forms of cancer.

The secret of garlic’s apparent health benefits may lie in its relation to H2S.  In 2007 (a researcher) reported that the sulfide-containing compounds found in garlic are converted into H2S by molecules that occupy the membranes of red blood cells.  Furthermore, garlic contains a compound called S-allyl-L-cysteine that boosts the production and circulation of H2S in the body…

Scientific American March 2010

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Florida citrus grower gets slap on the wrist after killing millions of honeybees—by Jen Hayden: "A large, well-known Florida citrus grower has been hit with a $1,500 for intentionally killing millions of bees: One of Florida's largest citrus growers has been fined after a state investigation found it illegally sprayed pesticide that caused the death of millions of honeybees. For the last seven years, the nation's beekeepers have been plagued by a malady known as colony collapse disorder, in which bees disappear from their hives. Pesticides have been blamed as one of the causes. The $1,500 state fine last week is believed to be the first time a Florida citrus grower was cited in connection with a bee kill. It might be the first time a fine has been levied, but the $1,500 is angering local beekeepers and environmentalists."

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