About Nature in the City
Introduction
Program Areas
Supporters
Vision
Contact
Introduction
Founded in Spring, 2005, Nature in the City is the only organization wholly dedicated to ecological conservation, restoration and stewardship of the Franciscan bioregion, the natural heritage of the northern San Francisco peninsula.
The city's biodiversity and wildlife habitats are fragmented and severely impacted by invasive plants, insensitive uses, agency neglect, and public lack of awareness. Kids and adults are increasingly disconnected from nature, and global species extinction proceeds at an epic pace.
How you can help save nature in the city:
- Become a member, partner or supporter!
- Volunteer to do habitat restoration or lead a trek.
- Plant a wildlife-friendly backyard.
- Advocate for City officials to take care of San Francisco's biodiversity, wildlife habitats and natural areas.
Program Areas
Corresponding to the strategies for achieving our mission, our three major program areas are:
- Public Education
- Habitat Restoration & Community Stewardship
- Conservation Advocacy
whereby we,
- Educate city dwellers, stewards, visitors and civic leaders about San Francisco's natural heritage.
- Catalyze, nurture and support the citizen network of community-based ecological stewardship, and direct native habitat stewardship projects in threatened natural areas throughout the city.
- Organize & promote grassroots advocacy to all government jurisdictions to achieve strong legal protection and comprehensive ecological restoration of our urban ecosystems and biodiversity
- Facilitate land management agency ecological best practices and inter-agency coordination for natural resources protection, stewardship, and ecological restoration
Partners, Supporters, Sponsors and Colleagues
Fiscal Sponsor
Current Supporter
Financial Arts Network
Foundation for Ecology and Culture
Friends of Glen Canyon Park
Henry George Historical Society
Melvita
Moxi Salon
San Francisco Garden Club
Seed Fund
Nature in the City Gala Fundraiser, 2009 & 2010
Annie’s Naturals
Bay Nature
Dolores Park Cafe
Harrington Investments
Shelterbelt Builders
The Xerces Society
Past Supporter <$1000
California Native Plant Society
Cole Hardware
Friends of McLaren Park
Green Zebra
Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council
Habitat Potential
Sierra Club, San Francisco Group
Tree Frog Treks
Past Supporter >$1000
Foundation for Ecology and Culture
Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
Parasol Tahoe Community Foundation
Jiji Foundation
Kimball Foundation
East Bay Community Foundation
Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI)
San Francisco Parks Trust
San Francisco Foundation
Vision
With its diverse neighborhood villages and tremendous grassroots energy, San Francisco has unparalleled potential to restore healthy relationships between people and nature where we live.
Our Local Nature
Imagine the future city of San Francisco when our native wildlife, plants and habitats are conserved for future generations within an ecologically sustainable network of restored watersheds and wildlife corridors.
Such an ecological future is possible if we evolve a new cultural ecology of local nature stewardship.
San Franciscans celebrate their diverse ethnicities & communities, their cultural resources & heritage. The city abounds with diverse natural resources, its own natural heritage. San Francisco's special ecological legacy is as worthy of celebration as our cultural history and distinct neighborhoods. We live in neighborhood communities adjacent to wild natural communities, and local nature offers a deeper sense of place for San Franciscans. Like cable cars and the Golden Gate Bridge, our native wildlife and wildflowers ARE San Francisco. They are the living natural history of a our wild city, where we have ideal opportunities to connect with nature "in our own backyard."
As San Franciscans, we can celebrate our indigenous habitats and natural areas. We must also activate. We can and we must restore ecological integrity to the City's wildlands and biodiversity, and play our role in helping the globe. Many other urban places do not have the fortune of San Francisco - we can connect with nature where we live by stewarding nature in the city.
Local Environmental Crisis
Broad consensus has emerged that Earth is warming rapidly toward a potential global climate catastrophe. San Francisco is located in a global biodiversity hotspot, harboring myriad rare and threatened habitats for endangered plants and animals, and the wild nature of San Francisco is experiencing its own environmental crisis, for example:
·The City's watersheds and biodiversity are fragmented and severely impacted by invasive plants, ecologically insensitive uses, and public and institutional lack of awareness;
· In the modern world, opportunities for people, our children, to connect with nature are elusive; our culture is becoming increasingly disconnected and disassociated from nature.
Urban Biodiversity
Nature is in Cities?
Isn't "urban nature" an oxymoron? People live in cities! Nature is "in the country!"
Cities abound with wild nature! In fact, a large percentage of Earth's biodiversity exists in urban or urbanizing areas, which are often adjacent to larger wild areas. It is more accurate to say that cities are in nature! Cities are embedded in the natural environment - the geology, watershed, climate and biodiversity - of whichever place on Earth where they devel0p.
Moreover, as of 2005, more people live in urban than in rural areas for the first time in Earth's history. Urban nature is critical for connecting half of the world's people with the natural environment. Connecting city dwellers with their local nature and watersheds is critical not only for building support for the conservation of faraway places, but also for the ecological restoration and stewardship of biodiversity at home.
Of course, more people means greater potential for continued destruction of our local natural environment. But if we change how we interact with nature, then we can turn people into a positive force for ecological restoration. Conservation of local urban biodiversity, everywhere unique in its own right, is as essential and paramount to global ecosystem conservation, sustainability, and human survival on the planet as is conservation of the Amazon rainforest or the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.
Having nature in the city is part of addressing urban environmental justice. Many urban people cannot afford to go out of town to experience nature and/or they have grown up without the benefit of experiencing wild nature. San Francisco has wonderful natural areas all over town. Our challenge is to tell people about local nature and help them obtain resources to experience it. Given the chance and the tools, many of the City's communities could connect with their nature.
Urban areas are the diverse, complex, intensely developed and decisive milieu in which we humans are confronted with the global challenge of how to interact more harmoniously, locally, with the rest of the natural world. Urban ecological restoration and stewardship is critical to urban and global ecological sustainability.
Human-Nature Dualism
One fundamental problem behind all efforts to restore nature is the 17th Century philosophy of Cartesian dualism - the dichotomous separation of humans from nature. The Cartesian dichotomy or paradigm has reinforced other ancient western cultural expressions of nature domination by placing humans above nature, as if we were not interconnected nor interdependent. For centuries, western society has controlled and dominated nature and become more and more disconnected from it. The human-nature dualism has proven to be one of the most important modern causes of human degradation of the biosphere, and it has produced many cascading effects right here in the watersheds of the City of San Francisco.
Nature in the City explicitly seeks to cause a paradigm shift away from this dichotomous relationship of humans with the rest of nature - to heal our physical and psychological disconnection from nature. Urban ecological conservation is the ideal cultural milieu in which to force this confrontation with our current relationship with nature. In the City, many of us humans are living in close proximity to our fellow members of the universe. We have to share our living space, our watershed. How do we consider the wildflowers emerging each winter down the street in our local natural area? What species of bird is that calling this morning? Why on earth did that coyote decide to take up residence in the City?
If we are going to survive on this planet, we must learn how to restore a more harmonious and respectful relationship with local nature, urban and rural. We cannot "just let nature take its course" and expect it to recover from our massive urban disturbance. The current human-ecological question is not whether or do we interact with nature. The question is " how do we interact with nature? "
Humans are of nature. Have we ever not interacted with nature? Our challenge is to change how we interact with nature - NOT "to leave nature alone" - including changing our definition of nature. Can we be truly connected to nature if our only "natural" experiences are annual visits to Yosemite and/or bimonthly day-trips to Point Reyes, interspersed with daily lives in front of TV, computers, and steering wheels? In order to reconnect with nature in a harmonious and sustainable way, we must learn that we can interact positively with nature in the city where we live. Ecological sustainability depends upon the restoration of our actual physical relationship with the rest of the natural world.
How many San Franciscans know that the name of the first native wildflower to bloom each year by New Year's Eve is footsteps of spring? People deserve to be presented with the opportunity to heal their collective disconnection from nature. Local people need the tools to learn about what nature we have and what they can do to help protect and restore it. They need to know about their local watersheds so that they can benefit from the pleasure that comes with participating with their neighbors in community-based ecological stewardship. San Francisco's wildlands need people, and people need their local nature to improve the quality of urban life and to experience and become aware of their interconnectedness with nature and each other.
Contact
Nature in the City
PO Box 170088
San Francisco CA 94117-0088
415.564.4107
steward@natureinthecity.org