Welcome to the Community Portal of Nature in the City!
Community is at the heart of the mission of Nature in the City. From our ecological stewardship opportunities, to our TALKS & TREKS, and from our collaborative local nature advocacy, to this website! Community permeates everything we do.
In the act of restoring our local ecology, we build, strengthen and help restore health to our human communities. As a primary goal of Nature in the City, building and strengthening human communities around local ecological stewardship takes shape in several important ways:
- Catalyzing deeper sense of place through neighborhood-based stewardship of San Francisco’s natural areas and wildlife habitats, such as the Green Hairstreak Corridor
- Building collaboration and common ground among agencies and local NGOs around better City biodiversity policy
- Creating shared identity and strengthening the citywide ecological stewardship, naturalist and advocacy network through all of our public education programs, and through our Twin Peaks Bioregional Park vision
Natureinthecity.org is designed to be the portal toward learning everything there is to know about the city's natural heritage and biodiversity. This is where people find out how to connect with nature where we live. Feedback is more than welcome because this resource depends on the community to help it grow and be successful. Please contact us to learn more about how you can help build our online community resource. Be sure to check out www.urbannature.org, with hundreds of links to local, national & international urban nature and biodiversity, also accessible from links on this site. More about community and our network…
If we want to increase and make more sustainable the population of a given individual endangered species, we must take care and restore its habitat, its home, the community within which it has co-evolved and has a complex network of relationships with other living organisms.
An Urban Nature Network
Ecosystems and cultures - human and natural communities - are all characterized by interconnectedness. Our local ecosystem or bioregional web of life, like the global environment, is a complex dynamical system, interconnected by an infinite network of ecological relationships. Our local human community is similarly interconnected by a complex and dynamic network of social relationships characterized by interdependence, diversity, adaptability, sense of place and mutual aid and responsibility.
The ecological restoration movement in San Francisco is already a vibrant network of individuals and organizations interacting with our local nature in revolutionarily new and restorative ways. People identify as "local nature lovers" differently. But stewards, naturalists, advocates, educators, and soon, civic leaders, share commonality in that they all recognize that we have nature in the city - and that we can interact positively, harmoniously and sustainably with urban nature and biodiversity.
We envision a much stronger and more organized community network that:
- physically stewards our natural areas and local biodiversity,
- educates the public about local nature and our interconnectedness with the global environment,
- advocates for stronger legal ecosystem protection and more comprehensive ecological restoration, and
- embodies a healthy culture of proactive, positive and restorative ecological stewardship, which becomes how we humans interact with our environment.
Nature in the City hopes to create a backbone of support for co-evolving community cultural ecological partnerships. Facilitating communication, co-education and collaboration over the ever-expanding network of San Francisco's ecological stewardship community, and creating a shared identity and sense of community interconnectedness and interdependence will be key to urban ecological sustainability.