San Francisco's Environmental Crisis

Our Ecology and Biodiversity in Jeopardy

The City's wildlands and watersheds are severely fragmented.
Invasive plants severely impact and degrade the health and integrity of San Francisco's natural areas.
Ecologically insensitive uses of open space negatively impact local biodiversity and watersheds via pollution, erosion of soil and geologic resources, and the spread of invasive plants.
Most of San Francisco's abundant indigenous water resources are channeled into the combined sewer and storm-water system, literally wasted, whereas they could be enjoyed by wildlife and people.

Budgets for public agency natural resources divisions - such as the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Natural Areas Program - are constantly being slashed or reduced by attrition.
Underfunded resource agencies, between and within jurisdictions, practice very little of the collaboration needed to manage our ecosystems according to a holistic, watershed approach.
Some agencies do not even manage their natural areas for biodiversity conservation.

Many San Franciscans are unaware of their local biodiversity and watershed.
Only a small subset of the city's wildlands and natural areas benefit from locally-based community stewardship groups. Places like Bayview Hill, Twin Peaks, Laguna Honda, Lobos Creek and Yerba Buena Island still need their own local neighborhood groups if their delicate webs of life are to survive.
The idea that humans are separate from nature still permeates modern society; many people still think that nature can only exist and/or be experienced at large nature reserves like Yosemite or Point Reyes and that we cannot interact positively and harmoniously with nature in the city.
In fact, many modern humans are culturally disconnected from nature's web of life; we no longer define ourselves in relation to the ecological community from which we originate and which gives us life.