Community
Community is at the heart of the mission of Nature in the City. All living things, including humans, live in communities. 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 - its ecological communities and biodiversity - are 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."
Community stewardship is a critically important part of ecological restoration and is the repair and healing of ecological communities. 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.
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 community-based ecological stewardship of San Franciscans' neighborhood natural areas.
- Fostering collaboration, cohesion and common ground among agencies and local NGOs.
- Strengthening the citywide ecological stewardship, naturalist and advocacy network including creating a shared identity and sense of community interconnectedness and interdependence.
Natureinthecity.org is designed to be a highly organized and optimally interconnected online community resource for San Franciscans and others to learn about and connect with nature in the city. This resource depends on the community to help it grow and be successful. We want to encourage more and more people to come to the website, so that every citizen can learn about how s/he could connect with urban nature in the city.
Please contact us
to learn more about how you can help build our online community
resource.
