Coyote finds nature in San Francisco; humans found "Nature in the City"

New organization for people who value urban wildness

Stars twinkle in a dark patch of San Francisco sky. The moon crests flat rooftops, shining down on the streets, reflecting in car windows and puddles. The roaring in the distance - is it cars or the crashing of waves? A siren cuts through the nearby avenues. The silence in its wake is sudden and sweet - till just as suddenly it is broken by a retort of howls, yelps, and barks. These were no garden-variety dogs. These were coyotes.

Coyotes have reputations. Among Native Americans across the continent, coyote is known as stealthy, clever, wily, and a trickster. In some circles coyote is reputed to be able to recognize its own mistakes. In other circles coyote is just a varmint.

Though San Francisco is known as a cradle of acceptance, even here coyotes were persecuted, hunted down for their crime of being truly wild. Even in the wilds of Marin County, coyote was hunted out of existence.

Back in the city, beginning after the Gold Rush, networks of wild land, waterways, and their associated natural processes began to collapse under a relentless barrage of pavement and intolerance. City managers and residents alike wrung wildness from cities like dirty water from a used sponge. For nearly a century, ignorance, discrimination, and hate locked coyotes out of areas they had occupied long before the humans who drove them away.

Then, like a desert rain, something began to happen. Dunes grew and sand began to shift in an ancient rhythm. Diverse maritime prairies sprang up from beneath monocultures of invasive European weeds. Tidal channels were opened, streams were daylighted, and marshes appeared where cement once lay. New seeds began to sprout. New insects and birds appeared.

People came outside to see what was happening. They wrote letters, they attended meetings, they planted seedlings, they looked at the creatures they had invited back into being. They felt nature in a new way and thought, "This is a good thing."

Thus coyote's wildness was coaxed back to the bustling city of San Francisco.

Our human relation with wildness

In this new year, the Year of the Dog, let us human urbanites recollect our place in the natural world. Let us embrace what is wild, remember what is domestic, and learn how as a city we can retain our shared natural heritage that so enriches our lives and our sense of place.

A small cadre of dedicated community stewards has long participated in the city's evolving natural history. Small community groups such as the Bernal Heights Grassland Restoration Project and the Friends of Glen Canyon spend hours every week tending their neighborhood wildlands. These small stewardship groups have very loose connections, and the land where they volunteer their time is managed by a severely underresourced agency, the Natural Areas Program. These folks have told us that they want help managing their sites and connecting with colleagues around the city.

Help has arrived in the form of a new urban-ecological organization. As part of last year's World Environment Day, a number of people and organizations, including the Sierra Club's San Francisco Group, hosted a symposium on "Nature in the City". This same ad-hoc set of people founded Nature in the City, San Francisco's first organization dedicated to conservation and stewardship of Franciscan biodiversity. It was founded to connect San Franciscans with our local urban nature and to realize local ecological sustainability via teaching San Franciscans to live dynamically and harmoniously with wild nature in the city.

San Francisco is known for celebrating diversity, yet the public is largely unaware that San Francisco is a biodiversity hotspot. Nature in the City aims to educate residents about our unique and varied natural history, about how we can interact positively with nature where we live, and about how to participate in community decisions about nature. Nature in the City will provide resources for the whole spectrum of urban nature opportunities, from habitat restoration to bird walks to public meetings to lobbying government officials.

Nature in the City will work with government at all levels on local nature-conservation policy. We will support and bring together staff of different agencies. When necessary we will rally the community to advocate for policy changes and legislation in the interest of local urban nature conservation.

We want to show people that nature is not just in Yosemite or Alaska. In the city we have an opportunity to break down the dichotomy between nature and culture, and to learn how to live sustainably with the nature in our own backyards.

NTC will serve as a meeting ground for the otherwise often-solitary nature lover. Members will have the opportunity to learn and share information with a wide range of fellow urbanites connected with the land. Gardeners, birders, butterfly-lovers, habitat stewards, stargazers, and mushroom hunters will all benefit from being part of this urban nature network.

Nature is everywhere all of the time, even in the middle of the city, if we can just tune in enough to let it find us. So nature lovers and nature advocates alike, come one and come all. Follow coyote's lead and expand your range, and as you do, you may just start to feel the urge to howl.

To learn more - about local natural history, upcoming events, and how you can get involved - see: www.natureinthecity.org or call (415) 564-4107.

Josiah Clark and Peter Brastow