Greening the Bay Area

**Review of Richard A. Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Washington Press, 2007).**

Richard A. Walker, professor of geography at UC Berkeley, has documented the conservation politics of our region with his new book The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Walker begins with the Sierra Club founders, who made the Bay Area an early center of environmental awareness. He tells the stories of wealthy landowner and Congressmember William Kent, who helped save Muir Woods and Mount Tamalpias as parks, and the elite Save the Redwoods League, which over the last 90 years has purchased and preserved $100 million worth of prime stands of redwood forest along the North Coast. He continues with the post-New Deal growth of the state park system, fueled by tideland and offshore-oil revenues.

County and regional parks have become an important part of the urban "greensward" in the Bay Area. The East Bay Regional Park District became the largest urban park district in the United States under the able direction of Republican conservationist William Penn Mott. Saving the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific coast required numerous battles, from preserving Angel Island, Point Reyes, and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area to the establishment of the California Coastal Commission; Walker covers each in a few paragraphs.

Protecting open space from the developer's bulldozer has been a continuing challenge. Walker details how such growth control measures as greenbelts, urban growth boundaries, and regional planning have struggled against suburban sprawl. Petaluma's action in 1972 limiting growth of annual additional housing units was a landmark. Open space districts and land trusts have become important tools using public and private funds to preserve crucial parcels when they become available for sale.

In a chapter on Napa and Sonoma Counties, Walker tackles the issues of agriculture and water, covering the expansion of the grape growing and winemaking industries and their positive and negative impacts on the countryside.

In his final two chapters Walker reviews the problems of water pollution and toxic wastes, and outlines the mass movements and organizations that have emerged to combat them. Advocates of environmental justice for communities of color have challenged traditional conservation groups to move beyond their privileged perspectives. Carl Anthony of Urban Habitat is one of the early Bay Area leaders of the movement profiled by Walker.

Not surprisingly, Walker sees the future of environmentalism as requiring new alliances of traditional conservation groups like the Sierra Club with the labor movement and expanding communities of Latinos, Asians, and African Americans in California.

Walker's book offers a fresh perspective on the historic range of environmental activities in the Bay Area, and his optimistic spirit should encourage all activists.

David Walls; adapted from the Sonoma West Times & News