Winner of the Western History Association's 2009 Hal K. Rothman Award
Finalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the Western
Nonfiction Contemporary category (2008).
The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities.
Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than
asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of
countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, stitched from
fields, farms and woodlands, mines, creeks, and wetlands. In The
Country in the City, Richard Walker tells the story of how the jigsaw
geography of this greenbelt has been set into place.
The Bay Area's civic landscape has been fought over acre by acre, an
arduous process requiring popular mobilization, political will, and hard
work. Its most cherished environments--Mount Tamalpais, Napa Valley, San
Francisco Bay, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, the Pacific coast--have
engendered some of the fiercest environmental battles in the country and
have made the region a leader in green ideas and organizations.
This book tells how the Bay Area got its green grove: from the stirrings
of conservation in the time of John Muir to origins of the recreational
parks and coastal preserves in the early twentieth century, from the
fight to stop bay fill and control suburban growth after the Second
World War to securing conservation easements and stopping toxic
pollution in our times. Here, modern environmentalism first became a
mass political movement in the 1960s, with the sudden blooming of the
Sierra Club and Save the Bay, and it remains a global center of
environmentalism to this day.
Green values have been a pillar of Bay Area life and politics for more
than a century. It is an environmentalism grounded in local places and
personal concerns, close to the heart of the city. Yet this vision of
what a city should be has always been informed by liberal, even utopian,
ideas of nature, planning, government, and democracy. In the end, green
is one of the primary colors in the flag of the Left Coast, where green
enthusiasms, like open space, are built into the fabric of urban life.
Written in a lively and accessible style, The Country in the City will
be of interest to general readers and environmental activists. At the
same time, it speaks to fundamental debates in environmental history,
urban planning, and geography.
