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.
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