The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) [Hardcover]

Richard Walker (Author), William Cronon (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books | Publication Date: May 15, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Walker has done in this book what essentially has never before been attempted by any other scholar for any other major American city: he has researched, analyzed, and narrated the evolving environmental politics of San Francisco from their origins in the nineteenth century to their explosive growth in the decades following the Second World War, right down to the present . . . A first-rate piece of scholarship.”—from the Foreword by William Cronon

“Walker has done a fantastic job of making both historical and contemporary urban environmental relationships engaging. The style is eloquent, pithy, and sometimes poetic. The Country in the City is an important contribution to urban environmental geography.”—Lisa Benton-Short, author of The Presidio, from Army Post to National Park

From the Publisher

"The Country in the City is a masterful and much-needed chronicle of the Bay Area's diverse ecopolitical scene. It is a fruitful serendipity that such a rich and wonderful place has a scholar who, with intelligence and affection, can gracefully capture its green evolution." - Orion

"Walker makes our landscape come alive as the arena of an ongoing struggle to figure out how to live lightly and well in this remarkable corner of the planet." - Bay Nature

"Meticulously and succinctly, Walker recounts the early vision and the prolonged determination that resulted in our precious - and all-too-rare - situation. He guides the reader through the first stirrings of environmental consciousness, which soon were followed by struggles to set aside preserves, then forestall depredations, and finally establish benign public policies to guide development and land management. After reading this book, even those who already possess a green tinge in their thinking will understand the promise and peril of modern times as never before." - San Francisco Chronicle, Outdoors

"Readers of The Country in the City will enjoy immersing themselves in the Bay Area's story. Readers will see that just as nature made this place, so did people - and it's up to people to keep doing so." - Greenbelt Alliance

"[I]n The Country in the City, a history of local conservation and environmental activism, Walker delivers a deeply loving paean to this place where he grew up and has lived and worked and been a political activist all of his life." - San Francisco Chronicle, Book Review --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 404 pages
• Publisher: University of Washington Press; annotated edition edition (May 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295987014
• ISBN-13: 978-0295987019
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #802,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine pick for any collection interested in urban planning, ecology, or Bay Area history alike., December 4, 2007

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) (Hardcover)

THE COUNTRY IN THE CITY: THE GREENING OF THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA should be a 'most' for any San Francisco Bay Area or comprehensive California library, whether it be a college-level or public lending collection. Students of California history and geography alike will appreciate this story of how the Bay Area's greenbelt was planned into an urban environment - and how each piece of it was fought for. From environmental battles which spread out to affect urban policies across the country to the involvement of businesses and individuals like, THE COUNTRY IN THE CITY is packed with insights on how early conservation affects today's urban environment, making it a fine pick for any collection interested in urban planning, ecology, or Bay Area history alike.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Green Activism, Bay Area Style, September 29, 2007

By 

Peter Richardson (San Francisco Bay Area) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) (Hardcover)

This book really helped me understand the world I was born into--Berkeley in the late 1950s. As Richard Walker points out, that world reflected the work of countless Bay Area activists reaching back to John Muir. Many were civic-minded and dedicated women, and some started or built environmental organizations with national impact. This book describes it all: the people, the organizations, the issues, the victories (always temporary), the challenges, and the movement's shortcomings and unintended consequences.

Always attuned to class issues, Walker acknowledges that these movements were mostly led by upper-class folks and ultimately turned parts of the Bay Area (e.g., Marin) into lightly populated enclaves for the well off. Working families in the Bay Area have had great access to public parks and the coast, but activists so far have done little to impede the siting of toxic nastiness in low-income neighborhoods. Walker questions the link between efforts to slow or stop growth and the Bay Area's high housing prices, but he notes that the growth that has occurred--in the eastern part of Contra Costa County and the San Joaquin Valley, for example--isn't very smart and may be linked to the inner Bay Area's aversion to virtually any growth at all. At the end of the day, though, it's hard to resist Walker's conclusion that Bay Area residents have plenty to be thankful for. Highly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Back to the Land, August 23, 2007

By 

Janet B. Thiessen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) (Hardcover)

Professor Walker's book is a solidly researched, comprehensive history of the environmental movement in the Bay Area. Written in a clear, accessible style, the book covers a century of landsaving, from the early days of the Sierra Club to the exciting years from 1965-75 when most of our environmental protection laws were passed, to the recent use of land trusts , conservation easements, and urban growth boundaries to safeguard the Bay Area's precious green heritage. This book will stand, along with John Hart's "Legacy" and Amy Meyer's "New Guardians for the Golden Gate" as the canonical texts in the environmental history of California for years to come.