Good afternoon to you all. My thanks to Dr. Michael Johns, Carol Page, and the graduating students for inviting me to speak to you this afternoon. It is a privilege to join with your faculty and your parents to salute your hard work and intelligence and the degree you are about to receive from this prestigious institution, and from this eclectic, pioneering and innovative department of geography. It was probably due to my current role as Publisher of Bay Nature magazine that I’ve been invited to speak today, but I’d also like to acknowledge a connection I have to this department from my previous occupation, as editor of Report on Guatemala. In that capacity I had the good fortune of working with your distinguished colleague, Dr. Beatriz Manz. Her engaged and tireless work with Guatemalan refugee communities in Mexico and northern Guatemala played a significant role in lifting the veil of silence from those communities that had been devastated by the brutal counterinsurgency war in Guatemala and in building international support for their negotiated return to that country.
Indeed, it seems to me—looking through the list of dissertations and projects you have produced—that the department has an enviable and continuing tradition of engaged scholarship. And it is that topic of engagement in the world outside that I’d like to return to a little later today.
I will start out by admitting that I haven’t been to a college commencement service since I attended my own 32 years ago. Even worse, I have absolutely no recollection who the commencement speaker was on that day. Since that college was Harvard, I have to presume it was a person of some note and distinction. I do hope I shall face a better fate in your memories of this day.
In fact, the only thing I remember about my graduation day was that a significant minority of the graduating students—myself included—wore armbands emblazoned in red with the woman’s symbol (the circle atop a cross, known as the mirror of Venus), with a fist in the center. If I remember correctly, we were protesting the pay differential between male and female faculty. Of course, you have to understand, this was 1973, and every spring of my four years at college featured some sort of student protest; the first two years, classes were temporarily canceled, but by senior year, all we could muster was armbands on commencement day. Nonetheless, I imagine – at least I very much hope! -- that male and female faculty are now on equal pay scales at Harvard, and at UC Berkeley as well, so perhaps we did score a victory or two. Though it is sadly has to be acknowledged that the current state of affairs in the country and the world are far from what we were hoping for or fighting for.
When I graduated 32 years ago, I really didn’t have a clear sense what I wanted to do next. I applied to graduate school in three completely different disciplines—none of them geography. I ended up at the graduate program in film studies at San Francisco State, not because it spoke to me any more than the other programs I was accepted at, but simply because it was in the Bay Area. I had decided, after a visit here during a beautiful, sunny week in January, including a trip (in both senses of that word) to the beach at Point Reyes, that no matter what I did, I wanted to do it here. In large part because this was, and is, a dynamic urban area surrounded by such accessible natural beauty. It would take me another 25 years to align my career with my post-graduate gut instincts, but better late than never. I guess the take-home lesson here is, keep searching until you find what works best for you, whether you’re 21, 35, or 50 years old.
Now I have to warn you: I’ve never taken a class in geography, and I actually dropped out of graduate school. So I might not be the best person in the world to give you advice about your next steps as geography graduates. But when I looked up the definition of the word geography preparing for this talk, I really liked what I found, because it also seems to describe what we do at Bay Nature. The definition they gave of geography at Dictionary-dot-com is:
- The study of the earth and its features and of the distribution of life on the earth, including human life and the effects of human activity.
That’s pretty much what we have set out to do with Bay Nature, except that we focus our attention on one specific corner of the earth, the San Francisco Bay Area. What we do is tell stories about the landscapes of the Bay Area, and about the many forms of life you find there, from the microorganisms in the soil to us humans who shake their world with every step.
So I thought that if I could address the impetus behind the launch of Bay Nature, that might be a good framework for answering the question of why do geography, which might be something you’re looking at as you take your next steps in the world.
It was nine years ago, in the winter of 1996, and I had just left my job as the editor of Report on Guatemala. I hadn’t figured out my next career move yet. But I decided to do something I had wanted to do for some time: explore the wild places around here in the Bay Area during the week, when everyone else was busy at work or at school. After all, it had been the beauty of the area that drew me in the first place, but somehow I had never taken the time since then to really explore it.
So one Monday morning in January, I headed out for a hike at China Camp State Park over in San Rafael. I was on a trail that’s usually crawling with mountain bikers on the weekends, but on a clear and cold Monday morning, I had the place virtually to myself. Able to move at a deliberate and contemplative pace, without distractions, I was taken in by the quiet, forceful beauty of the woodlands, and by the large number of birds that were moving about in the branches of the live oaks, bays and madrones that cover that hillside. And it struck me how little I really knew about this place and the species of birds and plants I was seeing; how little I understood why this slope was dominated by coast live oaks and madrone, while at the top of the ridge black oaks joined the mix (though I didn’t even know that’s what they were at the time), and why, at the head of a canyon a little further on, redwoods took over.
I realized then that I was just seeing the surface of things, appreciating their beauty, but not understanding what caused all these elements, these different species of native plants and birds, to come together in this place. Here were some of my neighbors, neighbors I really liked, and I barely knew their names, and little about their habits. I longed for a source of information that could tell me about the geology, the botany of the place, and about the native peoples that had lived here and how they used this rich and diverse habitat and its resources, something that might take me beneath the surface beauty of the place to a deeper understanding of how it worked. Those thoughts were what led, some four years later, to the launch of Bay Nature magazine, which I co-founded with Malcolm Margolin, publisher of Heyday Books here in Berkeley, and author of the classic book about the native people of this area, The Ohlone Way.
So at least part of the impetus for Bay Nature was to reflect and share some of the beauty we find in the natural world. And, moreover, to inform and deepen our experience of being outside in Nature here in the Bay Area, and satisfy some of our natural curiosity about the fascinating things we see there. The trees and the birds aren’t here by caprice or command. They evolved here, as a result of a combination of all the physical conditions and forces of geology, biology, and climate. To understand why the black oak thrives on the top of the ridge is to understand the underlying forces that shaped that ridge and the region.
This is not just a matter of satisfying curiosity or a craving for beauty, though I think both of those are laudable ends. There’s also a piece about feeling connected to the place where you live, as both an end in itself and as an antidote to the fractured and disconnected nature of life in our world. So as I have worked on Bay Naure over these past nine years, and had the privilege of getting better acquainted with the landscapes of the Bay Area, I have come to feel truly more at home here. I now recognize black oaks when I see them, and greet them as valued friends and neighbors, pleasing to both my eyes and my soul. I keep an eye out for the bright appearance of Toyon berries in late fall, welcome the Anna’s hummingbird back to the tree across the street from my house in early winter, smile at the bold orange splashes of California poppies in spring, and eagerly listen for the haunting song of the Swainson’s Thrush in the trees along Wildcat Creek in early summer. And there is nothing as exciting, and—at the same time—as soothing and fulfilling, as witnessing the return of coho salmon to the creeks of west Marin in early winter. These are good friends and neighbors now, welcomed by me and welcoming me in turn, throughout the year, to this area they have inhabited since long before humans arrived. Through the recognition and understanding of these native species and the signals of their reproductive cycles, I come to feel a little bit more like I understand the nature of this place, and that I belong here as well .
Of course, for good or ill, nowadays we no longer have to depend on receiving and understanding these signals from the natural world, and the resources they represent, to feed and clothe and house ourselves. But I don’t think that the severing of our physical dependence on these natural cues to survive has done away with our spiritual need for that connection, for a communion with our natural surroundings. Because ultimately, we DO still depend on the natural world and its resources for survival, even if we are separated from that reality by many layers of commerce, and we ignore that fact at our peril. As humans, we have the power to intellectually understand the cycles of the natural world in a way that other species don’t. And we also have the power to disrupt those cycles. But we don’t have the power to escape the consequences of disrupting them, at least not forever. Indeed, this severing of our connection, as a people, to the natural world has had serious and far-reaching consequences.
I was thinking about this as I was burning fossil fuels on the way back from a short vacation in late March down in Joshua Tree National Monument, in the California desert. As many of you know, the prolific rains this year produced what many are calling the bloom of the century in the desert, and I didn’t want to miss it. I was not disappointed. It was beautiful; truly amazing canvasses of color that defy one’s stereotype of what “desert” means. But as we drove home, I was brought up short when we got to that line of desert towns between Joshua Tree and the I-5. There you are, on a high desert plateau framed by towering, snow-covered mountain ranges, with carpets of yellow flowers right and left. And suddenly, you are driving through a seamless string of shopping centers and new housing developments, one after the other, from Victorville to Palmdale to Lancaster. A Target, followed by a Wal-Mart; a Staples followed by an Office Max; a Taco Bell next to a Round Table; Petco; Rite-Aid; Best Buy; and on and on and on and on. Huge, ugly, boxy structures surrounded by acres of asphalt. All of them filled with an unimaginable and superfluous quantity of stuff; rows of heavily packaged products, most of them manufactured in faraway places from materials forcefully extracted from this good and great earth and shaped into so many things that we don’t really need and that will sooner rather than later end up discarded back in the earth, only in a form that can’t be absorbed or reintegrated.
This isn’t a revelation, but it hits you especially hard when you’ve just spent four days in the stark beauty of the desert. And I have to wonder what it does to us as a species to have our craving for beauty met by packaging and advertising; to have our need to be connected to the planet and other people on it replaced by an anonymous supply chain that links us, but only sort of, and certainly not in a humane way, to a factory worker in China or Honduras and then later to a landfill god knows where polluting goodness knows how many wetlands. Clearly, this way of living can’t continue for ever, and we are certainly condemning our children, or their children, to a very painful reckoning if we don’t make some changes.
Speaking of children, my son and his best friend used to play a game when they were watching sports on TV together: when an advertisement came on, they would race to see who could shout out first what company the ad was for. “Toyota! Budweiser! MacDonalds!” But if I had shown them a picture of a buckeye tree or a California clapper rail, they’d have been completely blank and disinterested. And these are good kids who care about the world in their own fashion. I’ll bet that most children – and maybe even most adults -- know the logos of their favorite clothing companies better than they know the names of the birds that live in the trees on their street. Folks, this is not a recipe for successful, sustainable life on this planet.
So what can we do about this? Does geography have a role to play here? Does Bay Nature have a role.
Two years ago in the magazine, we published an essay by author Greg Sarris, who besides being a professor of literature and writing, is the Tribal Chair of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria, the official name for the descendants of the Coast Miwok people, original inhabitants of the areas we now call Marin and Sonoma. In his essay on the topic of sacred places, Greg wrote about how the traditional Coast Miwok viewed the landscape as a network of sacred places that were imbued with the stories of the generations that had come before them. Right here might be the place where your grandmothers and aunts gathered grass seeds, and over there was the place that the healer would go to sing songs to cure a sick person, and up there the place where the village would move to pick acorns in the fall. Sarris asks us to imagine a map showing the lines between all these places, and he goes on, “Eventually there would be so many places and connecting lines that the map would finally look like a tightly woven, intricately designed Miwok basket. The patterns would circle around, endless, beautiful, so that the map would, in the end, designate the territory in its entirety… Each place, each person, you and me, the earth, water, and sky, inseparable, fully connected.”
Now I don’t want to romanticize Miwok culture: life was often pretty hard for them; but there is no denying that the Miwok in Marin, and the Ohlone on this side of the Bay, had a pretty good record of thriving on this land base and keeping it healthy and productive over the course of 5,000 years or more. Something that we—with all our technology and enterprise--have not been able to replicate in the mere two and a half centuries since Europeans first colonized this area.
But this isn’t a story of gloom and doom, because I actually think things may be changing. And this is where Bay Nature, and you, come in. The Miwok gave meaningful names to all the features of a landscape and imbued them with stories as a way to pass on the culture’s accumulated knowledge of the land and its resources. Well, we are again beginning to accumulate deep knowledge of the landscapes around here, and now have the accumulated wisdom and experience to create stories that we can reflect and retell for our peers and for our children.
As I’ve worked to develop the articles for Bay Nature, I have been amazed by the extent and depth of knowledge about the natural world that we have here in the Bay Area. This includes work done by students and faculty here at UC Berkeley, as well as at SF State, UC Davis, and even Stanford. And by scientists at government institutions like the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park. And by private non-profit institutions, such as the San Francisco Estuary Institute and Point Reyes Bird Observatory, and so on. You and they have developed and assembled reams of data that allow us to understand what is happening to San Francisco Bay and its remnant marshes; what is happening in the ocean off our shores, and how that might reflect and impact global warming. And, most important of all, I have been completely and utterly thrilled at the number of very grassroots, very local citizen efforts directed towards defending, protecting, learning about, and restoring nearby pieces of the landscape, often in conjunction with the scientists at these institutions. I hesitate to call this a movement, because it frankly isn’t organized or coordinated in such a fashion as to warrant that name. But it is more than just isolated initiatives. It is broad, deep, healthy and growing. Look at the creek restoration movement, something that started here in the Bay Area—I believe here in the East Bay, in fact—and has really become a force for change in both the landscape and in the communities that live around the creeks.
We ran a story in our October 2001 issue about the return of Coho Salmon to Lagunitas Creek in West Marin. The salmon run there had almost gone extinct due to dam construction and a host of other insults, but a few fish hung on. When I first started going to look for the coho in 1996, right after the population was listed as threatened by the federal government, very few people knew about that run, and counts were way down. You could take a walk along the creek when the salmon were running and be the only one there. Now, after almost a decade in which the surrounding communities have been mobilized for information nights and creek bank restoration days and smolt surveys and nature walks, the salmon run has become a community event. Go out there on a Saturday morning after the first good rains of the season and you’ll find families walking along the creek, looking for the first returning salmon. In the Bay Nature article, the author talks about the salmon as a thread that weaves together the pieces of a frayed landscape, connecting the watershed with the ocean and returning nutrients to the watershed, and also connecting us to this ancient cycle of renewal. And they are also a thread weaving together the human community, providing a strong connection both to the landscape and to the other humans that we share it with.
And look what is happening in San Francisco Bay, that great big blue open space in our midst. Not so very long ago, small groups of citizens had to fight tooth and nail just to stop the Bay from being almost completely filled in. Now, many battles later, we are actually on the road towards the largest restoration project ever attempted on the west coast, returning 16,000 acres of industrial salt ponds to nature. As those of you who are involved in studying the estuary know, these efforts here in the Bay are on the cutting edge of restoration science, and they represent an exciting and inspiring partnership between government agencies, scientists, and passionate citizen advocates. In a world filled with gloomy news, these stories about people reshaping and recreating the geography of our home are not only beacons of hope, but road maps to a better world.
Bay Nature’s small role in all of this is to take these stories and amplify them around the Bay Area, to help inform, nurture and sustain this growing community of people who are committed to reversing the process of our alienation from the planet, and to building a critical mass of people who are committed to reconnectng with it.
When we join together with our neighbors to protect the Bay and the salmon, and to restore the creeks and the marshes, and to study the habitat requirements of endangered species, we not only reconnect with the planet, we reconnect with each other, and find that we really don’t need to buy all those things at the mall – and probably don’t have time to do it anyway, because we’re too busy sprouting native plants from seeds, pulling invasives from the shoreline, taking a census of elephant seals, finding a wildflower that we thought had gone extinct, and so on.
Of course, I don’t mean to say that Bay Nature, and the study of the geography of our home, is going to solve all the world’s problems. But I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that I harbor the hope and belief that this is one of the roads we have to take to get there. If we act out of love and knowledge for the place where we live, and work with others to understand it, and protect it, and restore it, it seems to me that we are much less likely to be swayed by fear, by anger, by alienation, into supporting acts of hate or destruction, either here at home or around the world. As I said in a recent editorial, my dream would be to replace weapons of mass destruction with acts of mass restoration.
That basket that Greg Sarris was talking about – that imagined map of our home landscape – has become frayed and torn over the years; there are so many holes in it right now it can no longer hold grass seeds or acorn mush or like it used to do. But as we start to refill the landscape with our own stories, as we start to re-fashion a geography of our home – the basket can be repaired and refashioned, and now with some designs of our own making. Whereever you end up calling home over the next few years, whether it be here in the Bay Area or beyond, I hope you will take the skills and knowledge you have gained here at Berkeley over the past few years and use them to create new maps, new baskets, of the places you find yourself that reflect back to those communities the promise and possibilities that can come from an understanding of the geography of your homes.
Thank you for inviting me to come share this day with you, and thank you in advance for all you will give to the world in the days and years to come.
