Maps are so unreliable. Even when they are well drawn—which hilly places never were before the advent of contour lines in the 1850s—they don’t necessarily have a key telling useful details. Sometimes a map shows what a place has or had, or what the mapmaker thought was once there. All too often, though not captioned  more »

Check out what interesting stuff I’ve sleuthed up for the “trek” I’m leading with Nature in the City on November 14th. The tour will start in Golden Gate Park, because since the late 1800s, the Laguna Honda watershed has been a main source of water for irrigation of the Park. The creation of the irrigation  more »

How Golden Gate Park reflects the big changes in society Once a field of dunes, Golden Gate Park was built on a swath of sand called the Outside Lands. An ambitious garden the size of New York’s Central Park replaced the dunes, partly to create a refuge from city stresses of the Industrial Age and  more »