Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco

Wednesday, August 8, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

Few cities are so dramatically identified with their environment as San Francisco--the landscape of hills, the expansive bay, the engulfing fog, and even the deadly fault line shifting below. Yet most residents think of the city itself as separate from the natural environment on which it depends. In Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco, Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the history of San Francisco from Indian village to world-class metropolis, focusing on the interactions between the city and the land and on the generations of people who have transformed them both. Dreyfus examines the ways that San Franciscans remade the landscape to fit their needs, and how their actions reflected and affected their ideas about nature, from the destruction of wetlands and forests to the creation of Golden Gate and Yosemite parks, the Sierra Club, and later, the birth of the modern environmental movement.

This is a Merced Branch Library Arts & Culture Salon.