Remembering Mary Baird

Please visit our Nursery Updates Journal to find a page dedicated to Mary, her life and her contributions to Mountain Watch.

Save the Daly City Dunes

© 2010 Margo BorsThe Daly City Dunes on the western end of San Bruno Mountain are the last remnant of an ancient dune system formed 80 to 125 thousand years ago, when the North Peninsula was an island and water lapped at the base of the mountain.  It is very rare and endangered, but the heart of it is privately owned by folks who now want to put eight houses on the site. 

Houses already cover a good portion of the dunes, leaving this rare dune remnant which is about 10 acres in size.  The development plan would fragment what is left and make much of the remainder vulnerable to more building.  

This is a precious rare dune, composed of sandy deposits laid down during the Pleistocene era, that is unique on the San Francisco Peninsula.  The San Francisco dunes are made of sand from a later era. Naturally, as a rare ecosystem, it also hosts a very rare and sensitive community of dune plants that exist only in a few other locations in the GGNRA, where they are carefully tended. San Francisco Lessingia © 2012 SBMWThis community includes some very endangered plants, the San Francisco Lessingia, the San Francisco Spineflower and a miniature dune suncup.  The Lessingia is on the Endangered Species list, and preservation the Daly City dunes is an important feature of this plant’s recovery plan.

For members of San Bruno Mountain Watch, the reasons to save this unique feature of San Bruno Mountain are obvious. These include: Reserving our local biodiversity leads to a healthier ecosystem; open spaces and native landscapes provide a sense of wellbeing; and future generations should be able to enjoy as much of this biodiversity as possible. San Bruno Mountain is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspot, and this dune is a very unique and fragile feature of the mountain.

We hope to convince the owners of the threatened parcels of our point of view.  It would be a great gift, a legacy gift, to the people of Daly City and the Bay Area, were they to work with us to preserve this rare and endangered area.

In the meantime, we also need to convince everyone else of the dune’s value.  Daly City, along with the land-owners, will ultimately have to decide whether or not they are preserved.  You can help by giving city officials your opinion.  Read more here about what you can do right now.  Then please watch for more information about the dunes coming soon to this website.

(We now have pages addressing all issues relating to the Daly City Dunes, so please check out them out to learn about the dunes and what you can do to help save them.)

Terry O'Connell Joins Brisbane City Council

        Former SBMW board member Terry O’Connell officially joined the Brisbane City Council on December 5th.  Terry has been a hard working and thoughtful member of our board until she resigned to run for City Council.  Although we will miss her, we are sure that Terry will successfully work for a secure and environmentally sustainable future for Brisbane. Terry was co-chairwoman of the successful campaign to prevent housing in the Brisbane Quarry. She was a regular participant in our stewardship program, a tireless fundraising event producer, and was active in guiding SBMW from her position on the board.

         Terry will be joined by another newly - elected environmentalist on the board, Ray Miller.  Ray has served for many years on Brisbane’s Open Space and Ecology Committee and is especially interested in ensuring that the upcoming Baylands project is energy positive through the collection of wind and solar energy.      

         Four of the five City Council members are supporters of SBMW.  SBMW members are also active on the Planning Commission (2 of 5 members), and the Open Space and Ecology Committee (3 of 6 members).  With 12.4 million square feet of space being proposed in the build-out of the Brisbane Baylands, a strong council is essential to insure that the environment at the eastern foot of San Bruno Mountain is protected and that whatever is built is truly sustainable.

         It is through our community activism on environmental issues that SBMW has attracted concerned citizens who go on to play important roles in their communities.  Presently, we are extending our community ties to South San Francisco and Daly City.

Good luck Terry, we’ll miss you, but we are happy that you have chosen to serve Brisbane and San Bruno Mountain in a new role!!

Connecting the Dots

In these times, it is impossible not to connect the dots between our environmental problems on San Bruno Mountain and political assaults on almost everything except the right to carry a gun and tax cuts for the very wealthy.  It is, I think, time for us to get out of our “green silos”, as Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine says, and recognize that many problematic issues are closely tied together. 

For example, this fall, leading Republicans and tea partiers are planning a full throttle assault on environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, all in the name of fiscal responsibility and job creation.  Does this sound like the recent claims that we can’t afford to take care of the poor, fix our bridges, or improve our schools, or pay our teachers a decent wage?  It should, and the similarities are not coincidental.

If we examine how the following phenomena are related to environmental destruction, we see a pattern:

•Increasing attacks on unions

•Rising rates of hunger and homelessness

•Declining oceans

•Contining subsidies for nuclear power and the relicensing of old plants;

•Continuing massive military efforts

•The scape-goating of immigrants

•Denying climate change 

All of these troubling tendencies are rooted in the drive to exploit the middle class and the environment for financial gain by corporations and the very wealthy.  In the current financial crisis, our society is especially vulnerable to sweeping, strong-armed changes that benefit the richest among us at the expense of environment and the poor among us.  Finacial aid is cut, education is cut, government services are cut.  And the wealthiest individuals along with corporations get tax cuts.

If we think of ourselves and the environment as a community, with common goals and aspirations, and common resources, we can clearly see how we have gotten into this situation as well as the way out. If the commons, by which I mean the pool of natural and human resources, was cared for by and shared among us all, many present day problems would be greatly diminished. We would have a much more sustainable economy and society, and be entering the second decade of the 21st century with a much rosier forecast.

How do we get to a rosier forecast for our future?  Naomi’s Klein’s message is that we have to do more than tend our own garden, that we need to speak up and help out with other burning issues since they are all related.  For example, while San Bruno Mountain Watch concentrates on preserving the habitat on San Bruno Mountain for generations to come, we also need to support and work with those, like CREBL, who are working in Brisbane to combat global warming, or Mountain Keepers, who are fighting mountaintop removal in West Virginia.  It’s a small world, and if one part of the commons is under attack, its all under attack.  As we defend San Bruno Mountain, we also need to lend a hand to other defenders of the common good.

Natural Resources in San Mateo County

When San Bruno Mountain Watch crafted its mission statement, to “preserve and expand the native ecosystems of San Bruno Mountain, in perpetuity,” we were thinking about all the variety of life on the mountain, woven into the incredible tapestry by natural factors like geography, soils, wind, water, and sunlight.  Together, these are the natural resources of San Bruno Mountain. 

San Mateo County has a wealth of natural resources in its county parks. Yet San Mateo County Department of Parks has not one biologist on staff dedicated to preserving and enhancing those resources -- No one whose job it is to advocate for the wealth of biodiversity in this special part of the world, though this is a primary management objective of the parks department.

Now MW has approval by a funder for a $100,000 bog pond enhancement project that would improve the biodiversity of the bog, and possibly lead to the return of the red-legged frog and San Francisco Garter Snake to the area.  It would also provide many educational opportunities for nearby schools, and volunteer opportunities for the nearby communities. It’s tailor made for the park’s master plan vision, and would cost the department virtually nothing.

Yet, the county is turning its back on this project, and waited to say “no” until it’s almost impossible to negotiate or move the project elsewhere. Is this just a glaring lack of vision because there is no natural resource advocate in a position of authority on the park staff?

In any case, we need your help.  Please write an email to Supervisor Tissier asking her to save this project, and inject some dedication to natural resources into the parks department.