The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area

Foreword: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally

I n 1969, having just been forced to step down as executive director of the Sierra Club after a dispute with the club’s board about financial management, the colorful, larger-than-life David Brower founded a new organization called Friends of the Earth that soon became a worldwide leader in environmental politics. As the motto for this new group, Brower offered a prescriptive phrase that has since gone on to become a defining theme of environmental activism: “Think globally, act locally.” However broad or systemic environmental problems might be, they almost always express themselves in local places, so that we often encounter them most directly in our own homes. Moreover, Brower was suggesting that effective environmental activism also begins at home, in the seemingly small day-to-day actions within our own communities that when multiplied together by thousands and millions of other people doing similar things, ultimately produce our myriad impacts on the creatures and ecosystems of the planet. The other key insight expressed in this slogan is that people can feel immensely disempowered and dispirited trying to solve the problems of an entire planet. Rather than leading to effective activism, the global perspectives of environmentalism can all too easily yield passivity and despair. By calling for local action, then, Brower was focusing people’s attention on places where they could unquestionably make a difference if only they chose to do so: in their own homes and communities and daily lives. ix foreword Thinking Globally, Acting Locally William Cronon Given the widespread acceptance of “think globally, act locally” as a key principle of environmental politics and ethics, it is a bit surprising that relatively few environmental histories have been written in this spirit. Except when dealing with a single local campaign (for instance, the controversy surrounding Love Canal in the late 1970s), academic studies of environmental activism have typically focused on geographical scales well above the local community. More often than not, national legislation and the actions of federal agencies have received disproportionate attention. Certainly this was true of Samuel Hays’s classic Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, which arguably launched the modern field of environmental political history, and it was equally true of Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind. Hays’s magisterial study of post-World War II environmentalism , Beauty, Health, and Permanence, pays much more attention to local activism and conflicts, but the vast scope of the book prevents any one place from receiving more than a few pages of discussion. Although these books and their successors certainly detail political conflict in particular local places, their larger goal has generally been to attach those places and controversies to a wider national narrative. We do have a few environmental histories of individual states, with William Robbins’s two-volume study of Oregon (published by the University of Washington Press in this series) standing as the most distinguished benchmark of the genre. But below the level of the nation or the state, we have essentially no long-term histories of local environmental politics. The reasons for this are many, but can no doubt be attributed partly to environmental history’s long-standing interest in the public lands and the federal policies that have shaped places like national parks and national forests. Access to federal records is often a good deal easier and fuller than is true of more local archives, and this too may help account for the national and state-level scale of many environmental histories. Even those scholars who have focused on smaller geographical areas to analyze local environmental politics—here, Andrew Hurley’s Environmental Inequalities remains among the most distinguished examples—have tended to focus on a single issue or campaign. For all these reasons, Richard Walker’s The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area should be welcomed as a truly pathbreaking work. There is really no book quite like it. Not only does it offer the first comprehensive history of environmental activism in the commux foreword nities surrounding San Francisco Bay from the nineteenth century to the present, it is in fact the first comprehensive study of local environmental politics that has ever been written for any American city. As such, it offers a model that we can only hope other scholars will emulate. Rarely have the benefits of “thinking globally but acting locally” been more evident than in the pages of this...