Open Space Happenings: 10.26.11

Your weekly helping of Bay Area conservation news and inspiration...

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will present a special one-week engagement of Gary Hustwit’s vibrant new film Urbanized.  Click here for more information.

(If you're reading this on email, click here to see a video)

 

• Work starts on Golden Gate Bridge's 75th anniversary building.  The 3,500-square-foot building — set to open by mid-April — is being built at the southeast end of the bridge near the statue of bridge builder Joseph Strauss. The bridge turns 75 on May 27, 2012. (Marin IJ)
• Partnerships try to keep threatened state parks open.  Across the country, people are taking the initiative to save state parks as budget cuts threaten to close them.  (USA Today)
• Battle over the Baylands: Opponents in Palo Alto's Measure E debate prepare for Election Day showdown.  (Palo Alto Online)
• Quick and dirty: Congress may rewrite the Farm Bill in two weeks.  The next reauthorization was not expected until late in 2012—if not 2013—but through an unexpected turn of events, it may be decided much faster, and with even less input from the good food movement than the last one. (Grist)
• Bay Area duck hunters celebrate season opener.  It's the time of year when the leaves fall and hunters' pulses climb, as millions of migrating birds stop to refuel at the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge in the shadow of Google, Oracle and a metropolitan area of 7.5 million people. And the recent conversion of salt ponds to wetlands in Alviso, Redwood City and Newark has created new habitat -- attracting larger flocks. (Mercury News)
• Bay Area Nature 100 Years Ago, Through the Eyes of Painter William Keith.  An art exhibit at Saint Mary's College Museum of Art.  (Bay Nature)
• AUDIO: "A Big, Captivating Idea": The Bay Area Ridge Trail (KQED Quest)
• Big new section of Bay Area Ridge Trail to open Saturday east of San Jose.  Roughly 5.3 miles will be added to the Bay Area Ridge Trail, bringing its total completed segments to 337 miles. The new route follows broad open meadows and oak woodlands in the Sierra Vista Open Space Preserve, which sits just east of Alum Rock Park in the Diablo Foothills. (Mercury News)
• 20 Years After Fire, Revelation and Tribute.  Richard Misrach's images, currently on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Oakland Museum of California, were taken a week after the fire swept through the hills on Oct. 20, 1991, and show an almost monochromatic sea of devastation. (Bay Citizen and New York Times)

 

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This is the weekly Happenings, a weekly round-up of news - with some art and fun thrown in - related to the members, partners, supporters, and friends of the Open Space Council.  

We'll be talking about The Big Picture and Tactical Next Steps for State Parks at our next Gathering on November 17 from 10am-1pm at the Brower Center in Berkeley.  New partnerships are being formed.  New ways of working together have been created and are being implemented.  And new strategies are needed to deal with the new realities of publicly funded conservation.  What does it all mean?  What is being done?  And how do we need to think in new ways?  Join us for a conversation.  Click here to register.

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