Open Space Council's Blog

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What do you think of this? 

Betting The Farm TRAILER from Pull-Start Pictures on Vimeo.

Join us on Instagram and Twitter with a picture of a cow. Or grass. Or milk. Or something related like a really good chocolate chip cookie being dunked. @bayareaopenspace and #ieatlocal

Open Space Happenings: 08.29.12

The light is changing, have you noticed?  

Courtesy of Outdoor Nation on Facebook

• Website dedicated to the State Parks Funding This is a great resource for anyone interested in latest news related to the State Parks scandal and crisis. (Sacramento Bee)
• Businesses Push to Change Environmental Quality Act. With just over a week remaining for California's legislative session, business and labor groups have started a push to pass broad reforms of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The effort has alarmed environmental groups and many legislators, who warn that change could leave the law ineffective. (KQED Forum)
• New CA Statewide Poll Results. A majority of Californians favor enacting Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry Brown’s ballot initiative that would raise taxes in order to avoid further spending reductions in education and public safety, according to results from a new PACE/USC Rossier School of Education Poll released Wednesday. (Tulchin Research)
• New generation of West Marin ranchers coming back to the family farm. A new generation of ranchers is emerging in West Marin, young adults who are going off to college but returning home to leave their mark on family businesses that have been around for generations. (Marin IJ)
• Why Youth Has An Advantage In Innovation & Why You Want To Be A Learn-It-All. No mention of land conservation in here, but I'm throwing it in here just for fun. (Above The Crowd)
• Celebrate the Farmer! Mark Bittman talks about the value of farmers. (NY Times)
• National parks face severe funding crunch. After more than a decade of scrimping and deferring maintenance and construction projects — and absorbing a 6 percent budget cut in the past two years — the signs of strain are beginning to surface at national parks across the country. (Washington Post)
• The Rise Of Visual Social Media. Blog posts became Facebook updates and Tumblr posts, which shrunk to Tweets and finally to Instagram or Pinterest. Here's how smart brands are navigating the new visual social-media era. (Fast Company)
• Men, Sportsmen, Conservatives, and Churchgoers are Motivated to Conservation Action through Personal Benefits. In June 2012, The Nature Conservancy conducted research on individuals’ motivation for protecting nature.  (ecoAmerica)
• Event: California Invasive Plant Council's Symposium on October 11-13.

 

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Every Wednesday we find stories about land conservation and we share them here. Sometimes the links aren't about land conservation and that's fine too. 

Join us on September 20 from 10am-1pm at the San Pedro Square Market in downtown San Jose for our Fall Gathering! We'll be talking about sustainable agriculture in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. More information about it, including who our distinguished panelists are, can be found over here. And join us on Instagram and Twitter with #ieatlocal

 

Sustaining our Communities with Local Food: September 20 in San Jose

 

It's time to start talking about and tweeting and Instagraming and registering for our Fall Gathering on September 20. Will you join us?

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The Bay Area is growing and the need to create sustainable and healthy communities is only increasing. How can we protect farmland, serve local food and provide food security? What role does farmland have in regional plans like the Sustainable Communities Strategy? And what are the opportunities for partnership and funding?

Our Fall Gathering on September 20 from 10am-1pm will address these questions with a focus on Santa Clara, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. In this part of the region, there are many efforts already underway to support local farms and connect people of all kinds to where their food comes from. Speakers include:

• Melissa Hippard, Greenbelt Alliance
• Kathryn Lyddan, Brentwood Agricultural Land Trust, moderator
• Andrea Mackenzie, Santa Clara County Open Space Authority 
• Kellyx Nelson, San Mateo Resources Conservation District
• Jennifer Scheer, Santa Clara County Farm Bureau

Come with us as we head to the San Pedro Square Market in downtown San Jose for a conversation about sustainable agriculture and the people making it happen. The program will be held from 10am-12pm. Lunch will be served immediately following and there will be lots of time for networking.

Click here to register

Do you eat locally? Know local farms? Shop at farmers' markets? Share pictures of what local food means to you via Instagram (@bayareaopenspace) and Twitter (@BA_OpenSpace) with #ieatlocal between now and September 20. We'll post photos here on this blog as well as share them at the Gathering. Extra bonus points for any picture that makes our mouths water.

 

Open Space Happenings: 08.22.12

Have you eaten a locally grown peach lately? If not, we highly recommend that you find a farmer's market or a local-farmers-friendly store and get yourself one. The peach season won't last forever and, man, they're good.

Hat tip to Outdoor Afro. The National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) works with a network of health professionals, weathercasters, land managers and teachers to create and leverage public-private partnerships to promote daily actions for helping people live well while protecting and enjoying nature.

 

• Santa Clara County supervisor wants more parks in urban areas ­-- but it's unclear who would pay. The Board of Supervisors will decide whether a 40-year-old, voter-approved fund meant to pay for regional county parks and trails can also be used to create smaller county neighborhood parks in dense, urban areas that are starved for green space. (Mercury News)
• Finalists Named for Bay Area's Cox Conserves Heroes Program, Public Asked to Vote. KTVU Channel 2 and The Trust for Public Land today announced the finalists for the Bay Area's fourth annual Cox Conserves Heroes program.  A total of $15,000 will be donated to local environmental nonprofits on behalf of the finalists. (US Politics Today)
• Price no guarantee of quality outdoors. The best and worst deals in the outdoors can turn your world around. (SF Chronicle)
• Placemaking as a New Environmentalism: Reinvigorating the Environmental Movement in the 21st Century. What kind of places do we want to create? What kind of communities do we want to live in? What kind of world do we hope to see in the future? These questions are at the heart of environmentalism today, but are seldom posed. Environmentalism can perhaps best accomplish its goals for humans to impact less by leading the conversation on how we can impact more. (Project for Public Spaces)
• San Mateo County looks to big ideas to fix parks. San Mateo County will consider some big ideas to fix its parks system, from installing athletic fields at Coyote Point Park in San Mateo to turning an old correctional facility in La Honda into a camping destination. (Mercury News)
• Viewpoints: Climate change is another reason to protect farmland. Most Californians take the existence of farming and ranching for granted, but this is a mistake. There are mounting pressures to convert farmland to other types of land uses. (Sacramento Bee)
• National Parks Birthday: Time to Renew a National Commitment. This week, as we celebrate the National Park Service's 96th birthday we can reflect on the challenges and opportunities facing our national parks as they near their second century. (Huffington Post)

 

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Every Wednesday we find stories about land conservation and we share them here. We're especially proud of the ones that involve our member organizations. Do you know who our members are?

Join us on September 20 from 10am-1pm at the San Pedro Square Market in downtown San Jose for our Fall Gathering! We'll be talking about sustainable agriculture in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. More information about it, including who our distinguished panelists are, can be found over here.

 

Open Space Happenings: 08.15.12

And we're back! We took two weeks off to do nothing but watch the Olympics (see blog posts below for evidence), but now we're back with real hard-hitting news about land conservation in the Bay Area. Or something like that.

Yesterday Bay Nature magazine launched Trailfinder, an easy to use guide to local parks and trails. Working behind the scenes by providing trailheads and the trip-planner, Transit & Trails, a project of the Open Space Council, is happy to be a part of this collaborative project.

 

• State lawyers told of hidden funds. A former California state parks employee says she told state attorneys her department was hiding about $20 million in a special fund several months before officials announced discovering the surplus money, according to a sworn declaration filed in court Tuesday. (Orange County Register)
• From the Department of Good News: Farmers’ Markets Keep Growing. Last week, the USDA released its annual update of the National Farmers Market Directory, which is now 7,864 markets strong. It’s a 9.6 percent uptick since last year, and more than double the number of markets since 2004. (Civil Eats)
• Young Farmers Begin the Path Towards Equality with Loans. New opportunities are in development for young farmers for whom capital and land are two major obstacles to starting their own farm. (Civil Eats)
• New Agtivist: From backyard farmer to community visionary in Oakland. Abeni Ramsey started growing food in her West Oakland backyard when she was a college-aged single mom who wanted her kids to eat better food than what they could afford. Some seven years later, she’s well known among the Bay Area food community, selling produce from her business, City Girl Farms, to local restaurants and through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program.  (Grist)
• Save the axolotl! Um, sure, but why?About two months ago, the Generation Anthropocene radio team was invited to Santa Cruz for a conference for the Aldo Leopold Leadership program in environmental science. Leopold was one of the grand old dudes of the environmental movement, and you probably think that a program sporting his name screams “old white man reeking of patchouli.” But the conference was actually really cool. (Grist)
• Parkside Trails proposing open space, housing project in Cupertino. Big plans for new homes and open space are in the works near the southwest edge of Cupertino. (Mercury News)
• Tax measures piling up on Bay Area ballots this November. While it may seem like governments across the state are digging deeper than ever into Californians' pockets this year, an analysis by this newspaper shows there are fewer tax and bond initiatives across the state and in the Bay Area than there were just two years ago. (Mercury News)
• Locals will have their say in new conservation area. Northeastern Napa County is set to be designated as a National Conservation Area. (Napa Valley Register)
• With new vision, a shift for Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Despite its 18,000 acres, many visitors to California's first state park tend to gravitate toward park headquarters, venturing out from there to explore forests, meadows, canyons and waterfalls. That crowding can detract from the visitor experience, and have environmental consequences for the park. (Santa Cruz Sentinel)
• Richmond shoreline set for improvements. Richmond's shoreline, one of the longest of any city in the Bay Area, will be a little greener and a little more accessible after two agencies voted to make major improvements along the formerly industrial waterfront. (SF Chronicle)

 

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Every Wednesday we share links to news about land conservation in the Bay Area (and sometimes beyond). Like the members of the Open Space Council, we focus on many aspects of land conservation including food, recreation, biodiversity, policy, and more. 

 

Let's start a new Olympic sport

What if there was an Olympic sport for most parks visited in one day?

Farms and ranches could be included. So could regional trails and community gardens. Competitors would have to touch a sign post with the park's name on it before moving onto the next. They could use any transportation available to them to get between the parks (excluding helicopters - that's not fair). 

The Park-A-Thon would have to take place in the San Francisco Bay Area because no where else can you visit as many parks all in one day. We have over a million acres of parks for all to enjoy. We have national leaders in land conservation throughout our ten counties. We have regional trails, regional plans, and regional projects. And we have some of the most beautiful parks in the world.

And it's never too soon to start training.

 

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We have Olympic fever. But since NBC hasn't asked us for our commentary on the 2012 London Games, we'll share our ideas here with you. Our regular programming will return August 15.

Photos by Lech Naumovich at the 2012 Alt. More info about the event can be found here.

Olympic Climate Change Scientists

If there was an Olympic event for fine-scaled climate change projections or ecologically-relevant fog data sets for London's East End, this is the team you'd want to assemble. 

For three years now a group of scientists have gathered at the Pepperwood Preserve to talk about climate change and land conservation in the Bay Area. The Open Space Council has been there because of the Conservation Lands Network (CLN) and our ability to engage a broader community in this important work. The CLN will be updated to include all of the scientific goodness, including the handy online tool, Explorer. Stay tuned for more information about the project over on www.BayAreaLands.org and on this blog.

 

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We have the Olympics on our mind. Could you tell? 

Our regular Happenings posts will return on August 15.