Poison oak! Does your skin itch at the very thought of this common plant? If you’ve ever accidentally brushed up against poison oak and developed a skin rash, you know how uncomfortable that can be. So, what’s the good of poison oak? Can’t we just get rid of it once and for all?
Poison Oak
FollowOakland debt will be raised with zoo’s new multi-million dollar aerial gondola
The Oakland Zoo expansion plan being pursued by zoo management with the approval of the Oakland City Council includes a big and expensive aerial gondola.
You might ask, with the new City Administrator, Deanna Santana, noting in her December budget letter that the City doesn’t have money to replace aging fire pump and ladder trucks, or pay off the debt from past City projects, or keep the City infrastructure safe,…why would Oakland choose to go further into debt to help buy and maintain the expensive cars, wires, power equipment, and massive columns for a big new zoo gondola.
Mountain Lions – An Inconvenient Truth
Mountain lion in the East Bay. Photo by Jim Hale.
As we were finishing up the post on mountain lions last week, the story broke that Dan Richards, President of the California Fish and Game Commission, had killed a mountain lion in Idaho on an arranged hunt. After a long chase led by hunting dogs, he shot the exhausted animal out of a tree where it had climbed to escape the dogs. Later that night Richards dined on his kill and gloated about it in a letter to a California state lawmaker. Not so surprisingly, public outrage has erupted and there have been calls for his resignation since the Commission is involved with protecting California’s wildlife. But Richards’ defenders point out that hunting mountain lions is legal in Idaho.
Slow Nature: How the Slow Food movement is related to the effort to protect Knowland Park
Western Blue-eyed grass - photo by Mack Casterman
The Bay Area is a hotspot for the Slow Food movement. Slow Food started in Italy, a movement aimed at countering the influence of Fast Food by encouraging people to take time to cook and eat meals at home, understand where their food comes from, maybe even grow some of it themselves or buy it from local growers. While everyone likes to grab a quick Fast Food bite once in awhile, Slow Food is about getting back something we lost in turning food into a cheap, high-calorie drive-thru commodity: the whole way that food centers communities and families through sharing the bounty of harvest, eating seasonal fruits and vegetables, cooking together, and talking around the table. It’s about really appreciating food, but also about appreciating our place as human beings—in families, communities, as inhabitants of the natural world that provides our food.
Mountain Lions in the East Bay Hills: Why Conservationists Should Care About Knowland Park
Living with Lions in the Urban Wildland Interface
Mountain lion in Tilden Park. Photo by Jim Hale
From the point of view of a mountain lion, Knowland canyon sits at a key crossroads: to the north and south are the East Bay Regional Park District’s ridgeline parks extending in a nearly unbroken 25-mile chain from El Sobrante south to San Leandro. To the east is San Leandro Reservoir and to the west is Knowland Park. These north-south and east-west axes afford mountain lions critical migratory corridors of sufficient size to accommodate portions of their large home ranges.
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