Human Impact on the Environment

Chapter 12

San Francisco is filled with National Recreation Parks, this has influenced the city to be very environmentally concieious. I am sure that this environmental conciousness was present before the hippies of Haight and Ashbury back in the mid-1960s, but I am sure that some of their lifestyle that involved getting back to nature has influenced present day environmental conciousness.

One may visit San Francisco’s Department of the Environment’s website to see just how serious they are. <>

Recent Oil Spill in the Bay

Oil Surrounding Alcatraz

A huge oil spill occurred in the San Francisco Bay on November 7, 2007. 58,000 gallons of oil seeped from an 810-foot-long containership as a result of it smashing into the base of the Bay Bridge. The Bridge suffered no structural damage, but wildlife will be in trouble for the weeks to come. On another economic level, the commercial crab season was coming up, but due to the spill, it has been postpone. It apparently was a bad fishing summer season, and now this.

An oil broom pulled up from the waters.

In the first few days, there was an overwhelming response of citizens volunteering to help clean up the oil spill, however they were turned away for safety reasons–the oil is just too hazardous for untrained people to handle. Training of this kind can take only 24 hours, but at the time, there was no time or offical trainers set up to train volunteers. The City of S.F. has about 150 specially trained municipal workers in this line of work, to help clean the beaches, but the Coast Guard has been reluctant to call on them, stating that they have it under control. Early this week of November 11th, the Coast Guard recognized that it as well as state and federal agencies were ill prepared to handle volunteer requests, and realize they lost out on a great resource those first few days. In response, the California Department of Fish and Game held instructional session for volunteers.

Those first eager citizens were given grunt work to do for Oiled Wildlife Care Network (www.owcn.org), an organization of UC Davis who are helping to save the birds. Citizens are not washing birds, but they are helping with food preperation, cleaning equipemtna and bird pins. (Fun fact: Ultra Dawn dish soap is what is being used to wash the oil off the birds, because it has been proven to work the best of them all. Proctor & Gamble, makers of UltraDawn have donated 30 cases of 22-ounce bottles for OWCN’s current work).

A volunteer picks up an oil-slicked bird

Here is one of the better articles pertaining to this incident, with a link that has a audio podcast of the Coast Guard talking with the newspaper The Chronicle, along with photographs
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/13/MNO2TB3AV.DTL&hw=oil+spill&sn=022&sc=573

Clean Technology

San Franciscos biggest economy draws are technology, biotechnology, health care, and telecommunications, in addition to tourism. But another technology of special interest to venture capitalist has been Clean Technology. What is meant by Clean Technology are innovations such as hybrid/electric vehicles, wind power, solar energy, and energy efficient building design. The Mayor of San Francisco has an initiative that works with the an advisory council to help put San Francisco at the hub of this business and job attraction strategies, and help establish public-private partnerships in this industry.
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Recreational Resources

Chapter 11

What are the City’s recreational resources?

Although San Francisco is 7miles x 7 miles, there is an amazing amount of things to do. Because it is a walking city, and transportation is plentiful and constant, it is easy to get around. For instance, I live 10 miles away from my job here in Los Angeles. I have taken the bus before and with our MTA it takes 2 hours to get there because of the poor frequency of buses. I have taken the bus, light rail, trolley, or BART from one end of San Francisco to another, and it is anywhere from 30-45 minutes.

According to an article in Outlook Magazine's quality-of-life report , San Francisco ranked #1 nationally in nine categories: arts, health, recreation, transportation, education,climate, economy, safety, and housing. San Francisco ranked first in the arts, second in health and
recreation, and fourth in transportation.

The City contains many National Recreation areas. One of the biggest and best getaways is Golden Gate Park, a National Park. It is a little over 1,000 acres in the middle of the City and is larger than New York’s Central Park. It starts, or ends depending on how you look at it, at the beach and stretches into San Francisco. There are numerous things to see here other than just green grass and trees; there is a botanical garden, the Striping Arboretum; the Japanese Tea Garden, where you can have Japanese tea service in a traditional Japanese wooden patio overlooking the carefully laid out and beautifully manicured garden and pond; the only national AIDS memorial called the AIDS Memorial Grove; two lakes, Stow Lake and Spreckels Lake where you can rent rowboats and where you can race radio controlled boats; it contains two museums, the De Young Art museum and the Academy of Sciences, one of the largest natural history museums in the world which also houses an aquarium and planetarium; Kezar Stadium is also located here, in the southeast corner of the park, the former home of the Oakland Raiders and 49ers–it now host amateur sports, high school football games, and is the home to the San Francisco Dragons, a lacrosse team.

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area is not a continuous location, but there is a collection of areas all over the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of the more popular areas are: Alcatraz, the Presidio, Ocean & Baker Beaches, and Land’s End.

Additional recreational things to do in San Francisco are sight seeing places like China Town, Coit Tower, Lombard Street (the curvy brick street), jumping on one of the public transpirations and seeing where it takes you. For shoppers and real tourism, you can go to the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Warf where there are loads of stores, seafood restaurants; Giant’s Stadium is located on that side of town.

One of my favorite things to do in San Francisco is eat. There are so many great places to dine. Just like Los Angeles, they have every ethnicity, but it’s all in walking distance or a hop on the bus: Indian, Asian, Little Italy, Russian, American, or British just to name a few.

More about The City

Chapter 9

What kind of urban city is SF and what makes it urban?

San Francisco is the 14th most populated city in the US, and the 4th in CA. Its situation and site one of the most densely populated in the US, with a little over 750,000 people at the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula (37°46´0´´´N 122°26´0´´W). The City is 54 feet above sea level at the edge of the Pacific Ocean to its west, and the peninsula creating a bay to the east, known as the San Francisco Bay. The San Francisco Bay Area which is made up the cities that surround the San Francisco Bay contain at least 7 million people.

There are several smaller islands that are part of the city and sit in the Bay. Most famous of them all is Alcatraz. There are also a set of islands located 27 miles to the west of the City in the Pacific Ocean called the Farallon Islands, which are uninhabited.

San Francisco is a metropolitan area. According to our text, the definition of metropolitan area is “a large-scale functional entity, perhaps containing several urbanized areas, discontinuously built-up but nonetheless operating as an integrated economic whole.” San Francisco is a part of the conurbation known as the San Francisco Bay Area, which is a part of the Cities of Oakland and San Jose, and including the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma. According to the text, San Francisco ranks 5th in the largest Metropolitan area in the U.S.

Although San Francisco was not fully built up before 1850, it followed a city planning structure like that of New York or Boston, a very pre-1850, East Coast city structure; it is very much a walking city. Yerba Buena was the City’s first name. The first homestead was put up in 1835 and it was built up around the Mission Dolores settlement by the Spaniards in the 1770’s. Yerba Buena started to attract Americans. It was claimed for the U.S. during the Mexican-American War in 1846 and renamed San Francisco. By then, the California Gold Rush brought in many settlers. The City grew in one year from 1,000 to 25,000 people. Because of the gold coming in, there arose a need for banks. San Francisco in its early years was a banking city. And where there is money, there is strong politics, and that too is very evident by their stunning City Hall and, even today, thriving Civic Center.

Although this chapter does bring up ethnic and racial distribution, segregation, and gentrification, I believe that these topics can be better explored in chapters 10 & 13 when talking about neighborhoods.

Transportation

Chapter 8

San Francisco, like most other major cities, relies on transportation for goods and public transportation. The City was thought important enough to make major highways, rail systems and air lines a large part of the transportation system (i.e., U.S. Highway Route 40).

The City also cares much for their public transporation. I think that this is one of the reasons, like New York, that San Francisco is so popular and successful as city and major tourist attraction. People that I know who have visited Los Angeles, as well as locals, realize that one can barely get around Los Angeles without a car. For a tourist to come here, they either have to know someone to take them around, visit only certain areas that they can walk to, or have a great sense of direction to drive themselves around!

But in San Francisco, you can get lost, but you are never far from a MUNI bus, a BART Subway station, or one of the light rails M, T, J, K, N, to name a few. And its affordable too.

This is a picture of a MUNI bus.

This is a picture of a light rail (LRT).

Public Transportation is the best choice for the City because of its limited space, therefore, lack of parking. If and when I have drove my own car there that is the biggest problem–trying to find parking! I usually ditch my car somewhere and then take the MUNI everywhere else. Not to mention traffic!

A famous Cable Cars of San Francisco (anyone remember Rice-a-Roni?)

The MUNI (Municipal Railway), which oversees the buses, trolleybus, light rail, street and cable cars, began its operation in 1912, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year. There are some MUNI buses that are electric, and others that run on ethanol. All light rails are electric. Many bus lines also have night owl services.

The BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is the heavy rail part subway system that covers in the City and the surrounding Bay Area (Richmond, Oakland, etc.). It began operation in 1972.

San Francisco is always working to improve their transit. As of this year, they added the light rail T line, which services the southeast side, making sure that lines hit key places such as Giant’s Stadium, the 49ers stadium and The Embarcadero.