It would be a good thing. Urban Forest Map is trying to make a log of all of the trees in San Francisco. The group is made up of government agencies, nonprofits, and private businesses. By mapping the city’s trees they hope to calculate the environmental benefits the trees are providing: “how many gallons of stormwater they are helping to filter, how many pounds of air pollutants they are capturing, how many kilowatt-hours of energy they are conserving, and how many tons of carbon dioxide they are removing from the atmosphere. The information we gather will help urban foresters and city planners to better manage trees in specific areas, track and combat tree pests and diseases, and plan future tree plantings. Climatologists can use it to better understand the effects of urban forests on climates, and students and citizen scientists can use it to learn about the role trees play in the urban ecosystem.”

You can add some trees to the count.

Today’s image of shafts of sunlight cutting through tall redwoods along a Muir Woods hiking trail comes from vgm8383′s photostream. This is an HDR (high dynamic range) photo — a technique that combines multiple exposures to give a greater range of tonal detail. It worked pretty well in this instance because Muir Woods is surprisingly dark (test it with a light meter if you don’t believe me), and the light is very green.

This view of Muir Woods in Marin County is from soupboy‘s photostream.

.

Yesterday I attended the Goldman Environmental Prize Awards, as I have done most years since sometime in the early 1990s. The event is held in the city’s beautiful War Memorial Opera House, with a reception afterward at City Hall. The award honors grassroots environmental activists from around the world with a cash prize of $150,000. According to Nancy Pelosi, the award is “on a par with the Nobel Peace Prize in terms of its recognition of courage and brilliance in protecting our environment.”

This year two of the winners were lawyer Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and community organizer Luis Yanza, both of Ecuador, who are suing Chevron to clean up oil contamination in the Amazon rain forest. This region is one of the world’s most contaminated sites, and residents report a large number of health problems and deaths that appear related to the contamination.

But the selection of the Ecuadorans for the prize has again highlighted the journalistic deficiencies of our local daily, whose declining circulation can be no surprise. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in an article headlined (not very grammatically) “Controversy Mires Choice for Goldman Prize,” recognition of the Ecuardorans has created “a raging controversy.”

Which is the Chronicle‘s way of saying that Chevron held a press conference to express opposition to the activists who were suing the corporation. After all, according to Chevron general counsel Charles James, even if the environmental activists win in Ecuadoran courts “their ability to enforce this is going to be very limited.”

Well, sure it’s going to be limited. If Chevron was a country it would be much bigger and more powerful than Ecuador. So I guess the message is might makes right, no matter what the human and environmental consequences.

Is this really a “raging controversy”?

.

The California poppy (Eschscholzia californica), the state flower, blooms profusely along the northern California coast from about February through September. The most common variety is a bright orange color, reinforcing the sate’s nickname, the golden state (which also alludes to the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush). This poppy-colored hillside was photographed on the central California coast between Cambria and Cayucos.

I once edited a book by the poet Michael McClure called Scratching the Beat Surface. One of Michael’s premises was that the natural world can be appreciated even in urban areas.

The screenshot above links to the website of Nature in the City, whose mission is “to conserve and restore the nature and biodiversity of San Francisco and connect people with nature where they live.” This initiative is a a project of the Earth Island Institute.

Don’t hold the organization’s arithmetical limitations against it. According to the website, Corresponding to the strategies for achieving our mission, our three major program areas are:

1. Public Education
2. Habitat Restoration & Community Stewardship
3. Natural Resources Management
4. Conservation Advocacy

These are worthy programs, however you add them up.

San Francisco was hardly a forest before the swell in its population in the mid-nineteenth century — it was mostly coastal dunes, scrub, and marshland. The city’s most extraordinary transformation was achieved by John McLaren, who magically conjured up a woodland out of Golden Gate Park’s dunes.

Today the city is home to many types of trees, some of them spectacular. One website has identified the locations of the best examples of 213 species; the list is still growing. If you want to see what a particular kind of tree looks like in the San Francisco ecosystem, all you need to do is consult this list. Click the screenshot below to visit the site.

Just for fun, I used Google Maps to zoom in on a handsome Juglens nigra (black walnut), located in the panhandle across from 1809 OakStreet (image above).

The San Francisco Bay Area doesn’t have such a bad climate for fall color. The image above is of a Japanese maple; below is a Fuyu persimmon (both from my lot). But what we have is one of the world’s best climates for broad-leaf evergreens (you can see a lemon tree behind the persimmon), and as a result we tend to get specimen trees but never masses of color like these (photos taken near Ithaca, New York).

I like the color, and once I finish getting my backyard pool taken out I might plant a few more deciduous hardwoods.

To the east is Mount Diablo, and to the south Wildcat Canyon.

You can descend to Carriage Hills to the north, if you wish.