Trying to Understand the Bay’s Historical Context: Part 2

Natural history. It sounds as though it only applies to the environment, but when thinking about history, it is so important to think about the natural history of the place and how that has influenced the past and present narratives, people, and cultures. This feels especially necessary in the Bay Area where there is such a sense of awareness of the uniqueness of the Bay Area and a sense of affinity with the Bay in ordinary settings. Also, as I mentioned in an earlier post, despite the unique and distinct natures of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, they, along with other parts of the Bay, are tied to the environmental past and future of this area of land.

I’ve been reading a book about the natural history of the Bay called Down by the Bay: San Francisco’s History Between the Tides by Matthew Morse Booker and I wanted to expand on my previous history post using some of the things I’ve learned from Booker’s writing and the ways that it has impacted my research. Specifically, Booker weaves together a narrative that addresses human history before colonists from both Spain and the rest of America arrived, and the natural history of the Bay. He addresses the ways in which the Indigenous Ohlone people changed and related to the environment:

In recent years, a group of historical ecologists has shown that San Francisco Bay’s tidal margin contained a remarkable diversity of habitats ranging across a spectrum from salty and marine to freshwater and terrestrial. Many of these habitats were made or maintained by human beings. The bunchgrass prairies and parklike oak savannahs, for instance, that so captivated Vancouver’s men on their ride to Mission Santa Clara, would have been overgrown by brush without frequent fires set by Indians. Ohlones maintained these grassy plains with their widely spaced majestic oaks. Native peoples surely also modified tidal and aquatic habitats. Like other coastal peoples of the Pacific, Ohlones used the shoreline intensively. They harvested fish, shellfish, and other food resources from the marshes and bay waters. They built fish traps and shot and netted waterfowl. Historians and ecologists have also speculated that native peoples enhanced naturally occurring salt evaporation ponds to improve their harvests of the precious mineral, which they traded with inland peoples.13 Ohlone oral tradition recalls some of these practices and their purposes in a social world whose heart was the water’s edge (Booker 9).

My favorite phrase here is “a social world whose heart was the water’s edge.” This feels to me to be the world that I am researching and attempting to create through my communications work this summer. This social world is ever-changing, but revolves around the water’s edge in the way that my work has revolved around telling stories about sea-level rise, the impacts of climate change on the Bay and the periods of transition that will come in the future. The idea of bringing back and giving a space for an Indigenous understanding of the land that ties the social human world to the natural world feels to be at the core of the connections that we need to make in order to create more resilient communities along the water’s edge.

This idea of transition has also really stuck with me. Booker says: “San Francisco Bay is a very recent landform. Geologists tell us that the bay’s presence is cyclical. During the ice ages, the ocean retreats offshore. And during the interglacial periods—warming periods like the one we are in now—a bay briefly appears” (8). It feels very important to my own experience that the Bay has always been in transition and is an area with an enormous number of moving cultures, understandings, and ecosystems. I arrived at my organization during a period of transition and lots of moving pieces and I’ve felt that I’m in a period of transition myself. Having an understanding of the Bay Area as an ecosystem and natural habitat in transition helps me to feel as though I am in sync with the environment and that it’s natural to be in constant transition. I see parallels between the Bay and non-profits and community organizations in the way that they respond to external events and stimuli, just like any unique biological system. Understanding the natural history and present of the Bay Area translates to not just understanding the environmental history, but recognizing how social movements can mimic the natural history and patterns of the area. If we can make the water’s edge the heart of our social world, it would tie us to the environment in a social way that would allow us to better understand how our physical fate is tied to the fate of this environment.

 

Booker, Matthew Morse. (2013). Down by the bay : San Francisco’s History Between the Tides. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Available through NYU libraries here and from UC Press here