New in paperback, looks at how the city managed to save large areas of natural open space.

Winner of the Western History Association's 2009 Hal K. Rothman Award

Finalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the Western Nonfiction Contemporary category (2008).

The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, stitched from fields, farms and woodlands, mines, creeks, and wetlands. In The Country in the City, Richard Walker tells the story of how the jigsaw geography of this greenbelt has been set into place.

The Bay Area’s civic landscape has been fought over acre by acre, an arduous process requiring popular mobilization, political will, and hard work. Its most cherished environments--Mount Tamalpais, Napa Valley, San Francisco Bay, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, the Pacific coast--have engendered some of the fiercest environmental battles in the country and have made the region a leader in green ideas and organizations.

This book tells how the Bay Area got its green grove: from the stirrings of conservation in the time of John Muir to origins of the recreational parks and coastal preserves in the early twentieth century, from the fight to stop bay fill and control suburban growth after the Second World War to securing conservation easements and stopping toxic pollution in our times. Here, modern environmentalism first became a mass political movement in the 1960s, with the sudden blooming of the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, and it remains a global center of environmentalism to this day.

Green values have been a pillar of Bay Area life and politics for more than a century. It is an environmentalism grounded in local places and personal concerns, close to the heart of the city. Yet this vision of what a city should be has always been informed by liberal, even utopian, ideas of nature, planning, government, and democracy. In the end, green is one of the primary colors in the flag of the Left Coast, where green enthusiasms, like open space, are built into the fabric of urban life.

Written in a lively and accessible style, The Country in the City will be of interest to general readers and environmental activists. At the same time, it speaks to fundamental debates in environmental history, urban planning, and geography.

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"Three cheers for Richard Walker's The Country in the City, as one of the first efforts to bring together a community-scale history of environmental activism and politics . . . . There is a wealth of information here, particularly pinpointing some of the specific individuals who spearheaded various activist campaigns to improve the area's environment."

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"The Country in the City clearly and concisely relates the story of a major environmental success. That this was achieved through the diligent efforts of a concerned population should give hope to other such populations nationwide."

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"Walker presents a highly readable case study of the San Francisco Bay Area. . . . An excellent book for all libraries, especially those with regional and environmentalist holdings. Highly recommended."

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"The Country in the City is a masterful and much-needed chronicle of the Bay Area's diverse ecopolitical scene. It is a fruitful serendipity that such a rich and wonderful place has a scholar who, with intelligence and affection, can gracefully capture its green evolution."

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"Walker makes our landscape come alive as the arena of an ongoing struggle to figure out how to live lightly and well in this remarkable corner of the planet."

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"Meticulously and succinctly, Walker recounts the early vision and the prolonged determination that resulted in our precious—- and all-too-rare—- situation. He guides the reader through the first stirrings of environmental consciousness, which soon were followed by struggles to set aside preserves, then forestall depredations, and finally establish benign public policies to guide development and land management. After reading this book, even those who already possess a green tinge in their thinking will understand the promise and peril of modern times as never before."

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"Readers of The Country in the City will enjoy immersing themselves in the Bay Area's story. Readers will see that just as nature made this place, so did people— and it's up to people to keep doing so."

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"In The Country in the City, a history of local conservation and environmental activism, Walker delivers a deeply loving paean to this place where he grew up and has lived and worked and been a political activist all of his life."