San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/category/parks-open-space/)
See our November 2024 SF Voter Guide for a nonpartisan analysis of measures on the San Francisco ballot, for the election occurring Nov. 5, 2024. The following measure is on that ballot. Proposition K would start a process that could, about a year later, permanently close a large section of San Francisco’s Great Highway to car traffic so that the city could later turn it into a park. The measure would not fund the design or creation of the park.
Proposition J is primarily designed to counter another measure on the ballot — Proposition I — which would overturn a Board of Supervisors ordinance passed in April 2022 closing off John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park to motorized vehicles.
Proposition I would overturn an ordinance that has closed John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park to most private motor vehicles seven days a week and closed the Great Highway along Ocean Beach to such traffic on weekends and holidays. The city would be forbidden from proceeding with plans to eventually close the Great Highway between Sloat and Skyline boulevards — a stretch that is subject to coastal erosion.
John Muir has been honored extensively, with his name on many sites and institutions, including 28 schools, a college, a number of mountains, several trails, a glacier, a forest, a beach, a medical center, a highway and Muir Woods National Monument, one of the most visited destinations in the Bay Area. But in the time since the Sierra Club issued a nuanced statement in 2020 acknowledging some racist language in his early writings, some have come to believe that Muir’s legacy should be diminished, despite his contributions to the preservation of wilderness and later writings praising native tribes.
More than half a century after they occupied the island in a monthslong protest for indigenous sovereignty, Native American activists gathered on Alcatraz on Saturday to watch the nation’s first indigenous secretary of the interior commemorate the occasion.
A report on the waste picked up by cleanup crews working along the nation’s beaches and shorelines from the Surfrider Foundation showed almost 90% of the more than 80,000 pounds of trash collected in 2020 was plastic.
With the help of the original occupiers, indigenous rights activists, photojournalists and historians, the National Park Service installed a prominent exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the island occupation — “Red Power on Alcatraz Perspectives: 50 Years Later.”
As California reopens to tourism, Alcatraz is once again drawing visitors from around the world and featuring an exhibit celebrating the 19-month-long Native American occupation of the island 50 years ago. And in a dramatic, if delayed, response to the occupation, the National Park Service is contemplating the installation of a permanent Native American cultural center on Alcatraz in collaboration with a group that formed with that as one of its key objectives more than 50 years ago.
Tere Almaguer, an environmental justice organizer with PODER, talked with “Civic” about how the group has adapted to years of inconsistent rainfall. Almaguer said California’s exceptional drought conditions have already had visible effects on the farm, like flowering plants that grew shorter and bloomed later this year than previously. Hummingbird Farm will also be experimenting with an alternative water source: Drawing water from the air.
According to a ranking from the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, all San Francisco residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park, but residents of neighborhoods where most people identify as people of color have access to 56% less park space per capita than residents in neighborhoods that are predominantly white.
A new documentary, “Playing for Keeps,” posits that humans benefit greatly from playing and suffer when we are deprived of play. Isabella Miller, who prior to the coronavirus pandemic would regularly go swing dancing, and David Miles Jr., the proprietor of San Francisco’s Church of 8 Wheels, are featured in the film and joined “Civic” to reflect on how they play and how that has shaped their lives.
