Why read Our Better Nature?

Book cover of Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco

Book description

Few cities are so dramatically identified with their environment as San Francisco - the landscape of hills, the expansive bay, the engulfing fog, and even the deadly fault line shifting below. Yet most residents think of the city itself as separate from the natural environment on which it depends. In…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Our Better Nature as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Chris Carlsson

Author

Philip Dreyfus has written a fantastic one-stop ecological history of San Francisco that properly puts the city’s evolution into the natural systems on which it was built. Too many histories overlook the basic questions of water, topography, and climate and how human activity, that is work, has altered those over time. Dreyfus starts with an eloquent description of pre-contact life on the windy, foggy, sand-dune-covered peninsula, and methodically takes us through the sequences of urbanization, including the struggle over green spaces and parklands, water provision, and ultimately the surrounding bay itself. Few cities have benefited as much as San Francisco…

From Chris' list on The best books to understand how the hell San Francisco turned out like it did.