The Future of Bay Area Wildlife: Talk & Reception | Berkeley

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join Malcolm Margolin, Beth Pratt-Bergstrom, and Kirk Lombard in a discussion of how the Bay Area is changing, how peoples’ attitudes are shifting, and how wildlife is adapting.

Free, but an RSVP and a $10 donation are suggested. Please arrive by 6:45 pm; any unclaimed tickets will be released at that time.

The hourlong program will be followed by a wine reception in the Hazel Wolf Gallery. Malcolm Margolin worked with the artist Maya Lin on her exhibition documenting the history of environmental change, What Is Missing, now at the David Brower Center.

The San Francisco Bay Area is a dynamic and constantly changing environment. When the first humans settled here some 14,000 years ago, Columbia mammoths, camels, llamas, bison, dire wolves, and other animals of the late Pleistocene inhabited the plain that stretched westward from what is now San Francisco past the Farallon Islands. 

The creation of San Francisco Bay only 8,000 years ago brought with it the great flocks of geese and ducks and the run of Chinook salmon to the rivers and streams of the central valley. With Europeans came an era of extinctions, diminishment, and environmental degradation. At the same time hundreds of thousands of acres of land have been set aside as parks, preserves, and wildlife refuges; laws have been passed to protect species and whole environments; and animals once extinct in this area—tule elk, elephant seal, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, porpoises, and most recently a condor—have returned. To make things even more complicated people’s attitudes toward wildlife have been changing and wildlife habits have likewise been evolving.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.