Spending your days maneuvering through a megacity like San Francisco after traipsing through national park wilderness can be a shock to your system, but we think we are up for it. Lots of hiking and eating healthy may take on a whole new look, more like hauling ourselves up the steep streets of the city, riding bikes along the harbor, or strolling through vineyards and drinking an Irish coffee or two at the Buena Vista.
Besides that, we are in foodie paradise, so diets be damned! This is where my hubby and I tossed back a few Irish coffees many moons ago. We were a bit more conservative today, I might add. Having been here since , he could most certainly make these drinks in his sleep. As we watched him line up the glasses and toss sugar cubes into them more like throw , I commented that he seemed a tad bit angry. Maybe I would be too if I had spent the last 38 years pouring drinks for tips. As we drank he loosened up a bit.
We were the ones drinking the Irish coffees. Nonetheless, Terry actually got him to smile and engage in conversation, with us promising to come back again for another round. What were we thinking?! If you liked this blog post, why no t subscribe to my blog via feed reader or e-mail? LuAnn, We are wondering if the one legged, leaning against the pole stance is because of the irish coffee or because San Francisco is so hilly where the cable cars run.
When we lived in Mill Valley, across the Golden Gate Bridge, we never remember riding the cable car with that stance. Hoang Create an account or sign in to comment You need to be a member in order to leave a comment Create an account Sign up for a new account in our community. Register a new account. Sign in Already have an account? Sign In Now. Go To Topic Listing. Flight Simulation's Premier Resource! Show More. Sign In Sign Up. In recognition of this ineluctable fact, the United Nations is hosting World Environment Day -- a five-day event, actually -- in San Francisco this week.
Central to the conference, which will be attended by mayors from around the world, will be the release of a Green Cities Declaration, a charter designed to guide the world's cities to a sustainable future. True, some of the events scheduled for the conference seem as fluffy as meringue -- a carnival of flowers, an eco-art photographic exhibit, an organic fashion show.
But there are also weighty seminars on sustainable urban planning and water use. More to the point, organizers hope the conference will set a global tone and establish broad international goals, as was the case with the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the Rio Earth Summit and the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Conference attendees have their work cut out for them. Worldwide, about 1 million people a week move to urban areas, and this trend will not change, barring some spectacular -- and no doubt traumatic -- event. In the coming century, the vast majority of us will live, labor and die in megacities. The small farmer and rancher, the subsistence fisherman on a mangrove coast, the shopkeeper in an isolated mountain village -- all will become rarities, subjects for nostalgia and sociological inquiry.
To a large degree, this is depressing. Most of the world's cities look alike today: Clusters of stone and glass monoliths at the core, flanked by purlieus of intensive development, the whole girdled by roadways choked with traffic. While some cities are truly hellish, others have managed to retain their essential charm and humanity.
By any but the most unforgiving analysis, San Francisco is one of them. For one thing, San Francisco is contained on a small peninsula, bounded by water. Its natural setting is spectacular. On a human level, San Francisco has perhaps the greenest citizenry in the country.
If it is a metropolis creeping toward sustainability, it is because of the vision of its residents. The future looks green. But is San Francisco's fate a deep, vibrant viridian or merely a washed out olivine? Intent, after all, doesn't necessarily translate as results. A city, any city, exerts tremendous burdens on land, air and water.
These impacts can be mitigated to an extent, but never eliminated. San Francisco has done a better job of mitigation than most American cities. The primary case in point: San Francisco Bay. Today, the bay is far cleaner than it was 30 years ago, the result of new and expensive sewage treatment facilities.
A concerted drive is also under way to reclaim the bay's natural heritage. The most ambitious wetlands restoration project in the country is reviving tens of thousands of acres of saltwater and freshwater marsh in South Bay salt ponds, North Bay farmland and Crissy Field in San Francisco, where a acre tidal marsh has been restored. Other areas of the country have recorded successes, too.
A wetland restoration plan of similar scope is just east of Miami in the Everglades, but pressure from developers and ongoing squabbles over water distribution threaten to scuttle the process. In Seattle, the fjord-like quality of Puget Sound makes large-scale wetlands restorations virtually impossible. Here in the Bay Area, the marshes are renascent -- an environmental victory of unparalleled scope.
Another bay-related triumph: The return of chinook salmon to the Sacramento River system. As with the wetland restoration, this was a regional effort, though San Francisco activists were instrumental in its implementation. Through water cleanup, restoration of spawning grounds, screens on agricultural pumps and increased downstream flows, the salmon have surged back.
They were at abysmal lows in the late s. Today, they are at their highest numbers since at least
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