Setting the Context - Michael Boland

The work of transforming and stewarding the Presidio has been a very multi-dimensional one, involving a unique partnership between the National Park Service, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, the Presidio Trust, and literally thousands of community volunteers that have all been a part of this. Today I'll use the royal 'we' throughout my presentation, but I just want to acknowledge that all of those things are the result of the hard work of many sets of hands. So my thanks to all of you from our community who have been a part of the transformation of the Presidio and are here today.

So just a little bit about the Presidio and what the Presidio has to do with bridging the nature-culture divide. The Presidio, as Craig mentioned, has a very long human history. Down at Chrissy Field we have a number of Native American sites; we know they date back to the 12th century and certainly earlier than that. This long continuous history of human activity on the site has endowed the site with an incredibly rich collection of landscapes and buildings. As Craig mentioned, we have nearly 500 historic buildings in the Presidio and over 1,200 historic features. This rich collection of buildings has a series of companion landscapes that are equally rich and that relate to evolving ideas about landscape and about the interaction between people and land through time, dating all the way back to pre-contact times.

In addition to that, Craig mentioned the historic forest of the Presidio, one of the largest experiments in landscape architecture the Army ever undertook. It's also the largest contributing feature to the Presidio's historic landmark and is frankly one of the most interesting synthetic landscapes that we have in the Presidio, an unusual intersection of nature and culture. Planted in the 1880s and 1890s, it's really the single feature in the Presidio that most people associate with it. I think in our first decade, every single plan we issued had a picture of the historic forest on the cover, which tells you something about the way the community feels about the forest and the way we feel about the forest as well.

Because of the high degree of integrity and significance in the Presidio landscape and also the Presidio's incredible collection of buildings, the site was designated as a National Historic Landmark District in 1962 while it was still an Army base, and was included within the boundaries of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area when it was established. As Craig mentioned, in 1989 it was identified for closure as part of the Army's BRAC process, and in 1994 the land transferred to the National Park Service. Now, although these are very pretty pictures of parts of the Presidio, the truth is that the Presidio that we inherited from the Army was a real mess. As a result, Congress created an interesting partnership to steward this land that involves three organizations: the National Park Service, the Presidio Trust, and also our partner the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Together we've worked over the last two decades to transform this place into the Presidio that you see today.

Among national park sites, the Presidio Trust was given an unusual task: to take the physical legacy of this long history of human use of the site and reimagine it as a 21st-century national park community that could sustain the park through the revenue that it generates. This is the work that we've undertaken over the last 15 years, and in 2012 we achieved financial self-sufficiency, making the Presidio the first national park site in America that is financially self-sufficient.

Now, although the Presidio was preserved primarily for its cultural resource values, as Charles and Craig both mentioned, what's interesting is that the Army inadvertently preserved the best remaining collection of San Francisco's native biodiversity. There are 13 different native plant communities, small fragments of land constituting in total about 7% of the Presidio's 1,500 acres. But within that 7% of this place, within that 100 acres, is the best remaining collection of San Francisco's native biodiversity, with about 370 native plant species, 21 of which are special status, rare, endangered, or threatened plant species. Nearly 300 different bird species have been identified on the site. The key thing is that many of the populations of these, particularly plant species, were far too small to be sustained in the long run.

Further complicating the challenge of stewarding this very small, very precious native biodiversity was the challenge that was ahead of us. I like this area because it gives you a sense of the mosaic of landscapes and physical forms that we have here in the Presidio. As I mentioned earlier, we have a multi-dimensional mandate: we have to preserve the Presidio's National Historic Landmark District and the character-defining features of the cultural landscape; we had to transform this site to create an economic engine that could sustain the park in perpetuity; at the same time, opening the gates of this former Army base that, when I was a young person, was very much off limits to the public. Although it was an open post, you came here rarely and you always were greeted at the gate by a number of MPs that had rifles in their hand, not really a welcoming place. But of course, welcoming a broad cross-section of people is fundamental to the notion of a national park. So one of the key things that we've undertaken over the last 20 years is to throw open the doors of the Presidio and make it a place for everyone.

Faced with this challenge against the backdrop of this challenge, we have had to develop a number of different strategies for how to steward the Presidio's rich biodiversity. Now, when we started this work, the prevailing notion of nature was something like this: get out of nature's way and leave it alone. I think this sign from the Prospect Park Conservancy back in the day sums it up really well, essentially delivering a message that 'get out of our way, let nature do her thing, and don't trample.' That was pretty much the approach that most natural resource planners and ecologists took. We had a number of really interesting conversations in the early days about just sort of walling off the natural areas in the Presidio and leaving them alone, which of course would have been an abject failure in a landscape as multi-dimensional as this. So our approach instead has been a different one, and has really been based on two bets. The first bet is that to be successful in the preservation of biodiversity in a landscape like the Presidio requires us to focus as much on the non-native parts of the post as on the natural areas within the post. The second bet is that to steward the biodiversity of the Presidio requires us to focus as much on people as it does on nature. These two principles have informed our approach to the stewardship of the Presidio landscape and the preservation of biodiversity in the Presidio.

Our work together is informed by a management plan that was developed by the Park Service and the Presidio Trust in 2002, the Presidio Vegetation Management Plan. This is a 50-year blueprint for transforming the Presidio landscape. Although it divides the Presidio into three zones shown here—the Design Landscape Zone, the Native Plant Community Zone, and the Historic Forest Zone—one of the fundamental precepts is that the entire Presidio be reimagined as an ecological whole, and that these systems be conceived of, though they are designed to different values, as working together collectively to create a more sustainable, more resilient, and a richer natural system that stretches throughout the Presidio. As Charles said earlier, wildlife don't really understand boundaries very well, and they tend to move back and forth between these different zones on the map very cleanly and effectively.

Our approach to the stewardship of biodiversity in the Presidio, just to dig down on this a little bit, has really focused on three key strategies. The first thing that we focused on is really about preserving these relic natural areas that I described to you. This was really our first priority. They were very threatened, they were heavily impacted, and we were especially focused on these 21 special-status plant species, coming up with strategies that would allow those small fragments of natural area to persist in perpetuity. Now, there are a number of threats that were challenging the survival of these small natural areas. Invasive exotics were a huge one, and we've had to adopt a number of strategies, some of them a little bit unusual for an urban site like the Presidio, things like control burns. In other national parks, control burns cover thousands of acres; ours covers about 10 square feet in that really nice fireproof metal box there. But bringing these landscape management strategies that are normally applied in a very different way out in larger natural areas into the city and testing them to see whether or not they have application in the urban environment, and frankly whether or not the public can stand them happening in the urban environment.

Early in the life of the Presidio, a really important decision was made that it was impossible to steward the Presidio's natural areas without the active involvement of the community. Now, bear in mind that for most people, the Presidio was an enigma, or for those who knew the Presidio, it was an enigma, but it was a place that was primarily important because of its historic values. The fact that the Presidio had incredibly rich natural systems woven through it was largely misunderstood or completely absent from public awareness. So the idea of creating programs like the Presidio Park Stewards Program, which created a vehicle for the public to come to the park and get very actively involved in the stewardship of these natural areas, not only brought the park really critical hands-on resources that it was sorely lacking to steward these areas, but it also developed a growing consciousness about the importance of these resources, frankly the fact that they were here at all, and played a really important role in raising public awareness about the Presidio's rich ecology. It's safe to say that without the work of programs like the Presidio Park Stewards, these natural systems would have disappeared over the last 20 years because they were being so heavily impacted by the invasive exotics that were woven through those systems.

Similarly, these systems were very much impacted by human access. If you look at areas like the coastal bluffs, which Charles showed some beautiful pictures of, they were crisscrossed with trails—social trails, we like to call them, which is a very nice word for what they were—but trails created by people in a haphazard way that were crisscrossing and having a significant impact because, of course, poorly built trails get very mucky and wet in the winter, and what do you do? You make a new one. So over time, these small patches of land in the park, these few relic natural areas, were crisscrossed with miles and miles of trail. By being thoughtful about how the public uses open space and asking the public what the reasons were why they were using these trails and trying to understand the way people moved through space, we were able to both create better experiences for the public that allowed them to have the kinds of experiences they wanted and significantly reduce the areas that were impacted in the park by creating a good trail system. Again, it now seems not very heretical, but 20 years ago the idea that you would be consciously building trails through these small fragments of natural area was fairly heretical. People saw the prevailing notion as putting a fence around these things and keeping people out of them. But of course, in a place like the Presidio where you have millions of people coming each year, it's absolutely impossible to surveil everybody who uses the site. So we have undertaken, working with the Park Service and the Conservancy over the last decade, a transformation of all of the pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure in the Presidio, introducing 24 miles of trail and 19 miles of bikeway that is woven through this mosaic of landscapes in the Presidio, not only to create a high-quality visitor experience but equally as important to pull all of this negative impact out of these fragments and to bring people in a carefully choreographed way in contact with natural systems so that they appreciate them.

We took a page from some of Joe Nassauer's writings from the '90s about framing the importance of natural systems so that the public understands that they're actually valued and so that they can see them. Most people come to a system like this, a site like this, and it looks like undeveloped empty land. By introducing carefully designed landscape features into the site, we were able to frame these natural systems, bring attention to them, highlight them, and help the public begin to value them and understand that they're actually things that are cared for and that require our care in order to persist.

One of the other really key threats facing these small fragments of natural system in the Presidio had to do with the small size of them and habitat fragmentation. This is a map of what the footprint of the native plant communities owned when the land transferred from the Army to the National Park Service in 1994. You can see one large contiguous patch of habitat along the coast and a series of much smaller fragments, very precious habitat scattered throughout the interior areas of the Presidio. As I mentioned earlier, this initially is about 100 acres, and the Vegetation Management Plan calls for, over the next 50 years, a quadrupling of the footprint of natural areas in the Presidio. The goal here—there are a couple of goals that we're trying to achieve. The first has to do with connecting most of these small fragments of natural area to reduce habitat fragmentation, allow for the movement of wildlife, but also to significantly impact the footprint of natural area in the park so that we can create sustainable populations of the plants and animals that were in the park, so that those systems become more resilient, they become more stable, and they're better prepared for the coming environmental changes that we know are on the way.

Now, we've accomplished this in a number of ways. Luckily, the Army left us, as I mentioned earlier, a pretty big mess here in the Presidio. Much of the Presidio—for those of you who haven't lived in this community for a long time, Chrissy Field, for example, was a kind of back-of-house space. For those of you who know Chrissy Field now, it's sort of hard to imagine they used to park cars and had motor pools on Chrissy Field and things like that. But the military life is a messy business, and they left us a really great legacy of really derelict sites, things like these tanks out at Mountain Lake Park. This is the pumping station they used to pump water out of Mountain Lake up to irrigate the Presidio Golf Course. We've taken a lot of these sites and looked at them as real opportunities to expand the footprint of habitat in the Presidio as we slowly cleaned up the site. For example, this site today looks like this. We've removed those tanks, we've restored a natural gradient on the site, planted thousands of plants grown in our native plant nursery using the help of community volunteers, planted and stewarded them, and restored a complete suite of native plants all along this upper area, creating a very precious commodity: upland habitat associated with this lake.

Turning back the clock on some of the serious environmental degradation that's happened in sites like Mountain Lake requires more than habitat restoration. It requires removing things like the blue gum eucalyptus trees that live upstream from the lake and contribute a heavy load of leaf litter and nutrients into the water body, which create algae blooms, which have a negative impact on the fish in the lake. It involves removing the non-native fish, many of whom evolved from goldfish into this sort of rogue carp that were larger than anything I'd ever seen. This is a sturgeon, by the way, not a former goldfish—I just want to make sure that's clear—but this sturgeon was actually living in the bottom of Mountain Lake, believe it or not. But removing the fish that had broken the dynamic balance in the lake and were constantly digging up the bottom of the lake and creating these algae blooms, and working with the blue gum eucalyptus creating this sort of green soup, a kind of miasma of algae and decaying fish every summer when there would be algae blooms. So undertaking work again that I think we normally associate with more remote national park sites. When we proposed to poison the fish in Mountain Lake—those of you who live in the local community probably saw recently we've gotten a little bit of press about that; the first time I've been accused of fish genocide in my career—when we searched for the substance that we were going to use to remove the fish from the lake, almost all of the sites that we found were very remote small alpine lakes and things like that. So bringing this technology and using the Presidio's landscape, using the challenge of stewarding biodiversity in the urban environment, is an opportunity for us to innovate and utilize strategies that are more commonly used in more remote settings to see if we can address the challenge of enhancing biodiversity in the urban environment. Of course, the goal is a simple one: we want to re-establish a balance in the ecosystem of Mountain Lake in this case so that the lake is healthier, so that it persists, and so that we can create healthier, more sustainable populations of animals. This is my picture of the Pacific chorus frog, but the point here is that this is not only an effort on the part of a faceless agency to impose on an urban site its mandate. The fact is that this project began when the community came to us. They were very concerned about the health of the lake; they had seen the deterioration in the health of the lake, and they came to us and asked us to work with them to restore the lake to health. So there's a really nice synergy in places like Mountain Lake between communities' expectations and aspirations for a place to have a beautiful urban environment, to be able to hear frogs when they go on their evening walks around the lake, to make sure there aren't mosquito problems in this water body next to their homes. There's a nice synergy between the community's desires and our mandate to preserve the park's natural and cultural resources.

We've had to do some kind of harebrained things, and I'll acknowledge this. One of the ones that caught on recently is the amnesty station we recently built on the edge of Mountain Lake, a fish amnesty station where people can bring their pets instead of dumping them in the lake. They can dump them here, and we'll actually escort those pets—because it's strangely hard to give up a pet, especially a fish or a turtle or a frog; pet stores don't take them back—we can escort them actually to a fish rescue, which is where we took most of the amphibians and reptiles that we netted out of the lake. But the point here is what we're trying to do is actually understand why the negative impact happened in the first place. The fact that so many of the fish in the lake were the offspring, the rogue offspring, of former pets told us that there was some healthy aspiration the public had. Every child in the city—I remember when I was a kid, you had your goldfish, you outgrew your goldfish, so you wanted to 'Free Willy,' right? So it grows out of this desire, this healthy desire, to not want to end the life of your goldfish. So it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to dump your goldfish in the lake. We wanted to create a way that the public could still express that, what I think of as a kind of healthy and life-affirming desire, but do it in a way that we're not going to get more rogue carp living in the lake. This is again one of these crazy, harebrained experiments that I think are part of what unusual sites like the Presidio can undertake and perhaps model strategies that could work in other urban environments like this. So anyway, we'll see how this works. So far, by the way, nobody has showed up at our fish amnesty station, nor in the lake.

The last point I want to make is that fundamental to harebrained projects like this is the need to engage the community in a very deep way. As I mentioned earlier, so many people in our community—certainly I, when I was growing up in this community—had no idea that the Presidio had the kind of ecological richness that it has. You approach the park with a mindset that you approach other, what I will call more typical, urban parks. You come here with a kind of recreation mindset; you don't come here with the same mindset that we approach other national park sites, where you come with your binoculars thinking about bird watching and things like that. Part of this is about shifting the public's consciousness around what this place is and, of course, building future stewards of the site. In the case of Mountain Lake and the surrounding community, particularly among youth—because of course it's so many youth in the community that are the ones coming here and wanting to 'Free Willy'—we've actually focused very much on engaging the young people in this community in restoring the lake to health, so that way we're building a solid constituency for the lake, a really well-informed population of young people that can basically enforce what we hope will be the kinds of behavior that will restore and maintain the lake as a healthy ecosystem.

We've also taken advantage here at the Presidio of other opportunities. Not only did the Army leave us a lot of really ugly things, they left us a lot of contaminated things, including 13 Army landfills. Over the last decade, we've been working diligently to restore those landfills. This, for example, had about 70,000 cubic yards of building waste and contamination under that little innocuous green meadow there. As a result, in the course of removing the meadow, we got down to a former creek that was buried in a large culvert underneath it and used that as an opportunity to restore the very bottom of Tennessee Hollow. That work has progressed, and we're now within shooting distance of having restored the entire central tributary of a watershed in the middle of a city. It creates an incredible opportunity not only for wildlife to thrive in the community but also for people to understand the water cycle again in a way that mimics at a larger scale the phenomena that you would have to start in the Sierra and drive to San Francisco to understand this complete water cycle. So an incredible opportunity to understand a meta-level ecological phenomenon on one site in the middle of the city.

Of course, we're not naive. Here's my dog, shot Charles. Cities are full of a lot of folks that want to do a lot of things that pose a real challenge in terms of stewarding biodiversity in the urban environment. It's critical that the open spaces in our community allow people to express those desires. So we have adopted a philosophy here of not questioning whether or not dogs should be in national parks, but rather asking ourselves how can dogs be in national parks in a way that doesn't imperil the biodiversity of the Presidio. So we've become very creative about thinking about landscape form. One of the key points that I want to make in my talk this morning is that design—for those of you who are landscape architects out there, and you all know this—design has such a critical role to play in mediating between people and nature in the urban environment, mediating between the kinds of activities that people like to undertake and natural systems in the urban environment. Fences are our friends, I like to tell my staff all the time. Tipping the composition of planting in restoration sites so that you put the pretty stuff near the path, so that you create a very dense boundary along the edge of a delicate natural system to buffer the adjacent wildlife from people, and many different strategies like that that we subtly weave through the landscape of the Presidio so that we can do our best to mediate between the inevitable conflicts that arise. But the whole time, we're working to create a beautiful experience and to accommodate the kinds of expectations that people have from a visitor experience perspective.

Early in my academic career, I studied French formal gardens, for example. When you look at a formal French garden, what was interesting to me is that you're actually using a tiny percentage of the site. Most of the landscape is actually enclosed by these landscape features—hedges and walls, they're called palisades in French—and most of it is closed to the public. It really inspired me to think about the fact that you can have an incredibly rich, incredibly beautiful landscape experience and actually have an impact on a very small percentage of the land. Informed by that kind of thinking, we try to accomplish the same thing here. Through these natural areas in the park, we have a very small footprint, both in terms of the actual area that the public gets to utilize, try to have a small disturbance footprint, but give people an opportunity to interact with nature because that's the reason urban national parks were created: to connect urban populations to national park experiences.

The third strategy I wanted to mention briefly focuses on the non-natural areas in the Presidio, these areas that are gray and green. As I mentioned at the beginning, one of the bets that we made early in the Vegetation Management Plan focuses on the notion that it is essential for us to reimagine the non-natural areas of the post as it is for us to focus our energy on the natural areas. At the Presidio, the non-natural areas—the Historic Forest and the Design Landscape Zone—are about three-quarters of the Presidio landscape and have two key elements. The Historic Forest, as I mentioned earlier, planted in the 1880s and 1890s, really is the single most important landscape feature here in the Presidio. It's the thing most people associate with this place. An interesting cultural artifact that, since it was planted in the 1880s, has developed a lot of structural diversity, really interesting ecological values, incredibly important landscape for raptors—this is a hawk—for owls, for hummingbirds. We actually have threatened parrots from Australia nesting in our eucalyptus trees here in the Presidio. They're threatened in Australia; they're happy as all get out here in the Presidio. But the important point I'm making is that here we have a cultural resource that has developed really interesting ecological values, but that also is dying. Like so many cultural resources, particularly cultural landscapes, these things have finite lifespans. The pines and cypresses that were planted in the forest only lived to be about 120 to 130 years old, and they're dying very quickly. It was an even-age system dying very fast. So we have a kind of double imperative: we need to restore this really important, very significant cultural resource, but we also need to do it in a way that we're mindful of the ecological values that have evolved in that landscape. So we have developed a reforestation program that looks at shifting the species composition in some cases, in other cases is focused on converting this even-age system to an uneven-age system, utilizing the best 21st-century technology so that we can plant tree species that will persist, utilizing academic partnerships with universities like UC Davis to breed new versions of Monterey pine that are resistant to pine pitch canker, or Monterey cypress that are resistant to our malaria, so that we are giving this forest the best opportunity possible not only to live longer but also to have even richer ecological values, so that the forest has greater structural diversity and can support the adjacent natural areas even better than the current forest does—a sort of supercharged 2.0 version of the historic forest.

The other key component of the design is the Design Landscape Zone, which are those areas shown in gray here. I like to think of them as the kind of matrix. They're about 800 acres of the Presidio landscape, and it is a very rich mosaic of historic landscapes and non-historic landscapes, some of them utilitarian, some of them domestic landscapes like this, some of them ceremonial like the main parade ground, all of them derelict when the Army gave the land over to the National Park Service. We've set about over the last 20 years to restore these, but to do it with the benefit of contemporary thinking about sustainable design and sustainable stewardship of the designed landscape. We've been focused very much on plant choices, only planting things that have been vetted to make sure that they have no chance of becoming invasive in the park, vetted to understand their potential habitat values, the way they can support wildlife use in the adjacent natural areas. We have a number of birds in particular that nest only in the Design Landscape Zone, which is very interesting, things like the hooded oriole that nest in our palm trees and things like that. These are very important bird species for us to preserve, so we're very mindful of the need for us to be thoughtful about the choices we make in the Design Landscape Zone. We're also very interested in sustainable maintenance practices, integrated pest management strategies so that we're sure that there's a healthy and abundant insect population to support the bird population of the Presidio. Again, birds don't understand the boundaries between these plant zones, so they're busy dining on bugs in the Design Landscape Zone just as much as they're in the Native Plant Community Zone. Integrated pest management strategies allow for healthy populations of insects throughout the post. We've experimented with strategies around not mowing. We have native grass that we haven't mowed, we have non-native grass that we haven't mowed, we have non-native grass that we do mow—every kind of strategy around reimagining the lawn so that we can reimagine it in more ecological terms. We've also discovered that wildlife has a fantastic synergistic relationship with gophers, particularly great blue herons that love to fish in the middle of our parade grounds. This is the Fort Scott parade, and it's a very interesting role for great blue herons; I never knew they would go for gophers. But the idea fundamentally is that we reimagine these design landscapes throughout the Presidio in more ecological terms because they are the matrix, they're the backdrop for these fairly small, fairly fragmented natural systems. We reimagine them in ways that they can support the adjacent natural areas while we're still achieving our other mandates: we're still restoring the historic character of these sites, we're still creating a wonderful community where 7,500 people live and work, and we are creating a national park that serves a broad cross-section of people in our community.

The other important point I want to make about the Design Landscape Zone is that our 'big brother' mindset goes beyond just the landscape; it also applies to the people that are living in the buildings and working in the buildings that are within the Design Landscape Zone. I make it sound a little more ominous than it is, but when you move to the Presidio, you make a series of commitments about the things you will and won't do here. You won't plant whatever you want in your garden, for example. So we've created community gardens so that people can express their need or their desire to plant, but even there, there's a list of plants that people can and can't plant because we don't want anything to become invasive. You agree to keep your pets inside; there are some neighborhoods where you can't even have pets. There are a whole array—you accept the fact that you're going to be sharing your front yard with coyotes, which is frankly the reason you should keep your pets inside. But the point I'm making is that what we've tried to do is work with the tenants who live in our buildings to develop a different kind of consciousness about the way in which they operate, so that they're not simply bringing their urban mindsets to the Presidio about how to be in the landscape of the Presidio. Again, many of these things are about making sure that the everyday activities—like dumping your goldfish in the lake, or walking your dog off leash, or letting your cat out—that these things don't have a negative impact on the biology of the Presidio.

This is part of a much larger project that I just want to speak about briefly, which really is the project that I think brings us all together here today and is something that I think we're all collectively very focused on: creating future stewards for nature and for our planet. I think that sites like the Presidio, where people can have as a part of their everyday life a direct relationship with natural systems, are vitally important in the middle of cities, so that people who live their entire lives in urban environments feel a sense of ownership over the natural systems that we've protected. Increasingly, if you read Richard Louv's writing, there's a whole dialogue about nature deficit disorder and all that. I have a 16-year-old, and I can tell you getting him outside is a pain in the ass. I love the outside, and he's better than a lot of kids, but young people these days aren't growing up with the same kinds of access to the outdoors; it's just simply a fact, and it's a fact that is going to become more and more acute as the world becomes an increasingly urbanized place. So I think it's vitally important that sites like the Presidio, these precious fragments of natural area that are in the middle of cities, adopt a mindset of not only preserving what we have—which is of course important and is part of our mission—but that we also create new ways for the public to connect to nature and understand nature. Things like collaborations with artists—artists are incredible at creating these sort of enigmatic interventions in the landscape that help people understand the landscape in a new and different way. Things like Presidio Habitats, a partnership with the Forsythe Foundation—for those of you who went to Ai Weiwei last night, that's another collaboration with the Forsythe Foundation and Cheryl Haines—that brought attention to the wildlife that exist in the designed landscape, and we used it as a vehicle for engaging particularly young people in an array of programs about the biological values of the design landscapes of the Presidio. A really important commitment that all three of our organizations have made to bringing audiences—urban audiences that don't normally have access to national parks or to outdoor experiences—into the Presidio. Programs like the Camping at the Presidio program, which this year will bring about 6,000 young people from underserved neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area to the Presidio for a first camping experience. In many cases, these young people have never slept outside. Or multilingual trails programs that allow young people to connect to the natural systems in the Presidio in new and different ways. And finally, volunteer stewardship and service programs that can translate into lifetimes of work in the environment, so that people can begin to make a connection between their need to survive in the world and the future of the environment of our planet.

In closing, I'd just like to make one more quick point. First, I want to say that it seems to be working. All of these various strategies that I've identified seem to be working. In fact, just a couple weeks ago, I got the latest monitoring report. We monitor bird life in the Presidio very carefully, and it was a 10-year look at wildlife, and the news is good. Populations of birds are increasing, and they're increasing at a time that there has been dramatic landscape transformation in the Presidio, which normally one would expect would have a negative impact on the populations of birds. So the fact that they're stable—of course, mallards are not really endangered or threatened in any way, I know, but it was a cute picture. The more important point that I want to make is that I think we're at a really important juncture where, because of the rapid urbanization of our planet, we need to really reimagine our whole relationship to the idea of nature. We need to develop a kind of expanded field of ideas of nature. For many people in our community, in our country, this is nature—the primeval, a very old idea about what nature is. There's another old idea about nature that actually the Presidio has a lot of: this idea of kind of nature remade for human use. The traditional notion of it is agriculture, but of course today it's things like synthetic playing fields and things like that, landscapes that aren't really burdened with any expectation at all that they have any ecological value, that they're completely remade for humans, for human use. And of course, there's a third idea that's prevalent, particularly in the world of landscape architecture: this notion of the picturesque, a landscape that is really more about representing nature but again doesn't really have any kind of mandate to actually create ecological systems or to support biodiversity or any of those things. In fact, we often run into problems. At the conference in 2012, I thought it was very interesting the challenge of stewarding a picturesque landscape in a way that it could be reimagined to have greater ecological value in the North Woods and Central Park. But my sense is that there's this missing fourth piece of this puzzle, which is really the thing that we're all here to talk about today, that lives at the intersection of two ideas: that lives at the intersection of ecological value, which we measure with terms like biodiversity and things like that, and this idea of—I like to call it naturalness—this idea of the sort of aesthetic notion that we all have about what nature is and the kinds of experiences that we want to have. I think there's a fourth kind of nature that we really need to begin to imagine: a more humanized version of nature that sits in cities, that allows for the kinds of level of human activity and intervention that the Presidio allows for, but creates the kind of biodiversity that we need to make sure that the wildlife and the natural systems of our planet survive. So I will end with this slide. I look forward very much to today, and I want to thank you again everyone for coming and being part of this important conversation. Thanks.