The recent (November 17) Shaping SF panel discussion at CounterPULSE was recorded and is posted here. If it’s been topped by more recent podcasts, search or scroll to “Watersheds Lost and Found: San Francisco, Guadalajara, Yuba.”

My part of it was the San Francisco part, of course, and I was joined by Derek Hitchcock of the South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL), and Sarah Kelly and Arthur Richards, co-directors of Adapting to Scarcity.

The Q&A was excellent and helped me to formulate my long-term concepts about why I do what I do. The short version: I hope to take advantage of an educators’ opportunity available uniquely in San Francisco. I believe that by promoting eco-literacy and humanitarian, egalitarian values among people who live here (or pass through, as most do), it will have a very wide ripple effect.

The intellectually and financially mobile folks that pass through San Francisco are interested in exploring geography, history and politics, if only to be in on the localistic self-satisfied hipness, though more often out of true curiosity. They are also particularly likely to make cultural impacts here or elsewhere, due to the economic screen of local housing costs and the inherent international draw of the existing cultural creativity, and its reputation.

I’m not just being snobby. San Francisco is a serious attractant to innovation of many kinds, still strong in progressive values, and cultivates some very important projects, and the people who create them have a lot of moral support here for their work. Add to that the financial facts, and you get people who have enough capital of one sort or another to carry out their creative dreams, not just dream them.

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