A modern John Muir hits his stride with Bay Nature, equal parts science journal and travelogue.
As a child growing up in New York City, David Loeb would go with his parents to the lower New York state woods for hiking or birding. But as much as he enjoyed the outdoors, he never felt like he was truly away from civilization. Even during walks in the deep woods, he would stumble on evidence of human encroachment, like stone retaining walls or crumbling farmsteads.
“The New York woods that I explored as a child were forests that had grown up on lands originally cleared for farms,” Loeb said. “So you would see old stone walls and ruins.”
It was only after he arrived in the Bay Area in 1973, to visit a former college roommate who had previously moved to the Bay Area, that he first experienced the larger vistas and untouched landscapes of Western nature and felt the stirring that would ultimately lead him to found Bay Nature, the Berkeley-based magazine that covers the science and beauty of the Bay Area’s natural landscape.
He still remembers the fateful visit to Point Reyes that first sparked his passion for Western nature.
“It was a January winter day, cool at night but nice during the day, and absolutely clear with no fog,” said Loeb, 64, now a Berkeley resident. “We had the whole place to ourselves. Out West, there’re still enough unspoiled spaces that you can really understand how landscapes evolve without the dominant hand of humans. There’s still enough stretches of wilderness that you can feel you’re a visitor, not a shaper.
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to understand the processes better that look so beautiful to the eye, from wild flowers to native owls,” he continued.
Loeb realized that an entire world of natural beauty existed right here, in the East Bay itself, hidden in plain sight—the flocking cormorants and grebes that accompanied the shifting tides at Cavallo Point or the wildflowers blooming on Mount Diablo—and all you needed to do was to look for it.
Loeb founded Bay Nature in 1997, partly to show locals the nature in their own backyard and partly to let Loeb satisfy his own curiosity about local nature. From how to tell a lichen from a fungus to identifying the dialects of regional white-crowed sparrows, its aim has always been to educate: To tell readers about the glorious outdoor world right at their doorstep and to encourage them to seek it out for themselves. The magazine’s dual role as science reporter and local travelogue has kept it thriving even in an age when so many other publications have struggled.
Loeb is a soft-spoken man with a deliberate way of choosing his words; when he speaks, it’s as if his words are coming from far away. But his quiet demeanor belies an incredible passion for the outdoors and a precise memory for science. Les Rowntree, a retired San Jose State University professor who has worked with Loeb on Bay Nature as a science consultant for more than 10 years, was astounded to see how Loeb picked up new facts on every nature walk, remembering the name of every insect found in the grass, every bird seen wheeling overhead.
“I’ve been on hikes with him,” Rowntree said. “The rest of us will all forget 50 percent, but David will remember 100 percent. And he knows how to think about it, not just file it away.”
At the same time, Loeb is not just a wild man of the woods. His first love is the great outdoors, but he’s equally at home behind a desk when he has to be, and his memory for science trivia extends to names and faces, two vital skills for running a successful magazine.
“He’s energetic, keeps late hours, he keeps it going,” Rowntree said. “He’s gracious, a good guy. He’s a leader and he’s inspirational.”
Bay Nature wasn’t an immediate epiphany for Loeb. He moved to the Bay Area in the 1970s to study film at San Francisco State University and lived in San Francisco for the first 15 years, moving to the East Bay in 1989. Loeb was sidetracked with other endeavors: He worked for People’s Food System and the People’s Bakery in the Mission District, excited for the opportunity to grow food outside of the corporate cycle. In the 1990s, Loeb worked for the Guatemala News and Information Bureau, an organization dedicated to spreading information about Guatemalan human rights issues. And while Loeb felt that his work was meaningful, he didn’t feel a personal connection.
“Ultimately, it was about someone else’s story,” Loeb said. “It wasn’t a story about the place that I had lived for nearly a decade.”
Around then, Loeb took some time to explore in depth the natural places around the bay. He volunteered with Point Reyes Bird Observatory (now Point Blue Conservation Science); he would spend an hour doing bird counts before going on all-day hikes, marveling at birds playing in the surf and flying overhead and remembering how, back East, the skies emptied as birds flew south during the winter. He visited China Camp State Park on a crisp January morning to gape at the variety of trees. Alone in nature, feeling like the only person in the whole world, he finally felt at home in the Bay Area.
It was at Henry Coe State Park near Morgan Hill that he remembered the feeling he’d first felt at Point Reyes in the ’70s. It was a cool May morning when Loeb set out to explore the park.
“I must have walked eight miles without seeing a soul. Of course, it was during the week. It was a revelation and it made me wonder: Why didn’t anyone ever tell me about this place?”
The San Francisco Bay Area is the heartbeat of the national environmental movement, where the same redwood forest groves and rocky crags and sandy beaches that first inspired early conservationists like the Sierra Club remain today. And while many of those groups are still based in the area, their reach had grown over the years to tell stories of national rather than local interest.
Loeb himself was already a member of the Audubon Society, enjoying its publications about exotic birds and faraway places.
“They talk about great places,” Loeb said, “but they are mostly places that I’ll never go.”
Loeb decided that, if no one else were telling local nature stories, he would be the one to do it. In some ways a modern John Muir, he had a gift for seeing the wonder that others overlooked.
“The bay itself is an amazing piece of nature,” Loeb said. “People see it every day, but they see it as the place you have to cross to get somewhere. I’ve learned over the last 15 years that there’s lots to do. There was no such thing as the Bay Trail in 1973. Most of the shores were closed then. Now there are lots of opportunities to enjoy this enormous open space right in the middle of our home.”
In 1997, Loeb contacted Malcolm Margolin, publisher of Heyday Books and News from Native California, with the idea of publishing a magazine dedicated entirely to Bay Area nature.
Loeb and Margolin reached out to long-time Bay Area conservation advocate Larry Orman to help helm the fledgling magazine. The former executive director of the GreenInfo Network, a nonprofit studio that provides cartographic and GIS services to the environmental and nonprofit communities, and a founder of the Green Belt Alliance, Orman was sold immediately on their vision for combining science and beauty.
“David has done two things for the people of the Bay Area,” said Orman, who served 10 years as the Bay Nature Institute’s board of directors. “He’s given them a playground that’s infinitely delightful for people who know nature, and he’s provided a storytelling framework for people who don’t know nature. It’s a rich resource for people to learn what’s here. David had the concept that Bay Nature would be the storytelling hub of the region, a central place where all nature stories could be told. He cares hugely. David’s out there all the time when he’s not in the office, he’s deeply committed to experiencing nature and he really wants to tell story of his experience.”
In recent years, the magazine has expanded to produce additional web-exclusive content as well as a series of nature videos in conjunction with a local TV station in Santa Rosa. “We thought we should do something where you can actually see the wildlife moving,” Loeb said. In 2002, the magazine began organizing free nature walks through Bay Area wilderness and beyond, led by experienced local guides. In 2004, Bay Nature Institute was formed as an independent charitable organization to consolidate all Bay Nature’s ventures.
People too often don’t see the value in nature because they don’t feel a connection with it. Too many people assume that nature is only something that exists in far-away, untouched regions of the world. And as much as Loeb loves the untouched wilderness, he knows that nature is something right outside your door, in your own backyard. The more people understand that, the more they realize its value, the more they want to protect and preserve and, above all, co-exist.
Loeb noted that, in the last 10 to 15 years, Bay Area residents have transitioned from just stopping development to proactively restoring nature.
“Even with cutting-edge science and really dedicated policy people work together, the Bay Area will never look like it used to, but we can make it so that there are places for biodiversity to flourish. We can learn how we humans and nature can co-exist side by side. That’s a good thing. We have the capacity to understand how to create spaces to accommodate nature.”
Loeb was overjoyed when, in the mid-to-late 2000s, harbor porpoises were spotted in the bay for the first time in 50 years. The porpoises initially disappeared from the bay after the U.S. government installed a submarine gate under the Golden Gate Bridge during World War II. But the porpoises didn’t return to the bay even after the gate was removed, preferring to stay in the open ocean away from the then highly polluted bay. The Save the Bay movement, launched by concerned citizens in the 1960s, spent years fighting to reduce pollution and restore tidal marshes. And Loeb saw the return of the porpoises as a positive sign that people were making an impact.
“But it’s not enough to just save harbor porpoises. They’re only one part of the whole econsystem,” he said. “We have to understand the relationships. It’s the evidence of an advanced society. The Bay Area has a legacy of environmentalism dating back to John Muir and there are still people who care enough to break out of routines of their lives to say they don’t want another shopping mall. That’s what we’re trying to reflect in Bay Nature.”
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Mike Rosen-Molina is an East Bay freelancer and longtime contributor to The Monthly.
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Margaretta K. Mitchell is a nationally known artist and professional photographer, author, and educator based in the East Bay. www.MargarettaMitchell.com.
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This online article contains several corrections as suggested by David Loeb, the subject of the profile as well as the founder and publisher of Bay Nature.