Today's Tomorrows, Memorial Grove

First public Academic Walk in the ramparts of Strawberry Canyon.

Today we will embark on our first approach to Strawberry Canyon in the Berkeley Hills.

It is difficult to imagine a site more pregnant with the signs of our time: its headwaters open land that connects to the network of parks running for some 40 miles as a shadow of wildscapes directly overlooking one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

The landscape is ample enough for large predators: mountain lions, great-horned owls, foxes (red and gray), coyotes sometimes.

The Canyon's mouth, crossed by the battle-scar of the Hayward Fault, was recently (1934) closed by a stadium. Just below, the City of Berkeley, the university Campus, which can rightly vie in handsome looks with any European campus, although it takes a while to note the difference: while Europeans have long learned to build landscapes to resemble what they had already lost by the Middle Ages, in Berkeley beauty emerges from the remnants of a flora in the process of disappearing. Spreading from the ports and roads in the lowlands, invasive exotic species, pollution and slabs of concrete keep a steady creep onto the wildscapes above, as a tidal premonition of the rise of the waters, when they come.

Of these remnants, the Memorial Grove, green foot of the stadium, may be considered as the biological center of gravity for the Eastern side of Campus, and a key corridor connecting both sides of the canyon.

Wildscapes lap at our doorsteps in the East Bay, our backyards wildscapes fenced and fragmented. Abutting the stadium, wild and urban meet to play their life-game along the piedmont of the Berkeley Hills. The scores are kept on mauled rose bushes, lost cats and road kill. In this frontier, the Memorial Grove forms a lynchpin corridor giving continuity to areas of possibility for wildlife: foxes, owls, mountain lions and many others find a living from here to Pinole and Chabot, Mount Diablo.