Preserving the legacy of Bay Area Action’s environmental work from 1990–2000 and beyond.
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Bay Area Action organized Earth Day around the San Francisco Bay Area region each year, often building a coalition of other environmental organizations to focus on a central theme. The theme would change each year.
Around 1994 BAA recognized the need for a more coordinated effort amongst the many regional groups, and began organizing a coalition of nonprofits, municipalities, and even faith-based groups. Participation among the groups varied, from smaller efforts like publicizing it in their newsletters, to larger contributions like organizing large events around the year’s theme.
1990 — n.a. 20th Anniversary
1993 — Bay Area Earth Day at Stanford
1994 — A Creek Runs Through It
1995 — Restoring Nature, Restoring Hope
1996 — The Planet On Your Plate
1997 — Forests for the Future
1998 — A Sense of Place – Bringing Earth Day Home
1999 — Shaping a Sustainable Society
2000 — Clean Energy Now!
2001 — n.a. Earth Fest at Mitchell Park
2002 — Celebrate the Bay
Being a large event that took many months of preparation and coalition building, Earth Day in the Bay Area was usually organized by a group of volunteers. In the late ’90s it was headed by a single coordinator or director, a paid position. Earth Day coordinators varied from year to year.
Responding to a financial crisis and other concerns, Acterra’s Strategic Planning Committee in 2002 recommended the organization phase out support of Bay Area Earth Day. While many local communities continue with annual Earth Day celebrations and events, the coalition-based coordination that BAA brought has ceased.
BAA and later Acterra ran the website promoting Earth Day activities around the SF Bay Area for many years, but after Acterra shut down the program, the domain registration was not kept up. It was then registered by Mark Bult, who had it in a dormant state for a decade before a volunteer with Berkeley Earth Day named Neil Planchon asked to use it in 2010. Mark continued to pay the registration fees and allowed Berkeley Earth Day to use the URL for many years, until it went dark again in 2023. Mark still owns the domain, including the .org, .net, and .com variants.
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