Citywide drill commemorates the Loma Prieta Quake that started the NERT program

Yesterday’s citywide drill for neighborhood emergency response teams in San Francisco noted 35th anniversary of lomaprieta quake, earliest NERT members from Marina … & the Japanese consul general joined (several other countries want to learn from this fire department program!)

Biodiversity hot spot grows 150 native species each year for Golden Gate National Parks

Since 1981, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has served as the nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, collaborating with the Presidio Trust, partners, donors, and the community to support the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). The GGNRA stretches across three Bay Area counties, north and south of the Golden Gate Bridge, and includes iconic places such as Muir Woods National Monument, Fort Point National Historic Site, Alcatraz Island, Crissy Field, Mori Point, Lands End, and the Presidio of San Francisco.

I volunteer with park staff at the nursery’s indigenous species greenhouses, shade houses and lab for seed processing and sowing.

Presidio Nursery is a cooperative program of Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, National Parks Service, and Presidio Trust.

Since September 2023, I have done transplanting, pruning, and pot washing and look forward to work in the seed lab during winter 🥼 🌱

These are some of the other tasks available for volunteers at the Presidio Nursery:

• seed collection

• seed cleaning

• transplanting

• pruning

• weeding

• composting

• pot washing

• nursery maintenance

• care of an educational garden

The Presidio is a haven for more rare species per acre than all national parks including Yosemite and Yellowstone.

This international biodiversity hot spot grows 150 plant species and 150,000 plants a year for habitat restoration and reforestation around the Presidio and other parks.

Among other places, you can enjoy their plants at the new Tunnel Tops park at Speaker Nancy Pelosi Plaza. Thanks to Pelosi’s initiative to save the Presidio for the people, the Presidio was designated a National Park 30 years ago.

Repopulating the Presidio with almost-extinct manzanita clones one afternoon.

One afternoon we handled newly discovered Franciscan manzanita that had been cloned for repopulating the Presidio with the species. We washed 100 pots for them to be repotted into later (after steaming, sterilizing, bleaching) these plants are the only ones that exist other than the mother plant.

What should journalism do to reveal the state of our democracy?

Here come the CONTENT CREATORS - 400 million impressions at the Democratic National Convention

I feel quite vindicated this month. The central contention of KIP, my passion project of the past decade, is hitting the mainstream. Everybody sees it!

A journalism society talked about feeling insulted this week. Meanwhile, journalists in the mainstream media had their lunch eaten last week by 200 ‘social media influencers’ invited to the Democratic National Convention who reached 400 million impressions (4x what cable news generated) for a media value of $800 million.

What a masterclass in disinter-media-tion. The Democrats went straight to the people.

The mainstream ‘journalism’ hits keep coming, with Dana Bash of CNN recycling racist Trump taunts as if it’s legitimate journalistic work in the first cable news mainstream media interview of the HARRIS WALZ team. Don’t waste our time!

I cannot help but notice these are the very same social media contributors I've been talking about as the non-traditional bridge media we need to connect to traditional journalism, and I conceived a framework to do that with my passion project KIP.

Journalists, it’s long past time for you to stop feeling insulted and get to work connecting with the people who are bringing news to us. They could use your rigor and training and experience, and we will all benefit from it. Democracy demands it.

By the way, I have a plan for that. Take a look at the KIP framework to connect journalists with content creators (I call them the Fifth Estate) and trusted independent parties to vet, frame, and generate discussion, games, research, education and commerce using current events.

Almost 2 decades of speaking to audiences far, wide, and totally niche!

I’ve enjoyed every minute connecting with the audience at entertainment and publishing industry conferences, universities, business accelerators, cultural organizations, and California’s oldest public affairs forum, The Commonwealth Club. I’ve talked about personal branding with social media, the worst entrepreneurship advice I’ve ever gotten, how to build community online and with content, foreign correspondence or writing from abroad, marketing for startups, the cultural exchange of the Expat Harem, among other specialty topics.

Crazy Rich Asians & the impact of my work: I helped save an architectural gem in Southeast Asia

Remembering the time when I conceived, pitched, wrote, sold, published a three page story in a top newsweekly magazine out of Hong Kong that highlighted a historical building at risk from nearby development to 93,000 elite members of government, business and the arts.

The article had impact.

The year after the article was published, the building won a newly created UNESCO Heritage Award.

To promote the conservation of the greatest diversity of the region’s built heritage, in the year 2000 UNESCO inaugurated the annual Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, a program designed to respond to the question: “Within the realities of contemporary, fast-track development, what of the built heritage do Asians value and want to preserve from the past to inform the region’s place in the global future?”

• quoted from TheSiamSociety.org Lessons from the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation: International Best Practices in Thailand

  Richard Engelhardt, Montira Horayangura Unakul and Julia Davies

In 2018 you saw this historic property in the film Crazy Rich Asians, which used it as a setting.

You know it from Crazy Rich Asians. I championed its story in 1998.

This blows my mind! I was trained in martial arts by the granddaughter of a samurai