Natural History Wanderings

What was California like 500 years ago, with native bunchgrasses, fields blanketed in wildflowers, vernal pools, giant grizzlies, herds of tule elk and pronghorn antelope, rivers filled with salmon, and condors soaring overhead?

Attend our November chapter meeting with author and artist Laura Cunningham for a presentation about the ecological history of the Bay Area and California to find out! Twenty years of research went into her 2010 book, A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, also illustrated with Laura’s paintings. She will present an hour-long slideshow of her artwork for the book, which reconstructs what our region and state as a whole looked like before European arrival, including oak woodlands, grasslands, Native American culture, and fire ecology.

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Laura Cunningham studied paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley and completed graduate studies in natural science illustration at UC Santa Cruz. She went into the field of wildlife biology, working for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the US Geological Survey, and as a contract biologist in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California desert, Point Reyes National Seashore, and Death Valley National Park. After 20 years of research and travel to various plant communities of California, she wrote and illustrated A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California (Heyday: 2010), about the historical ecology of the Golden State, as well as a children’s book, Bay Area Through Time (Heyday: 2013). She is a self-taught artist, lives with her husband in the Death Valley region, and works as the California Director for the nonprofit Western Watersheds Project.