Is San Francisco an environmental city?
It pretends to be.
• • • • • • • • December 2025 • • • • • • • •
The verbiage from the government and its well-connected elites is omnipresent. Yet, current policy prioritizes the disaster that is AI, the fraud of energy-intensive cyber “currency,” and the distasteful LED lights on buildings. Glaring strings of LED lights that deface our streets, making them look as if the businesses are beckoning bordellos. Atrociously, a diesel-guzzling, gigantic Ferris wheel was placed in the middle of the Concourse.
The soccer fields at Ocean Beach are now gaudily illuminated by anti-environmental floodlights and covered with environmentally hazardous astroturf. Huge, overpriced, fenced-off concerts in the western end of the park render it unusable for humans and creatures big and small for months at a time. City Hall is illuminated with garish nighttime lighting. Fighter jets, symbols of death and destruction (as well as being massive consumers of fuel), strafe our city every October.
Still, environmental consciousness concerning all these depredations stands at zero. Very few San Franciscans understand what an ecosystem is, let alone our connection with it.
As control of the Tea Garden, Arboretum, and Conservatory has been handed over to these carpetbaggers, there is no way to fight this. Please tell everyone: Boycott this, so this atrocity will not become an annual event!”
But the latest development really takes the cake! The San Francisco Botanical Garden Society (now corporate-branded as “The Gardens of Golden Gate Park”) is installing gaudy LED lights along a “mile” of trees in Strybing Arboreum (now commercially promoted as the “botanical gardens”). They are charging outrageous sums of money to gullible individuals to enter. As control of the Tea Garden, Arboretum, and Conservatory has been handed over to these carpetbaggers, there is no way to fight this. Please tell everyone: Boycott this, so this atrocity will not become an annual event!
We also need to fight for the right to have public meetings. Organizations such as the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society (now “Gardens of Golden Gate Park” (a misleading title) and similar organizations, such as the now-defunct Parks Alliance, whose purpose was to advocate on behalf of wealthy insider interests, should be forced to hold regular meetings with neighbors and other concerned citizens. Trustee Notes should be readily available, and concerned citizens should be able to address Trustee meetings. The Recreation and Parks Department should be mandated to hold monthly meetings with San Franciscans and greatly increase transparency.
Will you help make these changes happen?
Harry S. Pariser is a Westside Resident, check out his Medium page here.
December 2025
