brandonletsinger“For any social movement, there is a buildup, a prelude. The San Francisco Bay area provided a fertile ground for the growth of new movements: artistic, political, social, and cultural.”
https://www.diggers.org/history.htm
The Frisco Bay Mussel Group was started by Judy Goldhaft & Peter Berg in 1976. Recently returned from the United Nations Conference on the Environment in 1972, and their settlement and founding of the Planet Drum in 1973, the pair started the group as a network for members of different environmental groups to come together once a month, and present then discuss actions they were undertaking.
Meetings were held at the Farm, itself a cultural center, on Potrero Ave under the freeway. A space for action, activities, and that boasted it’s own garden and animals. As an extension of these meetings, Judy Goldhaft would also go on to found the reinhabitory theatre.
The name Frisco Bay Mussel Group was inspired by the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear group on the East Coast and used ‘Frisco as an homage that San Francisco be called Frisco because San Francisco seemed to be the upper class name for San Francisco. But Frisco is what the people in the streets called it in the 1860s, 70’s, 80’s as well as countercultural activists in the 1960’s.
The Mussel Group published Watershed Guide and Living Here to broaden local ecological consciousness of the Bay Area to support reinhabitation of the San Francisco Bay Area and produced some of the earliest bioregional maps and documents. The group also played a pivotal role in persuading the public through a newspaper ad campaign and in person meetings to vote down a California Water Project Plan proposal to divert fresh water away from San Francisco Bay to the Sacramento River and San Joaquin Valley and Southern California.
More information about the Watershed Guide: A Companion to Living here at: https://deptofbioregion.org/archival-material/watershed-guide-a-companion-to-living-here-by-the-frisco-bay-mussel-group
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