Preserving the legacy of Bay Area Action’s environmental work from 1990–2000 and beyond.
Learn more...
I’m spending 2025 collecting the archives of the influential 1990s environmental nonprofit Bay Area Action, sifting through thousands of photos and press clippings and fliers, and trying to turn it all into a historical website that makes sense.
In 2024 I was faced with a career choice — whether to take a full-time job again or try something else. Those of you who know me know I’m a designer, and while I’ve worked for a few companies over the years, for the most part I’ve run my own small freelance design firm. Since moving to Missouri for family reasons in 2017, my freelance business has been slowly drying up. There just aren’t a lot of jobs here for digital product designers and very senior creative professionals. So in 2024 I knew I had to change something. I can’t leave Missouri — my son’s here — but I had to make some choices about the next career path.
It was March 2024 and my son Oliver and I had just come back from a super fun spring break trip to California — his first time back there since he was 7 (he’s 14 now!) — where we’d acted pretty much like tourists the whole time, taking in sights and things we hadn’t seen or done in many years. The Exploratorium, Alcatraz, the Mission, the Computer History Museum, Santa Cruz beaches, and of course our beloved Cicero’s Pizza in San Jose.
%20in%20San%20Francisco%E2%80%99s%20Mission%20District.jpg)
We also stayed with our longtime friends David Smernoff and Cindy Russell, BAA stalwarts, and went on a walk in the Baylands with our friend (and Big Tree), Peter Drekmeier. I talked with them about how I’d hoped for years that someone would write the official history of BAA. I’d always hoped Peter would do it, because he’s a great storyteller and he was obviously the driving force of BAA for so long, but Pete has a job and a family and plenty going on. I told David about the chapters I’d envisioned, and we looked at lots of old photos I’d scanned.
When I got back to Saint Louis and was thinking about that next career step, I couldn’t get the intense, stirring feeling out of my mind that someone had to write the BAA story. We’re all getting old. Memories fade, people throw stuff away. Pretty soon it’s going to be an impossible task. And the Internet has pretty much forgotten BAA — there’s not even a Wikipedia page.
I thought — maybe I should just do it.
I went to the basement and dug around in boxes to see what I had: Bumper stickers, a giant stack of newsletters, old council minutes, T-shirts, banners, folders and folders full of photos and negatives and papers…
I thought about how my son knows about BAA, from stories I’ve told about “the old days,” but he really can only ever know it in an abstract way — he wasn’t even born then.
Then I thought about my parents, gone now, and what they left of their own stories. When I was a kid, and even later as an adult, they’d told me little of their pasts. They came from a generation that wouldn’t be seen to brag.
When my dad died in 2006, I barely knew much about his life story. His whole side of the family barely ever talked about themselves, their pasts, and certainly not their accomplishments. It’s only through my mom that I learned he was among the engineers at IBM who collaborated with American Airlines to create the first computerized airline ticketing system in the 1960s, which revolutionized the travel industry.
I knew he was in the Army before I was born, he was reading books about artificial intelligence research a quarter-century before most people were talking about it, he enjoyed raising begonias and fuchsias, and he loved his cat. But he’d severely cleaned house when he entered a retirement community; when he died, he left barely any records behind. I’d be hard pressed to tell you more about his life, other than the moments I witnessed myself.
On the other hand, when my mom died in 2019, she left a lot of documents. I was able to paint a long picture of her life story from the papers, greeting cards, letters, award certificates, etc. she left behind.
When Bay Area Action was ending in 2000, I recall a moment when we were cleaning out the Mountain View BAA office to move to the PCC building, as Acterra was forming from the merger of the two nonprofits. File cabinets were being emptied, boxes filled, and furniture was moving out. In the middle of the room, a large metal garbage can was being filled up with junk deemed unnecessary. I couldn’t help notice that some of the documents being trashed seemed pretty valuable, at least from a historical perspective. “Wait, how can we just trash this?” I asked.
“We don’t have a lot of storage at the PCC,” was the answer. “You take it, if you want it, Mark.”
So I did. In that moment, I suppose, I became the unofficial BAA archivist.
I went on to work at Acterra for three years after that, as communications director. But even years after I’d moved on to other jobs, people at Acterra such as Debbie Mytels and David Coale would call me up when they were moving offices or cleaning closets: “We’ve got a box of old BAA stuff you might want.”
I sure did.
Those BAA archives sat in a file cabinet and boxes in my garage or basement for years. Every once in a while I’d spend a weekend scanning photos and putting them up on Flickr (remind me to tell you how the US Bureau of Land Management used some of them on the interpretive signage at Headwaters Reserve). I started a Facebook group and a WordPress blog, posting photos and memories of BAA times past. People always loved seeing them, but months or even years would go by before I had time to do it again. Jobs, families, etc. always took precedent over this hobby.
Last year, in 2024, when I was faced with that proverbial career question mark, I decided it was time to make the BAA History Project happen for real. We’re all getting older — I’m 56 and even those who were in the High Schools Group in the late BAA years are in their 40s now. Pretty soon we’ll all be too old to remember anything that happened anyway!
And truth be told, I’ve experienced some health problems in the past few years and have probably been feeling kinda mortal. The thought of leaving my son a bunch of boxes full of old BAA newsletters and photos of people he’s never met, made me resolve to take action now, while I still can.
But this couldn’t be a hobby anymore, it’d never get done if it was always being shoved to a back burner every time something else more important needed focus. But I also couldn’t afford to work for free; I’ve got bills to pay like anyone else. But maybe there was a way to get paid to do it…
I figured I could get back in touch with enough BAA folks and hopefully convince them that conserving the accomplishments of BAA for the historical record was important. Maybe they would chip in and we’d do a sort of GoFundMe — a GoFundBAA!
I contacted Peter Drekmeier and David Smernoff again and they were on board with he plan. We recruited some other BAA rad sheep from back in the day to be an advisory committee — David Coale, Geoff and Sue Nicholls, Susan Stansbury, and Laura Stec — and started meeting monthly.
Since then it’s been a whirlwind of work for the past 6 months. Peter and Laura have been scanning photos and documents from their archives, DavidS and SueN and several other people have mailed me large envelopes or boxes full of more files and photos, videos are being digitized, slides and negatives are being scanned, sorting and tagging consumes my days and nights, plus I’ve interviewed over a dozen of people from the past about their BAA memories, among them:
I acquired nonprofit status under the umbrella of Media Alliance in San Francisco, so people can make tax-deductible contributions.
I started building a website with robust filters so we can relate all the data to each other. I’ve scanned and OCRd hundreds of newsletters and documents. I’ve scanned and often repaired hundreds of photos, bringing faded 1990s prints back to life with 2025 technology. I’ve created a YouTube account to store the videos we’re digitizing, a Flickr account to store all the photos, an Instagram account for people to follow along, and more.
And I’ve written a couple contemporary articles about BAA events that took place in the 1990s, looking back with fresh eyes from 2025:
There’s lots more where that came from…
I’m chronicling the making of this passion project though this blog / newsletter / UpdateLog. I hope you’ll find it interesting enough to read sometimes, and maybe even pay for a subscription.
The following fantastic donors have contributed financially to the BAA History Project so far — I thank these friends deeply for supporting my work:
There are several ways:
——
This was originally published on Mark’s Substack.
.svg){kind=small}