?EUR??,,????'??That used to be a field,?EUR??,,????'?? was a familiar refrain from my wife years ago, pointing to a building as we drove.

?EUR??,,????'??Everything used to be a field,?EUR??,,????'?? I?EUR??,,????'???d reply automatically, but imagining how it looked and smelled when orange groves dominated. My wife had been in the area longer and seen more changes, but I had seen my share of fields gobbled up by the urban muck.

Another reminder of urban encroachment came just recently when the California Coastal Commission approved in January the development of the Dana Point Headlands Conservation Park, a bluff above the Pacific Ocean between Laguna Beach and Dana Point Harbor in Orange County, a target of development for about 30 years (see the news item in this issue: ?EUR??,,????'??Southern Calif. Coastal Bluff Goes Way of Development?EUR??,,????'??).

The flora and fauna of the natural environment here haven?EUR??,,????'???t entirely disappeared, even though we?EUR??,,????'???ve asphalted and concreted much of the land. A few years ago, I went golfing in OC with a group of editors, long on words but short on swing. As we approached the first green, there under a dwarf evergreen lounged a fox, quite serene and looking contented...and not moving an inch. So cute. It was the highlight of the outing. The little critter was only a stone?EUR??,,????'???s throw from six lanes of some of the county?EUR??,,????'???s busiest roadways.

Less cute, was the recent attack in OC by a cougar on two mountain bikers, one of whom the big cat killed.

The area does have its regional parks and conservancies, including the Upper Newport Bay Ecological Reserve, a marshy land favored by bird watchers and people soaking in nature?EUR??,,????'???s glory, just a short kayak paddle to the Pacific waters in one direction, but from the other end, a mile from a freeway.

Three-hundred and fifty miles north in the San Francisco Bay Area, people apparently are feeling the same nostalgia and remembering how the landscape looked back when. The San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) recently started BayBoards, a project that employs billboards and bus-shelters as signposts for images of the area?EUR??,,????'???s forgotten landscape, just a little visual reminder of the lost or obscured landscape within the urban sprawl.

The SFEI, a nonprofit organization founded in 1994 to protect and enhance the San Francisco Estuary, is governed by a board of directors of Bay Area scientists, environmentalists, regulators, local governments and industries. Its niche is somewhere between environmental science and environmental management and policy, conducting studies, gathering information and collaborating with other scientists.

The point of this commentary, as the SFEI puts it so well, is that the urban landscape ?EUR??,,????'??remains a thin, freshly-constructed veneer over the native landscape.?EUR??,,????'?? For SFEI, the ?EUR??,,????'??forests, marshlands and shorelines?EUR??,,????'?? still largely shape the Bay Area. In OC, it?EUR??,,????'???s the shoreline, coastal headlands and interior foothills.