About the BAA History Project

BAA was an important force for environmental change in the 1990s

Bay Area Action accomplished many things in its run from 1990 to 2000, helping save Bair Island, educating about myriad local and national issues, bringing Earth Day to thousands of people every year, and much, much more.

The world’s digital memory doesn’t remember BAA

Do a Google search for “Bay Area Action” and you won’t find anything about the influential environmental group within the first page of search results. You have to go many pages deep to find even the most rudimentary citations (and little depth to speak of).
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A query using ChatGPT results in only vague recitations of BAA’s mission and little more.

This is primarily because A) the Web was still in its infancy when BAA was active and the vast majority of BAA’s work was never put online in the first place, and B) third-party references to BAA have largely gone offline in the ensuing decades, or are often locked behind paywalls (in the case of newspapers, for example).

We can ensure the historical record remembers BAA

BAA’s programs, campaigns, accomplishments, and stories should be made available to researchers, journalists, scholars, and the general public, ensuring it’s part of the historical record of the environmental movement in the late 20th Century in the United States.

A sizable physical archive of documents and photos exists in private hands that can be digitized and made publicly available.