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“How much control are you willing to give away, for how much protection?” asked artist Michael Hall at Thursday night’s art opening for “Security Question” at the David Brower Center in Berkeley. Hall is one of 17 artists whose work was selected for the summer-long exhibit that hopes to challenge and explore the cultural perception…

Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin senator who created Earth Day, never envisioned it as an annual event. In 1970 he proposed a national teach-in, a day for universities across the country to hold “soul-searching” discussions about environmental issues. But the day was such a hit—35,000 speakers and 20 million participants attended over 12,000 events across the…

BERKELEY — Spinning like a hub within a hub, the David Brower Center is gearing up for its first-ever Earth Day Festival. The all-afternoon festivities will offer hands-on workshops, moderated speaker panels, live music, art activities, food tastings and more from noon to 6 p.m. April 18 at the center, 2150 Allston Way. Short films,…

Our planet has been drastically altered by the rapid advancement of human civilization. In addition to scaling mountains and exploring the ocean’s deepest depths, we’ve also carved through all manner of terrain and harvested more than our share of natural resources. And in the past century, we’ve begun to notice the effects. One of the…

The Berkeley Arts District is booming these days and presiding at the eastern edge of that hub is the David Brower Center. An architectural curiosity in a ground-breaking “green from the ground up” design, the building looms like a docked, futuristic and uber-luxury ship at the corner of Allston and Oxford in downtown Berkeley. Their…

BERKELEY — Forty fifth-grade students sat around a small woman, who was dressed casually in jeans, a button-down shirt, a loose cardigan, and clogs. She spoke of environmental activism, creativity, and the importance of finding an artistic voice. And although the students are only 10 and 11 years old, they were mesmerized by her words…

When Nick Kordesch talks about his green wedding, he’s not referring to the color of the table runners. In June, Nick, 34, the sustainability coordinator at San Francisco State University, married Hazel Perry, 33, a genetic counselor at UCSF, in what the couple call a “zero-waste wedding.” Because the East Bay holds a special place…

In 1981, as an undergraduate studying architecture at Yale, Maya Lin made a bold artistic debut by beating out a host of established architects in a contest to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. The design was a gracefully simple landscape intervention — a clean slice into a grassy lawn that reveals a…

Recently 400,000 people took to the streets for the People’s Climate March, in anticipation of a climate change summit at the United Nations in New York. For anyone who still needs convincing, “Art/Act: Maya Lin,” on view at the Brower Center, addresses the crisis with work that digs into the Bay Area’s fragile resources. Know that…

Maya Lin is hopeful about the future, probably more so than most humans are. Her flat delivery of statistics at her lecture on environmental issues at the David Brower Center on Monday wasn’t intended to depress us into throwing up our arms and asking why we even try. Instead, her lessons are informed by a…