In 1970, fresh out of Princeton, Hart began contributing articles on planning and environmental subjects to the Pacific Sun, a weekly newspaper in Marin County, California. It happened to be an interesting place and time: a growing suburban county, uncommonly rich in natural beauty, that was just then seeking to rein in sprawl and preserve parks and agricultural lands. These assignments gave him a rapid introduction to the broader environmental field.
Hart would return to his initial "beat" for a series of books on landscapes and land use issues in the San Francisco Bay Area: San Francisco's Wilderness Next Door (1989), Farming on the Edge (1992), Redwood Refuge: Muir Woods National Monument (1992), and Gardens of Alcatraz (1996). The series continues with two "coffee table" books co-authored with photographers: San Francisco Bay: Portrait of an Estuary (with David Sanger, 2003) and Legacy: Portraits of 50 Bay Area Environmental Elders (with Nancy Kittle, 2006). Since 2003 he has written frequently for the unique regional quarterly magazine Bay Nature.
Early in his career, Hart was a regular contributor to Cry California, the influential magazine of the planning advocacy group California Tomorrow. In an extensive series of articles, he covered all aspects of the California environmental scene, returning often to water policy and farm policy. He would later assemble two decades of Cry California articles by many authors in the collection The New Book of California Tomorrow: Reflections and Projections from the Golden State (1989). His expertise in water issues led to publication of Storm Over Mono: The Mono Lake Battle and the California Water Future (1996).
In parallel, Hart was becoming an enthusiastic backpacker, desert rat, and climber, pursuits that yielded three books with the Sierra Club: two guidebooks to remote sections of the West (the Klamath Mountains and the Great Basin) and Walking Softly in the Wilderness: The Sierra Club Guide to Backpacking, a how-to book first published in 1977 and now in its fourth edition (2005). He has contributed in this vein to publications including Backpacker, Climbing, Outside, Sierra, and Summit.
A
skilled translator of technical information into lively English, Hart
occasionally works on a consultant basis, assisting in the clear
presentation of complex contents for public use and understanding. Clients
have included Adobe Systems, the American Farmland Trust, California Resources Agency,
California Tomorrow, California Trout, the County of Marin, Cushman &
Wakefield, The Greenbelt
Alliance, and others. The
resulting works have won recognitions from the American Planning
Association, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Soil Conservation
Society of America, and other professional organizations.
Click on images to order available books. The John Hart Bookstore has a stock of hard-to-find older works by Hart and others.
