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 SF Bay Focus Restoring Marshes |
"Environmental protection is the foundation upon which economic prosperity will be built in the 21st century." Will Travis, Executive Director, BCDC |
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BACK IN THE 1960S, HARDLY ANYONE WOULD HAVE IMAGINED that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would one day be working to improve living conditions for disadvantaged marsh rodents and birds. Except for a few ecopoets and visionaries, nearly everyone saw open acreage around San Francisco Bay as prime real estate. Marshes were being filled to create more land for roads and buildings. Some people still referred to unrestrained urban growth as progress. Nearly four decades later, a radically different future is unfolding for San Francisco Bay. Although the human population has kept growing in the nine-county Bay region, so has appreciation for the Bay as a natural and economic asset. Today's idea of progress includes an improved quality of life, with cleaner air, healthy Bay waters, more parks and trails along the shore and in the hills, and sufficient habitat for the region's abundant wildlife. In all Bay counties, work is under way to protect open space for farming and recreation and to repair damage inflicted in darker days on streams and, especially, marshes. Slowly, the tides are being readmitted to shorelands that had been diked or filled. The aim is to benefit many species and to provide more effective flood control. In San Francisco, Crissy Field is being transformed into a great beachfront park, which will include 20 acres of tidal marsh in the Presidio. The National Parks Service and Golden Gate National Parks Association expect to complete the job by the year 2000. In Napa County, citizens voted to allow the Napa River to return to its natural floodplain where possible, hoping thus to keep it from inundating their homes. As part of that effort, 950 acres of wetland habitat will be restored. Just downstream, the Department of Fish and Game and the City of American Canyon are acquiring 460 acres of land that will allow 800 acres to be reconnected to the river. Of several tidal marsh restoration projects in the North Bay, one of the most complex is the Sonoma Baylands, between the Napa and Petaluma rivermouths. Here 322 acres of diked bayland have been reshaped to allow the tides to return. To accomplish this project, the Coastal Conservancy brought together entities that are often in conflict, including the Army Corps of Engineers, Port of Oakland, and Save the Bay Association. The goal is to secure a more hopeful future for two endangered species, the salt marsh harvest mouse and the California clapper rail. But everyone involved benefits in some way from this project (see Coast & Ocean, Autumn 1994). Giant earthmovers working for the Army Corps have already finished their tasks and breached the dikes. Time and tides will complete the job. The Army Corps proudly offers tours of the site to school groups, pointing out marsh grasses that have begun to grow along the new tidal channels. The hope is that eventually, pickleweed and cordgrass will be dense enough to attract the big-eyed mouse and shy gray bird that makes a clapping sound with its beak. The mouse lives and nests in pickleweed, the clapper rail in cordgrass. Around the Bay, more than 180 public agencies, land trusts, and citizen groups are working to restore damaged baylands and waters to health, and to protect those now threatened. Every creek, mountain, marsh, and meadow on the Bay seems to have its own group of defenders. They are in a race against time, for the Bay's problems are far from resolved, and new ones keep surfacing. San Francisco Bay, with the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, is the largest estuary on the West Coast, draining 40 percent of all the land in California. It has been severely damaged by pollution, intensified land use, dredging, and especially by water diversions. In recent dry years, up to 70 percent of the freshwater flows to the Bay have been shunted to the Central Valley and southern California, to irrigate 4.5 million acres of crops and to supply 20 million residents. Bay defenders have to keep fighting to keep enough water flowing into the Bay-Delta to meet the needs of productive farms and more than 500 species of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. An amazing diversity of wildlife lives year-round or overwinters here. Millions of shorebirds and waterfowl traveling along the Pacific Flyway rely on the Bay-Delta as a stopover and overwintering area. |
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WHEN EUROPEANS FIRST SAW San Francisco Bay in 1769, some 10,000 people lived in villages around it, and the Bay's bounty sustained them. The Bay was considerably bigger than it is now, extending with its wide marshes for 787 square miles. The marshes were dense with waterfowl, oysters, mussels, clams, and many varieties of fish. Perhaps a million salmon passed through the Bay en route to their native streams. It was during the Gold Rush that human activities began to alter the Bay. Hydraulic mining in the Sierra foothills sent massive amounts of sediment downriver. Then large-scale logging of coastal redwoods began, and soil from bared hills streamed down with winter rains. More mud washed into the Bay than tides could flush out through the Golden Gate, and much of the estuary became shallower. New settlers began to dike, drain, and fill marshes for agriculture, industry, and towns. In time, the public was excluded from all but four miles of the 400-mile shoreline, and all but 10 percent of the marshes disappeared. By 1960, almost every bayside community seemed to have plans to expand bayward. Each year, about four square miles were being filled. The turnaround came in 1961, when the Army Corps of Engineers published a map that showed the Bay as it was likely to look like in the year 2020: not much more than a river winding between new developments on fill. That map awakened citizens. Three Berkeley women who were "too naive to know that what they wanted to do was politically impossible," as someone later put it, launched a movement to "Save the Bay." The Legislature responded in 1965 by establishing the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) as a temporary agency, and directed it to study the Bay, make a plan for its protection, and, while planning, regulate shoreline development. Four years later, the Legislature adopted the Bay Plan and made BCDC permanent. The agency has been remarkably successful in reversing the Bay's shrinkage and opening its shoreline to the public. While allowing an average of 15 acres a year to be filled for public access and water-related uses, it has demanded compensation for this fill by requiring that diked areas be reopened to tidal action. Since BCDC was created, about 200 miles of new trails have been developed along the Bay's edge, and shoreline garbage dumps (formerly intended to become real estate) have been turned into parks. Many forms of water pollution have diminished, and hundreds of acres of marshland have been enhanced or restored. Opponents of strong Bay protection had predicted that it would crush economic growth, but quite the opposite has occurred. The regional economy is thriving, and the protected Bay is a major attraction. Since the 1970s, many new state and federal programs to protect wetlands have been launched, and the Bay has benefited. In the South Bay, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established the 20,000-acre Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, named after the former Congressman, in 1972. The Peninsula Open Space Trust recently purchased adjacent 1,600-acre Bair Island and hopes to convey it soon to the Refuge. The Coastal Conservancy is working with several partners to enhance and restore wildlife habitat in this major wetland. In the North Bay, the Shell Trustee Committee facilitated the purchase of 9,000 acres of Cargill Salt ponds in 1994. The Department of Fish and Game is now working with numerous partners to develop a complex restoration project. Some 80 restoration projects are under way around the Bay. Still, the Bay has hardly been "saved." Many water quality components continue to decline, and habitat for fish and wildlife continues to degrade. Although the quality of discharges from municipal and industrial treatment plants has been improved and much hazardous waste has been cleaned up, contaminants still flow into the Bay, including mercury, PCBs, pesticides, copper, and selenium. Exotic species continue to arrive in the ballast water of ships and by other means. Fast-growing Atlantic cordgrass threatens to overwhelm native cordgrass, with drastic consequences to the ecosystem. The pressures are neverending. |
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THE GOLD RUSH PROVIDED A LESSON that did not sink in until recently: Any disturbance to the watershed is felt throughout the ecosystem. Therefore, protection strategy, to be effective, needs to be comprehensive. The first attempt to develop such a strategy was made in 1993 by the National Estuary Program, a collaborative effort which established the San Francisco Estuary Project and led to the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP), which recommends 147 actions. The CCMP called for regional wetland goals to be established. The San Francisco Baylands Ecosystem Goals Project is fulfilling that recommendation . The CCMP also recommended that a regional program be created to acquire and restore wetlands. In response, the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture was formed in 1995 to bring together public agencies and agricultural, business, and environmental organizations to work cooperatively toward that goal within the Bay Watershed. The Joint Venture is carrying out many of the Goals Project's recommendations (see Coast & Ocean, Winter 1996 - 97). Within the past five years, Joint Venture partners have protected 3,175 acres of wetlands, restored 876 acres more, and enhanced 150 acres. They expect to acquire another 3,200 acres from willing sellers, restore 4,200 acres, and enhance 2,100 acres. Over the next five years, their efforts could increase wetland habitat by as much as 30 percent. (For specifics, see the Coastal Conservancy web site, www.coastalconservancy.ca.gov). In its third move toward effective action within a larger frame, the Legislature created the Bay Area Conservancy Program within the Coastal Conservancy in 1997 to work toward common goals with BCDC and the Bay Area Open Space Council throughout the Bay counties. In an effort to resolve conflicts over freshwater flows and diversions, a federal-state effort named CALFED Bay Delta Program was launched in 1995. It hopes to make progress by considering all major aspects of the controversy together. We're wiser now in the way we treat our Bay, as articles in this issue of Coast & Ocean show. But if this great estuary is to thrive in the midst of a growing metropolitan region, there can be no let-up in its defenders' zeal. The stakes are rising. The San Francisco Airport has proposed the biggest fill project since BCDC was created. It seeks to build new runways by filling 1,200 acres of the Bay. The Oakland Airport will also need to expand, and is likely to look toward the Bay. The Port of Oakland, which recently deepened its shipping channels to 42 feet, now seeks to deepen them to 50 feet. More than 6.5 million people now live in the Bay Area, almost twice as many as in the 1960s. By the year 2020, a population of 7.6 million is projected. The rate at which open space is now being protected -- 10,00 to15,000 acres a year -- lags behind population growth, according to the Bay Area Open Space Council, a consortium of open space districts, agencies, and land trusts. The Council identified 1.1 million more acres as worthy of protection. At current prices, the cost of acquiring these lands would be $3 - $4.5 billion. The challenges are many, but they can be met. We still need to educate each other about the natural world we share with other species, to protect more land for recreation and natural resource preservation, to keep searching for creative solutions to emerging problems. Most of all, we need to get to know the Bay-Delta Estuary better and, while enjoying its many gifts, participate in its future.
Nadine Hitchcock is program manager for the new San Francisco Bay Area Conservancy Program. Nancy Schaeffer, coordinator of the San Francisco Joint Venture, contributed to this article.
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