The oversupply is intentional: while the yard belongs to Hahn, she does no gardening herself. Instead, she hires two professional urban farmers to plant, weed, harvest, and deliver the bounty to her family’s doorstep—and to her neighbors’ doorsteps—once a week. “I don’t even go down there,” the attorney and community activist said one morning last fall. “I’m busy!”

To Hahn, this arrangement makes perfect sense. Instead of hiring a gardener to tend her roses, she hires a farmer to tend her vegetables, thus putting her land to productive use. “If I turn my backyard into edible food plants, that means five or six other families don’t have to,” she says, as the chickens, which produce four to five dozen eggs each week, cluck in apparent agreement. “I spread the benefits to more than just my family.”

But feeding six families costs money, and Hahn has shouldered the set-up costs alone, installing garden beds and drip irrigation, buying seeds, and paying the farmers to coax the land to produce. To recoup those costs, Hahn wants to charge her neighbors a small fee for their weekly food baskets. This exchange, she says, would be similar to a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, in which people pay a subscription fee to a farm in return for regular deliveries of seasonal food. Since she lives in Berkeley, a city that just last year made building a local food system part of its long-term Climate Action Plan, Hahn figured she would have no problem getting a license from the city to run her small farm.

She was wrong. In fact, the process of getting a license turned out to be so convoluted, and so expensive, that for now she’s given up trying to do it. At a time when it seems everyone wants to bring the farm back to the city, and urban food projects are all the rage, Hahn’s story is a study in just how great a challenge this can be. Her adversary is not an anti-vegetable city official or a NIMBY neighbor—all that’s stopping Hahn is a few bland paragraphs in the zoning code.

Hahn’s backyard farm project started when she moved into her house in late 2006. At that time, she recalls, there was nothing at all in the yard—the previous occupants had laid down a layer of sod, which died soon after Hahn moved in, leaving the yard, she says, “ugly and useless.” Not much of a gardener herself, Hahn didn’t think about what to do with the space until more than a year later, when a flier in the neighborhood caught her eye: A woman named Willow proposed to set up a backyard garden in exchange for room and board. While she thought the flier “lovely,” Hahn was initially skeptical. “Seriously … Willow?” she recalls, rolling her eyes in a just-another-Berkeley-hippie sort of way.

But one phone call changed her mind. Willow Rosenthal was the founder of West Oakland’s food security project City Slicker Farms and about as far from a dreamy hippie as raspberries are from ramen. When she looked at Hahn’s yard, she saw potential. A veteran urban farmer, Rosenthal plans intensive gardens—so intensive, she says, that she only reluctantly concedes space for a picnic table. Hahn’s forty-by-sixty-foot backyard area, Rosenthal thought, could easily feed five or six families. The two hatched the idea to create a neighborhood-scale CSA, with Hahn lending land that would otherwise go unused to two farmers—in this case, Rosenthal and her assistant Laurel Sharp—who would manage its daily operation.

The problem is that Berkeley’s zoning code says nothing about a neighborhood CSA, and its absence is significant. Technically, such an operation would be considered a business, since money changes hands. But Hahn’s North Berkeley neighborhood is strictly residential. Its zoning code allows people to run small, low– or moderate-impact in-home businesses but mandates that all activity take place indoors. It also forbids “customer visits,” “handling or transport of goods or products” on-site, and “offensive or objectionable noise, vibration, odors, heat, dirt, or electrical disturbance perceptible by the average person.” An outdoor operation that uses a pickup truck and a compost pile, and would require customers to pick up vegetables, is not allowable under the code.

Hahn and Rosenthal discovered all this when they called the city’s health and planning departments to see what would be required to get a business license. While all the city officials they talked to said they supported the project in theory, they said that legally, there was no way to make it work. One official, says Hahn, described the farm as a “high-impact home occupation.” If Hahn and Rosenthal wanted to go ahead with the project, they were told, they would need a special exemption, which would require a public hearing, six to eight months of waiting, and close to $4,000 in fees. After months of haggling, they pulled their application last summer and decided to regroup the following season. “We didn’t think it was going to be so complicated,” says Hahn.

Berkeley city planning director Debbie Sanderson agrees that while a backyard CSA sounds like a good idea, as the laws are currently written it is unquestionably illegal. While the city could change its code, either under the direction of the city council or in response to a citizen petition, the process
is lengthy and complex. The most recent change, which created a provision allowing in-home teaching, took nearly a year to implement, Sanderson says. Still, she says, the code is a living document: “Life in the world is always changing, so the code has to change too.” Indeed, the question of how to integrate agriculture into urban landscapes has started to pop up in American Planning Association journal articles in recent months—one article analyzed the cities of Portland and Vancouver—but it hasn’t come up in Berkeley until now.

Decades ago, when Berkeley’s zoning codes were written, people wanted cities to be urban. Ornamental landscapes demonstrated leisure and wealth, a lifestyle different from working on the land. Far from encouraging backyard farms, city planners dismissed them as relics of the past. It’s only recently that people began transitioning to backyard farms. (Or, as Hahn prefers to call them, “edible gardens”—“When you say ‘farm,’ people think of tractors and Porta-Potties,” she says.)

Decades ago, when Berkeley’s zoning codes were written, people wanted cities to be urban. Ornamental landscapes demonstrated leisure and wealth, a lifestyle different from working on the land. Far from encouraging backyard farms, city planners dismissed them as relics of the past. It’s only recently that people began transitioning to backyard farms. (Or, as Hahn prefers to call them, “edible gardens”—“When you say ‘farm,’ people think of tractors and Porta-Potties,” she says.)

“The bottom line is that the code didn’t contemplate this,” says Hahn. “It anticipates piano lessons, college counseling, therapy.” In other words, quiet in-home businesses. This makes sense to her. “I don’t want, say, a car repair shop in the yard,” she says. “But edibles grow as quietly as flowers.”

Hahn is not the first would-be backyard farmer to encounter this set of problems. In an era of E. coli outbreaks, high food prices, and a torrent of food industry exposés, the push for locally-produced food has taken off in cities nationwide. But in many cases it has run straight into a regulatory wall. Most zoning codes, like Berkeley’s, are written to maintain separation between commercial and residential areas, and almost none address food production. Add the challenges of potentially contaminated soil, limited water, and neighbors unhappy about the smell of compost, and any project more ambitious than a hobby garden can seem daunting. Still, the small scale of what Hahn is proposing makes it possible to resolve these issues. None of her neighbors has ever complained about the farm, she says, and if anyone did have problem, it would be easy for that person to come talk to her because they’re neighbors. (That said, Hahn notes that changing the code would make it harder for one disgruntled person to sabotage an otherwise popular project.)

Farmers across the country have found individual workarounds. In Flint, Michigan, a collaborative of urban gardeners is working with the city to rewrite outdated codes with an eye towards local food production. In Detroit, which has a large percentage of vacant land within city limits, high– and low-tech urban agriculture is one solution to the search for a new industry. Entrepreneurs and do-it-yourself homeowners are flocking to the city, and a number of proposals to rezone certain neighborhoods and authorize farm projects are currently before the city government. (The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network says 900 farms already exist within city limits; meanwhile, an entrepreneur and money manager named John Hantz is offering to put up $30 million to convert large plots of city land to a conventional farm.) In Buffalo, New York, a couple last year reached an agreement with the city to lease 27 acres of vacant land for farming, provided they sell the food locally, and with the understanding that the city may still develop the space in the future. And in Sacramento, the city government amended its codes in 2007 to allow front-yard vegetable gardens, which it had previously forbidden as unsightly.

With the possible exception of Detroit, these are piecemeal solutions to what many people believe is a much bigger problem. Cities might be able to produce enough food to feed their residents, but to do it they need to rethink the way they use space, and that includes changing zoning laws to allow for small-scale businesses like Hahn’s. Berkeley has written goals for local food production into its long-term Climate Action Plan, including commitments to “encourage… buildings to incorporate rooftop gardens that can be used for food production,” “encourage residents to grow food in home and community gardens,” and “support local efforts to provide training to residents in farming and gardening techniques.” Right now, though, they’re just goals.

For now, Hahn and Rosenthal are giving their produce away to neighbors, but as the farm heads into its first full season, they’re again looking at ways to change the law. Though the concerns someone might have about a farm—“yucky smells and loud noises,” says Rosenthal—seem not to apply to Hahn’s farm, both she and Rosenthal say that zoning changes must take neighbor’s comfort levels into account. Still, they say, those changes can be consistent with levels of nuisance and noise that people already take for granted. “People are allowed to have dogs, and dogs are noisy,” says Rosenthal. “Construction workers and landscape workers can start making noise at 7 am.”

“I think it will take time for people to change their way of thinking about this,” says Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguín, who has spoken with Hahn about drafting legislation that would change the city’s code to encourage small-scale farms like the one she proposes. “We’re trying to achieve more sustainability,” he says, “but it takes a while for our law to change to catch up.”

Why go to all this trouble in the first place? Hahn lives in a foodie Mecca, replete with farmers’ markets and local produce at every grocery store. But for Hahn, even local food isn’t local enough. For example, she points out, “local” food often comes from the Central Valley. “If I can grow it in my own backyard, why would I get it from Salinas?” she asks. She wants to do everything she can, she says, to reduce her “food-miles”—the distance food travels from farm to plate—to zero.

The idea of food that’s “more local than local” has a certain appeal for some, though they can’t always put their fingers on exactly what that appeal is. “When I get the veggies, they have just been picked,” says Austene Hall, who lives down the hill from Hahn and has been getting vegetables from her for a number of months. After a pause, she adds, “I really like having it right next door. Willow and I chat over the wall; I hear all about what they’re planting and why.”

Hall also likes that she can eat vegetables that may as well have been grown in her own backyard, without actually having to grow them. Though she’s vegetarian and describes herself as an avid gardener, she prefers flowers to food and has no interest in trying to meet her own vegetable needs. To Hahn, that’s the reason the model she’s proposing is so crucial. Growing food requires time, resources, and skills that most urban dwellers don’t have and aren’t willing to acquire. “If you want to reduce the total amount of food trucked and shipped, you need a model where a paid professional
is doing it,” she says.

Rosenthal agrees. “We don’t think everyone should sew their own clothes. Why should everyone grow their own food? It doesn’t make sense,” she says. “There’s a huge number of people interested in using their yards to produce food for their families, but because of life circumstances they will never put time into actually growing it. They are in an economic bracket where they want to hire someone to do that for them, just as they would hire a landscaper to maintain their nonedible landscape. If we ignore these people, we ignore a vast productive capacity within the community.”

Despite the challenges, says Rosenthal, people’s growing interest in the origins and sustainability of their food means that the time is right for cities to take on these issues. “People are starting to ask, ‘How do we want to use our collective resources?’” she says. “I have complete faith that these things will change.”

Since the US housing market began its collapse in mid-2007, foreclosures have forced millions of people from their homes. Families leave behind neighbors, possessions, even pets in ever-growing ghost towns. Then there are the thousands of homes that were never filled in the first place: swaying high-rise towers and cookie-cutter single-family houses built for residents who never came. Nationwide, about three percent of homes sit vacant. For homes built since 2000—the beginning of the boom—the vacancy rate is nearly ten percent.

What to do with these empty spaces? And who should be in charge of doing it? The sheer scale of the task makes it a daunting problem. To try to sort it out, I talked to Allison Arieff, editor-at-large for Menlo Park-based Sunset magazine and author of the New York Times’ “By Design” blog.

Arieff has a background in architecture, and she has been keeping an eye on the American landscape for some time. Earlier this year, she wrote two long “By Design” columns surveying the state of the suburbs and contemplating their future. A solution won’t be easy to figure out, she wrote: The American suburb is not only vast and decentralized, it’s often connected only to vast and decentralized supply chains. It’s much easier to build a Wal-Mart on top of farmland than it is to tear down that Wal-Mart and put a local food source in its place, especially when the customer base has all but evaporated. “I feel really, really bad for anyone who bought a home in the first phase of a development that then didn’t continue,” Arieff tells me. “Because they’re never going to sell what they’re in, so they can’t leave, and it’s tragic.”

This is a key point: despite all the problems with the suburbs, Arieff doesn’t advocate abandoning them altogether. Her hope, she says, is that those spaces can become more livable for the people who remain there; that the foreclosure crisis, awful as it is, represents an opportunity. “I still dream that some major overhaul can occur: that a self-sufficient mixed-use neighborhood can emerge,” she wrote in one of her columns. “That three-car-garaged McMansions can be subdivided into rental units with streetfront cafés, shops, and other local businesses. In short, that creative ways are found not just to rehabilitate these homes and communities, but to keep people in them.”

Since Arieff published her musings in early 2009, things have only gotten bleaker. Is there still hope for a suburban turnaround? I spoke with Arieff in mid-October to find out.

What do you find most striking about abandoned developments?
It was pretty striking even before things started to get bad. I’ve visited a wide range of master-planned developments, mostly in Phoenix and Tampa, and I remember thinking, “God, they’re building an awful lot of these!” There were things that just intuitively made no sense. People in Phoenix telling us how much they loved their water view, but their water view was a man-made lake. It was wrong on every level. The ones I’ve visited more recently are around Merced, which I think has the highest foreclosure rate in California. And what’s amazing is just how much a lack there was of any kind of thought or planning. In some of these places, what’s as bad as the empty houses is the amount of land that was prepared for houses to be built but where no houses have gone up. It’s ravaged land. I went to developments where it was like, “We’re going to have ten thousand houses here,” and maybe two thousand were built, but they went ahead and prepared for the rest of them anyway. There are roads, maybe even signs, but no houses.

Do you have a sense of how Northern California’s suburbs compare to those elsewhere? Are we in better or worse shape than, say, Phoenix, and why?
Northern California is vast. Marin County is doing great, for example, while Modesto is falling apart. Phoenix is probably worse, though equal to the Central Valley. The potential for reuse is different here and everywhere else throughout the country. So much depends on cost of living, climate, codes, etc.

What are some of the other barriers to reuse? What would it take to repurpose the land and/or the buildings into, say, multi-unit apartments?
I’ve come across some innovative ideas but the costs are often so high so real transformation is difficult: If you build a four thousand-square-foot house that has one kitchen, turning it into apartments is not just a matter of putting on a few new doors. So not a lot of change has happened yet. But the biggest problem for the majority of the houses is that they weren’t built with the greatest materials. There’s not a lot of flexibility for repurposing when the buildings were not constructed well to begin with, or with healthy or recyclable materials. It’s not like you can repurpose vinyl siding.

In a perfect world, someone would sit down, look at the community plan, and say, “What can we do to make this more sustainable? Can we add retail, can one of those buildings be turned into a school?” It’s expensive, obviously, but it just seems like the best way to knit these communities back together instead of allowing them to fall apart.

Urban farming is an idea that’s gaining a lot of ground lately, especially in Northern California. Do you see a role for suburban farming as well?
I certainly think it’s feasible, more in some places than others. Merced, for example, was and is agricultural, so they could bring some of it back. You hear all those stories about the crisis of American farmers and farmland, so I think that that stuff should absolutely be put back. It seems to me to be sort of a great solution to employment issues as well. A lot of people would be ready for that kind of work.

But that goes to the larger idea of self-sufficiency and sustainability. If you are suburban or exurban, what are ways you can transform your neighborhood into something more walkable and self-maintaining? What services can you make more localized? I think schools and health clinics could be more localized—franchised clinics, almost like storefronts. You could just go there to pick up little things you need. Local and regional governments should be finding ways to incentivize all that kind of stuff. It’s not that there aren’t obstacles in terms of zoning, but let’s try a transitional solution—it’s not a lifetime commitment, we don’t have to do an environmental feasibility study. Let’s just try it. A colleague plays a sort of parlor game: What could we do if all impediments were lifted for six months? We’ve got to do some thinking under that paradigm and see what’s possible.

One of the great ironies seems that in order to really rehab vacant suburbs, you would need at least some people to commit to moving there, perhaps urban dwellers who are already used to making creative use of limited space. You’ve noted on your blog that there’s still a strong urban/suburban divide in this country. Do you think city dwellers would do it? Or is it a chicken-egg situation, where the urban dwellers would go to the suburbs if they were more like cities, but the only way they’re going to become more like cities is if urban dwellers migrate and transform them?

I’d hate to think it would require people from cities to move into the suburbs to do these things. I have no doubt there are suburban dwellers with innovative, transformative ideas; we don’t need to export urbanites to do it for them. I grew up in Marin County, which is a really nice suburb; I could walk to school, walk to a café. So I have little to quibble with about the design of a place like that. What I do have an issue with is something like in Phoenix where you have four man-made lakes and 30,000 houses and you have to drive an hour to get to anything. People heading for the suburbs move there thinking they’re getting certain things, and they may or may not be aware of what they’re missing.

We have to be able to illustrate the benefits of things like walkable communities, things people thought of as being important to urban neighborhoods, but left out of suburban developments. I don’t think people who live in suburbs are against those things necessarily. There’s just an extreme disconnect between perceived wants and desires and actual ones. There’s no reason to design anything that isn’t self-sustaining, walkable. I think if the developers would build them that people would start using them.

Is there a model for a rehabbed suburb?
That’s a complex question—I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer. It would depend so much on, say, the proximity of that place to places of employment or a university or something. What would be the economic driver to get people to that part of town? Or is that particular community one that should be bulldozed over and made into agriculture? So much is dependent on transit systems—if you can’t get anywhere, it shouldn’t be allowed to be built. But that just hasn’t been happening in development out here. I would hope there could be little test-case communities, and that once you show something works, that could help influence further development.

It’s all tied into this notion about the American dream and what that means. Can we design multi-family homes and denser communities and still have that be an acceptable goal for American mobility? Even the most liberal people I know in San Francisco go on and on about how much they hate density. Yet there’s nothing inherently problematic about density if done right. There are ingrained cultural things about what the suburbs symbolize and what the American dream really is. How do you begin to unwind all that stuff?

Do you see any change underway?
I see sprinklings of it, but no full-scale change. Most people don’t have five minutes to think about this. When gas prices started climbing up, people started buying out of exurban communities, trying to move in closer. They realized it was too much of a tradeoff to live so far away, so they were willing to buy a condo in the city or move to something closer, something smaller. Boomers are also buying out, selling their large single-family homes and moving into smaller places for cost reasons, or quality of life, or because they’re not able to retire when they thought. Will that move end up translating into smaller homes or denser communities? It may because of economic necessity, and I hope so. But I think that it needs to be driven continuously by the economic push, much like you see with environmental issues across the board. I have no illusions that people are all of a sudden going to be more virtuous. But that’s okay because what I have seen a lot are examples of individuals really making unique and often old-fashioned efforts at community-building within old neighborhoods—babysitter-sharing, food-sharing. I think more and more of those sorts of things are happening, and that’s the kind of thing where a deeply hard-hit community that’s not totally empty but has people left—those people could start to find their way to those solutions.

I’m wondering if you could talk a little more about the economics of trying to change land use. It’s hard to see how big corporations would be motivated to rehab houses/lots into denser or multi-use spaces.

Agreed. I can’t say I have the answer, but we can’t continue on this track. We seem poised for a second housing crash right now. How to stop it? Can we convert these homes to rentals? To housing for workers so they can live close to their employers? University housing? Senior facilities? Can we initiate temporary tax incentives toward restoring this land to parkland or to agricultural use? There is no one simple answer. Of course any transformation is expensive. But equally, if not more expensive, is keeping a lot of empty, unmaintained homes and simply doing nothing.

Will leadership on this issue come from the top or the bottom? Does government have a role?
I think it’s far more likely that change will come from individuals and small groups. No solution is going to work nationwide. Smaller, context-specific interventions seem to have the best chance right now. No one has the money to do a sort of New Deal type transformation of everything; the states are just all too strapped. So I don’t see a lot of top-down initiatives like that happening. Not that there aren’t any, but ones that are succeeding start at the other end. Those ground-up efforts are going to be the most successful and will, I believe, lead, rather than follow, national, federal, or local ones. Community initiatives are great, but it takes money to tear down developments, convert McMansions into multifamily units, create a transit network, etc. Without capital to change them, are the suburbs due to rot? Those things do require tons of money and tons of concentrated thought and planning. But I think you can also create a kind of micro-economy. I would love to think that remaining neighbors in hard-hit communities could be resourceful and say, “Right now we’re all driving to Wal-Mart in separate cars. Instead, let’s start a food-buying program, let’s have a clothing swap. Let’s start with small things and start saving people money that way.” I keep discovering new sites, initiatives, programs that aim to create and foster community: things like WeCommune.org, Shareable.net, the Star Community Index (ICLEIUSA.org), that head things in the right direction. Obviously, the impact, if things revert to the old ways, is devastating. More waste, more environmental disintegration, and honestly, a real lack of hope for any real change.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
Depends on the day. I sincerely hope people won’t go back to the way things were. Unfortunately, history suggests they will. Remember the ‘80s and all that excess? Clearly no lessons were learned there.

I go to housing conferences sometimes, and I’m like, “Oh my God! People aren’t paying attention!” I went to a shopping mall conference, and I just couldn’t believe it. Everybody there really thought that everything would come back to exactly how it was, and they just kind of needed to wait it out. No one was really rethinking their 400,000 square feet of retail palace. It doesn’t all have to change completely, but I don’t think that’s a viable model. It is unnerving when people insist on doing things the way they’ve been doing them despite clear evidence that change is necessary. I think that happens a lot with the housing industry also. They think, “We’re good at what we do, we can continue to do it, this is just a cycle.” So that’s when I feel quite negative.

Then again, I think if you can turn an old Wal-Mart into a church, not all is lost.

But there’s another way to tell the future, and that’s by looking at the past. Paleoecologists use fossils from hundreds of thousands of years ago to deduce not only what the climate was like, but also how the local landscape changed when, say, a major ice age began or ended. UC Berkeley paleoecologist Anthony Barnosky started studying fossils in the Rocky Mountains in the 1980s because he liked being outside and wanted to do fieldwork, but he soon realized he had stumbled upon something much more significant. “There’s a lot that the fossil record actually has to tell us about how what ‘normal’ really means in terms of nature,” he says. “How far are we off of that normal baseline? Are we off of it at all? And if we are, how do we fix it for the future?”

Barnosky recently published Heatstroke, a book examining through the lens of the fossil record what effects climate change will have on major mammal species. Perhaps more importantly, he addresses how quickly those changes might happen, and how our own ideas of conservation and protection of wildlife will have to change as a result. If we want wilderness, says Barnosky, we’re going to have to accept that the climate will change what it looks like—and that means letting some species die out.

Right now, that idea is heresy—how many millions have been spent to protect the giant panda? But Barnosky thinks that preserving undeveloped spaces, and the complete ecosystems within them, is more important to our sense of life on earth than keeping completely human-dependent animals alive. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t want to preserve biodiversity—he’s got some ideas for that, too—only that we have to think about it differently. I spoke with Anthony Barnosky in late July about the idea of wilderness, telling our fortune with fossils, and how to be a responsible environmentalist in the 21st century.

What convinced you that studying the fossil record is key to understanding current climate change?
I was doing grad work at the University of Washington, and at the time there was a big debate about whether direct pressures by people or natural climate change had caused the extinctions at the end of the last ice age, about 11,500 years ago. Since about 2.6 million years ago, there have been about 39 cycles of glacier growth (an ice age or glacial time) and retreat (an interglacial, as we are in now). For at least the last million years, each glacial-interglacial cycle has lasted about 100,000 years ago, with the glacial part of the cycle longer than the interglacial. Around 11,500 years ago, we came out of the last ice age, and into our present interglacial.

During my grad work, I happened upon a fossil site in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, which had a really, really
good sample of communities of mammals that lived during both glacial and interglacial times, long before humans even evolved. It was a really nice natural experiment: What are the effects of climate change if you take humans out of the picture?

The big thing we found by studying that site, after twenty years of work with a huge team of scientists, is that natural climate change seems to affect ecosystems from the bottom up. Normally you see changes in rodent– and rabbit-sized things, or changes in abundance, minor replacements of species. But really not much happens to the big guys, the megafauna. The difference between that and what humans are doing today is that we’re affecting the top end of ecosystems, through direct pressures like hunting and poaching as well as habitat fragmentation. The pace and magnitude of the current climate change means we’re even seeing climatic effects on larger species. The top carnivores and predators are being affected as well as the bottom ones.

Can you give some examples of where we might see this?
The classic example is something like polar bears, which are just disappearing off the face of the Earth. There are other, more subtle examples. In South Africa, where you see many of the large herbivores, big antelope things with spectacular curvy horns and so on, many of those species are actually being pushed out of various African national parks because they’re getting too dry in the dry season. When those animals go, larger carnivores that rely on them for food are going to go too. So you get this cascading effect. There’s the direct effect, like polar bears, then the indirect cascading relationships that end up causing a lot of things to go extinct.

Something I think it’s hard for people to get their minds around is how a loss of biodiversity will directly affect their lives. They hear about some beetle going extinct and can’t really figure out why that’s a catastrophe. Can you articulate
what we will lose, and why we should care?
There are really three reasons. One of them is a very practical reason, which is that it turns out we rely on other species in ways that people just don’t even think about. And without them, human life would be much poorer. A great example is the drugs we use, say, high blood pressure medicine that hundreds of thousands of people use. One comes from a very poisonous snake in South America called the fer-de-lance. It’s the only source of this drug Captopril, a common high blood pressure medication. That’s the only way to get it. The whole pharmaceutical industry has teams of people bioprospecting in remote parts of the world. There’s a fairly large percentage of pharmaceuticals that are derived from wild species. Talk about effects that would result from destroying most of the Amazon: You get rid of a lot of potentially life-saving drugs.

A more subtle example of this is that natural vegetation filters water in a way that’s economically more advantageous than building a filtration plant. So the city of New York buys property in rural areas as the cheapest way to provide water to Manhattan. It’s another example of “ecosystem services.”

Another reason is the moral obligation that some people would speak to, that we share the Earth with other species. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. And then the third reason I think is that the human species
has evolved with these other species, and we like places with biodiversity. We get something back from it aesthetically, which I think ultimately is the reason most nature preserves exist. We’re a poorer world for not having them.

What does responsible environmentalism look like in the 21st century? How do we have to reenvision our ideas?
The way we’ve tried to preserve species isn’t going to work any more. Trying to keep the place they live in as a protected habitat is reasonably effective, but climate change is now so fast that those protective nature areas are really just islands. As soon as you pull the climatic rug out from under that species, the animals have no way to get from the island they’re on to the island that may have a more suitable climate.

If a wildlife reserve isn’t practical, what are other options?
People are talking about assisted migration, which is what happens now with some species of butterflies. So, species X is going to go extinct in a particular place, but look, eighty miles north the climate is still suitable. Let’s take some representatives of that species and move them to the new place. If we do that, we will be moving species around in order to save them. And that’s great for saving biodiversity if it’s done right. But the flip side of that is that an important aspect of preserving wildlife is preserving the feeling of being in a place that’s undisturbed by humans. And as soon as we start moving species all over, we’re in danger of losing those places. The recommendation I make in the book is to shift our philosophy so we think in terms of two kinds of conservation: one with the express purpose of preserving biodiversity, something like assisted migration; the other, a hands-off philosophy that would let nature take its course with new climate and see what happens.

The wildlands reserves would be places where we do not under any circumstances import any species. And the climate is going to change, so we’re going to lose, in some cases, many of the species that are in there. But it’s important to have those kinds of control plots on nature. We need places where you can still experience the feeling of nature without humans interfering.

For example, one of the world’s most spectacular areas of biodiversity is the Tambopata wildlife preserve on the border of Peru and Bolivia. It’s right on the edge of the Amazon, and climatic models predict that it has a high likelihood of changing from rainforest to savannah. One way you can look at that is to say, well, it’s going to disappear anyway, so let’s get logging trucks in there and make lots of money. Another way to look at it is to say, this place is pristine. Let’s watch it change into a new kind of pristine.

I understand this idea of preserving a feeling of wilderness for people to enjoy. But realistically, a place that’s going to change from rainforest to savannah thanks to human action doesn’t really seem like a wilderness. It seems more like a petri dish.
“Wilderness” is a moving target in terms of specifics. If you define it in a way where people haven’t affected it at all, well, there’s no place on Earth. On the other hand, people have always been a part of nature and interacted with nature, part of wilderness and interacted with wilderness, so I don’t think we’re entirely separate from local ecosystems. There are still a lot of places on Earth where there aren’t too many people—close to half the terrestrial landscape, in fact. And there are places that, if you go to them, you feel like you’re in a landscape that isn’t overrun by people.

That’s the feeling that I think needs to be preserved. There’s a quote from Wallace Stegner in my book: “Better
a wounded wilderness than nothing at all.” I tend to dismiss arguments that say there is no nature, there is no wilderness left. Give me one of those people and let me take them to the backcountry of Yellowstone Park and leave them for a week, then see if they tell me there’s no more nature.

Which specific species should we try to preserve?
There are certain species called keystone species whose disappearance would have dramatic effects on the rest of the ecosystem. Elephants are a good example of that. If they go, open woodland turns to closed forest, and there’s a whole cascade of things that go along with that. Secondly, you want to maintain diversity in the sense that, if you have two equally threatened species, one of which has a whole bunch of closely related species, the other of which is the only such species in the genus, of course you’d want to preserve that one.

What about California natives?
It’s difficult to say exactly. What we do know is projecting where the climate that supports certain species
will actually be in ninety years indicates that neither the California state tree (California redwood) nor the California state bird (California Valley Quail) will be able to live in California.  For keystone species a bit farther afield, a good example is the whitebark pine, which is being severely reduced in Yellowstone Park due to a combination of warming winter temperatures and infestations of pine beetles and blister rust (the pine beetles are moving in because winter temperatures are no longer cold enough to kill them). Whitebark pine cones provide a critical food resource to sustain grizzly bears during certain parts of the year when other food resources are scarce. The grizzlies raid the caches of whitebark pine nuts that red squirrels have accumulated to help them make it through the lean times. Thus disappearance of whitebark pine is likely to cause reductions in both red squirrels and grizzlies.

It seems like a stroke of good luck that many “keystone species” are the sorts of animals that play well on calendars.
It is true that in a lot of cases the keystone species align with so-called “charismatic species,” because they’re often the top carnivores. If you take out the top carnivores, you immediately have increasing herbivore populations. The reintroduction
of wolves into the ecosystem of Yellowstone National Park has brought down elk populations and allowed aspen and willow to regenerate, really increased the diversity of life there.

Do you think humans are going to come around to these ideas, and do what is necessary to preserve not only our ability to live on the Earth but our sense of it as a place?
I have good days and bad days on that. Overall, I’m optimistic in the sense that when the human race recognizes a big problem, we seem to be pretty good at dealing with it. The state we’re at right now is not having recognized that we have a big problem. Still, if you think about awareness of global warming now versus ten years ago, there have been huge strides. It’s kind of a race against time. I think that if we get people thinking about this and recognizing what the problems are, we have a good chance of fixing it. But it’s not going to happen without governmental involvement, and it’s not going to happen without
a grassroots movement. We have to be working at it from both the top and the bottom.

Is there anyone out there now doing work you think others should emulate?
There are some very interesting initiatives going on now. One that’s been around for a long time is a group called the Yukon to Yellowstone Initiative, which has the goal of maintaining migration corridors between all natural areas in the Rocky Mountains. That’s one strategy that is going to be very helpful. I think Patagonia has just launched an initiative, maybe about a year old, where they’re doing similar sorts of things where there are still some semblance of natural landscapes
and trying to connect them by corridors. But of course now we have to think about overlaying projections about climate
on those corridors to make sure the species we want to preserve are going to have climate to move to.

There’s also an idea called win-win ecology, which focuses on preserving biodiversity by doing some fairly simple things like planting native vegetation in your yard instead of lawn. It’s one example of how we can actually design our living spaces and human-intensive landscapes to maximize habitats for other species as well. Those strategies are part of the picture. The ecosystem services angle is also going to be very important in terms of putting values on these services we get from different species. It has to be a whole cluster of strategies.

It’s a sunny morning in mid-April, and about sixty Northern California “water people,” as the speakers affectionately call themselves—managers, attorneys, and specialists in all things water-related—are gathered in a hotel conference room in San Francisco to discuss the condition of the state’s water system. Between the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009—the start of the state’s “water year”—California had almost no rain. It was the state’s third straight dry year. Officials and water managers were panicked; districts across the state began imposing mandatory rationing and long lists of rules for water use.

But then, in February, it rained. In March, it rained more. By the beginning of April, most regions of the state had received slightly less precipitation than average—it wasn’t overly wet, but neither was it critically dry. The worst, it seemed, had passed.

Wendy Martin is not so sure. As the drought coordinator for the California Department of Water Resources, her job is to look beyond the rain’s immediate effects. “We have to be careful,” she tells the group. “We cannot give people a sense of relief that the crisis has passed. Because it hasn’t.”

While this may be obvious to the “water people,” it’s not so easy to sell the public, in part because the rain really did make a difference. While the state’s biggest reservoirs are far from full, they’re fairly close to average for this time of year. Add in a solid snowpack, and there’s more water available for the coming year than anyone thought there would be.

But the longer-term picture isn’t pretty. An increasing population and expanding agricultural needs, not to mention the wild card of climate change, are all putting pressure on the state’s water system. Conservation and efficiency must become the norm. The problem is how to get people to look past the last big rainstorm.
The door to the conference room is open, and across the hall a floor-to-ceiling window offers a panoramic view of the blue bay, the sky above it crisscrossed by planes arriving and departing San Francisco Airport. The scene is a fitting backdrop for a conference devoted to a fundamental California paradox: Even when you can see nothing but water, you still don’t have enough.

In 1933, the California Supreme Court wrote in a landmark water rights decision that “it requires no extraordinary foresight to envision the great and increasing population of the state and its further agricultural and industrial enterprises dependent upon stored water.” The court continued, “The conservation of the waters of the state is of transcendent importance.”

Nearly eight decades later, California is still struggling to find ways to put that sentiment into practice. The state’s population has more than tripled in the last fifty years, driving up demand as supply remained relatively constant. Agricultural production increased as well: California now produces close to half of the nation’s domestic fruits and vegetables and nearly a quarter of its milk. All told, the state demands billions of gallons of water every day.

Yet the state is drier than ever. After suffering severe droughts in the late ‘70s and early ‘90s, California entered another dry spell in 2006. A dry year is one in which the state receives less water than normal from at least one of its main sources: precipitation, snowpack, runoff, and reservoirs. Local water districts can also run short for regulatory reasons—for example, when the state or federal government restricts pumping in order to protect fish stocks.

Water districts typically encourage conservation in dry years, shying away from mandatory restrictions unless they’re absolutely necessary. But last summer, the combination of dry weather and pumping restrictions meant to protect fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta led Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a statewide drought for the first time in California’s history. As recently as this January, water districts around the state were instituting water rationing programs, drastic rate hikes, and supply cutbacks. San Diego encouraged residents to tattle on profligate neighbors. In the North Bay, the town of Bolinas threatened to cut off water to serial wasters. At the time of the drought conference in April, farmers in the Central Valley had just embarked on a four-day march to protest the state and federal regulations that, along with the dry weather, forced many farms to lie fallow.

The environmental and economic effects of the current drought will be felt for years. Over 16,000 fires burned more than 1.5 million acres of land and cost the state a billion dollars to fight; the state also suffered nearly $400 million in agricultural losses, and more than 100,000 acres were left unplanted. Related job losses are projected to reach 23,000 this year.

Fortunately, February and March saw significantly more rainfall than expected—about eighty percent of the normal amount. In the Bay Area, it was enough that EBMUD, the East Bay’s water district, voted to repeal drought rates and stop requiring mandatory conservation as of July 1. Even Bolinas lifted all of its restrictions.

But the relief was short-lived. Rainfall in April was again below average, and at the end of the month, two of the state’s largest reservoirs, Shasta and Oroville, were at barely three-quarters of their average storage. The third reservoir, San Luis, was at just over half its average and significantly lower than last year. State and federal water allocations have been reduced as well, and in some cases cut off entirely. “We’re really thankful for February and March,” says Richard Harris, EBMUD’s water conservation manager. “Even May has started out with a bang. But we’re still below normal, and this is still the third year in a row.”
For Harris and the rest of the state’s water managers, the challenge now is to convince residents that the drought is just a symptom of a larger problem, one that won’t wash away with the rain. To create lasting change, people will have to adjust the way they think about water. Wendy Martin believes that this year’s restrictions, and the public awareness campaigns that accompanied them, present a unique opportunity to catch people’s attention. “This is about changing, long-term, what we do,” she tells the water managers at the drought conference. “We have to be more frugal.”

For water districts, conservation is a double-edged sword. As one speaker at the conference put it, “conservation is good, but so is revenue.” Water districts have a mandate to supply water to their customers, so it’s in their interest to conserve and make sure everyone gets enough. But when people use less water, the district makes less money. Higher drought rates can make up some of the shortfall, but not always enough to cover costs.

In early April, at the meeting where EBMUD voted to lift its drought rates, board members debated for some time about whether to leave them in place over the summer to make up the money they lost by imposing mandatory conservation—customers had reduced water use by an average of thirteen percent. Ultimately, the board decided it couldn’t justify continuing an emergency rate structure without an emergency. The board hopes that people will use more water than they did under mandatory conservation, but less than they would if supply were no concern at all.

Complicating matters in the East Bay is the fact that around the time the drought charges disappear, a regular rate hike of 7.5 percent will start appearing on bills. Customers will pay less than they did under drought rates but more than they did before the drought began. Harris acknowledges that some customers may feel that their conservation doesn’t mean anything if their bills don’t change. But, he says, relative to most other necessities, water is cheap. “Water is still very, very inexpensive,” he says. “It’s still one of the best bargains going.”

The fact that it’s a bargain may be part of the problem, says David Zetland, a UC Berkeley economist who studies California’s water: “Pricing should reflect the scarcity of water,” he says. Zetland, who keeps a blog about water economics at Aguanomics.com, thinks that until prices reflect demand, the state will continue to run short because no one has an incentive to conserve. “Eighty percent of the people do not care,” he says. “It’s just not worth their time. And they will only use less when it comes down to price.”
Harris says that in many cases, people don’t even have to conserve. If they fixed leaks and installed new appliances, they would save significantly without having to alter their lifestyles. Still, Harris says that
lifting the drought restrictions will ease up on the need for some conservation measures that people considered truly drastic, like letting their lawns go brown and taking shorter showers. “People will relax on some of those changes that are considered doable, but a little uncomfortable,” he says.

Art Jensen would like to find a happy medium. As the general manager for the Bay Area Water Supply & Conservation Agency, he oversees the water for 27 cities around the bay. One of the last people to speak at the April conference, Jensen is witty and able to get a rise out of the crowd, even at the end of the day. Over the long term, he tells them, there isn’t enough water; he worries that people will have to migrate out of population centers and into areas where water is more abundant, and he believes that Californians can no longer “build our way out” of water shortages by constructing more dams and pumps to haul it longer distances.

But in the short term, he advocates a more moderate, flexible approach to saving water. His district, for example, has reduced water use sixteen percent over the last two years, and has purchased the same amount of water for nearly two decades, despite population growth. But as he’s keen to point out, users’ behavior isn’t uniform: In his district, per capita consumption ranges from 50 to 338 gallons a day. “Should everybody be made to live the same way?” he asks. “This country hasn’t adopted that kind of a philosophy. And yet, when we’re talking about limited resources, it can’t just be ‘as much as you want.’ Because that much doesn’t exist.”

Although Jensen agrees that some change is necessary, “we don’t have to change our lifestyles dramatically,” he says. “I don’t think we have to disadvantage ourselves.” Instead, he urges compromise. For example, he says, you don’t have to sacrifice having a yard; a homeowner could skip the moisture-sucking rhododendrons, planting drought-tolerant or native plants instead. Combined with high-efficiency appliances and sensible watering patterns, that homeowner would conserve a good deal. “A low water-use yard doesn’t have to be ugly,” Jensen stresses. “You can still have blooms and nice smells all year around. I think that’s important.” (He’s a little less flexible about another conservation issue, though: “I think we have to spend the public’s money on replacing toilets,” he tells the crowd at the conference. “Even if we have to break into their homes to do it.”)

In his district, Jensen is pursuing long-term solutions: landscape audits for corporate clients, city conservation ordinances, and massive outreach and education campaigns that seek to make conservation the norm. These kinds of approaches would give people some breathing room, he says, and help them feel like they’re making their own choices rather than being forced to live a certain way.

At EBMUD, Harris says conservation workers will continue to pursue many of the strategies they already use: targeting heavy water users for outreach and education, giving out rebates for high-efficiency washing machines and toilets, conducting public education campaigns, and encouraging people to voluntarily cut their use by ten to fifteen percent. “It’s a testament to our customers that we’re able to pull out of this early,” he says, referring to the drought restrictions. “But we’re not out of the woods yet. We still need you to continue to do what you did two years ago, so we can stretch next year’s supply and avoid mandatory rationing if we have a fourth dry year.”

While Harris doubts everyone will participate, he believes that once acquired, conservation habits die hard. In the long term, it’s all about perception. “I think people have to view the resource differently,” he says. “They shouldn’t see [conservation] as a hardship or a takeaway. We want people to see this as a solution.”
As an example of water frugality, Wendy Martin cites Australia, which has suffered from a decade-long drought. Some regions limit citizens to thirty or forty gallons of water each day, mandate four-minute showers and graywater systems, and forbid outdoor watering. At the conference, these numbers provoke a collective gasp; “low use” in California is more in the range of 100–150 gallons per day.

California’s situation is not yet as dire as Australia’s—but it could be. Martin believes that achieving Australia-like savings would require people to view water scarcity as a permanent condition, rather than a temporary inconvenience. “When it’s abundant, we use it,” she says. “That’s human nature.” Although Martin admits she would have a hard time managing an Australian-style shower, she thinks it’s a matter of perspective. “There are places where people don’t have water to drink,” she says. “Decadence is a twenty-minute shower.”

Even among water people, perceptions of decadence are relative. Martin recalls that an Australian water official recently insisted to her that California didn’t have a water shortage. “He said, ‘You have turf everywhere,’” she explains, referring to the ubiquitous lawn. The Australian official reasoned that if all the water devoted to outdoor landscaping went to personal consumption, hygiene and agriculture, California would be out of its drought.

But will Californians buy into conservation as a lifestyle? For now, the state is back from the brink. But that edge is still visible, even if Martin sees it more clearly than the millions of water users she seeks to protect. “As a state, we need to start developing strategies,” she says. “There’s not going to be more water.”

Shafer’s house is an original, and his business, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, designs and builds similar structures for anyone who wants them. A fully built, custom-made tiny house costs about $40,000; the plans cost $1,000. Anyone willing to put in the time to collect recycled materials, says Shafer, could use his plans to build his or her own house for around $10,000. And lest you worry that 89 square feet is not sufficient for you and your cat, never mind your spouse and children, Shafer has thought of you, too: the largest “tiny house” he offers is 900 square feet, with multiple bedrooms.

“My definition of small house can go up to and beyond 4,000 square feet,” he says. “If a large house is being used very efficiently by a bunch of people, I think that can be very beautiful. And I would still call that a small house.”

Born in Iowa and raised outside of Los Angeles, Shafer returned to Iowa as a teenager and lived there until just two years ago, when he towed his first tiny house back West. Around Sebastopol, he’s one of a few people who design and build tiny houses. (Exact numbers are hard to come by: Most building codes don’t accommodate tiny houses, so tiny-house dwellers don’t always advertise their living arrangements. “Most of them are totally secretive,” says Shafer, adding, “there’s three or four of us who are out of our tiny closets.”)

The trend seems to be catching on: companies like Shafer’s are thriving in Texas and California, and tiny house Web sites exist across the Internet. Shafer’s work has been featured in the New York Times and other major media outlets, and he’s sold houses to people as far away as Australia and Taiwan.

When I met Shafer in late September, the national zeitgeist about housing seemed to be shifting. For decades, politicians had emphasized homeownership as the key to prosperity and the attainment of the American dream. But the collapse of the housing market and subsequently the wider economy signaled to many people the end of infinite credit, and with it, infinite expansion. The shift puts Shafer, who runs a for-profit company, in a unique position. On the one hand, he is offering a small-scale, sustainable vision of what it means to own a home. On the other, he is doing it as part of an industry that by definition requires consumption. Can the two be reconciled?

With that tension in mind, Shafer and I sat down (in two tiny chairs) to discuss the logistics of tiny living, reformed McMansion dwellers, and whether building houses can ever really be green.

How do people respond when they first set foot in one of your houses?

People get really excited about it. I can only speculate as to why, but from my own perspective it seems like in a tiny house there’s just no room for the extras. The superfluous space, the superfluous parts are done away with, and all you’re left with is this essence of home. And I think that’s an archetypal hot button for people. We all love a homey home.

And there’s so much potential. People immediately intuit that a smaller home equals freedom. With a tiny house, you really eliminate a lot of the mortgage payments and vacuuming and what-not. All that time is time then spent on things you actually want to do with your life.

You’ve said that you don’t see a real difference between a big house and a small house, provided that people use the space well. So why not just live in an apartment?

Ideally people would live in apartment buildings. They are more efficient, they’re better for the environment and better economically—because of all the shared walls, there’s less loss of heat, less surface area, less wasted space between structures. But that said, 85 percent of Americans do want a detached house. I’m in that category. I figure as long as people want detached houses, detached houses will have to be built more efficiently.

Doesn’t that limit people to living in rural areas, where there’s space for a number of detached houses? That seems to go against the idea of fighting sprawl.

I actually prefer high-density; if a city is well designed, it doesn’t feel crowded. It’s a balance—if we’re not going to build sprawl we’re going to have to increase the density of our existing built environments. But there’s more than one way to create high-density environments. The most common is to go up vertically with high-rises, and not everybody likes that. I haven’t seen it done yet, but I like the idea of putting tiny houses on rooftops as penthouses. I like the idea of pocket neighborhoods—little villages of freestanding houses.

If you got to design one of these villages, what would it look like?

Variety would be key. It’s great to outsource: I don’t have to have a huge library, I can just go four blocks from here and be at the Sebastopol library. So I do like the idea of small houses being near other functions, near the city. I also think it’s healthy to have private space for every member of the household. I’ve seen a lot of [intentional] communities that work, and I’ve seen a lot that don’t. The ones that worked are those that paid attention to private space. Those that thought they would just go totally against the grain of the suburb and ignore privacy for the sake of community, they don’t do any better than the suburbs. I lived in one of those; it was pretty horrible. I’m just lucky I had my house there with me.

Does the housing market affect you?

It doesn’t seem to have had a negative effect so far. If anything it seems to be good for business—there’s a lot more interest now. The reason I set out to do this was in hopes people might see how ridiculous an exclusively McMansion-oriented culture is. The current situation, both economically and with the housing market and the environment in particular, is perfect for getting people to think outside the bigger-is-better paradigm. So there is an upside.

But if people have no money to buy things with, I suppose we’ll see a sharp increase in the sale of plans, of people building things with recycled materials, and doing things more efficiently than buying prebuilt houses from us.

That’s a very non-capitalist thing to say.

I’m not really into the growth model.

But this idea of voluntary simplicity, of paring away what’s unnecessary, seems like it might ultimately put you out of business. Is that something you think about?

My original goal was to build a tiny house to show people how they could live simply and happily. I hoped that other people would just run with the inspiration, but now that I’ve got a business based on it I still hope they come to me and give me some money. It’s paradoxical. But as long as people actually buy the plans from us, then we’re in business.

Are many of your customers reformed McMansion dwellers?

Our e-mail box is kind of like a confessional. For some people it’s like, “I live in a giant house, but I promise I’ll move into a smaller one someday!” Of course we’re not about that sort of thing, though if that’s what they want to do, that’s great.

People who see there’s actually something else out there besides oversized housing, which is all that has been offered for a long time, they’re like, ‘Oh, wow.’ And they decide to move from their oversized house into a small one. It’s a shift in the way America’s thinking.

Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?

Well, I always like to say that there is no black or white in green. We all can do something no matter what our weaknesses are, so I focus on building small. When it comes to building houses, that’s the greenest thing you can do. The best thing is just not to use materials in the first place whenever possible.

Doesn’t building at all go against that?

Of course, reducing is the best way to go. Recycling is infinitely more wasteful. The best thing you can do is move into pre-existing structures. That said, the second-best thing you can do is build less, use fewer materials, and along the way you might as well use more sustainable materials, renewable stuff. But it’s all a balancing thing. If you’re going to build a house from totally treated lumber, it’s better to do it on a small scale.

So is it green to build small?

Building smaller has never been touted as a really green thing to do. Buying less doesn’t really behoove many businesses. “Less” is just not a marketable thing. But it turns out there are ways to push it.

Say I’m going to buy a house. What’s the first thing I should think of?

Paying attention to what’s actually needed is a good way to start. People don’t even know what they need to be happy, especially in a culture of excess. So they just buy everything and hope something will cover it.

When I see an oversized house, I see a lot of waste, and it’s ugly to me. When I see a small house I see the essence of house, and I see it as very beautiful.

But that is exactly what happened to countless farmers and nursery owners in the Bay Area over the past few months, as entomologists, state agents, and activists followed the trail of the light brown apple moth (LBAM), an Australian invader. Since its first recorded sighting in Berkeley in 2006, the moth spread as far south as Los Angeles, prompting the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to declare an emergency and begin aerial treatment using a pheromone intended to keep the moths from mating. “Aerial treatment” is a nice way of saying “spraying stuff out of airplanes,” and it’s that part that had organic-food-eating, chemically sensitive folks up in arms faster than you can say “Silent Spring.”

When the state sprayed Monterey and Santa Cruz counties last fall, more than 600 people filed health complaints, claiming the spray had caused rashes, asthma-like breathing problems, and chronic fatigue, among other symptoms. Anecdotal reports surfaced of pets dropping dead after exposure, and in the days following the spray hundreds of seabirds washed up dead on the shore. The human health complaints could not be conclusively linked to the treatment, but neither could they be denied; there was simply not enough information. As for the birds, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife issued a report finding no link between the spray and their deaths. However, the state did acknowledge that the original spray, as well as three similar products under consideration for an aerial bombardment, are believed toxic to aquatic species.

Thinking over the long term, environmentalists worried that the pheromone could disrupt the mating of species other than the light brown apple moth, and that the plastic shells used to deliver the pheromone might be picked up by bees in place of pollen. Says James Carey, an entomologist at UC Davis and opponent of the spray, “We don’t know what the impacts of the pheromone are on non-targets. Why in the world would you subject all these people to involuntary risk?”

Because no one had charted the long-term effects of the spray, no one could say for certain whose science was right, and the uncertainty propelled the battle for months. By the time the state backed down in mid-June—agreeing to release sterile male moths into infested urban areas to control breeding—thirty local governments and more than eighty citizens’ groups had gone on record opposing the spray. The state has not ruled out spraying in agricultural and outlying regions, though Steve Lyle, a CDFA spokesman, says that sterile insect release will be the primary approach in these areas as well, perhaps followed by ground treatment with pheromones and the release of stingless parasitic wasps. He says the sterile release program will not begin until sometime in 2009. Meanwhile, presumably the moth is thriving. As of press time it has done no significant damage.

So which was it—the eleventh plague or the biggest hoax since War of the Worlds? We may never know the answer, but in some ways it’s beside the point. In a global economy, exotic invasions like the moth are not the exception, they’re the norm. California’s agricultural industry is worth roughly $32 billion, about a third of which comes from produce exports. In the past few years, the state has gone after weevils and glassy-winged sharpshooters, invasive species that went right to work destroying crops. In a world where plants move freely, the pests that accompany them move as well, and once they arrive, they aren’t that easy to eliminate. So what do we do when the next pest comes?

MMD: Moths of Mass Destruction?

“Our goal is always to eradicate a pest before it causes any serious damage,” says Lyle. That goal is admirable but probably not feasible, says Steve Scholl-Buckwald of San Francisco’s Pesticide Action Network. “Truly eradicating something as widespread as LBAM is scientifically very challenging, probably impossible. And aerial spraying is very intrusive—people are so upset, you’re going to have health damage just from stress.” In this case, he says, the uncertainty, the public relations battle, and the probable return are just not worth it.

The real problem, says Scholl-Buckwald, is not so much the moth as the mechanisms in place to respond to it. The state received close to $75 million from the US Department of Agriculture to eradicate the moths—not, notes Scholl-Buckwald, to prevent them from arriving in the first place. “The USDA is demanding that they take action to try and eradicate, and will give them money to do something they can claim is a strategy. The wiser choice is to presume that you can’t eradicate, and that what you have to do is go into a long-term pest control program,” he says.

The reason there is no such program has to do with the government’s insistence that counterterrorism efforts trump most other domestic concerns. After 9/11, the Bush administration moved much of the USDA’s border monitoring work over to agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, in particular to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Combating terrorism was the agency’s top priority, and the focus on agriculture diminished. According to a 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office, the move led to vast gaps in enforcement, resulting in fewer inspections of incoming produce shipments and increasing the country’s vulnerability to invasive pests and disease. At the Port of San Francisco, inspection rates for incoming cargo declined by nearly half between 2003 and the end of 2005.

“California’s monitoring program has forty vacancies right now,” says Scholl-Buckwald. “They’re getting their money from Homeland Security, but if you took homeland security seriously, you’d be doing a lot more monitoring and prevention. In an ecological pest management program, you keep watching to see what’s out there. If you let things get established, then you have a problem.”

Here Scholl-Buckwald finds an ally in the spray’s staunchest defender, Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura, a third-generation California farmer and businessman who took over the post in late 2003. Says Kawamura, “CBP runs the ports of entry inspection services, and their agricultural specialists should be doing these kinds of inspections.” He added that his agency learned of the forty vacancies only in April, long after the moth had been detected. “We’re putting pressure on them to fill those positions as quickly as they can,” he says. “It is a vulnerability for the state of California if they don’t make this a priority.”

Kawamura, who grew up working on his family’s farm and remains a farmer to this day, says he’s sympathetic to people’s concerns. “As a result of the pressures that we’ve been feeling since I got here, we’ve started to pull ourselves together and acknowledge that we’ve got a system that needs to be invested in and improved,” he says. The most recent farm bill, he notes, increases funding for preventive measures. “We’ve also put enough pressure on CBP that they’ve developed an action plan in response to all of us banging on the table. That’s a step, but it’s a plan that hasn’t been enacted yet, it’s only a plan on a piece of paper. Those forty positions, how come they’re not filled?”

Kevin Harriger, the CBP’s new head of agricultural oversight, was unavailable for comment for this article. Still, both supporters and opponents of the spray agreed that the system is inadequate. “It’s a federal government issue, in a way,” says Ring Cardé, chair of the entomology department at UC Riverside and a member of the USDA working group that advised the state on the eradication program. “These things are coming in, sometimes from other states, many times from overseas. My view is that we might well consider more stringent requirements for importing plant materials into the US.”

Nan Wishner, chair of the city of Albany’s Integrated Pest Management task force and an activist who opposed the spray, says what the country needs is not only improved border protection, but a more holistic approach to agriculture. “We have to shift our model from chemical interventions to supporting the natural ecosystem, so it will be robust against species that might have a damaging impact,” she says. “It’s a pretty rare case where you get the plague of locusts.”

While the federal government drags its feet, the state is using some of its federal funding to pursue longer-term control measures, including the sterile moth-breeding program that CDFA now hopes will achieve the same result as the pheromone. “Ideally, you’d have a global program going,” says Scholl-Buckwald. “You want to look beyond LBAM to the next pest, and the next pest after that.”

“Well,” says Morgan slowly, looking down at the grass where the NatureSweep swept, “if you go over it more than one time, you’ll pick up more poo-poo.”

After two weeks of test driving, park officials still aren’t sure if the NatureSweep, currently on loan from the company’s marketers, is worth the $10,000 price tag. They’d need more than one machine to cover the whole park, plus attachments (tractors to haul the sweeper around), modifications (Morgan’s larger engine), and labor costs. Without question, it’s one of the most expensive options under consideration by the city to manage the Canada goose droppings strewn across park lawns.

Though this is the first year that money may be officially allocated towards the issue, the problem is not new, for migrating geese arrive on schedule every year. Lake Merritt hosts between 200 to 400 resident geese year-round. But the lake is also a tourist destination. Visiting geese—and they can number in the thousands—arrive in late spring and stay until late summer, by which time they’ve molted and grown a new set of flying feathers. In the meantime, they spend their summer days like anyone on vacation: In the words of Jones & Stokes, the consultant retained by the city to assess the problem, “the bulk of daily activity is devoted to foraging, loafing, and preening.”

And pooping. An average of 28 times a day, per goose.

“I had an experience where I took some home one day,” says Morgan, glancing down at his shiny burgundy wing-tips. “As a supervisor, I wear shoes, but I still gotta come out here. I learned my lesson, but it’s a problem.”

Because Lake Merritt is a protected wildlife refuge, the city can use only nonthreatening, nonlethal methods to address the geese question. In addition to purchasing a NatureSweep, the consultants’ suggestions include discouraging feeding and creating fenced “goose exclusion areas,” known in layman’s terms as pens. Since the geese cannot fly while they’re molting, even low fences would keep them out of designated areas. By the time they were able to clear the barriers, it would be time to migrate anyway.

The above options and others were presented for community input in late July, and are currently under consideration. Jennie Gerard, chief of staff to Oakland City Councilmember Pat Kernighan, who co-sponsored the community meeting, estimated that the head of the task force would present final recommendations in December or January.

In the meantime, the geese aren’t going anywhere. And actually, it doesn’t seem like anybody really wants them to. For starters, there’s a question as to how much of a problem the poop presents. Though it more or less precludes lawn-sitting and could pose a potential health risk to children who might put it in their mouths, no serious disease issues have been documented. Meanwhile, the number of park users hardly dwindles during the summer, and delighted children can often be seen tossing bread to doting birds around the playground. Even the community meeting, says Ryugo, was attended by an overwhelming number of people who came to speak in defense of the geese, suggesting that the city leave well enough alone.

“It’s first a wildlife refuge and then a public park,” says Eli Saddler, conservation director of the Golden Gate Audubon Society. “I think people should take pride in the fact that we have a wildlife refuge in our city as opposed to complaining because of the impact of wildlife.” He added, “The bottom line is that people can always go other places to do other things, while the birds have few other places to go.”

There’s no question why the geese choose Lake Merritt. Adaptable creatures to begin with, geese prefer short grass, easy access to water, and a low threat from predators. The lake has all of this and more, since dogs are prohibited, and passersby often feed the geese despite the fact that, as herbivores, they’re self-sufficient.

“There’s no dogs, no predators, so there’s no ‘natural selection,’” says Ryugo. “There’s a lot of reasons Canada geese stay here. I don’t think we’re gonna change that.’

What the report refers to as “dog hazing,” however, is an option under consideration. When it comes up, though, both Ryugo and Morgan sigh.

“It just adds one more thing to manage,” says Ryugo, who’s already spent a great deal of time this morning discussing engine needs, hours per lawn of poop, and salary issues surrounding the potential acquisition of the NatureSweep. “There’s a dog consultant, and a handler, then a specially trained dog. You can’t have just any dog.”

As he speaks, a pedestrian walks by the geese, trailing not one, but three small dogs on leashes. The dogs, though together perhaps a third the size of one goose, lunge eagerly at the birds, who don’t notice. “They’re not even fazed!” Ryugo exclaims.

As they turn to leave, he and Morgan glance wistfully at the lawn bowling green just across the street, where happy bowlers toss balls over the pristine grass. “The bowlers don’t want ‘em there,” cracks Morgan. “They’ll chase ‘em out!”

The green—and its cheerful bowlers with their clean soled-shoes—is surrounded by a low chain-link fence. Goose-free zones. Sounds like a plan.