Treatment wetlands need to be built near an existing plant to minimize pumping costs, close to a potential disposal or re-use site, and on relatively flat land, all of which narrow down a city’s site choices. In some cases, there’s another hurdle to pass: proposals to create treatment wetlands are getting the ax because the site is already in use & as another wetland. Recently, the North Coast Regional Water Board shot down several cities’ proposals on the grounds that installing a treatment wetland could damage an existing wetland on the same site. The board is attempting to protect existing wetlands even if they are seasonal or already degraded by livestock grazing.

But if a little wetlands is good, isn’t a whole lot of wetlands better? Does a seasonal horse pasture count as degraded land ripe for a wetlands, or is it a habitat to preserve? Everybody involved in these stand-offs is trying to do the right thing, and the clashes demonstrate the strains between environmentalists with different land-use priorities.

First, though, a word about waste: It’s routine for most of us to flush a toilet and not give it a second thought. Unless you have a septic tank (and most urban users don’t), the flush goes into a sewer pipe that connects to a wastewater treatment plant. The force of gravity helps carry waste to the plant, but if the plant is uphill, sewage has to be pumped. The plant is likely a large concrete building tucked out of sight, and the only clue you might have to its existence wafts your way when the breeze blows just right.

After the sewage arrives at the plant, large debris is screened out (you’d be surprised what ends up in sewer pipes), and then the sludge is aerated and mixed in large vats. Grease, plastics, and soap are skimmed off the top, and the wastewater is sent to more tanks where it is disinfected using chlorine and other chemicals. Solids are kept for days in large heated digesters where bacteria gobble up as much as they can; the remains are sent to a landfill or incinerator. Some plants make leftover solids into “cakes” or “pellets” to be sold as fertilizer. The disinfected wastewater is discharged—usually via a long pipe—as far out as possible into a nearby bay, river, or ocean. If you’ve ever been trapped in traffic in the MacArthur maze, you likely noticed that East Bay MUD’s treatment plant is located nearby, with its discharge pipe into the bay.

In rural areas where land is still available, treatment wetlands offer a viable alternative. They mimic and function like natural wetlands, with plants, soils, algae, and bacteria filtering and taking up nutrients from the waste. These created wetlands usually work along with some traditional treatment but still greatly reduce the use of energy and hazardous chemicals, as well as maintenance costs. Martinez, Hayward, Palo Alto, and Los Gallinas in Marin County treat their waste with wetlands; Humboldt County’s Arcata, Manila, and McKinleyville also use the system, and Petaluma is completing construction.

Treatment wetlands keep waste local: “The worst thing we can do is treat [waste] at the end of the pipe,” says treatment wetland expert and Humboldt State environmental engineering professor Brad Finney. “Shipping it off to some place on the other side of the bay where some magical plant pops out a little brick—I’m not interested in that.” One of the biggest benefits of treatment wetlands, say advocates, is that they provide much-needed wildlife habitat, helping replace wetlands that have been filled for big boxes or condos.

What about the witch’s brew of chemicals that clogs our sewers these days? Finney, who helped write the US Environmental Protection Agency’s manual on treatment wetlands, says wetlands probably do a better and safer job of tackling contaminants than traditional treatment. “Worries about toxins are real, but [many toxins] are not removed during conventional wastewater treatment,” he says. “With treatment wetlands, you’re tightly regulated—you’re right there in front of everyone’s face. If dioxins start showing up, we can control them, contain them in a treatment wetland. With traditional treatment you send it out there into the bay or ocean and hope for the best. If it shows up in fish in fifty years, it’s too late.”

Finney was part of a team that studied potential pollution bioaccumulation at Hayward Marsh’s treatment wetlands. “It was a comprehensive study, and no significant problems were found with birds, mammals, or other organisms,” Finney says. “In fact, we found that the wetland water and sediments were significantly better than the adjoining bay muds and waters. In wetlands, there’s an incredibly diverse set of organisms, solar radiation, lots of oxidizing agents, and lots of time—thirty, forty, fifty days of contact [compared to the average three to six days at a traditional plant]. It’s likely that that complex environment can handle being exposed to these toxic compounds and also attenuate them better than conventional treatment—it can’t do any worse. The key is a lot of opportunities for organisms to naturally break things down.”

The downside to treatment wetlands is that they take up more land than those concrete buildings—and some communities have identified sites for treatment wetlands that already contain seasonal wetlands used for grazing cattle or horses. That’s how Ferndale and Willits ran afoul of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board—and in the case of Willits, aroused the ire of environmentalists who might be expected to support this greener method of treating waste.

When a proposed site contains a wetland of any kind—or in any condition—state and federal laws designed to ensure no net loss of wetlands come into play, particularly since so many wetlands have been destroyed, and continue to be destroyed, by development. In California, wetlands fall under the jurisdiction of the US Army Corps of Engineers, the region’s water board, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Fish and Game. Explains North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board’s John Short, “Wetlands, riparian areas, and headwaters are shallow waters, which by their nature are affected most often and severely by filling and excavation.” When regulatory agencies allow developers or others to fill or alter natural wetlands, those parties are required to mitigate by creating new wetlands on- or offsite.

In Willits, a long-planned proposal to build full-treatment wetlands on agricultural land that contained seasonal wetlands was turned down by the North Coast water board regulators. “We had the land purchased; we had the design for three levels of treatment,” says Willits city manager Ross Walker. “We knew that the deep oxidation ponds [used for the first level of treatment] would have taken some area designated as jurisdictional wetlands, but the treatment wetlands were designed not as a detriment to wetlands but an enhancement.”

That was not the view of the water board or the Army Corps of Engineers, says Walker. “Our question was, what was our impact going to be? I could see no rationale for [the board's position] because ‘no net loss’ made no sense in an area where there are hundreds of acres of wetlands. We never wanted to do anything that was not improving the environment; we felt like we were enhancing it.” Walker says he understands and supports wetlands regulations and stresses that he is not a scientist. What he can’t understand is the board’s decision: “When you’re taking a piece of hardened ranchland, you’re not talking about a major detriment to a wetland.”

The city could have mitigated off-site—but “the cost [to acquire land] is a big thing for a small city; we couldn’t do it,” says Walker. Willits is now trying to squeeze an upgraded facility onto the footprint of its current plant and build a much smaller treatment wetland in an upland area. Because of the delays, Willits must raise its sewage rates to pay for the new mechanical plant.

Regulators weren’t the only problem in Willits, says Walker. “We didn’t have the full backing of a very active environmental group here,” he says. The Willits Environmental Center’s Ellen Drell says her organization was disturbed both by the scale of the project—ponds with berms for primary treatment, and acres of treatment wetlands for secondary treatment and beyond—as well as the proposed location. “The fact that this valley is a seasonal wetland makes it even richer than a permanent wetland,” she says. “It acts as a sponge to absorb excess runoff; it recharges groundwater, mitigates flooding, and supports a wide range of vegetation and critters. That there’s not only water every winter, but grasses going to seed in other seasons, is one reason it supports so many species.”

Drell says she felt the city leaders never understood the value of seasonal wetlands. “They thought, ‘If a little bit of wet is good, then a whole lot is really good.’ We disagreed.” Drell says the seasonal wetlands flood in the winter and connect to local creeks that support runs of steelhead, and Chinook and coho salmon. That made her nervous about altering the existing hydrology. Drell says the sewage treatment wetlands, some of which would be surrounded by berms, would have blocked the flow of water into the creeks. Drell says she wouldn’t have objected had the city put wetlands on the site of an auto wrecker or lumber yard, but she felt the proposed site—known by locals as Little Lake—was just the wrong spot. “They said, ‘There’s nothing there.’ But there is something there.”

Farther north, Ferndale also ran up against the North Coast Regional Board. Facing enforcement orders from the board to upgrade its existing plant, the city rallied the community around the idea of a treatment wetland. City councilmember and wetlands ecologist Ken Mierzwa says the treatment wetland had tremendous support from Main Street business owners. “A lot of them are elderly and conservative politically,” says Mierzwa, “but they understood that birdwatchers would come to see the birds.”

Ferndale’s geography got in the way. Situated at the mouth of the Eel River, the city is surrounded on three sides by wetlands—the floodplain of the Eel. That meant that building a treatment wetland on open space anywhere close to town would have involved impacting a natural wetland, says John Short, even if those wetlands happen to be cow pastures. And that meant that Ferndale would have had to mitigate for those impacts—with the only space available for mitigation on an upland area, a less than ideal spot for creating a wetland.

Building a mitigation wetland upland probably has the “least likelihood” of success, says Mierzwa: “You’d be trying to force ecological processes to do something they don’t naturally do.” Finney, too, was frustrated by the outcome in Ferndale. “There’s nothing wrong with the wetlands that exist in a cow pasture, but to say that the [treatment wetland] systems we’re creating have less wetland value makes no scientific sense.”

Short says, “No one technology fits every situation. Each community has its own unique set of issues. In my mind, certain wetland treatment advocates have done a disservice to small communities by pushing treatment wetlands as a solution to all wastewater problems, and unfortunately, that is not always the case. Our responsibility is to remove pollutants before the discharge reaches our wetlands and streams.” The bottom line, says Short, is that if Ferndale had been able to do enough wetland mitigation, the Regional Board probably would have permitted their project. Instead, Ferndale, like Willits, will undertake an expensive major upgrade of its existing treatment plant.

It wasn’t always this hard to build wetlands. In 1974, the Mt. View Sanitary District in Martinez became the first wastewater wetlands in the state, built on the site of a degraded natural wetland that had been diked off and used for agriculture. The site was located between the treatment plant and the Carquinez Strait, where the district discharged its wastewater. To adequately dilute its waste, the district needed to build a very long, expensive, deepwater outfall pipe, says Mt. View Sanitary District’s Dave Contreras. Instead, the wetland helped Mt. View retain and treat its wastewater sufficiently so that it did not need to build the pipe. In the early ’90s, the district upgraded its traditional plant to use UV disinfection and sand filtration to treat the wastewater before it enters the wetlands for final treatment.

In addition to an enthusiastic San Francisco Bay Regional Water Board, Mt. View had support from the Department of Fish and Game and the Audubon Society, says Contreras. Today, the marsh is promoted as Martinez’s crown jewel. “We have over 120 species of birds and wildlife, deer, river otter, fox, and beaver in these wetlands,” says Contreras. By switching to UV and sand filtration for primary and secondary treatment, and treatment wetlands for final treatment, Mt. View has been able to stop using chlorine gas, gaseous sulfur dioxide, sodium hydroxide, and anhydrous ammonia, says Contreras. “We eliminated the use of acutely hazardous materials. It’s actually been a model for the Bay Area.”

Steve Moore, an engineer who formerly worked for the bay’s regional water board and is now with a private engineering firm, says he thinks Mt. View produced “a net environmental benefit of treating waste while providing 21 acres of habitat.” But as he points out, making a decision isn’t always easy. “From a regulatory perspective, you have to decide: How do you fairly account for that lost natural wetland versus the wastewater purification function on your balance sheet?” he asks. “It’s different environmental values clashing. I think we have to take a more holistic perspective and realize that all of us are robbing the state’s natural waters for drinking and farming. That water is unavailable for wetland habitat. As we try to make gains in wetland function and habitat, wastewater wetlands are a good tool. That’s the perspective we’re missing.”

Since it’s hard for regulators to decide whether building treatment wetlands is ultimately going to help or hurt the local environment, the decision process can be rife with contradictions and absurdities. The Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary, a highly successful treatment wetland and a major tourist attraction, likely would not be permitted by the North Coast Regional Board today. Arcata Marsh was built on top of historic wetlands that had been filled and become degraded, says Finney. “Their functioning was extremely poor, but in today’s regulatory environment, [some regulators] would have said they were jurisdictional wetlands.”

Often where a treatment wetland can or cannot be built depends on the judgment of the individual regulator—and the regional board office—involved. Says Bob Bastian with the US EPA’s Office of Wastewater Management, “It’s not unusual to see varying interpretations and constraints being imposed by field offices. The same thing happens with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and endangered species. In one part of the country they are open and willing to work with [a private landowner or developer] on how to manage an area to protect endangered species. In another office, you just can’t do anything. I think we’re seeing some of the same thing happening when it comes to how to protect existing wetlands.”

Finney points out that since we have paved over most of our historic wetlands, constructed wastewater wetlands help replace that loss. But, he says, “If you object to the notion of using a wetland for treating water—which is what wetlands have been doing since before man roamed the planet—that contains some human waste, then it will be increasingly difficult to find sites that can receive regulatory approval.” The bottom line is treatment wetlands have to be done right and in the right place, says Finney. “I wouldn’t want to convert a nice, beautiful existing wetland to a treatment wetland. But where there’s an opportunity to create new beneficial uses and at the same time take care of a problem, I think we should do it.”

PFOS has been detected in the marine environment worldwide, but preliminary work done by the Marine Mammal Center’s marine biologist Denise Greig, in collaboration with the San Francisco Estuary Institute, suggests that the chemical’s levels in seals from the San Francisco Bay may be two to three times higher than levels reported in seals from the Baltic Sea or Norwegian Arctic.

Greig plans to follow up on these results with another year of sampling that will focus on the health of the youngest seals. “I’m trying to investigate whether first-year survival is affected by disease or contaminant levels, but I don’t have a big enough sample size yet,” she says. “My big push right now is to monitor the tagged animals we’ve already sampled. We have 35 juvenile harbor seals out there with tags, including some of our rehabilitated animals, and we really want to know what kind of body condition they are in.”

Seals have lived in the bay for thousands of years, says Greig. They “haul out” (rest), give birth to live young, and feed in the bay. “This is their place,” says Greig. But that also means that they are exposed to whatever runs off into the storm drain system—or doesn’t get treated at sewage treatment plans—and ends up in the bay.

“Over the years, we’ve seen animals strand and come into rehabilitation with a variety of illnesses and injuries,” says Greig. “So we are trying to understand whether some of these diseases that we see in stranded animals, or have been detected in harbor seals in other locations, are likely to be having an impact on the wild population. We’re looking at contaminants and immunity and exposure to a variety of pathogens—Giardia, Leptospira, Toxoplasma, influenza—and assembling a health profile. Then we’re investigating whether these factors have an impact on survival.”

Greig says other environmental stresses that are not part of her current study may also play a part in the overall health and reproduction of harbor seals: habitat degradation, human-caused disturbances, and changes in prey availability. “The increasing coastal population puts pressure on the marine environment: everything from plastics and refuse to sewage and boat traffic and noise,” she explains. Correlating seals’ health with the combined effects of so many stresses is tricky. “It’s a little like the studies that are trying to understand why there are high rates of breast cancer in women in the Bay Area. There are all these factors to tease out,” she says.

Harbor seals haul out at about a dozen sites around the bay; their favorite spots include Mowry Slough in the south bay, Yerba Buena Island, and Castro Rocks by the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Mowry Slough is most popular for pupping, followed by Castro Rocks.

Fortunately, the harbor seals did not fare as badly as birds during the Cosco Busan spill. Observers noticed seals with oil and tar blotches on their bodies, says Greig, but they seemed healthy, and no oil-covered harbor seals stranded. Greig explains that oil on a harbor seal does not impact its thermoregulatory capability the way it does with fur seals or sea otters, which depend on their fur for warmth. Since harbor seals do not groom themselves the way fur seals and sea otters do, they are not as likely to ingest oil. However, she says that oil in the bay still puts them at risk of inhaling fumes or ingesting oil-soaked prey.

People who spot a tagged or stranded seal should report it to the Mammal Center, says Greig, adding that reports from the public are very helpful to her study. However, she asks that people not pick up stranded pups or adults and instead call (415) 289-7350 or report sightings to sealhat@tmmc.org.

On my way, I stopped at the Seabreeze Market to check out the tiny beach just behind. I hoped I wouldn’t see any oiled birds, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I didn’t. But when I picked up a Styrofoam cup at the water’s edge and my hand came away sticky with dark black grease, I began to worry for real.

As I arrived at Shorebird Park, I could smell oil in the air. I didn’t see any dogs chasing birds, but a small circle of officials—from the State Parks Department, East Bay Regional Parks Department, and OSPR (the state’s Fish & Game Office of Spill Prevention and Response)—stood in a circle discussing how to put on and take off a HazMat suit and latex gloves. I sneaked into the circle. There could be serious health risks to anyone touching birds covered in oil, one of them admonished us over and over again. He estimated that there were perhaps a hundred oil-soaked birds between Shorebird Park and Golden Gate Fields.

The man from State Parks asked if everyone in the circle had signed the sign-up sheet. I hadn’t and asked if I could. “Did you attend the four-hour training session this morning?” he asked. I hadn’t known about it, but said that I would like to volunteer anyway, explaining that I had years of experience rehabbing injured birds, including cleaning oiled birds. “Not until you take the class,” he snapped and went back to discussing the suits and gloves. I asked when I could take the class, but no one seemed to know exactly when or where the next one would be held.

As they continued talking, a distraught elderly kayaker ran up from the water carrying a surf scoter dripping with oil. At that moment I understood that the spill was much worse than reported. Both man and bird reeked of bunker fuel. As the leader of the group screamed at the kayaker to wash his hands, a woman in the group blurted out: “Are you guys just going to stand here talking while birds are out there dying?” The officials ignored her to point out how the bare-handed kayaker was a perfect example of why the public should not be involved in rescue operations. I could see why they were concerned, yet after thirty minutes of discussion about how to wear a HazMat suit, I felt I knew enough about suiting up. Meanwhile, Patty Donald from the Shorebird Nature Center (already in her HazMat gear) left to help the kayaker and the bird. As the officials still chatted, I saw the kayaker go back out to rescue another bird.

When two young HazMat-suited guys drifted away from the official group carrying a couple of pole nets, I decided to tag along. Cardboard animal rescue boxes had been delivered from Berkeley Animal Control, and I grabbed a few in case the guys were able to catch birds. One whispered to me, “The four-hour training was worthless.” For several hours, I trailed the two, watching their bird-catching techniques and bringing the birds they caught to the nature center. Catching oiled birds with pole nets isn’t easy, particularly if the birds are close to shore.

By the time I returned to the nature center, the circle of officials had dissipated, and the woman who had asked the question of the day—whose name I learned was Nancy Powell—was trying to coordinate chaos. A volunteer from Albany, she had stepped into a vacuum, taking charge by directing other would-be volunteers to drive birds to Fort Mason, where the initial intake station was set up. (By the next day, the intake trailer was moved to the Berkeley waterfront, but all birds, wherever collected, had to be delivered to the washing facility in Fairfield). Several of us, including a nurse and a former firefighter trained in HazMat response, started talking about what appeared to be an understaffed, inept response—and that volunteers were being turned away, despite the “official” response seeming almost nonexistent. As dusk fell, we decided to reconvene the next day at the same spot. I went to buy some pole nets.

The situation wasn’t much different on Saturday morning, the third day after the spill: a few officials were wandering miles of shoreline with a few pole nets. We found some HazMat suits and gloves and decided to head out on our own. Several of our group had previously been HazMat-trained but would not have been allowed to help because they hadn’t been retrained for this specific spill. Many of us had handled birds before as volunteers at wildlife rehab centers, but that didn’t count either.

On the Albany shoreline, homeless people were catching birds with their bare hands. We gave them some nets, gloves, and boxes and set off for the Richmond shoreline, which we suspected was receiving even less attention. Perhaps the oil had not moved that far north. Unfortunately, we discovered that the Richmond shoreline was taking a huge hit.

On the Richmond Bay Trail, one of our first efforts was using pieces of driftwood to drag a glob of oil the size of a large man out of the water—not an easy feat for three smallish women. Somehow we got it (and the now-contaminated driftwood) into black plastic trash bags and hauled it up to the trail. We were desperate to get rid of whatever oil we found because we knew what it meant for birds that came near, and because there was no one “official” cleaning it up. Later that day, Contra Costa HazMat pulled up and offered us fresh HazMat suits and gloves. They told us that had they been notified sooner—and allowed to buy a boat—they could have installed floating booms off the entire Richmond shoreline and kept it from being contaminated.

Our ragtag team of volunteers—now joined by a few others—split into groups of two and three and spread out along the Bay Trail between Point Isabel and Barbara and Jay Vincent Park. In the Richmond marshes and riprap, we found oiled grebes, surf scoters, loons, cormorants, ruddy ducks, coots, even a Canada goose. We weren’t great at catching them, but we got better as we went along. We avoided going after large groups near the water’s edge, because they would immediately flush into the bay and we didn’t want to stress them more than they already were. We caught the low-hanging fruit: birds huddled away from the others, hauled up high on the marshes, or hiding in the riprap—birds already in big trouble. For every one we caught, we saw at least ten similarly covered in oil.

An oil-soaked western grebe screamed in outrage as I slowly and gently untangled it from the former firefighter’s net. A loon let out a mournful wail as we put it in a box, a sound that will haunt us forever. Most birds were silent and didn’t struggle much. Some were so coated with oil they were not recognizable. Sometimes, the shape and size of the bird—and its tiny red eye—gave it away as an eared grebe, or the distinctive “Donald Duck” shape of its bill let us know we’d found a ruddy duck.

Although I’ve spent plenty of time birding and rehabbing various species of birds, I never appreciated just how gorgeous seabirds are. I wished I was seeing them in such detail through binoculars, not while holding their soiled bodies in my hands.

For two weeks, we walked the trail from morning ’til dusk, and the entire time, we saw at most two or three authorized rescuers. At various times, we found ourselves in tears—for the innocence of the birds, for the senseless loss of life that could probably have been prevented had the Cosco Busan had a double hull. But our tears were quickly brushed away. As sad as we felt, the birds were worse off.

Desperate for help, we recruited joggers and bicyclists to transport the birds we caught and to collect more boxes and towels for us. No one turned us down. Jim McKissock, a longtime environmental activist from El Cerrito, drove several birds to Cordelia. Dismayed, he commented, “This is like Katrina for the birds.” A few days into the spill, we set up our own “command central” at Shimada Friendship Park, and bicyclists ferried messages from one of our groups to another. Passersby on the trail begged us to help this bird or that bird, and we did all we could. Sometimes it was impossible: the birds were too far from shore to catch without a boat, or they were in flocks that could not be flushed. Of course, we had no cannon nets—nor, as it turns out, did the official rescuers.

One authorized rescuer (who asked not to be identified for fear of losing his job) told me, “I’d rather work a spill anywhere other than California because the response here is so slow and bureaucratic.” Rebecca Dmytryk, an authorized responder with International Bird Rescue, part of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, asked for equipment, including cannon nets and boats, and was simply ignored. Says Dmytryk, “On November 9, after surveying Rodeo Lagoon in the Marin Headlands, I advised my supervisor, Kirsten Gilardi, that I observed twenty heavily oiled ducks on a sand spit in the lagoon and told her that the only feasible way to capture them would be with a net cannon, a boat, or night operations. I was never given use of a boat, night operations for this area were never discussed, and the net cannon and its operator came too late, seven days after I had requested its use. I watched these birds die off, fewer and fewer each day until there were maybe three or four dispersed within the lagoon.”

Continues Dmytryk, “If you count most of the interior of the bay, the curvature of the Pacific coastline, inlets, and marinas from Half Moon Bay to Salmon Creek, that’s close to 400 miles of shoreline that needed coverage by experienced rescue teams. If we had had sixty trained personnel, I have no doubt we could have saved many more birds—I’m guessing thousands.”

Instead, says Dmytryk, there were only eleven search and collection people dispatched during the first three days, and three of those were pulled off to help run rehab efforts. These authorized responders had little more than a few pole nets, a few ATVs, and a couple of boats that “didn’t touch the water until the eighth day after the spill,” says Dymtryk. At the height of the response, Dmytryk says, fewer than twenty experienced personnel—those who could correctly identify oiled birds and had the expertise to successfully capture them—were deployed.

In the meantime, word was sent to our team via our volunteer drivers that we were engaging in “unauthorized bird collection” and that we should stop immediately. Nancy was ordered to report to the collection trailer. She didn’t. She replied that we would be more than happy to stop as soon as officials showed up to do the job. Every day we expected the cavalry to come racing over the hills, but finally we stopped hoping for official help. A fellow rescuer from Marin dubbed our group “the Richmond Renegades” in jest, but after a monk was arrested in Marin for cleaning a beach, we kept our operations mobile, communicating by cell phone and parking in less visible locations. We remained frustrated that we couldn’t do a better job or save more birds. Despite the warnings being sent our way, the few authorized rescuers who crossed our path seemed grateful anytime they saw us with a bird in a box.

So where was the official response? The Richmond shoreline seems to have been a microcosm of what was happening—or not—elsewhere around the bay. According to OSPR’s Area Contingency Plan, the Richmond shoreline is a “Category A, priority resource area of concern”—habitat for endangered species, thus deserving of special protection, as are other areas along the bay’s shoreline. Said the anonymous official rescuer, “Based on the number of birds I saw early on, I thought they needed to call in as many trained people as possible from throughout the world. But that didn’t happen.”

Other areas were ignored as well. According to birder Glen Tepke, the response at Alameda was “pretty anemic,” and the Environmental Water Caucus’ David Nesmith says the Oakland response was dismal. Ingrid Taylar, one of many would-be volunteers relegated to spotting and reporting oiled birds, says, “We had to witness bird after bird dying because no rescue efforts were deployed to areas like Middle Harbor or even Lake Merritt.”

Weeks later, still puzzled, I talked to former Deputy Director of Fish & Game Diana Jacobs. Jacobs says she was shocked at OSPR’s poor response; Jacobs knew there was a problem when the OSPR administrator said she had “stopped watching news reports” about the spill after the second day. Part of the problem is understaffing: the administrator’s second-in-command position is unoccupied, and the agency has other vacancies. “Fish & Game should be the biggest and best agency in the state,” Jacobs says. “We have more biodiversity and resources here than almost anywhere else. But instead, we have the dinkiest little agency.” On top of that, the agency culture is not one of open communication with the public, says Jacobs: its once “open-door” policy has turned to biologists behind closed doors. From budget cuts (see “Overwhelmed and Outgunned,” Terrain, Fall/Winter 2007) to plummeting morale, Jacobs says Fish & Game is on a downward spiral.

She suggests that citizens demand to be part of the next spill response, and that spill containment and wildlife rescue equipment be stockpiled at locations around the bay. A network of area activists, nonprofits, and agencies could be put into motion in conjunction with the official response. Jacobs also suggests that OSPR conduct wildlife response drills as part of their regular oil spill drills. Still, more than that is needed, such as a consciousness change on the part of Fish & Game. “As biologists, we’re taught to care about habitat—the big picture—that impacts from an oil spill probably won’t have a population-level impact,” says Jacobs. “If citizens feel that every bird should count, they need to send that message to Fish & Game and OSPR.”

Perhaps the mindset at Fish & Game explains the response to the Cosco Busan spill. Says the anonymous official responder: “This is what happens when you let paper-pushers make an emergency response. They’re not used to being action-oriented kind of people. We’d say, ‘Now, we need help right away.’ And they’d say, ‘Calm down, relax, don’t rock the boat, we’ll get this handled.’ The people in the field were new at it—they didn’t feel the urgency to catch birds immediately. Maybe they don’t have the same level of compassion for each individual bird. Or they didn’t understand what happens if you don’t catch them. We know you have to do everything in that first week.”

With habitat disappearing, plastic and other poisons contaminating the ocean and bay, and populations of some water birds plummeting, an oil spill that kills thousands of birds could have a population impact, especially if it’s followed by a second spill. Global populations of greater and lesser scaups, some of the birds most commonly found covered in oil from the Cosco Busan spill, have decreased by 75 percent over the past 40 years; greater scaups are now on the Audubon Society’s list of common birds in decline. Clark’s grebes, another one of the ten most common species of birds found oiled, are on Audubon’s watch list of species that are declining or rare.

For every bird rescued, an estimated ten more will die on the water: one estimate runs as high as 22,000 mortalities. At the WildCare wildlife rehabilitation center in San Rafael, emaciated diving ducks are being brought in, possibly as a result of impacts on their food supply. Another bad sign: scaups, scoters, and Brandt’s cormorants were low in the annual Christmas count, according to Golden Gate Audubon’s Noreen Weeden. If there is another spill—a distinct possibility due to the ever-increasing container ship and tanker traffic in the bay—what will happen to shoreline habitats now being restored with millions of public dollars and thousands of volunteer hours?

In addition to the big picture of habitat restoration, the “little picture” of a bird covered in oil, huddled in the riprap waiting to die, has to matter. I’m angry that OSPR officials told the public that they had the situation “covered” and to stay away when volunteers could have helped rescue more birds. Bird lovers were told to call in reports of oiled birds to a number that stopped working a few days into the spill. Based on the response we saw in Richmond, I doubt that many of those birds were picked up. As Glen Tepke put it, “I was surveying for oiled birds and taking photos and reporting to OWCN under the assumption that rescues would be attempted quickly. I don’t know what I would have done if I had known that the birds were not going to be rescued any time soon.”

Since the spill, our group, now renamed East Bay Bird Advocates, has prepared and disseminated a report about what we saw in the field, available at www.eastbaybirdadvocates.org. One of our goals is to let people know what we witnessed, especially since the party line continues to be that the response was a great success. We’ve met with legislators to make wildlife rescue a priority in the spill response bills now being drafted, and we’re passing on the message that every bird counts. Yet the question remains: if better plans and legislation are written, will they be carried out by officials, or will disaster response again be left in the hands of renegades?

What are you aiming to do?

I’m planning to use some of the photos I took during the spill and those of others in a project aimed at NGOs and volunteers, with a broad goal of creating a call-to-action plan that was sorely missing during the Cosco Busan disaster. I hope to include big and little picture views of the spill from a historical and conservation standpoint in a Web-based publication that will link to many resources. It could be used to plan and implement action for future spills, advocate and facilitate training for volunteers and professionals, debunk myths that have crept into the system, and make transparent the agencies’ responsibilities and inter-relationships. Obviously we can’t rely on government agencies and the maritime industries not to minimize accidents such as this and to efficiently mitigate the effects. There needs to be public oversight and involvement.

What I don’t want to do is what every other group is doing. One of the things I’ve noticed is that there wasn’t an organizational plan or place to get volunteers involved. I’ve been advocating to San Francisco Animal Care and Control that they become part of Oiled Wildlife Care Network (OWCN). It was inspiring how involved the city departments got. They were frustrated and really wanted to mobilize, and they did to some degree, but they were undertrained and understaffed for handling wildlife.

The number one problem is that there aren’t enough people trained to capture wildlife. The officials told us they had 200 people out there doing rescue, but they needed more like 2,000. Not only should there be training but whatever funding comes from the Cosco Busan settlement, part of it should be peeled away and dedicated to mounting a local response force. Volunteer or not, this would be a trained force of teams working together from boats in the water and from land. There is way too much ship traffic in the bay not to have things localized. The O’Brien Group (hired by Cosco Busan to clean up the oil) was flying people in from Louisiana. We need to expand and think more logistically for when it happens again.

What are some of the “myths” you think have crept into this process?

I heard a presentation by a chemical engineer on oil, in particular bunker oil and toxicity levels. This was where I realized that we should not have been toeing the line with the officials (regarding the hours spent in HazMat training rather than in rescue), because the oil was not particularly toxic unless you’re a bird and covered with it. Every substance has its own story. Once there’s a spill, all the toluene and benzene in the bunker oil evaporates, and after six to twelve hours is almost all gone into the atmosphere. The toxicity level drops very low. We really need to know the truth about the toxicity of these products. Don’t greenwash it; don’t use smoke and mirrors. Just tell the truth about what it is. If you look at all of the different groups involved, it comes back to the feds or the state. These people are not telling the whole truth about the oil, and they’ve got liabilities, so you can’t be involved with them and have independent thought.

How are we going to fix this broken system?

There should be trained individuals who attend ongoing exercises and drills of how to handle spills just like any other emergency. These are the first responders. You need to be able to suddenly come up with a couple hundred boats and a thousand people. If that had happened, the number of wildlife fatalities would have been way down. We also need to work with existing agencies to modernize their approaches—how many Fish & Game wardens are available during a spill? This time there were not enough. And International Bird Rescue is seriously understaffed. They need to be independent, not under control of any agency; we need to get them out from under OWCN/OSPR (state Department of Fish & Game’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response).

How do you respond to agency biologists who say the oil spill is an isolated incident that doesn’t have population-level impacts?

In so many ways we marginalize these species every day that any opportunity we have at all to help them out, we’ve got to do it.

Read the latest legislation to improve spill response at www.leginfo.ca.gov. Search keyword “spill response.”

Because prescriptions are regulated by the federal DEA, which has stringent requirements for controlled substances (a law enforcement officer has to collect them), mail take-back or pharmacy take-back programs have been hard to get off the ground. But San Mateo County came up with a simple solution. After her father died in 2004, Supervisor Adrienne Tissier found herself digging through a medicine cabinet full of painkillers, sedatives, and other medicines. When she took office in 2005, Tissier, who was aware of the environmental impacts of flushing and dumping old meds, began to research disposal methods. After discovering that a convenient method did not exist, she worked with the San Mateo County Police Chiefs and Sheriffs Association to create a program with minimal staffing. Refurbished, repainted postal collection boxes—each with several large red biohazard logos—were placed in three police departments. A hazardous waste disposal company periodically collects the contents. The program now has eleven drop-off sites countywide and has so far amassed over 1,750 pounds of pharmaceuticals. Illegal drugs—methamphetamine, for example—cannot be dropped in the boxes.

The program recently won the National Association of Counties 2007 Achievement Award. Tissier’s legislative aide Bill Chiang says their office has received calls from the East Bay Municipal Utility District, wastewater and health departments in Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Michigan, and the Miami-Dade County, Florida police department. “There is huge interest,” says Chiang. “Hopefully we won’t be so unique for long.”

Thankfully, they aren’t. Berkeley’s Teleosis Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the environmental impacts of health care, recently began partnering with several local pharmacies—including Elephant, Chimes, and Pharmaca—to take back unused meds. Teleosis also plans to gather data about which prescription meds are being turned in unused. Armed with data showing which meds aren’t being taken, the group hopes to stop such ‘scripts at the source—the doctor’s pen. For more information, contact the Teleosis Institute at 510-558-7285 or www.teleosis.org.

In 2004, to try to stop runoff and death in salmonid-bearing streams, the Washington Toxics Coalition and Earthjustice filed suit—twice—against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The result was a court ruling that prohibits agricultural users from aerial spraying of thirtysome pesticides within a hundred yards of salmonid-bearing streams and on-the-ground use within twenty yards. It also requires retail stores in urban areas—with populations of over 50,000 in Washington, Oregon, and California—to post warnings that seven pesticides are a “salmon hazard.” The seven bad boys are 2,4-D, carbaryl (in Sevin dust and granules), diazinon (Knox Out, Gardentox, Spectracide, and others), diuron, malathion (Celthion and Maltox), triclopyr BEE, and trifluralin.

Have you seen warning signs in your local big box or hardware store? As so often happens, regulation doesn’t always lead to implementation, and the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s (OAEC) Brock Dolman wants to step up the signage. OAEC’s Water Institute has developed a campaign in Sonoma County to educate storeowners about the effects of pesticides on salmon and to ask them to advertise in-store alternatives. Says Dolman, “After that second court ruling we started looking around here; there were no signs. We figured OK, the EPA has been slapped twice, now how else can we help at a local level to implement this program? Let’s do our own follow-up.”

OAEC has developed an information packet that it sent out to vendors in Sonoma County and has hired a multilingual, part-time coordinator, Viviana Coloma, who will visit the stores in person. If the signs are up, she will thank the manager; if not, she will request a formal meeting to encourage them to comply with the law, says Dolman. OAEC has also launched an email effort, contacting other watershed groups around the state, to advise them of the ruling and ask them to do similar store visits in their own areas. A quick look at some East Bay hardware stores turned up no salmon signs, despite the fact that Codornices, Wildcat, and San Pablo creeks are home to steelhead.

Dolman and Coloma say a few stores in Sonoma County have put up the signs. OAEC has also created “Salmon Safe” signs that retailers can use to advertise alternatives to the hazardous pesticides. “We try to both let them know that they are legally required to put up the warning signs and that there are alternatives,” says Brock. “We tell them that there is this huge growth of green products out there on the market and that people want alternatives, that we’re not just going to cut into their market. It’s a good way to go when dealing with business owners.”

For more information: www.oaecwater.org/education/salmon-safe-pesticide-awareness-campaign

In The Country in the City/The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley geography professor Richard Walker details these battles in a delightful and comprehensive way. Like all geographers, he is a big-picture guy, so the story is told in its entirety. In fact, the book serves as a cultural and natural history of much of the state. For instance, Walker describes how large-scale preservation efforts in the Bay Area were inspired by even larger-scale efforts to preserve redwoods throughout the state and the Sierra. But preservation efforts also had a strong local impetus, and Walker chronicles the “city beautiful” and “pleasure grounds” movements in which urban dwellers could sneak off for a little respite in “nearby nature” at Golden Gate Park, Tilden Park, or Oakland’s Dimond Canyon.

Walker also shows how agricultural and grazing lands surrounding the cities of the Bay Area have contributed to our green necklace, and describes the efforts urban environmentalists have made to save and restore remnant “greenswards” and “wild gashes,” the many streams that still flow through our cities. He devotes one chapter to the history of the movement to save San Francisco Bay from development, and credits that effort with spawning generations of environmentalists, himself included.

As he details the often heroic efforts of a few to save some nature for all of us, he also describes our destructive, extractive acts. Gold, mercury, sulfur, gravel, and mineral mining have left their marks on the landscape—and can still be seen today in places like the East Bay hills where scars tell their tales. Despite crediting the wealthy with helping to save much of the Bay Area’s open space, he reminds readers that wealth is often created with great impacts to the land.

It’s easy to get discouraged about the state of the natural world, and that includes our local environment, despite its city, regional, state, and national parks, especially when you see the nonstop onslaught of sprawl. Yet reading Walker’s book reminds us that we are lucky to have as much open land as we do. The book is a tribute to activists all around the bay—north, south, east, and west—from the late 1800s through the present. More importantly, it is a reminder that now is not the time to sit back and fret but to get active. There’s a lot more work to be done.

I chatted with Walker by phone.

I appreciate the homage you pay in your book to women environmentalists, especially those in the Bay Area who were so critical to saving places.

Nobody’s really written about the role of women in the environmental movement. As usual, history gets written about big names and organizations—white men have usually gotten the vast majority of the credit. When I sat down to write this book I suspected the role of women. It was just apparent from what I already knew but the more I plunged in, the more I learned. Women are the grassroots, and the men were the leaves of grass blowing in the wind. Of course, there were lots of good men doing a lot of good things too. But earlier on, you had these quite liberated, very well educated women, usually housewives—that Rachel Carson generation or even before—who were smart, worldly, energetic, and had time on their hands.

Now everything has become institutionalized; there are more environmental nonprofits. But that’s a sign of success of the environmental movement. Of course it’s women working at them, often for low wages. I do think we’ve lost something since the “good old days.” Progress comes at a price.

I was surprised to learn of the depth of the contributions of some of the Bay Area’s wealthier citizens.

It was interesting; there was an amazing cross-class alliance in this deep green culture. If it was not actually explicit, it was implicit that people were bearers of the same kind of ideas working sometimes in parallel without knowing what the others were doing. They had the sense that if I work hard, I might succeed at this. Often that success comes from a combination of people in high places who tilt your way; it’s an important political lesson

We always celebrate the grassroots—the most democratic form of rebellion and participation—but the elite have the power, so to have an enlightened elite is really important. There was this tradition of liberal Republicanism that was still alive until the new conservatives, starting with Reagan’s governorship. Weinberger was against Reagan and was fighting freeways in San Francisco, then he got swept away by Reagan’s charm and became a bastion of Reaganism. It’s so important to have a political culture that sweeps people toward the green.

It seems like we’ve lost some of these cross-class/cross-party environmental efforts.

It’s very hard to say; it’s always hard to read your own time. Still, there’s a lot of enthusiasm out there. I’ve hit a nerve with my book—how widely [environmental activism] crosses class and race lines; it runs very, very deep. Now it’s more institutionalized, but that’s almost inevitable. When you win you get laws to make things work. It’s that kind of boring, long-term grind. There’s always a danger that you lose your movement edge, your spontaneity, your radicals. Yet it never ceases to amaze me how people come out of the woodwork—sometimes it takes a trigger like UC Berkeley’s developmental foray.

Your book describes the sprawl that our two most famous universities, Stanford and Berkeley, have caused, and you are somewhat critical of what UC Berkeley has done to its campus. What is your feeling about the proposed demolition of the oak grove? Are there better sites for a sports training facility?

They’re the two worst [universities for creating sprawl]. I have mixed feelings about Berkeley, of course, and I like football. They need to shore up the stadium, but the stadium should never have been built there. That was a catastrophe and idiocy at the time, and a lot of people knew it. Andrew Lawson quit Berkeley and went to Cal Tech after that fiasco he was so furious. He went down there with Richter and made Cal Tech great. The stadium is dangerous; the west side is exceedingly dangerous. It’s true that we probably put far too much money into sports, but compared to war, sports are OK with me. I don’t think the oak removal is as drastic as it’s been portrayed, but probably a lot of trees will be killed just from the construction. The practice facility shores up the west side of the stadium; it’s really a hidden earthquake retrofit. Its footprint is large but not that large. The biggest problem is the stupid new parking lot. It’s being built so the old Blues who give a lot of money to sports can have a place to park on game day. The other problem is access. We do not need more parking lots near campus. What the protest has already achieved is that I think the university has downsized the parking lot.

What about the idea that has been proposed of putting the facility at Golden Gate Fields?

You could build a whole new stadium complex at Golden Gate Fields, but looking at it from the East-shore State Park perspective, you don’t want a stadium down there. The university is very tied to having the stadium where it is, so what can you win in this debate? What you want to win is absolute minimum of oak tree removal and parking spaces.

It’s easy to get discouraged about the environment these days. Do you stay positive, and if so, how?

It’s discouraging now because of global warming. We’ve been thunderstruck by this imminent disaster. It’s one of those cases where Chicken Little is right, and the enviros who have a bad name for exaggeration are right. What’s going on is really catastrophic; it needs to be slowed down as much and as fast as possible. On the other hand, I think it has energized some people.

I wrote this book not out of thinking of global warming but out of Bush’s victory and how depressed we all were. That’s when I started it. I was thinking that we needed something positive, and here right on my doorstep was something I knew about. The achievements were great—the greens had saved the bay and the coast. And I thought, my god, nobody really appreciates this achievement, albeit checkered and with losses on the way. But overall, you’ve got to say, given what we were up against, it’s a remarkable story of success. In 1960 or 1970 you could never have imagined that development would be so hemmed in as it is today.

I’m far to the left of most of the greens I write about. I know all the problems environmentalism doesn’t address. At the same time I appreciate what the greens have done, and I admire their courage. They’re more radical than a lot of non-green lefties think. There’s been a failure of imagination on the social left and racial left to appreciate environmental radicalists. Since I’ve been a red green for thirty to forty years now, I’ve always been a bit appalled at how isolated different segments of the left are. There was a moment in the ’70s of convergence, and there was more convergence here than anywhere else. You had counterculture combined with green combined with antiwar combined with racial justice.

There’s convergence now too. Global warming, while very discouraging, has people very energized. The dam is broken now; the right had completely jammed up the political discourse on global warming, minimally during the early years of Bush, but it’s actually been longer, since the ’80s. The dam has finally broken, and there’s lots of activity from places you wouldn’t have expected—from businesses with solar power, Wal-Mart reducing energy (of course, a lot of that’s greenwashing and they are not to be trusted as far as you can throw them). Corporate people are often a bit more open-minded and less ignorant; the Bush people were to the right of Schwarzenegger, who’s a total business Republican. He sees that you can have energy conservation, and that we can create new technologies around it and generate new businesses.

What can people do to make a difference now?

The environmental movement has reenergized a lot of ordinary people, who are thinking, “I should do something, but what?” We’ve made a beautiful city here; in many ways we have a big greenbelt. But our transportation technology is behind, and we’re still automobile-dependent. We had a lot of people fighting for more intelligent transportation planning for years, but we still have a huge problem. We need to tax SUVs, keep pollution standards high, keep raising gas standards, come up with new technologies and subsidize our buses better. We really don’t do a good job of that. MTC actually has a lot of teeth, they just don’t want to use them. That’s a pressure point; people have to get on them.

People need to get out of their cars and get off the grid at home and work. It’s really about social behavior. In the energy crisis of the ’70s, people changed their behavior. California energy usage per capita is still the lowest in the nation because of that—we passed a lot of good laws. But you look at young people today, and the lights just stay on. We always jump to “Can I put a wind tower on my roof” instead of “Can I get my kids to turn the lights off?” There’s a lot of easy stuff we can do.

We have to build our cities differently. We need more gardens, collective community spaces, and local food sources, which means rethinking land use even more profoundly than just [legislating] open space. It’s a tremendous challenge, but the Bay Area is well positioned to take some leadership. There’s a lot of NIMBYism here; a lot of anti-density movements. We have to have more density. You have to fight every fight. You can’t just say, “Oh well, we need density and therefore it must be good.” Never accept a developer’s proposal on its face; you always have to fight for improvements.

I hope people don’t read my book and rest on their laurels. I tried to keep some undercurrent of dissatisfaction in it. But I think people have to have that sense of what you can accomplish if you have a movement. That’s always the hardest thing, to get people active if they have a sense of futility. If my book contributes to making people feel empowered, then that’s most important.

What about kids who sit inside all day on the computer? How are they ever going to learn to love nature—and to do something to save it?

We’ve got to get the kids outside; that’s partly the responsibility of all our park and open space entities—service agencies—to make sure the kids get out. There’s a lot more organized stuff than when I was a kid—more stream cleanups, coastal cleanups, etc.— but maybe less of the family-based disorganized stuff.

You became inspired by the movement to save the bay.

I used to listen to Don Sherwood on the radio, and he got converted by Kay Kerr [one of the three Berkeley housewives who started Save the Bay]—that and the Sierra Club and David Brower and his ads. But my parents had also taken me out to these places that I felt a personal connection to. I thought, how dare they build a dam in the Grand Canyon; how could we fill the bay? That just made no sense, but that was because I had experienced it first-hand. It doesn’t take that much to make a difference to kids.

More than ever, the Bay Area seems to be divided into “haves” and “have nots.” How does that affect the environment?

The United States is more unequal than ever. The data shows we’ve the most unequal we’ve ever been; we’re getting close to Brazil. The bottom’s dropped out from the lowest 20 percent. We have higher unemployment and crappy wages and pickup jobs while the top 5 percent made out like bandits, thanks to the stock market and tax cuts. I think that “keeping up with the Joneses” effect is harmful. Most of us don’t suffer absolute poverty, but people are dissatisfied because they see all the toys, the way of life of the rich and famous through movies and TV. It makes people feel “it ain’t fair,” and it isn’t. So middle-class consumers are trying to be like the rich, and the poor aren’t going to be able to do that in any case. It also encourages the sense that the purpose of life is to get rich, that money is everything, that what life is about is accumulation, accumulation.

That’s always been a problem, but buying into that in our time is fantastic because there is no social alternative right now in the mainstream. It seems like the only thing that makes sense is to make money; it wasn’t like that in the New Deal era where there was a much stronger sense of social obligation, that you do things for the social good and you feel good about it and that is reward in itself, that you don’t need a lot of money. For example, I love teaching, but I don’t need to be paid fabulously to do it. We’ve lost a lot of that. We need a new New Deal to revive faith in government to help those who have the least.

For such a positive, inspiring book you end it on a not very optimistic note—that as long as we continue our capitalist, consumptive life styles, the environment will always be in danger.

We’re filthy rich. We’re still the richest metropolitan area in the county. There has to be a way to consume that is built around human satisfaction and not around compulsive buying because you’ve got the money and you want the toys. It’s not about going back to the Stone Age; it’s not about living without buying anything. But we could all live so much simpler. I got divorced a few years ago and I had to move from the hills to the flatlands into a smaller house. I’ve found that I like being in the flatlands. I like to be able to bicycle everywhere. I found that I didn’t need to consume at the level I was consuming. We can have a modest amount of clothing, smaller cars, the simpler joys of getting together and talking instead of going to the latest rock concert.

But we’re all full of contradictions. I watch my daughter and see how she’s a fashion victim to advertising and school pressures. Advertisers are clever. And the way we raise children is more and more lax. Because we’re all richer we buy them whatever they want; with my parents it was pretty minimal, except maybe on Christmas.

It isn’t enough to wait for the government; it’s not enough to wait for a new law on high, you have to have a sense that other people are trying. But you also have to do things on your own even though you might not think anyone else is doing anything.

Owls are all the rage: they’re making a comeback on greeting cards, jewelry, and chatchkes galore. California vintners and other growers put up owl boxes, realizing that the big birds bring big pest control benefits—bye-bye gophers. The city of Berkeley even named the barn owl as city bird recently, to honor its ghostly denizens. If you are an owl-ophile, Hans Peeters’ new book will only fuel your obsession.

Fortunately for Westerners, all of the nineteen North American owl species can be found in the West, and every county in California has at least two or three species of owls. Peeters starts with the basics of owl phylogeny (a few surprises here: owls are more closely related to nighthawks than to raptors), and moves through owl anatomy, senses, and vocalizations: owls not only hoot, they “scream, screech, moan, purr, chuckle, bleat, yowl, cackle, hiss, and tick like a grandfather clock.” Chapters on predators of owls contain more surprises: snakes, foxes, raccoons, coyotes, other owls and raptors, bobcats, and (sadly) the occasional human.

A chapter is devoted to human attitudes toward owls, both past and present. Despite the lasting “wise old owl” stereotype, humans have often been ambiguous or negative about these creatures of the night. The Greeks thought of owls as both evil omens and portents of victory while many Native Americans had elaborate superstitions and rituals involving owls. Owls are no longer persecuted as they once were; however, in some Mediterranean countries, they continue to be shot from the sky, as are raptors, and in China, owl soup is a delicacy.

Peeters is not only an engaging and captivating writer; he also is an artist, and the book includes color plates of each species, including a rather comical page of chubby owl nestlings. The book also has many gorgeous and unusual photos of owls perched, nesting, and flying, and of their habitats.

Importantly, Peeters includes a chapter on threats to owls—primarily human destruction of habitat and other human-caused problems like car strikes, secondary poisoning from rodenticides, fence entanglements, or (in the case of burrowing owls) nests being plowed under for parking lots. Even birders—who play owl call recordings to lure owls into range so they can see them—can cause great damage by harassing the owls, sometimes to the point where they fail to breed. Peeters describes the conservation status of each species of owl: six of the nineteen included in the book are endangered, threatened, or species of concern. Species accounts are given for each, detailing their ranges, distribution, and habitat and their daily activities and feeding patterns, along with tips on identification. In some urban areas, barn owls in particular are making a comeback, and when given even a tiny piece of open field, burrowing owls will try to make do (although it’s often not enough). But as Peeters describes, owls need all kinds of habitats, from forests to grasslands to oak woodlands. In a modest strip of oak riparian woodland along a tiny seasonal stream, he found eight barn owls, a pair of great horned owls, and a pair of western screech owls. If we want to keep hearing their nighttime hoots (or bloodcurdling screams), we need to leave them some space.

—Lisa Owens Viani

Every day, the media bombards us with news about health, food safety, emerging diseases, and cures in the offing. Since Merck’s Vioxx scandal in 2004, a clutch of drug safety problems has come to light; most recently, GlaxoSmithKline’s Aventis, for patients with Type II diabetes, has been found to increase risk of heart failure. Elsewhere we hear that alcohol, obesity, or even under-wire bras increase the risk of breast cancer, and we are asked to vote on euthanasia and genetically modified crops.

Should you go out of your way to feed your child genetically unmodified food? How can we predict the long-term effects of new technologies on the environment, and who is responsible for those predictions? For those who want to develop an educated opinion and a context in which to understand the increasing role of biochemistry in our lives, Greif and Merz’s book offers an excellent overview.

A collection of loosely related essays explores many topics, including boundaries of research, intellectual property, reproductive technologies, the role of the FDA in drug safety, forensic testing and the legal system, cosmetic surgery, the public health response to anthrax, media coverage of science, scientific misconduct, public misunderstandings, environmental toxins, organ transplants, and the right to die. The scare over silicone breast implants is discussed, the debate over genetically modified organisms is critiqued, and Terri Schiavo’s story is retold.

Although the book overlaps a class I took a class at UC Berkeley a few years ago, I learned something new in every chapter, such as legal precedents, historical background, and details I hadn’t gleaned from the news. Each section gives legal and biological background in easily accessible, functional language and includes references. If your interest is truly piqued by a debate, Greif and Merz provide an annotated list of reading suggestions.

—Vivian Choi

This hefty tome ought to become a new bible for aspiring landscape designers, botanists, and obsessive amateurs compelled to learn the identity of every tree they see in California whether native or introduced. Author Charles R. Hatch does an exuberantly thorough job of identification; he employs over a thousand of his own excellent photographs. Each tree listing includes a photograph of a medium- sized specimen (the size most likely to be encountered), close-ups of the tree’s bark and its foliage (flowers and fruit included when noticeable), and for deciduous trees, a photo of the bare tree. Descriptions are precise and technical. Hatch’s taxonomy chapter is the best explication of plant identification and terminology I’ve encountered, with one page of text and over thirty pages of illustrations (mostly leaf photographs).

A detailed chapter on trees in urban landscape design positions the book as a must-have textbook in the field, while the overview of California topography, geology, climate, and plant communities will make it useful for students of California ecosystems. Identification keys can be used by any reader strong enough to carry the book around outdoors (or smart enough to photocopy the relevant pages).

—Gina Covina

We used to think that we should get that water out of sight as quickly as possible; rather than flooding streets, send it off to the bay lickety-split. But now we know that the gunk in that runoff causes problems for everyone, especially fish. Take copper, leaching from worn brake pad linings, roofing materials, algaecides, and fungicides. Copper can cause salmon to lose their sense of smell, so they aren’t as alert to the presence of predators or able to find their natal stream. Some pesticides have the same effect.

So how do we deal with stormwater? Rechanneling it into our aging sewer systems is not an option. The problem only gets worse as we add impervious surfaces with parking lots and new housing. A recent visit to Seattle convinced me that there is a better way.

Using a revolutionary series of “natural drainage systems,” Seattle is attempting to detain and slow stormwater by trying to mimic the forest floor and pasture that once covered its landscape. Bit by bit, the city rips out pavement and pipes in suburban and urban neighborhoods, replacing concrete and asphalt with swales, rain gardens, and other soft surfaces.

California is starting to think in this direction: The state and regional water boards, the agencies with jurisdiction over water quality in the state’s streams, rivers, and bay, have begun requiring large new developments to capture most of their runoff on-site with grassy swales and porous pavement. But a lot of urban runoff comes from cities that are already built-out—San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, to name just a few culprits. Although the Bay Area has been a leader in restoring urban streams, when it comes to retrofitting older cities with greener “pipes,” it is far behind the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere in the US and around the world.

Seattle’s first project, called SEA Street (for Street Edge Alternative Street) was put in the ground in 2000 in an older neighborhood northwest of downtown. The city’s transportation and public utilities departments worked with neighbors to replace an old “unimproved” gutter and ditch stormwater system with a series of connected, vegetated swales. The swales resemble the understory of a Pacific Northwest forest. “We’re trying to make an urbanized environment think like it’s still forested,” says Bob Spencer, the city’s Creek Steward. The ground is soft and covered with leaf litter; trees and shrubs glisten in the damp air. Most of the vegetation is native, but some drought-tolerant non-natives are included; neighbors were given a range of choices. Looking at other streets nearby, I can see that SEA Street (aka 2nd Avenue NW between 120th and 119th streets), was previously an “anywhere USA” older suburb. SEA Street now has a vivid sense of place, and songbirds and butterflies flit among the shrubs and trees.

“People who didn’t even know each other before come out of their houses and talk to each other now,” says Spencer. He helps organize occasional “mulch” parties to keep down weeds—the neighbors took over maintenance of the swales after the first three years. Many of them have incorporated the swales into their own gardens so that the swales look like an extension of their own yards—but a little wilder. Another benefit is slower traffic—the curvy, narrower street discourages speeding. Spencer tells me foot traffic has quadrupled. As if to validate his statement, a jogger trots by, followed by a woman pushing a baby carriage and a teenager walking his dog.

Fire trucks gain access via flat, jumpable curbs. The narrower, curved street means that less pavement can be used, says the city’s Jim Johnson. The project cost $850,000 and was funded through the city’s stormwater drainage fees. Most importantly, SEA Street led to several similar projects on a larger scale, and to huge public awareness. I ask Kevin Olson, who lives on the street, his understanding of the swales’ function. “They hold and slow down the stormwater so it doesn’t race into Pipers’ Creek and hurt the salmon,” he replies. Recent studies by the University of Washington confirm Olson: the swales are reducing runoff from two-year storms (storms that occur on average every two years and do the most damage to local creeks) by 99 percent.

Two years following SEA Street, the city ripped out four blocks of a ditch and culvert system a few blocks to the south and replaced it with a series of vegetated pools that stair-step down a fairly steep hill. This project, known as 110th Cascade, drains 21 acres of the Pipers Creek watershed. The next project, Broadview Green Grid, is larger still, draining 32 acres of the Pipers Creek watershed. Encompassing 15 city blocks and completed in 2004 at a cost of $5.1 million funded by drainage fees, it built upon what was learned at SEA Street and 110th Cascade. It incorporates swales on the north-south oriented streets and cascade step pools at the east-west boundary streets. Last October, another similarly sized project—called Pinehurst Green Grid—was put in the ground.

Seattle is also going natural in neighborhoods with straight, wide streets and conventional curbs. The first phase of the largest such project to date has just been completed—redevelopment of High Point, 130 acres of World War II housing south of downtown Seattle. The project—a collaboration among the Seattle Housing Authority, Seattle Public Utilities, and other city agencies—followed the city’s new low impact development guidelines, using porous pavement, disconnected downspouts, rain gardens, and swales; existing large trees were saved. But its most impressive feature is the series of vegetated swales—modeled after SEA Street but straighter since they run along traditional streets—between the sidewalk and street. “The idea here was to fit natural drainage systems into a new urbanist framework,” says landscape architect Peg Staeheli, who designed the swales.

Even downtown, stormwater gets a nod. With help from a one percent art tax, several stormwater treatment “installations” were put in a few years ago. One is a 10-foot-high, 6-foot diameter cistern that takes roof runoff from the downspout and stores rainwater that can later be used for landscape irrigation. Another is a series of “cistern steps,” adjacent to a downtown community garden called P-Patch. A series of terraced water gardens follows a series of pedestrian steps. Rain and runoff flow from one garden to the next (at each retained for awhile) before flowing into a small jade pool at the bottom of the hill. Part of the idea behind this project, says Staeheli, was to reintroduce the concept of the hydrologic cycle to city dwellers.

If our neighbors to the north can get on board with stormwater, why does the Bay Area and most of the rest of the state lag so far behind? We require that sprawling new developments treat their runoff on-site, but older urban areas—most of our cities—seem to have been forgotten. I posed this question to Shin Rae Lee of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Lee says that improving stormwater runoff is a priority for her agency but that it’s hard to make things happen here. “When we first issued our stormwater permit [to cities] to deal with new and redevelopment in 2003, this was such a big issue. We realized we cannot touch existing neighborhoods, just go in and say ‘fix it,’” says Lee. Her agency has tried to be flexible, and when a site is being redeveloped, she says, it will often allow developers to retrofit “the low hanging fruit,” such as install a stormwater swale in a nearby parking lot, for example, instead of on the site being developed. But more often, she says, cities argue against doing anything at all. “The 2003 requirements just became effective,” she adds. “We gave them a schedule for planners to be trained, for contractors and developers to be educated, to slowly bring them on board.” In other words, cities and developers leaned on the board to get a four-year extension.

Lee wishes local city and flood control agencies would realize that if they would use natural biofiltration systems such as swales, they might slow runoff and avoid widening creeks and turning them into ugly flood control channels. Part of the problem, says Lee, is that her agency’s authority over the cities is indirect and limited. The regional board is focusing now on a more stringent creek protection policy that will keep development farther from creek banks, which should lesson impacts. “We do have control over development close to creeks, so we’re trying to tie that to stormwater runoff to protect the creeks,” says Lee.

Another perceived obstacle in California, she points out, is that Prop 218, passed in 1996, required that any increase in stormwater fees be approved by two-thirds of California’s voters. Yet, she adds, several bond measures recently passed here contain money for stormwater projects, and cities, counties, and others can apply under a competitive grants program. “We need to push people to think in a more integrated creative way, to put stormwater into the grants,” says Lee. “If you do a project, it should serve multiple objectives.” Lee hopes that with better public awareness about climate change and sea level rise and the impacts they could have on storms and flows, that more cities, counties, and developers will want to do more about stormwater.

I ask Greg Gearheart, a stormwater engineer with the State Water Resources Control Board (the next level above the nine regional boards) the same question I posed to Lee. Gearheart points out that while California is ahead of other states in restoring streams and rivers, the state—and the regional water boards—may need to push harder to get local agencies to do something about stormwater. “It took a series of enforcement actions to get San Francisco to finally realize that it was in their interest to treat stormwater,” he says. Although San Francisco has not yet implemented many innovative stormwater projects, it employs a full-time staff person who is actively seeking opportunities for pilot projects.

Gearheart says California has been more focused on educating the public about not polluting downstream—stenciling storm drains, for instance, and going after industry polluters—than on looking upstream and trying to intercept and treat stormwater throughout the entire watershed. What’s sad about that is that in many of our urban areas, where creeks are underground, people have no clue about where their stormwater is going. “It means that people don’t get that there was once a natural system before they moved there,” says Gearheart, who thinks visible stormwater treatment projects—like Seattle’s swales and Portland’s rain gardens—educate people who live in cities. “Subtle landscape features are hard to understand in the first place. It’s hard to get to ‘what used to be here?’, but stormwater projects like swales and rain gardens could help with that,” he says. “California gets hung up on the big icons—the salmon in the north; the beaches in Southern California.” But, as Seattle has shown, sometimes little, slow, and green can go a long way.

The city has hired consultant Laurel Marcus to come up with a plan for increasing tidal inflows and water flow to the park’s lagoons. Five tubes that connect the lagoons with San Francisco Bay will need to be retrofitted, and the big storm drain pipes coming from Potter and Strawberry creeks would be connected to the lagoons to help increase flows and tidal action, which the low-lying creeks receive. Because water quality in the lagoons is already poor, the city plans to install gates in the pipes to keep them from pouring more contaminated stormwater into the lagoons, particularly at “first flush”—the first heavy rains of the season tainted with detritus that’s been cooking on the streets all summer.

Marcus says that while the gates to prevent too much stormwater coming into the lagoons should work, she is sympathetic with Liolios’ concerns. She has been giving presentations to City of Berkeley staff about green stormwater solutions—a la Portland and Seattle. She thinks natural drainage systems should be installed upstream of Aquatic Park, between Addison Street to the north and Heinz Street to the south and 7th Street to the east. “The more Berkeley can do upstream, the better. All these parking lots could filter and detain water,” says Marcus. “There’s great potential there. We’d like to make it a regional demonstration project and get funding to implement it. This could be integrated into the restoration of the park.”

Natural drainage systems wouldn’t completely eliminate the need for retrofitting the pipes, says Marcus, but they could delay—and thereby treat—much of the runoff before it reaches the lagoons—and the bay. She says, “This is Berkeley’s problem—none of the pollution is coming from someplace else.” Marcus points out that if the city were to implement a demonstration project here, it could very likely get grant money through the regional water board. “It’s interesting that a lot of people think Berkeley is so progressive and ahead. It is, but not on this.” Marcus says a push will need to come “from the top. There is all this green architecture going on, but where are the effects of the green buildings going? People don’t realize that a building that uses fewer impacting materials is nice, but the building itself can have a huge negative impact. There’s space for all of this [green stormwater projects], but it will require funding and a real commitment to recognizing the problem.”

With Berkeley and Albany’s recent Herculean efforts to restore Codornices Creek, particularly for the steelhead that swim to and from the bay, the often-heard excuse that “but Seattle has fish in its streams” no longer applies. Not only do we have fish in many of our urban streams—Wildcat and Alameda creeks to name just a few more—we have plenty of fish in the bay. And many fish, even if they do not spawn in urban areas, move through urban areas to get to the bay and ocean, points out Marcus. They too are affected by urban runoff.

“By addressing stormwater you’d be addressing the biggest source of pollution into San Francisco Bay,” says Marcus. “Some of the pollutants of concern—heavy metals, pesticides, persistent materials—go into the food chain. Those are the things that can be taken out by biofiltration; it catches the little particles. You don’t want them to go down into the bay.”