Cleanup of the site had been under supervision of the Water Board, but after a November 2004 California Assembly Committee hearing in which speakers voiced concern that the agency was ill-equipped to handle such a difficult project (see “Ravaged Roost,” Winter 2005), the responsibility was divided between the Water Board and the DTSC.

The governing bodies reached their decisions to shift sole oversight to the DTSC after Contra Costa County Public Health Director Wendell Brunner wrote in a letter to Richmond Mayor Irma Anderson that he believed “the Regional Water Quality Control Board has neither the expertise nor experience to handle a site this complex.” While both agencies are sub-branches of the EPA, the DTSC requires stricter regulation and greater community participation.

The resolution is a major victory for Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development, an organization formed to ensure responsible cleanup of the Superfund site. Sherry Padgett, who believes her health was affected by chemical releases migrating from the site while she worked across the street at Kray Cabling, Inc., notes that the portion of the site under DTSC oversight has been managed much more strictly since November than in the years when the Water Board had control. She notes one example in which activity on the site was shut down due to potentially hazardous dust migrating from the parcel. “That had never happened before—it was the first time ever,” she says. Already, the DTSC has begun working with residents to form a community advisory group after receiving a petition containing 80 signatures of community members, gathered by longtime resident Ethel Dotson.

Yet anxiety over the future of the South Richmond parcel still lingers, especially in light of DTSC’s December 2004 reclassification of site materials as hazardous waste. Padgett voiced her concern in an online web posting after witnessing discolored water at the marsh. “In addition to the orange- and chartreuse-colored water, what other not-so-obvious toxic substances are flowing in and out of the marsh into the bay and underground aquifer?” she asked.

The resolution requesting the change in oversight to DTSC was pronounced a “win-win resolution” by Richmond Mayor Irma Anderson and a step in the right direction by area workers and residents. In question is how far DTSC will take the newly awarded jurisdiction, including determining exactly how toxic the 350,000 cubic yards of excavated material piled and temporarily capped is, and whether the shoreline marsh, a habitat of the endangered California clapper rail, can be restored.

Ethel Dotson sits in her Richmond home, surrounded by aerial photographs, laminated news clippings, and piles of documentation dating back to the ’40s. Her gold bracelets clink together as she gestures to unearthly bright spots on an oversized black and white photo from 1962. “You can see how those chemicals glow,” she declares.

She displays a photograph of herself as a young child, scowling, outside the housing project where she grew up. Beside her stands her brother, grimacing. “My brother couldn’t stand to go outside. There were always bad smells in the air. And I can remember seeing the stuff from my backyard, big hills of it. Black, pink, yellow, white, all this stuff. All chemicals.” During the ’40s and ’50s, Dotson’s family lived in the Seaport War Apartments, next door to the Stauffer Chemical manufacturing facility, on Richmond’s south shoreline. A third image shows neighborhood members gathered outside a community center. Dotson notes that many in the photograph died of serious illnesses such as cancer.

The 85-acre parcel between I-580 and the San Francisco Bay Trail has messy nomenclature too. Once Stauffer Chemical, it is now the Cherokee-Simeon Venture property, but it’s commonly known as the Zeneca site, after its most recent industrial owner. Operations began at the site as early as 1897, when Stauffer started manufacturing sulfuric acid and a variety of industrial and agricultural chemicals, leaving a landfill of pyrite cinders that contaminated next-door Stege Marsh, one of only a few wetlands around the bay that supports the endangered California clapper rail. In 2001, a report released by the Department of Energy under the Energy Employees Occupational Illnesses Compensation Act listed the old Stauffer plant as a radioactive materials processing site. The act requires compensation for workers who contracted illnesses, but no such funding is offered to neighbors, such as Dotson’s family, across the fence.

When Stauffer packed its bags in 1982, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca carried on the site’s toxic legacy, making herbicides, fungicides, and other pesticides there. By the time the last of the Zeneca facilities had been demolished in 1998, a new toxic soup—of PCBs, heavy metals, pesticides, and volatile organic compounds—was left behind. At least 160 potentially hazardous chemicals are known to be present, substances that would later lead the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board to characterize the Stege Marsh portion of the site as a “toxic hot spot.”

Cleanup of the site became a priority, and Zeneca pledged to pay $100 million towards the costs of hauling away the contaminated soil. But in September 2001, the Water Board approved the less costly measure of covering the site with a giant—over 60-acre—flattened cap meant to contain the contaminants on-site. The property next to Zeneca, a UC Berkeley-owned research lab called the Richmond Field Station, once held a blasting cap manufacturer. Hazardous waste from those operations also now lies beneath the cap, for an estimated 350,000 cubic yards of contaminated muck. “That cap has a lot—I mean a lot—of cracks in it,” says nearby resident and UC Berkeley professor of environmental science Claudia Carr. Yet if plans before the city are approved, the site will become a place quite a few people call home. The newest owners, joint developers Cherokee-Simeon Venture, envision the cap as a foundation for a high-rise with 1,330 shoreline residential units in buildings ranging from 40 to 200 feet high. Giant fans at ground level would churn away hazardous fumes migrating upwards from the cap. These plans were made only after the original scheme to build a biotechnology research facility was quashed in the face of economic downturn. The question as to whether it will ultimately be approved for residential use is still on hold. “This is one of the worst projects that I have ever seen proposed in this area,” says Henry Clark of the 21-year-old grassroots West County Toxics Coalition.

“No Human Health Hazard Detected”

Bureaucratic approval is not the only thing up in the air—lately, dust plumes from the site have been plaguing nearby businesses and residents, and anxious workers and homeowners are fighting back.

The morning of December 1 is so chilly that you can see the breath of picketers as they shout, “No toxic housing!” outside an entrance to the Zeneca property. It is six-thirty AM, still half an hour before trucks will rumble in to continue work on bayside East Stege Marsh, the wetland portion of the site, whose contaminated soil is being excavated until February 1, the date clapper rails begin nesting. The protesters, organized by Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development (BARRD), seem an unlikely bunch to be blocking the gates of an industrial work zone—doctors, business owners, a lawyer, a professor, other professionals, and neighbors like Dotson. The demonstration, which includes a staged donning of gas masks and gloves, was held after months of letters, e-mails, phone calls, and even a public hearing proved futile: according to members of BARRD, state agencies have gone ahead with dangerous cleanup procedures on the marsh without sufficient public protection.

Homemade signs invoke the names of the state agencies and developer whom demonstrators hold responsible: the Regional Water Quality Control Board, a state EPA agency that currently has oversight of the Stege marsh cleanup; the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, the agency working on the upland portion of the property; and Russ Pitto, president of Simeon Properties.

The controversial plan to cap the contamination, at a cost of $20 million, rather than remove it, was formulated by consulting firm Levine-Fricke. Former head James D. Levine, who once worked for the Water Board, had sold his share of the company by the time work commenced—he is now a hopeful casino developer at Richmond’s Point Molate. According to Kent Kitchingman, brownfield specialist at the federal EPA, caps are a common method of dealing with contamination: “The cap is meant to prevent human exposure via inhalation or dermal contact,” he says, and goes on to explain that a typical brownfield cap consists of multiple layers including clean fill, clay, and high-density polyethylene to form a barrier to water. The exact composition of the permanent cap at Zeneca is yet to be determined, but as a temporary solution the contamination is topped with a cement mixture. Says Kitchingman: “The remedial action objectives at Zeneca were to clean up to an industrial standard, not a residential standard. Is it safe to put residents on top? That’s a good question.”

Now that the contamination has been contained to some degree, the project focus has shifted to dredging the contaminated matter from Stege Marsh and replacing it with fill. When marsh excavations began, the muck was stored in an opened section of the upland capped portion of the site. In November and December, 11,400 cubic yards of excavated marsh material were deposited on-site, drawing fire from critics. More recently the removed muck was treated with highly corrosive lime, then hauled away to a Pittsburg landfill. While Department of Toxic Substance Control officials assert that there is no threat of exposure during the process, residents say that strong winds coming off the bay whisk particles into surrounding communities. The heavy metals tend to bond with silt and clay, so the greatest threat is airborne dust particles.

BARRD member Sherry Padgett, who witnessed the cleanup from its beginning in 1998 from her fence-line office at Kray Cabling, says that of the 300 full-time employees in neighboring businesses, 24 were diagnosed with cancer and conditions associated with toxins in the last few years of remediation—including herself. In 2002, the major cleanup operations took place. “Blowing dust was so prevalent and dark we could not see the sun for hours on many days,” she says. “Vegetation was covered with so much dust that some died, unable to breathe. Large populations of rabbits, skunks, squirrels, mice, birds, and feral cats disappeared. Zeneca provided no public warning or comprehensive view of the cleanup’s extraordinarily lethal human health hazards.”

Both the Water Board and the Department of Toxic Substance Control maintain that current procedures do not pose a human health threat. “There has been air monitoring every step of the way, and the monitoring has detected no human health threat,” says Curtis Scott of the Water Board.

The air monitoring system, managed by both Cherokee-Simeon and the Department of Toxic Substance Control, has been a major source of criticism from concerned neighbors and workers. In a project status update by the toxic control agency in late December, a number of air monitoring equipment malfunctions were reported. For instance, one monitor measured volatile organic compounds to be at levels more than 27 times higher than the mandated safety limit on December 28, but officials believe this reading to be inaccurate due to weather conditions. Yet on each of the five days reviewed in the report, there was a problem with the air monitoring instruments, leaving residents and area workers uncertain what kind of threat they were facing.

On December 23, toxic control staff completed sampling of the stockpiled marsh material and found high concentrations of soluble arsenic, lead, copper, and mercury. The test results led to a reclassification of the material as hazardous waste. Beginning this February, material will be hauled away to a Class I hazardous waste landfill at Altamont. Concentrations of PCBs and pesticides were also present in the samples but below hazardous levels.

The report notes that the hazardous waste levels were developed based on less stringent standards for aquatic environmental health, not human health. “As long as no dust leaves the site, there are no exposures by these chemicals to the community,” the report reads. Yet Padgett and other others living and working in close proximity have repeatedly contacted the agency about the dust nuisance. Reports of the road being too dusty for drivers to see the yellow line, or of trucks on the road dripping trails of mud that later dried into dust, are frequent in e-mail exchanges throughout November and December.

Meanwhile, Richmond is in financial straits, struggling with an estimated $35 million deficit. No one debates that development on a would-be wasteland would be attractive to the strapped city. And just to sweeten the pot, according to city records, a few city councilmembers received campaign donations from Cherokee-Simeon. “The pressure to remediate these sites comes from the fact that the site is ripe for economic development,” said Jane Williams of California Communities Against Toxics during a November public hearing called by Assemblywoman Loni Hancock. “The local regulatory agencies don’t care about human health and the environment, only the tax base. From the developers’ perspective, the main issue is profit generation.”

Barry Cromartie, director of planning for the City of Richmond, played right into that perception: “Any delay is a delay in income,” he said at the hearing, to boos and hisses from the crowd. “Our rallying cry is that we don’t want to delay the kind of development we need. That would hinder the financial growth and financial sustainability of our city.”

Ecological Restoration or Economic Manipulation?

The documented history of this sliver of land goes back much farther than the Seaport/Stauffer days. According to the team of scientists who compiled the 1999 Baylands Ecosystem Habitat Goals report, the area used to be part of the extensive tidal flats that edged much of the bay, with marshes and higher areas reached by high tides. Stege Marsh is an important habitat for the California clapper rail, a secretive, chicken-sized bird whose total population is confined to only a handful of bay marshes. According to wildlife conservationists, residential development at Zeneca is a lose-lose proposition: while environmental contaminants may be perilous to future apartment dwellers, the residents themselves could have a devastating impact on wildlife in nearby wetlands.

“You can’t look at the restoration in isolation of what goes on around it. If you have lots of urban night-lighting, pets accessing the marsh, and a lot more people, there are going to be significant impacts on the rails,” says Art Feinstein of the Golden Gate Audubon Society. Night lighting, he explains, can affect rails’ breeding cycles and make them more susceptible to predation. Rails are preyed upon by dogs, feral cats, and rats, he says, all of which are more likely to be present in a residential scenario. The bird needs low marsh, where it nests and hides from predators, as well as high marsh, where it retreats during high tide, in order to survive. The rails’ habitat is already compromised by recent “improvements”: traditional high marsh areas, where it would feed and retreat from high tide, are now covered by the steep-walled concrete cap, and the site has been fragmented by a high-banked access road built through it for remediation activities in 2002.

Yet a pledge to restore the rails’ habitat is supposedly a focus of the developer. When the site cleanup was initiated, Cherokee-Simeon sent out glossy pamphlets to the community outlining a program that would “provide improved habitat for the endangered California Clapper Rail as well as other native plants and animals.” While Cherokee-Simeon appears to speak the lingo of Bay Area environmentalists, foes of shoreline development have yet to be convinced.

In a letter addressed to the head of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers, environmental attorney Peter Weiner and UC Berkeley professor Claudia Carr charge that “CSV remediation, restoration and development-related activities take no account of the presence of California clapper rail within East Stege Marsh.”

According to Levine-Fricke’s recommendation for remediation, clapper rails are present in all of the adjacent and surrounding marshlands except East Stege Marsh, the portion owned by Cherokee-Simeon. Yet Carr’s letter to Fish and Wildlife points out that documentation of rails in East Stege Marsh is available despite the fact that “no investigation or notation of clapper rail in the East Stege Marsh has been noted in CSV documents.”

Then there is the question of how high levels of contamination will affect the birds. Jules Evens of Avocet Research Associates says that the presence of several pair of rails still in the marsh is “encouraging” in view of the contamination, but “we have no idea how it will affect their reproduction.” Cleanup should be completed by February so as not to interfere with the clapper rail mating season.

Carr characterizes the entire project as “a classic example of development disguised as restoration.” Carr lives at Marina Bay, just next to the marsh. A sign on the shoreline SF Bay Trail alongside Stege Marsh states marsh restoration is being carried out to save one of California’s endangered shore birds. Carr points out what the sign neglects to mention: that dense urban development comes with the package. “One of the major problems is that state agencies are relying on data from private consulting firms,” she says. “US Fish and Wildlife needs to play a greater role in assessing the site.”

Yet Fish and Wildlife hasn’t been much help: agency spokesman Jim Nickles says that according to the Endangered Species Act, a listed bird is to be protected from injury and its habitat cannot be damaged. “Fish and Wildlife reviewed the cleanup in the wetlands area at Stege Marsh, but we haven’t conducted any review of the uplands area, because it does not appear that the upland development will have a direct impact on the clapper rail habitat,” he says.

At the turn of the 20th century, clapper rails were so abundant that San Francisco restaurants hung strings of them in their windows. Today, the bird is regarded as an indicator of environmental quality, and there is little certainty that it will survive the next couple of decades. Its habitat at Stege Marsh has been forever altered by toxins—the same ones spewed into the air when Seaport residents lived right next to Stauffer in the ’50s, re-released into the community during the remediation from the late ’90s until the present.

Ethel Dotson wears a ring shaped like a golden bird, a West African glyph known as a San Kofa. Dotson says the San Kofa signifies that in order to know where you are going, you have to understand your history. Dotson ticks off the problems with the site: pollution, ecological destruction, health threats. Today, developers say dwellers living atop the mound of hazardous chemicals will be safe as long as they don’t try to grow their own vegetables.

Leaning over stacks of photocopied government documents and old newspaper clippings—including one from the 1950s with the blunt heading, “Richmond Has Problems,” Dotson recalls the Seaport days. “Things haven’t changed much,” she says. “We’ve always had the brunt of the mess.”

With its mature oaks and manzanitas, the golf course gives an illusion of permanence. General manager Mark Gurnow says Shapell uses monitoring to ensure that there is no groundwater contamination: “Our pesticide application is very minimal, less than most agricultural endeavors. The groundwater quality has actually been improving. We also use 100 percent reclaimed water from Santa Clara County for irrigation.”

Still, says Michele Beasley of Greenbelt Alliance, “We need to ask ourselves if this is the best use of land. It’s possible to reduce the amount of water used on a course, limit pesticides, and even preserve the natural trees, but you can’t escape the fact that a golf course and pricey homes have a huge impact on the land.”

Wildlife and plants are affected by habitat destruction, noise, outdoor lighting, traffic, and pollution. Shapell homeowners may enjoy their wild neighbors, but are they good neighbors in turn?

After you read this chilling account of the invisible, science fiction-esque technology that surrounds us on a daily basis, the world will never seem the same. Derrick Jensen’s latest stab at what he perceives to be a civilization of systematic destruction explores the web of surveillance, cutting-edge nanotechnology, and other Orwellian methods of control utilized by big business, government, and the military. Throughout the book, Jensen revisits a blueprint designed by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham as a metaphor to describe our present predicament: the Panopticon, a cylindrical prison in which the central tower is always dark and the inmates’ cells are always illuminated. The effect of the Panopticon is that those all-seeing forces at the center are invisible while those on the outside are constantly exposed.

What will happen when Wal-Mart has a tiny radio frequency ID tag embedded in every product on its shelves for tracking purposes? What if one of these same miniaturized computers—comparable in size to a grain of sand—were stamped into every passport, bank note, or garment of clothing from Benetton? Or if rats’ movements could be controlled by keyboard strokes through chips implanted in their brains? These are only a few of the ongoing projects Jensen explores.

Want more? Pills are being formulated for US military soldiers that erase feelings of remorse, and nanotech advocates envision merging organic brains with non-biological intelligence. The book contrasts these so-called advances with the real state of things: the 90 percent of fish populations that have disappeared, the 214,000 acres of forest destroyed every day, and the brutal product testing inflicted upon chimps, rabbits, and rats.

Jensen counterposes his descriptions of a stark mechanical world with reminders of what is missing from a civilization not dominated by technology. “Last week I had one of the most exciting and wonderful mornings of my life,” he writes, and describes sitting by a pond watching a dragonfly emerge from its former skin over the course of two hours. Underlying the disheartening connections woven among corporations, government, religion, prison, and ecological destruction is a call to action: “All it will take for this rotten system to collapse is for enough of us to learn to say no.” —Rebecca Bowe

“Fatty foods. High cholesterol. Excessive salt and sugar. Shit-contaminated meat. Mercury and metals in fish. Fruits and vegetables tainted by toxic residues. What is an eater of food to do?” Searching for answers—and more importantly, causes—investigative journalist Christopher D. Cook wades through the myriad ways that agribusiness is destroying our health and our pocketbooks in this dense but readable book, aptly subtitled How the Food Industry is Killing Us.

Cook goes several steps past Fast Food Nation in this systematic look into supermarket politics and corporate policies of profit over health. He gives a comprehensive history of how post-WWII American agriculture and industrialization resulted in present-day ecological destruction: corporations selling products at the lowest cost have replaced independent farmers focused on providing quality meats and produce. Despite the growing popularity of organics and free-range livestock, Cook believes these markets cater only to a small niche and are still too expensive for the average household.

At end, this is a harrowing account of good food gone bad. Cook argues for aggressive federal policies to address food production, security, and consumption and promote a shift in priorities from profit to a more holistic approach. He gives a snapshot of the strategies of those resisting agribusiness and suggests community-level changes that would advance those strategies in a ripple-up effect. But the book, as evidenced by the title, couldn’t be called optimistic. Cook believes the organics movement is only just beginning to gain headway against agribusiness; consumer access remains a huge problem. Cook gives us the tools and the history, and he asks the right questions—in this super-sized world, can we inspire the commitment needed for change? —Mary Vance

If your favorite foodie magazine is Cook’s Illustrated, you’ll appreciate Timber Press’ new book IPM for Gardeners: A Guide to Integrated Pest Management.

The textbookish prose contains embedded gems: “Pest management may have started with our prehistoric ancestors, removing lice and their eggs from one another’s scalps and driving off competing animals from a kill with a club.”

With useful illustrations of pest signs and disease symptoms, a decent glossary and directory of scientific names, and a list of recommended readings, this is a very basic book about how plants work and what they need; how typical diseases and pests work and what they need; and a grounding in exemplary control methods, how they work, and why they’re better than, say, repeated dusting with Dursban. You’ll want a companion reference or two, ideally one specific to your area and interests. —Ron Sullivan