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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it was no drought. Hall says he observed trucks filling up water from along the creek at Golden Eye and taking it into the town of Philo and other areas where Anderson Valley’s growing population of vintners cultivate their grapes. “You had trucks filling up multiple times a day, every day, all summer,” he says.

Whether by truck, pump, a trench dug into the side of a creek, or a make-shift dam of dirt piled into a creek bed, water users are dipping into creeks and streams without permits. And it comes at a cost: lower flows impact fish and other aquatic life by diminishing water and raising the temperatures in pools that keep fish alive throughout hot summers.

The main culprits, according to the State Water Resources Control Board, which regulates water rights and diversion permits, are agricultural users, frustrated by having to wait five to more than ten years for a permit. Hall and other residents in Anderson Valley, along with counterparts in Sonoma and Napa valleys, narrow those responsible to a specific group of ag users—vintners. State officials concur.

“Wherever vineyards are being developed—Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa, Solano—that’s where we’re seeing lower flows,” says Jeremy Sarrow of the California Department of Fish & Game.

These unauthorized diversions come in many sizes. Sarrow, one of several Fish & Game staffers charged with looking at the biological impacts of water diversions, says many diversions are ten acre-feet or less; authorized users can legally divert small amounts for domestic uses like stock ponds and drinking water. But Sarrow says these diversions are being abused, and ag users are taking water for crops. “You might think, ‘What’s one acre-foot of water?’ but if 500 people in Sonoma County are taking five to ten acre-feet each&cumulatively that’s a lot to take from watersheds that have coho and steelhead populations in jeopardy.”

The practice of unauthorized diversions—particularly in the wine country—is widespread, says Brian Johnson of Trout Unlimited, because the permitting process for smaller diversions makes it hard to regulate who gets to dip into the river and when. “The culture in this part of the world has been that people build first and then ask permission later,” explains Johnson.

Meanwhile the state Water Board has become buried in a backlog of about 500 applications for water permits and roughly the same number of petitions to change water right conditions. “The Division of Water Rights has about twenty technical staff working on these thousand actions,” the Board’s Liz Kanter explains in an e-mail.

And that’s just the queue for water rights and permit changes. Kanter says the Board acts on unauthorized diversions only after someone files a complaint. Estimates of the number of complaints range from a few hundred to nearly a thousand. And the staffing for investigating these claims is even less than the staff assigned to permits—the Board has only twelve staff dedicated to enforcement. “And these staffers have other assignments unrelated to water right enforcement,” she writes.

How does one police unauthorized diversions? Fish & Game’s Sarrow describes a labor-intensive process that includes aerial photography, water right records, and database matching, and old-fashioned shoe leather detective work to see whether diversions are affecting fish in a watershed and whether the diverters have permits. “We’re typically outgunned&we don’t have the staff—regulatory, legal, or otherwise—to take on all the vineyards and other diverters,” explains Sarrow. (See following story for more on Fish & Game’s budget woes.)

Not all is lost. Trout Unlimited and the Natural Heritage Institute filed a petition in 2004 calling on agencies like the Board and Fish & Game as well as Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, and Humboldt counties to improve the permitting and regulatory process for water diversions on central coast streams. The petition has called attention to problems of permitting and enforcement.

One result has been the passage into law of AB 2121, which directs agencies like the Board to develop binding standards for diversions from North Coast streams. The bill faced opposition from agricultural interests, particularly the California Farm Bureau. Nonetheless, the bill passed in 2004, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—who voiced strong support in advance of the legislature’s vote—signed it into law.

Trout Unlimited’s Johnson says the Board, vintners, agencies, and counties are trying to work out an amiable solution to the permit glut. As a result of the petition, Johnson says the Board and others understand they have kinks to fix so obtaining a water right is more efficient.

At the same time, Johnson says vintners appear amenable to moving their diversions to the winter. Another key will be getting the vintners to build their storage systems as off-river ponds instead of engaging in practices such as “spill and fill,” where a crude dam is built by dumping dirt into a river and letting the water pool up behind it while the excess spills over. These dams impede water and sediment flow as well as fish passage. “A lot of them want to do the right thing, and if we can respond with a system to get them a permit in a reasonable time, then I don’t think this is an insurmountable challenge,” says Johnson.

Good faith notwithstanding, however, AB 2121 doesn’t designate new funding for staff—including Fish & Game. Nonetheless, Hall is optimistic that he’ll see some improvement in the Anderson Valley. “The [Water] Board understands that the system is broken, so AB 2121 is the best way we can get them to straighten out their act,” says Hall.

Allen provided the missing piece of the puzzle. Everyone at Fish & Game is just too darn busy to talk. Officers who fill the 361 law enforcement positions statewide provide the front line for wildlife—and they also try to pick up the slack generated by 70 positions lost to budget cuts. And that’s just the law enforcement segment. Similar stories abound throughout Fish & Game. There’s way more work than employees can handle.

Fish & Game breaks the state up into seven regions, with regions one, two, and three in Northern California. When I reached Sandy Morey, manager of region two, she told me the web site is out of date and she no longer holds that position, though that was news to her staff. The managers of the other two Northern California regions did not return calls. An unnamed entry-level biologist that I managed to reach called me on his own time in hopes that his story might ring alarm bells.

He expressed his bewilderment that he was only the second biologist to be hired in five years. A hiring freeze was in effect during former governor Gray Davis’ term, and it seems to have continued under Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Because of tight budgets, the biologist says that management scrutinizes each expenditure. “We have to get three bids on any item over $100. If I want a new pair of waders, I have to go to at least three different places for prices, submit that to management, and wait for an answer before I can buy them. In the meantime, I’m working in leaky waders. Valuable time and money are wasted in the process.”

Most of the money that Fish & Game receives is directly tied to the national and state economy. According to Allen, when there is a shortage within the state, California’s budget is augmented by the general fund. “If the economy is doing well, then the department does well,” he says. “The bottom line is money. The funding issue is a yearly rollercoaster that every state department has to ride.”

The main problems with a fluctuating budget relate to planning and administration. Since positions are often cut as a result of funding shortages, there should be a number of open positions, waiting for the boom years. This is not the case. If a position remains vacant for more than six months for any reason (funding shortages, retirement, illness), it is eliminated. And then, say both Allen and the biologist, it’s “darn near impossible” to reinstate those positions. So officers and scientists end up doing mountains of paperwork, either trying to reinstate positions or filling the gaps left by downsized jobs.

The end result is that the department’s mandate—to protect fish and wildlife—suffers. Long-term investigations and stakeouts are hard to manage with such a short staff, and yet that is often the only way to crack operations such as the black market traffic in abalone. “The illegal commercialization of red abalone remains a serious concern,” says Nancy Foley, Fish & Game’s chief of law enforcement. California’s fragile abalone populations declined from a high of more than 5.4 million pounds of commercial abalone in 1959 to a low of 229,000 pounds in 1992. Abalone commerce was banned in 1997. Currently only free diving, where divers hold their breath, is allowed during a limited recreational season with daily and annual limits. Abalone poaching is a very difficult activity to police, and recent crackdowns of black market sales in San Jose and Cupertino demanded the efforts of forty wardens. Allen sums up, “The major problem facing Fish & Game—both for law enforcement and biology—is the ever-increasing population and development of California.”

Every new piece of legislation creates even more duties for already over-extended wardens and biologists. September’s designation of the Central Coast Marine Protected Area is the first of five regions to be protected along the California coast under the Marine Life Protection Act. The lofty aims of this landmark program mean Fish & Game must create a new infrastructure for research and enforcement related to the act.

And meanwhile, the number of game wardens in California is one per 185,000 residents, the lowest in the nation. Says the biologist, “There are no serious advancements being made. It’s basically about keeping your head above water.”

I welcome criticism, but frankly, I was startled that people became so vitriolic in defense of a bean. Judging by some remarks, one would think my story suggested meat as a replacement (it did not), slammed natural foods (soy products are among the most highly processed foods), or demonized soy (I’ve been known to imbibe miso soup).

What struck me was that many took the story personally, as if I had insulted them. Perplexed, I talked to Kaayla Daniel about the blog posts. Daniel, the author of the The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food, told me that she received death threats after her book was published. That news made me wonder why we’re not empowered by information and debate rather than threatened by it. Is this the legacy of talk radio? Are we so on-edge that we can’t stand a reversal of dietary fortune? Or are we simply tired of being told that thing after thing is bad for us?

Below are a few emails and posts from AlterNet and digg. Draw your own conclusions. Just don’t munch soy crisps while you’re reading.

“I’m absolutely offended at such an obvious hit piece. The whole article is deliberately written in an obfuscating manner. Ask yourself. How can a natural food be bad?”

“I have doubts about the accuracy of this article… either the author is quite ignorant on this matter or has some vendetta against the soybean.”

“I don’t know if I believe it. That’s the problem with all the ‘armchair surgeon generals’ out there on the net: everyone’s an expert and they all spout off medical advice about what’s good and bad for you. We’ve flip-flopped on the benefits of coffee, wine, milk, herbal supplements, soy, aspirin and hundreds of other food products. To make matters worse, everyone is getting their medical information and advice from the internet. People don’t go to a medical professional for diagnosis anymore—they simply hit Wikipedia, make a diagnosis, and start treating themselves.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the dairy or meat industries are behind this. Their lies on protein indexes lasted decades. Ten years ago nobody would think the top recovery protein supplements used in hospitals now would be from soy.”

“Three years ago I went vegan. I began eating a lot of soy, i.e, soy milk, tofu, tempeh, soy cheese, yogurt, and ice cream& basically, I ate all forms of soy daily&.Ê I stopped menstruating and this was followed by extreme fatigue. As time went on, I began feeling worse. I could not understand why I felt sick all the time when I was eating fruits, veggies, soy, grains and legumes& Then I read your article.ÊI was shocked to think that the main ingredient in my diet—soy—could possibly be what is causing me to feel so horrible every day.Ê I have since cut out soy to the best of my ability (soy is in practically everything), and I have begun to feel better.”

“This is a well-orchestrated spin campaign against soy that has been going on since the late ’90s or earlier& Follow the money. We are worth more to them sick than healthy.”

“Without even reading the article, I’m going to call bullshit on it. Japanese people have been eating soy forever (what do you think tofu and natto are?), and I don’t think they have many health problems as a nation.”

“Within several months of increasing my soy intake at age 41, I started having full-on symptoms of menopause, and my health went into a downward spiral that has taken me years to recover from. I learned that my excessive soy consumption caused premature ovarian failure, thyroid nodules/Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and many other problems—several of which are permanent. A huge caveat to peri-menopausal women: soy can block your own natural estrogen from attaching to the receptors and cause severe and permanent endocrine disruption. Thank you for printing this really important information.”

“What’s the problem? I thought everyone knew soy milk changes people into hippies…”

“I appreciate the information about these matters that I get, but seriously, what’s next? You’re going to tell me my Quaker oatmeal is toxic?”

Briley’s PowerPoint presentation is really a series of slides, some so horrific that previous audiences have begged him to remove them. He has deleted a very few, but he knows that what he imparts today will save lives, both of those in his audience and those his audience serves. He’ll only soft-pedal the truth so far.

First he rehearses the basics with the troopers. What should they do when they find something they can’t identify on state park land? Call 911 and say Haz-Mat. That will summon Briley or one of his two partners. The rest of the lecture consists of explaining why that call is vital, and why the troopers, all of whom seem like can-do types, need to stay far away from those 55-gallon drums or plastic carboys.

According to the Rural Assistance Center, methamphetamine is a stimulant that strongly activates the central nervous system. It can be smoked, snorted, orally ingested, and injected. It comes in a powder form that looks like granulated crystals and in a smokeable rock form known as “ice.” The drug has such ugly side effects that these have gained their own names, such as crank bugs—the illusion that bugs are crawling under the skin (users develop wounds from scratching) and meth mouth. Meth users often become paranoid and violent, and those who cook meth—or make it—deal with fire and explosive and caustic chemicals.

Briley describes a typical call. A source complains that someone is dumping in a river. When Briley and his team arrive, they find glass lab mantles floating like big bubbles in the shallows, which alerts them to the presence of “a gigantic meth lab dump. At that point,” he explains, they “haz-cat” it—or categorize the material as to its hazards. And lucky they do, because they find a drum of white phosphorous, used in making the drug. “It is air-reactive,” Briley says. “If we’d unscrewed the lid, that area would have disappeared, and us with it.”

The vast majority of dumped drums contain waste oil or antifreeze. “But you can’t open these things anymore,” Briley says. “We need to get suited up and put on respirators. That’s what meth has done for us.” He describes opening a container that had washed up at a vineyard property. A red cloud wafted past his respirator. “It was nitric acid,” he says. “It would have taken off my face.”

As if anyone needed more, Briley points out that the bases used in meth cooking are worse than the acids. “Acids are gonna burn, and you’ll run to the sink,” he says. “The bases burn too, but then you forget about it, ’cause it’s burned through your nerves, and it just keeps burning down through the tissue.” A few slides of ugly spreading wounds on presumably dead individuals demonstrate this effect. By now everyone in the audience is on tenterhooks; after all, they patrol state land daily, often alone. Between marijuana grow scenes operated by foreign cartels, meth cooks, wildlife poachers, and the usual crazies, it’s a mission that grows more dangerous every year. (See related stories on pages 9 and 16.)

Approximately 95 percent of the material used in production is discarded as waste. The cook must have ephredrine, which comes from cold medicines. Cooks used to buy every package off drugstore shelves; now consumers must sign for a single package of cold medication. “That is just an inconvenience,” Briley says. “It’s slowed it down a little, but people order thousands of packages online from Canada or China.”

All these pills must be processed to get at the pure ephredrine within, which means cooking them with a solvent, the hotter the better. “The best meth has a nice little cancer component,” Briley notes: toluene, benzene, xylene are all used and then discarded. A binder pit—a dumping spot for the white gooey stuff that binds the pills—can be yards across. The pits are the most benign waste discarded by cooks; some of the rest is so dangerous that it is categorized as IDLH, or immediately dangerous to life and health, meaning that fifty percent of those exposed to such chemicals will die.

Briley describes the process, which goes from bad to worse, with multiple pourings-down-sinks and dousings with solvents. The cooking uses red phosphorous and iodine, and the cook must pay careful attention that the temperature does not rise over 290 degrees, when it will turn into white phosphorous and explode. “If you go into a house, and the walls or the sink is stained red, it’s a lab,” he concludes.

And that is bad news for anyone who owns the building. In Minnesota, state officials tested the migration of the chemicals used in cooks. The chemicals go through paint and into wallboard. As they cool, they stick to the paper on the backside of wallboard. When the room temperature rises, those chemicals migrate back through the wallboard into the room, sometimes for months, years, or as Briley puts it, “forever.” “You could potentially have to take down a house,” Briley says. “The whole house is toxic waste.”

New state laws require that all of the materials that were exposed to the gases must be removed.ÊBriley points out that removing the wallboard near the cook is the easy part. Costly tests must be performed throughout the house to make sure that the gases have not reached other areas. Between the costs of tests, rebuilding affected areas, and paying for the transport of materials by a licensed hazardous waste hauler, cleanup could cost more than the house is worth.

Cooks pour the mess—caustic and carcinogenic— into streams, down sinks, and into storm drains or gutters, contaminating groundwater, wells, sewer systems, fields, yards, and bodies of water. Since meth can be cooked in a matter of hours in small spaces—even the back of a pickup or a storage unit—it can leave its deadly, dangerous residue almost anywhere. “Don’t assume because it’s an expensive neighborhood that you’re safe,” Briley cautions.

How might you become exposed to such chemicals? “You’ve probably rented a motel room that was used as a cook,” Briley says blandly. Some chains employ the equivalent of a private haz-mat/cleanup crew that travels from town to town. When a manager realizes a room was used as a cook, the team is called in; they take the leftover chemicals and waste to a toxic waste site, then remove all the wallboard in the room down to the studs, clean up, and then reinstall new wallboard and paint. Briley points out that landlords and motels are responsible for illness caused by the detritus or chemical migration of a cook.

Briley describes how cooks sometimes pour sulfuric acid and rock salt into the containers that are used for propane gas. The reaction makes hydrogen chloride gas. Eventually those valves and cylinders deteriorate. “If you roll it over, and there’s a little rust, what if it rusts through right then? One breath will knock you down, and the second will kill you.” A final slide shows the dollar amounts: a 22-liter mantle—which can be cooked overnight in a motel room—can yield the maker approximately three pounds of meth, or $40,000.

As the lights come up, everyone is haunted by a single question. One woman finally voices it: “But what can be done?”

“I don’t know,” Briley says. “I really don’t know.”

Over time, meth destroys dopamine receptors, making it impossible to feel pleasure. A meth user’s desire to get high is extremely intense, surpassing the urge associated with other drugs, so recovery is challenging. A source who works in an outpatient drug treatment program in Fremont comments, “Former users may not leave their lifestyles behind, and once they’ve cleaned up, they have nowhere to go. Returning to the same environment plays a big role with repeat offenders.”

In Alameda County, meth use has been climbing steadily, up from 18 percent of drug abusers in recovery in 2002 to 21 percent in 2005. Nationally, meth lab seizures have rocketed up 577 percent since 1995. Recovery rates hover around 50-60 percent, both nationally and locally, but relapse rates are astounding: over 90 percent, according to national statistics. “I think the problem is tremendous in Alameda County,” notes the source, who did not want to be identified. “Most of the cases I get now are meth users. A few years ago, crack was the epidemic, but now we’ve finally realized how big meth is. I have clients aged sixteen all the way up to sixty.”

Meth induces the release of high levels of adrenaline, which causes anxiety, wakefulness (some users report staying up for days or even weeks at a time on binges), and intensely focused attention. It ups the ante on blood pressure and body temperature, so the user risks heart attacks and strokes. While users say the drug makes them feel confident and attractive, meth literally destroys the body’s tissues. It also suppresses appetite, making it an attractive but deadly diet aid.

Research suggests that some damage incurred from chronic meth use may be permanent, and while it is possible for receptors in the brain to heal, the process is not well understood. Users may suffer impaired motor function, psychosis, and death. “Some clients go into psychosis and need to be hospitalized,” says the source.

Brain scans show that after a year of sobriety, some damaged dopamine receptors have regenerated, but those in recovery still showed severe cognitive impairment in memory, judgment, and motor coordination, similar to Parkinson’s Disease. Some users also experience lead poisoning from the chemicals used to cook meth. Says the source, “Most often, I’ll see nervous tics or facial twitches that seem to stay with them. Some have paranoia that stays.”

And then there’s “meth mouth,” characterized by yellowing, broken, rotting teeth. Meth causes salivary glands in the mouth to dry up, allowing acids to eat away at enamel, accelerating tooth decay. Users also obsessively grind their teeth.

Treatment programs can last up to eighteen months or longer, but few prevention programs remain in Alameda County. “It’s hard because there’s no money,” says the source. “We used to have a program for students where we’d go into schools and talk, but state budgets have cut funding in all areas. That affects outreach, and prevention programs aren’t bringing money in.”

You must be mistaken—your well is spring-fed and you had it tested for mineral and bacterial contamination before you purchased the property. You test again, and this time the sample indicates serious diesel contamination. Further investigation leads to a “fake house” nestled in trees on the other side of the creek. The building looks like a residence, but it’s only home to several hundred marijuana plants. The diesel tank for the system’s generators—necessary to power about forty 1,000-watt lamps, some on eighteen hours a day, some twelve—is leaking gallons of diesel into the soil, the creek, and the groundwater.

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman tells this story about a family in Piercy. It’s becoming more common in the new climate of large-scale illegal grows, indoors and out. The quiet-seeking family listened to generators running day and night, smelled diesel exhaust, and learned more about bad installations than they ever hope to know: The grower used a polymer tank connected to the generators with PVC pipe and wire clamp connectors. Neither the tank nor the pipe and fittings are rated to hold petroleum products. The Hazardous Materials unit ends up at situations like this, and landowners are responsible for the clean-up costs. Assuming there is a landowner. Often grows happen on remote tribal, BLM, or national forest lands, and taxpayers foot the bill.

According to a 2006 report by Dr. Jon B. Gettman of Shepherd University, California leads the nation in indoor and outdoor marijuana production. It is the state’s largest cash crop, generating nearly $14 billion, more than grapes, vegetables, and hay combined. Moreover, production has increased ten-fold in the last 25 years. Much of that production takes place in marginal and remote areas, where ATVs power up hills to tiny outcrops, generators thunder day and night, and water trucks suck water out of tiny creeks.

Humboldt County supervising environmental health specialist Melissa Martel says that diesel bioaccumulates in aquatic species and continues up the food chain. “The coating action of diesel oil can kill algae, insects, fish and birds,” she says. “Studies indicate that 50 percent of fish will die when exposed to about 1 teaspoon of diesel in 25 gallons of water.”

Diesel setups are so prevalent that Martel gives advice on setting up safe fuel conveyance systems. “The growers that we investigate aren’t the peace-loving, organic-growing hippies that you might imagine. We find 100-KW generators with multiple 10,000-gallon diesel storage tanks sitting on the ground, commonly in a creek drainage with good riparian coverage, with makeshift piping, hoses, and no seismic support. Not surprisingly, grows are too frequently discovered by CDF or local volunteer fire [fighters] when the grow and surrounding trees are on fire.”

Mendocino County fisheries biologist Cynthia LeDoux experiences other difficulties related to large grows: her own safety is at risk. On a number of occasions, she has abandoned stream monitoring related to watershed and fisheries restoration and recovery because of large grows. Once she and her colleague were removed from a research site due to a 16,000-plant operation nearby. “Migrants are being helicoptered in by cartels,” she says, referring to Mexican drug cartels that have recently begun growing in Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity, and Lake counties. “The California Department of Fish & Game doesn’t deal with many large-scale grows because of the major possibility of violence.” These dangers extend beyond law enforcement and game wardens down to biologists and the general public.

Henry Alden, vice president of Walala Redwoods Inc., agrees that there is “an increasing trend of full-time growers who aren’t local and are more violent.” There have been reports from many parts of Northern California of hikers and equestrians being threatened and even shot at as a result of stumbling upon a pot plantation. Allman says, “These large grows are always well off the beaten path. We were on a helicopter bust of 34,000 plants. There must have been twenty people living at the site who scattered when the helicopter came. They lived there all summer, putting all manner of waste into the soil and water.”

The danger extends to wildlife. Allman describes deer, squirrel, and raccoon carcasses found near grow sites. “The animals are going to go for the greenest thing around come fall. In this case, it’s the foliage of large marijuana plantations.” Growers put out poison or shoot the animals.

The presence of rats creates another problem. “They’ll chew the stalks of the plants and girdle them,” says Allman, so the growers use poison pellets. “The rat ingests the poison and goes to get a drink at a nearby stream,” Allman says. “Rat poison is activated by water. The poison kills the animal close by, and when the body decomposes, 100 percent of the poison is carried directly into the watershed.” Raptors and vultures eating the rats can also be poisoned.

Allman says that a mature pot plant can use up to 15 gallons of water per day: “If there are 100,000 plants in Mendocino County, then come fall time, that’s 1.5 million gallons of water per day.” Often growers suck water directly from creeks; one observer saw ten rafts floating in Outlet Creek, which supports several salmon species. Each raft was equipped with a generator powering a submerged pump connected to camo-painted pipes extending up a hill to an outdoor grow.

The plantations require high levels of nitrogen fertilizer, often bat or seabird guano. Enormous numbers of bags of soil are necessary to fill the pots and grow-bags many growers use; area nurseries sell soil by the truckload. Allman says, “To avoid suspicion, most of these bags don’t make it to the landfill. They stay at the grow site along with whatever other waste materials are produced by plantation caretakers. There should be a California redemption value for soil bags.”

Some operations go beyond the careful placement of grow-bags and pots. “Some bulldoze large areas of land to create a sunny clearing, often at or near the tops of hills,” Allman says. Creeks and rivers below are flooded with silt once winter rains come. LeDoux has witnessed first-hand the devastation this can cause to breeding salmon and other fish. Erosion and contamination combined with fertilizer-laden runoff and water drafting does not bode well for fish species in some of Northern California’s most remote creeks and rivers. “The cumulative effect of illegal marijuana cultivation on fish in these streams is a serious issue,” she says. “We need a think-tank on this whole problem. It needs to be addressed as soon as possible.”

Allman wants to clarify one point: “There is a ser-ious distinction to be made. Many medical [legal] marijuana growers are some of the most responsible citizens around. They buy soil in bulk, use rat traps instead of poison, water with timers and drip systems. They have very little physical impact on the land. I’m not up against legal growers. The ones I’m concerned with are the ones polluting the environment in the name of huge profits. The plants are seasonal, but the environmental damage lasts forever.”

Is it time for a Green-Growers stamp or the think-tank LeDoux proposes? Organic and sustainable growing practices are well suited to this hardy plant. Cartels, diesel generators, and poisons are not. Consumers can demand the greening of the green, and move growers in the direction of environmentally friendly marijuana.

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.