Terrain » Spring 2004

Contra Costa’a Lost Valleys

Mary Vance — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:54:15 +0000

Contra Costa Water District (CCWD) voters will decide on March 2 whether to expand Los Vaqueros, a 100,000-acre-foot reservoir in eastern Contra Costa County. The proposed $1.5 billion project would inundate up to 2,000 acres of additional land. A “no” vote will effectively block any expansion. A “yes” vote would require further environmental review and water and construction permits, but voters would have no input on the final proposal.
The Los Vaqueros reservoir is part of the drinking water supply for 450,000 people in the eastern part of the county. The reservoir gets its water from the Delta, which, in turn, is fed by a network of rivers and streams that drains much of the state. Water from the Delta flows into San Francisco Bay, but about 40 percent of it is diverted into numerous canals and water projects for residential and agricultural use before it gets there. If approved, the Los Vaqueros expansion would drain an additional 200,000 to 400,000 acre-feet of water (up to about 130 billion gallons) from the Delta.
“Imagine a dam six times as big, a reservoir five times as big and a water surface 170 feet higher than it was before,” says Seth Adams, of the Committee to Stop the DAM Waste. “Four square miles will be destroyed, including some spectacular areas, like Adobe Valley. The wildlife and recreation corridor along the west side of reservoir will be taken out entirely.” The expansion would inundate miles of oak woodlands as well as grasslands home to several endangered species, such as the San Joaquin kit fox.
Opponents of the project have criticized the Contra Costa Water District (CCWD), which controls the reservoir, for putting the measure on the ballot before environmental impact studies have been done and details about the project have been released. “[The timing is] entirely political,” says Adams. “What they’re looking for is a go-ahead from the public as political cover for a project that’s going to be disastrous. Voters won’t have the final say.”
The ballot measure includes several provisions that officials say are key to the project. One is that none of the water stored in the expanded reservoir will leave Northern California. Another is that the CCWD would retain control over the operation of the reservoir, even while other agencies share the costs. “CCWD wants to make clear to everyone what the conditions for expansion are with this vote,” says Gregg Gartrell, assistant general manager at CCWD for CALFED Studies/Planning. But if the measure is passed, it’s up to the water district, not voters, to make sure these conditions are met.
As with any major California water project, the Los Vaqueros expansion plan raises concerns that some of the water will be sold to Southern California. The district’s assurances to the contrary, says Adams, “carry no weight. The district can change its opinions at any point. Plus, water is a commodity. There have been several cases where water was transferred from one district to the next, and ultimately ended up sold to Southern California.”
The expansion plan calls for the construction of several new pipelines connecting Los Vaqueros to nearby water districts. One would connect Los Vaqueros to the East Bay Municipal Utility District; and another to the South Bay Aqueduct, which could feed water into southward-bound canals. The water district insists this won’t happen.
Water district officials contend that a larger reservoir will help the Delta, by giving the district more flexibility in its pumping schedule. According to a report by CALFED, the joint state-federal water agency, greater reservoir capacity would allow agencies that depend on Delta water to pump and store water at peak flow times, and avoid pumping when fish are near intakes or water quality is low.
But Bay Institute senior scientist Tina Swanson says that the Delta’s fresh water supply is already precariously low. “Those peak flows which make it through the Delta into the bay are critically important to the estuary, and we’ve been reducing both the frequency and the duration of those flows for decades,” says Swanson. “We’ve reduced the bay to chronic drought conditions.”
Only six years after the completion of the Los Vaqueros reservoir, critics wonder if the expansion is really necessary. Adams points to 1988 CCWD campaign materials that claimed the original reservoir would “give CCWD customers enough high-quality water to meet their needs, even during a prolonged drought.” District officials reply that Los Vaqueros was designed to provide only six months of drought protection, which would be insufficient to deal with a prolonged drought like the one that hit the region from 1987 to 1993.

Mendocino Opens Fire on GMOs

Linnea Due — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:53:40 +0000

Genetically modified potatoes can vaccinate consumers against hepatitis B and cholera. Flounder genes render strawberries and tomatoes more resistant to frost. At least that’s the line of the biotech industry. But critics across the globe say there’s a potentially disastrous flipside—like vaccine plants getting into the general food supply, or pollen drift and crossbreeding creating herbicide-resistant weeds.
On March 2, Mendocino County voters may make their county the first in the nation to ban the “propagation, cultivation, raising, and growing of genetically modified organisms.” The fate of Measure H will affect a raft of similar measures, now in the signature-gathering phase, in Marin, Sonoma, Humboldt, and other California counties.
“We’re confident but nervous,” says campaign coordinator Doug Mosel. Confident because Mendocino County is famously liberal, even radical. Nervous because an Oregon state measure that demanded GE products be labeled, which had the support of 70 percent of the electorate before the election, went down to a resounding defeat after a $5.53 million blitz of anti-labeling advertising, nearly half of it in the last few weeks before the election. The big spenders in Oregon were Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow Agrosciences, and similar corporations, banded together under the name “Coalition Against the Costly Labeling Law.” Monsanto alone ponied up $1.5 million, according to Oregon’s Money in Politics Research Action Project. Everyone in Mendocino—opponents and supporters alike—expects a similar deluge leading up to the March election.
But the Mendocino measure doesn’t go as far as Oregon’s attempt—in Oregon all GE products coming into the state, like cereals, snacks, and animal feeds, would have had to be identified. Products like these are not covered under the Mendocino proposal.
The county Farm Bureau opposes any attempt to block what it describes as future life-saving techniques. More practically, says bureau president Peter Bradford, “We feel this measure is inappropriately addressed at county level. These issues should be developed at a state or federal level. We’re already strapped for cash. This would only deplete resources sorely needed in other areas.” The ballot argument against Measure H, submitted by Bradford to the county registrar, is slyer: “All plants—whether grown in your backyard or on a farm—could be subject to regulation and enforcement if Measure H passes. Does the government need to know what’s growing in your garden?” In a county with an estimated $2 billion pot industry—compared to $156.4 million in above-board agriculture—those are fighting words.
Mosel calls the measure an application of the precautionary principle. “The citizens of this county could decide any time in the future to rescind it once the technology is proven safe. I see a ban as putting a stop to this uncontrolled experiment whose consequences we don’t know.” Mosel points to evidence of GM pollen contamination—two recent studies in the UK reported that bees carried GM rapeseed pollen to conventional plants more than 16 miles away. Studies by UC Berkeley’s Ignacio Chapela, recently denied tenure (allegedly) over the GMO controversy, found traces of genetically altered material contaminating heirloom corn varieties in isolated Mexican villages.
The first legal shot was fired in Mendocino on December 19, when fertilizer and pesticide industry advocate California Plant Health Association, which represents Dow AgroSciences, HydroAgri, and others, brought suit to prevent the printing of pro-H ballot arguments. On December 30, Superior Court Judge Leonard J. LaCasse refused to change any language in the ballot material. The suit might have backfired on industry advocates—it was revealed in arguments before the court that there are a couple dozen trials of GM grapevines now under development in California.
Both sides agree that there are no GM organisms growing in Mendocino at present, and both foresee that wine grapevines genetically engineered to resist Pierce’s disease, caused by a bacteria borne by insects like the glassy-winged sharpshooter, would be the likeliest target of the new measure.
That’s about the extent of the accord: proponents see the measure as easily enforceable by agriculture officials who already inspect incoming plants, while county agricultural commissioner Dave Bengston, speaking at a Board of Supervisors meeting in December, called the measure “unenforceable” and said passage would place a burden on local farmers, who wouldn’t be able to compete “on an even scale” with growers of GMO crops elsewhere. Proponents counter that being GM-free would give Mendocino farmers a marketing advantage.
While expecting a hard campaign, Ukiah Brewery owner Els Cooperrider, one of the originators of Measure H, believes it will pass: “People feel so unempowered in the world, and this is something they can do on their own and make their own issue. That’s helping us.”

Homeland Security to Plague Livermore

Chris Terry — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:52:48 +0000

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory may soon be home to the Department of Energy’s (DOE) first-ever Biosafety Level 3 lab, which, along with a sister facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory, would conduct defensive research on biowarfare agents—such as anthrax, plague, and hantavirus—that could be used in terrorist attacks against the US.
Davis voters recently defeated a similar bid for a Biosafety Level 4 lab at their University of California campus. That lab would have conducted research on diseases like ebola that are considered even more dangerous than anthrax and plague. “We don’t want these labs in any community,” says Samantha McCarthy of the Davis-based community group Stop the UCD Lab Now. Her group is trying to get assurances from UC President Robert C. Dynes that the entire UC system will not bid on other federal biodefense lab projects.
In Livermore, DOE officials hope to begin assembling the $2.5 million lab structure soon. But if a lawsuit by local watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs is successful, construction may be delayed pending a more thorough environmental review. A final ruling is expected by May 15. Until then, US District Judge Saundra B. Armstrong has issued an injunction that temporarily prohibits Lawrence Livermore from receiving restricted pathogens destined for the biolab.
“We feel that it’s an affront to the community of Livermore to build the lab without performing a thorough EIS [environmental impact study],” says Loulena Miles, a Livermore resident and Tri-Valley CAREs attorney.
Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government significantly increased funding for biodefense work, culminating in this year’s proposed $1 billion Project BioShield. A rush of proposals over the last two years resulted in a biodefense building boom; applications for federal funds have come from the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, universities, and the DOE.
The 1,600-square foot facility in Livermore would be run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the division of the DOE responsible for countering threats from weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The research agenda, much of it classified, would be controlled primarily by the Department of Homeland Security. This differs from the proposed Davis lab, which would have been funded by the National Institutes of Health. Critics from Tri-Valley CAREs and elsewhere charge that putting a Homeland Security-funded bioweapons lab at Livermore is bound to raise suspicions internationally, and could spark more bioweapons work abroad.
“Throughout the world, Livermore and Los Alamos are known as the homes of thermonuclear weapons,” says Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project, an international anti-bioweapons organization. “What those guys do in large measure is develop weapons of mass destruction. If that facility were in Sudan, it would probably be cruise-missiled in a heartbeat.”
Livermore officials dismiss such concerns about “co-location” of weapons and pathogen research. “Co-location is not a problem as long as other countries are following their Biological Weapons Convention treaty obligations,” says Lawrence Livermore spokesman Scott Wampler. But, according to Hammond, the US is itself in violation of many reporting requirements in that treaty.
At the heart of the dispute in Livermore is whether the proposed lab has undergone sufficient environmental review. In December 2002, the NNSA completed an Environmental Assessment (EA) for the Livermore site, but this type of review lacks the detail and public-comment requirements of a full Environmental Impact Statement. Tri-Valley CAREs’ lawsuit, which was filed jointly with Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, alleges that the EA is “grossly deficient,” and that an EIS is required under federal law. In addition to extensive public hearings, an EIS would also require a more detailed study of potential earthquake dangers and, the lawsuit charges, it would have to consider the issue of weapons proliferation internationally.
Despite the lawsuit, lab proponents contend that Lawrence Livermore, which currently has a lower-security BSL-2 facility, is an ideal site. “Given the threats posed by terrorists and the security situation after 9/11, it makes sense to go to the next level. There’s lots of expertise that Livermore can offer,” says NNSA spokesman John Belluardo.
But critics charge that Lawrence Livermore’s history of accidents and questionable security, including the recent loss of a set of master keys, make it a poor choice for dangerous and sensitive bioterrorism work. Accidents include an October 3, 2003 incident in which up to 12 workers were potentially exposed to radioactive plutonium, and a history of tritium contamination in areas surrounding the lab.
To retired Lawrence Livermore staff scientist Marion Fulk, that history makes for a particularly disturbing future. “These [pathogens] are potentially more dangerous than anything in the plutonium lab,” he says. “Some can be infectious at exposure levels of even a single organism.”

Farmers to Clear the Air

Lisa Stapleton — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:51:36 +0000

In January, air quality boards across the state began restricting agricultural air pollution under the Clean Air Act, thanks to a group of groundbreaking bills signed into law last fall. The state’s $27 billion farm economy has long been a “sacred cow” exempt from pollution control regulation. The new laws, which eliminate that exemption, nearly stalled several times before being pushed through by a coalition led by California State Senator Dean Florez (D-Shafter), who represents a heavily agricultural district.
“What was once an obscure environmental problem is now recognized as a health and economic issue,” says Carolina Simunovic, environmental health project coordinator of the Fresno Metro Ministry. “Mothers tell me that on bad air days, they have to take their kids out of school, or they get sick themselves, and they have to miss work. Now they realize that if the air quality improves, their quality of life gets better in a real way.”
The new laws call for local air boards to evaluate agricultural impacts and to issue permits for dairies and diesel farm equipment such as pumps and tractors. The laws also set up subsidies for farmers who buy cleaner equipment. Despite those subsidies, most farm associations opposed the legislation. But Central Valley activist Tom Frantz says that complying with the laws is pretty easy. “The public is paying for the farmer to comply. I own farm land that my brother farms, and the new pumps we needed cost about $20,000, and they were about 90 percent subsidized.”
“I’m not sure they [agricultural interests] understand how broad this could be,” says Brent Newell, an attorney at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment who participated in last-minute negotiations that saved the legislation. According to Newell, large dairies realized only late in the process that they would have to comply with the new laws and may have to buy mitigation credits to offset emissions from animal wastes. The high cost of such credits, Newell says, could torpedo some plans for “mega-dairies.”
“It covers a lot. It could even cover some pesticides, if they’re volatile organic compounds,” he says. That would be good news for communities affected by pesticide drift (see Terrain, Summer 2003).
The new laws will also regulate ozone, which plagues the Central Valley and has been implicated in a wide variety of lung ailments, including asthma. More than 300,000 valley residents suffer from chronic respiratory conditions, according to The Sacramento Bee.
Among the first to react to the new legislation were officials in the San Joaquin Valley, which, in late December, became the first region in the country to ask to be designated as an area of “extreme non-attainment” under federal air standards. Under its previous “severe” designation, the valley would have had to achieve clean air standards by 2005—or lose $2 billion in federal highway funds. The “extreme” designation buys the valley about five more years before having to meet those standards, says Newell. If the designation is approved, San Joaquin Valley will become only the second region to get the “extreme” rating, which currently applies only to Los Angeles.
Activists like Simunovic say the Florez legislation is welcome, but overdue. “The whole bureaucratic process will take a long time to show any measurable change. [Meanwhile] Fresno County has the highest asthma rates for children in the country.”

North Coast Loggers Face Veto

Amy Standen — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:50:27 +0000

It’s not often that forestry activists in the North Coast get good news from Sacramento, so it was a rare celebratory moment in October when then-Governor Gray Davis signed Senate Bill 810, which gives water quality control board officials the authority to block logging operations that are likely to endanger watersheds.
The statewide law, which went into effect the first of the year, will be felt most strongly on the North Coast, where activists, regulators, and logging companies have squared off for years over the fate of forests and watersheds. Over 90 percent of the rivers and streams on the North Coast have been listed by the EPA as “imperiled” by sediment overloads, a result of logging operations that loosen soil and remove canopy cover, hastening erosion and causing landslides.
Despite the EPA listings, the region’s water quality control board has wielded little power over the California Department of Forestry (CDF), which reviews logging proposals. As a rule, the water board reviews all major logging plans, but the CDF was free to ignore its recommendations. “In maybe 10 percent of the [logging plans] we reviewed, we would reach an impasse,” recalls Catherine Kuhlman, who directs the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. In those cases, says Kuhlman, “the CDF would send us a letter saying ‘thanks for the input, but we won’t take your comment.’”
Logging lobbyists fought the bill, arguing that it would hand too much authority to water boards. But Kuhlman says the veto power “is not something we should use lightly. It’d be nice if we didn’t have to use it at all. But it does give us some leverage in the process.” In parts of California where watersheds are in better shape, the new law will have little effect. “If you’re doing good logging, you’ll never know this law exists,” says Paul Mason, a forestry lobbyist for the Sierra Club.
But if the past is any indication, water officials at the North Coast board may be making good use of SB 810. Asked how often SB 810 might be invoked, one staffer suggested a look at the board’s record of “non-concurrences,” or formal objections it has filed against timber harvest plans. In 2002, water board staff issued about 25 “non-concurs” on CDF-approved logging proposals. In all of those cases, the logging took place as planned, despite significant risk to watersheds.
One such objection was filed in response to Pacific Lumber’s logging plan for the upper Freshwater Creek area, one of the region’s most sensitive watersheds, and a key habitat for coho salmon. CDF approved the logging, which began on January 1.
Whether SB 810 is properly enforced, says Mason, depends on the “dynamics of the actual water quality control board.” In the final days of his term, Governor Davis filled several seats on the water board with logging industry insiders. Those appointments were quickly revoked by Governor Schwarzenegger, who has yet to announce his new picks.

Stockton Water Deal Runs Dry

Dan Rademacher — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:50:17 +0000

In December, the largest water privatization deal on the West Coast was struck down when San Joaquin County Judge Robert McNatt ruled that the city of Stockton violated state environmental laws in its water contract with OMI-Thames, a joint US-British firm. The judge ruled that the agreement, which officially went into effect last August, is illegal, because it was awarded without a full environmental impact review. OMI-Thames was to receive $600 million over 20 years to maintain, upgrade, and operate Stockton’s formerly public water system.
“The Stockton privatization issue is going to be significant statewide and nationally,” says Stockton resident Dale Stocking, a lead critic of the privatization deal. “The pendulum is swinging back away from privatization, and I don’t think the companies are finding it quite as profitable as they thought it was going to be.”
According to Brian Johnson, lead attorney for the coalition that sued to block the deal, this case is among the first to require that a municipal district comply with the California Environmental Quality Act’s full environmental review process. The decision may reverberate far beyond Northern California, says Alex Hafini, an attorney with the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide, a nonprofit that aims to get legal information to activists and public interest lawyers in developing nations.
“This case could mean that other countries could use their environmental impact laws to better scrutinize water privatization,” Hafini says. “This will plug environmental considerations into what tends to be a [strictly] cost-benefit analysis.”
Judge McNatt’s ruling requires the city to immediately begin severing ties with OMI-Thames and reconstituting the public water agency over the next six months. But the city council voted six to one on December 12 to pursue an appeal, and may seek to delay breaking ties with the private water company. The appeal must be filed 60 days after McNatt’s ruling is officially filed, likely in late January. Stockton Mayor Gary Podesto, a major proponent of privatization, did not return calls for comment.

Planet Garden

Joe Eaton — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:48:53 +0000

The chameleon, according to malagasy folklore, keeps one eye on the past, the other on the future. This would make it an appropriate totem for those who practice ecological restoration.
The past part seems straightforward enough. “Restoration” implies putting pieces back together, making something whole—a work of art, a political system, a natural community. The complications begin when you pick a baseline. In restoring California ecosystems, are we trying to recreate what was here before the Gold Rush? Before the Spanish Entrada? Drake’s landfall? Each choice has a different set of consequences.
For a long time, botanists debated whether the California sea fig was a native plant or an invasive exotic. Its nearest relatives were South African and South American, but there was no record of an accidental or intentional introduction. At the request of the state Parks and Recreation department, Susan Bicknell and Ellen Mackey examined a 900-year pollen record cored from a lakebed on the central coast. The sea fig’s distinctive pollen appeared only in sediment deposited since 1800. Their verdict: the plant’s an alien, likely a hitchhiker in ship’s ballast.
But forget DeAnza and Drake: how about before the Holocene? It’s easy to dismiss paleontologist Paul Martin’s plea to rebuild what he has called “the last entire earth” by bringing back the elephants. Not to mention camels; other Ice Age beasts, like sabertooths and ground sloths, left no suitable next of kin. But Martin seems quite serious. And in a way, reintroducing California condors to the Grand Canyon, where none have nested for 10,000 years, is an exercise in restoring the Pleistocene.
Others have picked up the idea of “resurrection ecology,” as Robert Michael Pyle calls it. Pyle suggests translocating the nearest living relative of the extinct Xerces blue to the butterfly’s former habitat in San Francisco’s dunes. Would that be close enough, though? Would black bears from Yellowstone work as surrogate California grizzlies? (Not that bringing back an apex predator seems politically feasible; the wolf’s quiet self-reintroduction has been problematic enough.)
It may be more realistic to look for the ecological equivalents of extinct beasts. Stephen Edwards of the East Bay Regional Parks Botanic Garden argues that native California bunchgrasses co-evolved with a suite of long-gone grazing and trampling mammals: mammoths, camels, horses, bison. If so, cattle may have a positive role to play in restored grassland. It’s controversial, but Edwards makes a persuasive case.
As for the future, as long as a reservoir of weeds and other invasives exists, restorationists can’t just walk away from their work: Keeping exotics out requires a sustained commitment.
Beyond that, we all know that ecosystems aren’t static. Ponds become meadows become forests; fire, flood, and other disturbances reset the clock. Factor in anthropogenic climate change, and restoration becomes an even more complex enterprise. How do you rebuild a natural community to last?
A few years back, the Nature Conservancy funded a study of the impact of global warming on North American plants. The authors, Larry Morse and Lynn Kutner, defined a “climate envelope” for each of 15,000 native plant species, looking at mean annual temperatures. They concluded that with a global temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius, up to 11 percent of those species would be outside their optimum climate envelopes. The percentage would be highest in the Southeastern states, but California falls in the 5 to 10 percent range.
We know something about how trees—keystone species—respond to warming climates through the work of Harvard paleoecologist Margaret Davis. Trees, like other organisms, track climate change. When the last glaciation ended 16,000 years ago, they spread north from the southern refuges where the ice had confined them. But Davis’ analysis of fossil pollen shows that they didn’t all move together like Birnam Wood. In the east, chestnuts “migrated” north at a rate of 100 meters per year, maples at 200, jack pines at 400. Some, like the Florida torreya, never made it out of their refuges at all. Davis found that lags in response to temperature change resulted in plant communities—and by extension, ecosystems—that were out of equilibrium. Such imbalances will happen again, and this time we won’t have millennia for the laggards to catch up, or unobstructed routes.
The alternatives are clear: accept the loss of whole ecosystems through global warming, or assist plant communities (and their pollinators, seed distributors, primary and secondary consumers) in their migration. The second option is a daunting but profoundly creative task: becoming, as author Connie Barlow puts it, “gardeners of the planet.”

Terra Renewal

Jeffrey Blumenthal — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:46:46 +0000

It’s a sign of how far the environmental movement has come that after talking for decades about conservation and preservation—ideas geared towards stopping environmental abuses—“restoration,” or repairing damage already done, has found a home in the lexicon.
California’s restoration scene has taken off over the last 20 years. Once the province of a few community activists, scientists, and enthusiasts, the movement today encompasses thousands of ongoing projects, hundreds of millions of state, federal, and private dollars, and dozens of government agencies in cooperation with the private and nonprofit sectors.
At the same time, the challenge of restoring what has been lost, damaged, or simply altered by 150 years of industrial and agricultural development remains daunting. Take, for example, the San Francisco Bay and Delta Estuary.
A century and a half of filling, dredging, and diking has shrunk the bay by one third of its original size. Once lined with 190,000 acres of marshes, today it has only 40,000 acres. Of the 500 species of fish and wildlife associated with the baylands, 20 are endangered or threatened with extinction.
At the same time, seven million people live and work adjacent to the bay’s historic wetlands, a fact that forces engineers and planners to consider some difficult and fundamental questions: What are the goals of restoration? Who or what benefits? And how far are we willing to go to achieve those goals? In May 2002, officials announced a $100 million plan to purchase and restore 16,500 acres of former salt-making ponds in San Francisco Bay. If the project takes place, it will be the most ambitious wetlands restoration in California history—but it’s still a drop in the bucket. To truly restore the bay would mean reversing decades of so-called progress, tearing down whole neighborhoods, breaking up dams and levees and ports. But restoration at its most radical—the “bringing down of civilization” as Derrick Jensen calls it (see page 18)—has never been on the drawing board.
“We’re certainly not going to take people’s homes out to create wildlife habitat,” says Clyde Morris, manager of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, regarding the Cargill salt pond restoration. “It would be pretty silly to try to return to a pre-white man environment.”
Not that it hasn’t been tried.
In 1934, a faculty committee at the University of Wisconsin in Madison began acquiring derelict farmland—dominated by non-native, weedy quackgrass and bluegrass—for the establishment of an arboretum that would incorporate a collection of all the ecological communities native to the area. A rich mosaic that includes wildflowers, prairie grasses, and hardwoods, the resultant 60-acre Curtis Prairie now contains over 200 plant species and is considered one of the earliest and most extensive restored ecological communities in the world.
Nevertheless, 70 years later none of the communities of the Curtis Prairie represents a perfect snapshot of the pre-settler environment. Rapid urban development in nearby Madison has left its mark—roadwork has slimmed buffer zones of planted pine trees and caused erosion and deposition that have buried parts of the prairie. A siltation pond was added to offset urban runoff, but the pond has contributed to erosion of a creek that runs through the prairie, allowing the intrusion of aggressive reed canary grass. Further complicating the restoration is timescales: soil structure alone may take hundreds or even thousands of years to develop.
Realistically, restoration isn’t about crafting historically exact re-creations, writes Seth Zuckerman, a California-based environmental writer. “People can . . . seek to restore the land,” writes Zuckerman, “to a particular snapshot of ecological beauty from an imagined earlier era: before industrial logging, before the arrival of white settlers, before the diking of wetlands. But any such snapshot only existed for a moment in time. Lasting restoration does not attempt to restore an ecosystem to a particular state; it attempts to restore the processes of natural succession and evolution that occur in wild, self-regulating systems.”
Restoration, in other words, is less about turning back the clock than it is about allowing natural processes to return to an area that humans have disrupted—setting the evolutionary clock ticking again, as restorationist Don Falk puts it. Nature is far better at creating nature than humans are (see p. 19).
Meanwhile, it becomes ever more evident that what’s good for nature is also good for humans, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the watershed restoration movement.
For much of the 20th century, big federal projects channelized urban waterways in rapidly growing population centers, straightening and wrapping them in concrete and frequently burying them to control flooding and make room for new development. Ironically, these expensive efforts to control the environment often had the opposite effect: watersheds lost their ability to cope with increased sedimentation and polluted runoff, resulting in increased flooding and the degradation of water quality. As urban streams were essentially converted into underground storm sewers, “what used to be a neighborhood amenity [became] a neighborhood nuisance,” says Larry Kolb of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board.
By the 1980s, many citizens were fed up with the failed creek projects of the previous decades, particularly in the low-income and minority communities that frequently receive the brunt of industrial pollution and runoff.
One of those communities is North Richmond, where a trash-strewn creek flooded chronically; its eroding banks were an eyesore and a public nuisance. Residents had received an offer from the Army Corps of Engineers to relieve the frequent flooding of Wildcat Creek with a concrete culvert behind a chain-link fence but turned it down, opting instead to hire their own expert, nationally known hydrologist Ann Riley, to help design a community-based solution.
Volunteers removed trash from public access areas of the creek; stabilized eroding banks with native vegetation, brushpiles, and cages of rocks; and widened the floodplain to accommodate 100-year flood cycles. The result was a shaded, meandering neighborhood resource and critical habitat for endangered red-legged frogs and the occasional great egret. Bordered by the 1.5-mile Wildcat Creek Trail, the creek is also a place where kids go in search of crayfish and reintroduced rainbow trout.
According to Lillie Mae Jones, a longtime community leader who was instrumental in the Wildcat Creek restoration, the flooding has been alleviated. But Jones says the true benefit of restoration lies in the hands-on educational and job training opportunities it offers to locals.
Groups from nearby Verde Elementary School frequently visit the creek to monitor water quality and learn about the ecosystem. “By taking city kids and putting them in the boonies,” Jones says, “it gets them interested in where they live, what affects their lives, and it gets them interested in ecology. When you make them aware of the environment and injustice, it makes a difference.”
Jones is proud of the work her organization, Community Youth Council for Leadership and Education (CYCLE), does in bringing at-risk youth—some of them on probation or under house arrest—out to work on the creek. Jones explains how the environmental work translates to life-skills training. “It’s our way of creating employment for the kids who are out here pushing drugs and killing each other,” she says. “It gives them legitimate roles.”
The success of Wildcat inspired dozens of similar locally based restoration projects. The Urban Creeks Council of California has coordinated efforts in North Richmond, Albany, Berkeley, and El Cerrito, pulling in state and federal dollars and enlisting the participation of community groups like the East Bay Conservation Corps. Notable examples include Oakland’s Sausal Creek (see page 20)—where in the ’80s, grassroots activists halted the proposed burial of the city’s only large creekside parkway—and Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek, of which volunteers “daylighted” approximately 500 feet in 1994.
Kolb says that local flood control agencies have reinvented themselves as watershed stewards. Last year, the California Department of Water Resources awarded 26 urban stream restoration grants worth nearly $8.6 million. As scientific understanding of natural water systems has grown, Kolb says, agencies have learned that “you can’t treat the stream separately from the watershed.”
Over the last decade and a half, government agencies have sponsored more and larger restoration projects, many due to wider applications of two of the nation’s most important environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act—in particular, a 1987 Supreme Court ruling requiring that storm flows and urban runoff be regulated under the latter.
The broadening interpretation of those two acts has forced South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project planners to consider the bay within a larger regional context. On the one hand, transforming salt ponds to habitat for endangered wildlife communities such as the clapper rail and salt marsh harvest mouse means a host of technical activities in the ponds themselves—assimilating brines, grading levees, breaching dikes, replacing dredged material, controlling non-native plants and animals, and disposing of derelict equipment. On the other hand, water quality in the bay is essential to the survival of these species, which means that upland watersheds hundreds of miles away are now a critical piece of the bay puzzle.
“You can’t address the quality of the bay until you restore the streams,” Riley says. Just as scientists found that the Curtis Prairie could not be isolated from the effects of nearby urban areas, bay agencies have finally acknowledged the importance of upland water corridors where riparian woodlands and meanders catch sediment and filter pollutants such as pesticides, fertilizers, and PCBs. “It’s the dot we’re finally connecting,” Riley says.
At the heart of this regional approach is CALFED, a cooperative effort of more than 20 state and federal agencies working with local communities to address water management and ecosystem health issues throughout the San Francisco Bay Delta, including the Sacramento and San Joaquin river valleys, Suisun Marsh, and San Francisco and San Pablo bays. CALFED, by one official’s estimate, is the largest supporter of restoration projects in the state, with a $150-million-per-year ecosystem restoration budget. Since 1996, CALFED has supported 402 projects to the tune of $476 million.
The California Department of Fish and Game, which invested in over 200 restoration projects last year, awards approximately $20-25 million per year in restoration grants, most oriented towards restoring fish runs and habitat. Commercial and sport fish populations—native and non-native alike, such as salmon, steelhead trout, and striped bass—have been devastated by decades of damming, resulting in the widespread loss of riparian habitat and disruption of spawning routes. A 1988 California Department of Fish and Game report estimated that a fully implemented recovery strategy for salmon and steelhead could produce a net benefit of $6 billion and 8,000 new jobs; even doubling existing stocks of these fish would produce net benefits of $150 million a year.
Typical of Fish and Game projects is the public-private partnership that in 2002 brought together Trout Unlimited, the California Conservation Corps, and landowner Mendocino Redwood Company to plant and irrigate 200 trees along a tributary of the Russian River west of Ukiah. Dam removal has also gained momentum as a more ambitious habitat restoration strategy; Friends of the River has targeted 22 dams for removal, mostly in Northern California.
Although they have attracted much of the attention and resources, restoration is not the exclusive province of streams, rivers, and wetlands. The Natural Resources Project Inventory tracks over 4,000 restoration or assessment and planning projects in California. Of those, about 600 are exotic weed eradication programs. In Palo Alto’s Arastradero Preserve, for example, volunteers work year-round(see p. 21).
Large-scale projects—like the South Bay salt ponds, or the proposed restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, can have long-range price tags in the billions of dollars, causing some to ask whether it would be cheaper not to have destroyed them in the first place. “Nature does a far better job of making nature than mankind does,” says Will Travis of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, “so it’s always cheaper to protect what we have than it is to despoil it and then come back and try to restore it later.”
Friends of the River’s Ron Stork sees it as a matter of tradeoffs. “For the cost of another B-1 bomber, does the country want another Yosemite Valley?” To that, he says, many people would say yes.

Budget Blues

Chris Terry — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:43:12 +0000

A Public Policy Institute poll last November found that 89 percent of Californians consider the environment a top priority. And Californians aren’t just talking, they’re voting. Since 2000, voters have approved propositions worth about $12 billion for land and water conservation. But while this money funds some ambitous projects, it may not be enough to keep them going. In 2002, Proposition 50 gave $3.4 billion to the Coastal Conservancy, the San Francisco Bay Conservancy Program, the Wildlife Conservation Board, and the Department of Water Resources. San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department (SFRPD) was an indirect beneficiary; its ongoing trail maintenance project at Glen Canyon was funded through a $250,000 Coastal Conservancy grant. Some cities have passed their own bond measures, and San Francisco requires that 0.025 percent of its property taxes go towards acquiring open space, which recently enabled the city to spend $3 million for land linking Golden Gate Park and the GoldenGate National Recreation Area. Private organizations also donate. The Packard Foundation alone has contributed tens of millions of dollars for state restoration projects over the last five years. It seems as if California is flush with cash—but there’s a catch. Much of the money can be used only for land acquisitions and projects, and not for park maintenance or staff salaries. That leaves it up to state and local governments to fund day-to-day operations, an increasingly difficult task in the current budget crisis. This means that even agencies like the SFRPD, which rely largely on city money, are feeling the pinch. Becky Ballinger, an SFRPD spokesperson, says her agency has almost run out of options. “The only way we can figure to meet our current budget reduction requirements is through [not re-hiring] people,” she says. The SFRPD’s Open Space Program currently employs only four gardeners (five positions are left vacant) to administer all of San Francisco’s natural areas. Gardeners double as volunteer coordinators, garbagemen, and even maintenance workers. There is simply not enough staff-power to ensure weeding of natural areas or removing smothering vines from trees, for example. As if existing budget shortfalls weren’t enough, there’s always the threat that voters won’t approve the next bond measure. About $1 billion remains from Proposition 50, just enough to fund existing priorities. The pace of acquisitions is slowing, and may eventually stop. Says Reed Holderman of the Trust for Public Lands, “If more bonds are not approved, you can expect to see less conservation, resource protection, and open space at a time when our population’s growing by leaps and bounds. If you don’t buy stuff and protect it, we’ll lose it forever.”

Best Intentions

Philip Huang — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:40:07 +0000

While officials cite the successful restoration of the lower Sausal Creek watershed as a model for citizen-agency collaborations, runoff from its upstream neighbor, the recently built Chabot Space and Space Center, threatens to erase the entire project—the painstakingly restored trails, replanted habitat for native plants and animals, the natural flow of the creek. The developing crisis over Sausal illustrates a point too often ignored: watersheds work as a whole, not as a sum of parts.
The Sausal Creek watershed covers over 2,600 acres in the East Bay. From its headwaters in the Oakland Hills, the creek flows through Dimond Canyon in Oakland before entering a culvert under the Fruitvale Bridge and then into San Francisco Bay. Before flowing into the culvert, lower Sausal Creek nurtures a verdant oasis. According to citizens group Friends of Sausal Creek, the watershed is home to 80,000 residents, as well as over 250 plant and nearly 80 bird species.
The creek—once known for its salmon run—used to flow through forested hillsides. That began to change in the late 1800s, with logging and urbanization. Most of the creek was channeled, culverted, or otherwise buried. In 1996, Friends of Sausal Creek (FOSC) formed with support from the City of Oakland, Alameda County, and the Aquatic Outreach Institute, with the aim of restoring and maintaining the watershed. The Sausal Creek Restoration Project was soon launched at a cost of $322,000, with a $250,000 grant from the California Coastal Conservancy and the remainder from the Alameda County Flood Control District.
After years of preparation and planning and thousands of volunteer hours, the project was completed in November 2001. Three-foot-high concrete dams were removed along a 600-foot stretch at the lower end of Dimond Park, and moldering culvert walls were replaced with woven willow poles and other natural materials to stabilize banks. The creek itself reverted to a more natural meander. Besides enhancing flood control, the project has improved water quality and thus provided new habitat for native rainbow trout. New trails allow access to the creek. FOSC members have continued their work, replanting the watershed with starts grown in the group’s native plant nursery, organizing clean-up hikes in Dimond Canyon, and monitoring water quality.
But high above the restored area sit the two large parking lots of the Chabot Space and Science Center, which opened in 2000. Rainwater now runs off an impervious asphalt surface rather than percolating into redwood duff, and that water empties into the headwaters of Palo Seco and Shepherd Canyon creeks, which feed into Sausal. Parking lot runoff has created a 20-foot deep incision at the headwaters of Sausal—and erosion, like water, runs downhill.
The increased runoff is likely responsible for undercutting the Dimond Canyon trail where it crosses Sausal Creek. Larger amounts of storm water overwhelmed the culvert that ran under the trail, so half the width of the trail was dumped into the stream. “Structures that withstood the ’97 El Niño have collapsed since Chabot was built,” says FOSC president Karen Paulsell. She adds that the trail damage is not 100 percent attributable to increased runoff—“But that was the only thing that changed.” She says the city has allocated $170,000 to build a new bridge across the creek.
Sedimentation from erosion is not as easily solved. The heavier runoff gathers sediment from the point of fall and all along the length of the creek. The steep incline near the headwaters allows the sediment to move unimpeded, but when Sausal Creek reaches the flatlands, the flood of sediment settles. Some restored pools are filling with silt, undoing the work of the project.
These possibilities were cited in Chabot’s Environmental Impact Report, and staffers are aware of the runoff problem. “We are committed to exploring ways that we can help alleviate this,” says Eric Havel, Chabot’s environmental programs instructor. He points out that FOSC and Chabot have a history of working together, with the institution even serving as a meeting place for FOSC’s board.
A containment pond for Chabot’s parking lots would solve the problems caused by runoff—and it still may. But the creek illustrates a cautionary tale: while public agencies count on citizens groups like FOSC to implement physical restoration, only the agencies themselves can make policy to protect an entire watershed. Chabot is a nonprofit governed by the City of Oakland, the East Bay Regional Park District, the Oakland Public School District, and the East Bay Astronomical Society. The city and the park district have the means and the obligation to assess development in light of its impact downstream—no matter how public-spirited the development. Says hydrologist Laurel Marcus of the Watershed Assessment Resource Center: “Whether you’re building a building to teach kids or building a Wal-Mart, the effect on the watershed is the same.”