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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Constructed between 1908 and 1962 by the PacifiCorp power company, the seven hydroelectric dams ensure delivery of hydroelectric power to ratepayers in Northern California and southern Oregon, as well as water to upper Klamath Basin farmers around the small Northern California town of Yreka. At that time, it was assumed that salmon could adapt to dams and a hatchery system. Instead, the dams have delivered unintended results: every summer a toxic algae bloom in the reservoirs creates a public health hazard as well as a danger to wildlife and pets. This “salmon without rivers” system (as one critical biologist called the scheme) does not work: the dams have greatly reduced the number of Chinook and Coho salmon (a federally endangered species) and Steelhead that return annually to the river. The four lower dams (the first ominously named Iron Gate) have become emblematic of the problems associated with water and hydroelectric projects in the American West.

The long-running conflict has pitted upper basin farmers and PacifiCorp against fishermen, Native American tribes, and conservation groups. But now, participants in one of the West’s most bitter water wars may finally sign an armistice. Following two years of negotiations, stakeholders released a draft of a settlement agreement on January 15 that could result in the demolition of four of the dams, giving farmers more irrigation water and, hopefully, giving salmon a chance to thrive.

A federal order, issued in early 2007 by the Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had provided an early nudge in this direction. It mandated that before PacifiCorp could renew its expiring dam licenses, the company had to spend approximately $300 million to build “fish ladders” that would allow fish to swim through the structures. It would be much cheaper, according to a study published later that year by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to just get rid of the dams altogether.

If PacifiCorp, owned by financier Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, signs the agreement, it would set a precedent for how water is allocated and delivered to urban and agricultural users in the West. While the 20th century was the great dam-building epoch, during the 21st century the tide has turned towards removing dams, restoring the environment, and finding alternative sources that provide energy without the deleterious effects of hydroelectric projects. The next few years could see the removal of some of the most controversial dams, including the Klamath dams and the four lower dams on the Snake River.

This change is already underway in other parts of the American West: In 2007, dams were removed from the Sandy River in Oregon, and dams on the Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula are slated for removal by 2009. If the four dams on the Klamath come down, it would be what the Washington Post dubs the “largest dam-removal project in world history.” Yet the growing dam removal movement conflicts with the Schwarzenegger administration’s push to build expensive and only marginally useful new dams in California (see story on page 27).

For those who favor the dams’ removal, there is no time to waste. In 2006, the commercial ocean salmon fishing season was almost completely shut down to protect the record low returns of salmon to the Klamath, and fishermen and others affected by the closure were recently given $61 million in federal disaster relief. The weak Klamath stock has shortened seasons and made it difficult for fishermen to make a living. The negotiations hold the promise that some day in the future—perhaps in a decade—fishing could once again have a full season.

Last summer, before negotiations had reached a head, the Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR), a nonprofit founded by commercial fishermen to address destruction of salmon spawning habitat, organized a tour of the mid-Klamath area (the ancestral home of the Karuk tribe) to signal urgency about the dams’ impact on salmon runs and coastal fishing communities. I came along as an AmeriCorps volnteer for IFR. For IFR project director Sara Randall, the goal was to showcase restoration work performed by local nonprofits and government agencies—even as she pointed out that true restoration depends upon the removal of the dams and the increase of free-flowing water. The tour also gave stakeholders a chance to meet one another and share ideas about restoring the river, and to remind politicians that many of their constituents would like to see these dams removed.

A slight woman with an activist’s zeal, Randall had joined an AmeriCorps program to “save salmon.” In recent years, she found another mission: saving fishermen. She now counts many friends in the fishing industry who have been affected by the dwindling Klamath stocks. As the tour participants gathered for a rafting trip, Randall remarked, “Fishermen are the last cowboys. Today everyone works in cubicles and doesn’t know how to do anything else.”

Mike Hudson came on the tour to give a salmon fisherman’s perspective—and also to go rafting. Hudson represents a new kind of fisherman in California, one steadily replacing the ethnic family fishermen since the 1960s. Modern salmon fishery, running from Santa Barbara north into Oregon, was established in the early part of the 20th century by Sicilian and Portuguese immigrants. But as second-generation sons assimilated into American culture, many abandoned their fathers’ professions—Joe DiMaggio famously did not like the smell of his father’s boat. During the ’50s and ’60s, teachers would often spend their summers plying the waters off the coast, and they were able to earn more in a summer than they did during the school year. Independents started entering the fishery, attracted by flexible hours, the freedom, and the stunningly beautiful California coast.

Northern California’s salmon fishery boomed, with Fort Bragg becoming a major producer with its eight processing plants. But the construction of dams on every major river in California slowly reduced the number of salmon over the latter half of the 20th century, reaching a full-blown crisis by the ’90s. Today Fort Bragg and many other coastal communities now depend on tourism.

Originally from Germany, Hudson became a salmon fisherman in his late thirties; he previously made his living as a Berkeley electrician and blues musician. He takes the dams personally—they’re destroying his chosen profession. Hudson had made the trip up to Klamath to talk to Ron Reed, the Karuk tribe’s cultural biologist, famous within salmon circles for his impassioned public speeches at rallies and protests. Hudson wanted to enlist the help of the Yurok, Karuk, and Hoopa tribes, in a benefit concert for salmon he’s organizing. The Karuk have been one of the most active groups agitating for the removal of the dams, as well as one of the groups most severely impacted by them.

Hudson met up with Reed just before the tour of Ishi Pishi Falls, the center of the earth in Karuk cosmology, and where Karuk tribal members still use traditional dip nets to catch salmon. Reed envisions a time when the Klamath dams will be removed, and salmon will return in numbers large enough to harvest so that—after a hiatus of nearly a century—salmon may again become the center of the Karuk diet. He believes restoring the salmon runs is essential to repairing health challenges that his impoverished tribe faces.

A powerfully built man in his forties, Reed could be at any tailgate party for the Silver and Black. Sporting a bandana and cut-off T-shirt and a goatee, Reed bounded down the steep mountain at Ishi Pishi Falls in flip-flops. Ishi Pishi Falls is not so much a waterfall as a steep series of rapids, boulders, and pools. The sound of rushing water made it hard to hear, but this was a speech Reed had given before, and he could project his voice. He pointed out the mountains that surround the falls and mentioned how the falls and the course of the river itself have changed since European settlement. Mostly he talked about fishing—about how it is a rite of passage for a Karuk boy to come to the falls with his father and learn to fish for salmon and lamprey.

But he admitted that his cause has been a difficult one. “You talk and talk to all these people, and most of the time you know it won’t do any good,” he said. “But you hope that one time you talk to the right person who might do something to help us, to change the situation out here.”

After years of struggle, Reed finally may have found the right time and the right people. Hudson’s SalmonAid benefit concert will be held this May in Oakland’s Jack London Square, with help from Ron Reed and the Karuk tribe in addition to many other conservation and recreational fishing groups. The concert will bring publicity to the Klamath while PacifiCorp considers the proposed agreement, and while the many groups with an interest in the Klamath River hash out their differences.

An environmental group, Oregon Wild, has already denounced the draft agreement for guaranteeing farmers too much water in drought years, although supporters of the draft agreement contend that the water guarantees to farmers would not threaten salmon runs. The Hoopa tribe on the Trinity River, a tributary of the Klamath, has not signed on. Those who support the draft agreement, including the Karuk tribe and IFR, argue that compromises are necessary, and hard-line positions will only extend the impasse.

Whether the dams will stay or go is still an open question. When the dams came up for relicensing under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2006, a number of factors favored their removal. The dams now must comply with the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, neither of which existed when the dams were built. The dams are no favorite in the court of public opinion: the public was particularly unhappy after 70,000 adult salmon died in the river in 2002. The dams also have become a financial liability to PacifiCorp; two studies have shown that if costly mandatory salmon mitigation measures (mostly fish ladders) are integrated into the relicensed dams, the dams would no longer turn a profit.

Despite press releases and public relations bluster, it’s likely that PacifiCorp wants to relieve itself of a financial liability as cheaply as possible. However, who will pay for the estimated $1 billion removal of the dams has proved to be a major sticking point. The draft agreement assigns most of that cost to the federal government. As the economy is likely headed into a recession and the federal deficit grows ever larger, federal appropriations may become difficult to obtain, and the state is an unlikely source of money. PacifiCorp may choose to indefinitely renew its FERC license on temporary one-year licenses.

With the Democrats already controlling Congress, PacifiCorp may try to cut a deal while the Bush administration, which has actively supported both PacifiCorp and Klamath Basin farmers, is still in power. But if a back-door deal isn’t cut, PacifiCorp’s signature on the draft agreement and $1 billion will resolve the Klamath water war.

All of this backed-up grease jamming the city’s arteries is taking a heavy toll on the heart of its century-old sewer system, which is nearly at the end of its expected life span. In 2006, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) estimated that it received about seven calls a minute due to complaints about fat-clogged sewer lines. The agency says that the city has been spending about $3.5 million a year to clean up sewers blocked by oily wastes illegally or irresponsibly dumped by commercial and residential kitchens. Additional “hidden” costs include lost business (such as when a restaurant can’t operate because of a sewer backup), and expenses to the city’s Health Department, including the rather grim possibility that it will boost the rat population by giving them a food supply. Another problem: in San Francisco, unlike other cities around the bay, storm water and sewage share the same piping. These grease-constricted sewer lines are apt to overflow during winter storms.

Can this organic waste problem actually be a solution to the city’s insatiable need for renewable, clean sources of energy? The PUC thinks so. Its new SFGreasecycle program aims to prevent grease from entering the sewer system in the first place, instead turning it into biofuel. Karri Ving, coordinator of the program, puts it this way: “The best solution is to stop pollution at its source.”

To this end, SFGreasecycle offers restaurants, hotels and schools with large kitchens free collection of waste vegetable oil. The program provides 55-gallon collection drums for high-volume kitchens and encourages the smaller ones to reuse the five-gallon containers the oil originally comes in. SFGreasecycle educates kitchen staff about how to avoid mixing food scraps or water into the waste oil, and about why it’s wiser to use pure vegetable oils than partially hydrogenated ones. (The program may be expanded to collect the waste that winds up in restaurants’ grease traps, which usually contains more animal fats.)

Currently, the program dispatches trucks to pick up vegetable oil and tote it to a transfer facility at the city’s southeast sewage treatment plant. There, the waste oil is filtered and shipped to one of four companies for conversion into biodiesel. SFGreasecycle is also responsible for storing the biodiesel, which will be used to fuel city vehicles.

The program fits neatly with some of the city’s larger environmental goals, including reducing the city fleet’s reliance on petroleum, promoting green practices, and preventing social inequities like allowing waste to be offloaded to landfills in disadvantaged communities. “The only drawback to this program is that we should have been responsibly doing it fifty years ago,” says Ving, who credits “really strong mandates from the top” for pushing it forward.

Specifically, she means directives from Mayor Gavin Newsom, who ordered that by the end of 2007 all city-owned diesel vehicles would be running on a mixture called B20, which contains at least twenty percent biodiesel. The city met that goal and is now required to increase the percentage of biodiesel used, ideally to 100 percent. Currently, most of the city’s biofuel is supplied by San Francisco Petroleum. Although the company is required to buy preferentially from local sustainable biodiesel companies when it can, there’s just not much nearby supply. Instead, San Francisco Petroleum largely produces its biofuel from virgin vegetable oil transported from the Midwest.

Ving hopes this will change in mid-2009, when the city’s three-year master fueling contract is up for renewal. The SFPUC’s new contract is expected to include more stringent requirements for use of local biofuels. While SFGreasecycle can meet some of this demand, the market opportunities opened up by the new contract may also help spur competition among public and private companies for production of alternative fuels.

SFGreasecycle will also provide a springboard for the SFPUC to address other conservation and social equity issues. There are plans for SFGreasecycle to provide education, internships, and jobs, particularly targeting less economically advantaged neighborhoods, such as Hunter’s Point. Ving says the utility may partner with nonprofits, such as Goodwill, and with community colleges to help residents develop job skills and safe, well-compensated employment. In addition to jobs in biofuel production, there are other training opportunities—for example, interns can earn their Class A drivers’ licenses while transporting waste vegetable oil and biodiesel.

The idea that every sewage system can become an energy conservation facility is precedent-setting, and an all-encompassing program like SFGreasecycle is still unique to San Francisco. “No other city is setting a goal to direct all of its organic food waste into biofuel,” says Ving. She hopes that SFGreasecycle can become a model urban zero waste program, not only for US cities, but throughout the world. She notes that many towns—from developed nations to third-world countries to remote places like the Amazon—have trouble both with importing fuel and disposing of their waste. Turning fat into fuel could be an elegant solution to both problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you aiming to do?

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

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

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

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

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

How are we going to fix this broken system?

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

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

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

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

When I returned to Berkeley, I realized the true scope of what had happened. The mass media did a fine job of covering the triage, but what happens now that the frenzy is over? After the “oil on beach” signs have disappeared and volunteers have gone back to their daily lives, oil is still traveling in our open ocean, up and down our coast, lurking in the substrates of our bays, and polluting the environment for all of its inhabitants.

Humboldt State University ornithology professor Dr. Mark Colwell, who specializes in the ecology of water birds, says that the spill happened at an exceptionally bad time. “Because the spill took place just as many waterfowl and shorebirds reached us from the Arctic and places in between, the scope of the event was greatly magnified,” he says. There are around 800,000 birds that call the habitats of the San Francisco Bay home, and as the winter migrants pour in, those numbers creep steadily past the million mark. “The majority of the surf scoter population winters in the San Francisco Bay, and a large percentage of western grebes as well,” Colwell says. “This spill will drastically affect the population dynamics of those species and several others.”

California has the advantage of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network (OWCN), with its seventeen years of experience, no fewer than 2,000 active volunteers, state funding acquired through a tax levied on oil companies, and 25 wildlife rehabilitation centers, including the International Bird Rescue Research Center (IBRRC) in Fairfield, at which I volunteered. To put this largesse in perspective, the Gulf Coast has about half as much coastline as California, yet has no equivalent organization to administer wildlife care despite 850 to 1,000 oil spills per year. The Oregon and Louisiana coastlines have no response organizations, and Washington has only a small rehab facility with no washing capability. Fortunately, California’s globally recognized team consults and responds to environmental accidents worldwide.

The first day that I volunteered at the IBRRC, state spill expert Cindy Murphy reminded us of oil’s disastrous effects. “Birds are directly poisoned by getting oil on themselves, which mats down their insulative feathers and leads to hypothermia in the fifty to sixty degree waters of the bay,” she said. “When water birds get hypothermia they waddle to shore where they spend their time attempting to preen the oil out of their feathers.” Cold birds on the beach are vulnerable to predators and unable to obtain nourishment—but, as Murphy points out, it’s also why rescuers are able to collect them.

There are other dangers from oil: migrants from the north arrive tired, skinny, and hungry. As they forage on plants, invertebrates, and fish in the muddy substrates, they ingest whatever their food has been exposed to—in this case, bunker fuel. Merely getting some grub means being exposed to toxins, including floating oil in tidal fluctuations that coat sediments with fuel, and weathered tar balls that settle on beaches and the bay floor.

A small percentage of the oil from the Cosco Busan spill was removed from the bay. The rest will degrade slowly or remain sequestered in the marine ecosystem. Most forms of oil degrade through dispersal into miniscule particles, exposure to oxygen, or exposure to the sun’s rays. When bunker fuel is spread out on the water’s surface, the volatile portion will evaporate into the atmosphere while the rest will form tar balls and sink to the floor or wash ashore. It can also become a frothy sludge of water, air, and fuel that travels around until it weathers away or lodges in a protected harbor. The Exxon Valdez spill demonstrated that oil can remain in an environment for decades if it makes its way into an area protected from the elements. The dramatic and rugged beauty of our coastline—the rocky crevices, boulders of all shapes and sizes, gravelly shores, and shellfish beds— creates physical barriers to the breakdown of oil.

In the thick of the rehabilitation effort, IBRRC was a cacophony of wailing birds, high pressure hoses, the clomping of ill-fitting rubber boots, and volunteers trying to communicate over the hubbub. After signing in and watching a quick safety video, new volunteers were whisked off to find a workstation that coincided with their abilities. Whether you worked in the kitchen sterilizing feeding and watering tubes (oil-drenched birds are often dehydrated and starving and must be nourished by tube until they are able to feed themselves), helping with vet checks and stabilization, siphoning holding tanks, or washing birds, egos were checked at the door. Everyone did the jobs they were assigned and then looked around to see if there was anything else they could do.

My duties included washing birds and feeding tubes, tossing herring to clean birds, and filling out pre-release evaluations. On my last day, I spent the better part of the morning assisting Mike Ziccardi, a professor of clinical wildlife health at UC Davis, by wrangling a wily surf scoter so he could give it a physical, a vitamin, and take a few drops of blood.

Ziccardi is a global authority on the long-term health impacts for birds that come into contact with oil. “Oil exposure can affect every system in a bird’s body—neuro, liver, kidneys, blood, reproductive,” he says. In addition, he points out, “Oil can have a large effect on every aspect of the reproductive process, from mating, to the number of eggs laid, to how many make it to hatching, to chick survival, all of the way down to the reproductive success of those offspring. As long as the oil is out there in the environment, you’re going to see decreases in reproductive success.”

While we know that oil is bad for birds, we know less about how well rescued birds fare once they are returned to the wild. Ziccardi estimates that the average survival rate for birds after California spills is between 50 and 75 percent. “We are working to find out more about whether rehabilitation really works for oiled animals, or if it mostly serves to make people feel better,” says spokesperson Sylvia Wright of UC Davis, whose Wildlife Health Center administers the Oiled Wildlife Care Network.

It’s a tricky question: should oiled wildlife be rehabilitated, or would all the work, resources, and money be better used for activities that we know will result in conservation gains? If there had been no rehabilitation in this spill, nearly eighty percent of the surf scoter population in the West could have been exposed to oil contamination, according to the Western Ecological Research Center. IBRRC director Jay Holcomb argues that many rehabbed birds have a very good chance of survival. “We have documented many survival stories, but it is very difficult to follow up on seabirds that live in colonies in remote areas. We receive less than a one percent return rate on banded birds and especially seabirds that live in colonies that sometimes range in the millions,” he says.

IBRRC has also rehabbed and released many shorebirds—dunlin, sanderling, piping plovers, and snowy plovers. Studies of the 32 oiled snowy plovers captured and released after the New Carissa spill on the southern Oregon coast in 1999, showed that the rehabbed birds had normal life spans and breeding activity. Hunters have turned in bands from oiled ducks years after they had been rehabilitated.

To provide a more accurate way to track survival rates, during the rescue efforts that followed the Cosco Busan spill, Ziccardi and his team placed radio tags on sixty surf scoters, sea ducks that were one of the hardest hit species. “We have a pilot doing overflights of the bay two to three times a week, and we hope to be able to follow them at least through March when they leave the area,” he says. “Hopefully the batteries on some of the transmitters, as well as the scoters carrying them, will last an entire season, and we can track them the whole time.” The radio transmitters emit a unique signal if the animal stops moving, presumably at death. Ziccardi says, “With the transmitter we can locate the scoter’s carcass for a necropsy and learn about why it didn’t make it.”

Ziccardi finds it hard to even guesstimate how many birds were affected by the spill. “There are many factors to consider,” he says. “This time of year is tough, and birds are in poor body condition.” He adds that the state’s Department of Fish & Game is building a natural resource damage assessment model. “They gather as much data as they can about the search effort in the field and survival of treated birds and come up with an estimator of how many birds we collected in terms of how many were actually exposed. The correction factor can range anywhere from one in five to one in a hundred. California’s correction factor is pretty low due to the huge effort that we put into collection.”

By Wright’s calculations, 1,084 live birds were collected. Of those, 652 died or were euthanized and 418 were released, either at Tomales Bay or Half Moon Bay. In January, there were still fourteen birds at IBRRC. Volunteers collected another 1,851 dead birds on the bays’ beaches and marshes. Rehab survival is a maze of complicated issues but, according to Ziccardi, the most important factors include immediate availability of facilities, equipment and supplies, and pre-trained personnel.

The trauma will not be limited to the Bay Area. The bay is a stopover for birds on the Pacific Flyway. “This migratory route extends from the northern expanses of Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina,” Humboldt State’s Colwell says. “Few birds travel its entire length, but several species cover a large part of it biannually, in the spring and the fall.” Point Reyes Bird Observatory naturalist and co-founder Rich Stallcup told me that the surf scoters that winter in the bay will travel up the coast this spring on their way back to the Arctic, stopping in Humboldt Bay, Coos Bay, Willapa Bay, and Puget Sound, among other bays and estuaries. Western and Clark’s grebes were also heavily affected, and the majority of the bay’s grebes will spend the breeding season in Clearlake.

Most birds travel roughly the same path, and the situation at stopovers affects the rest of the route: if there is terrific feeding at one stopover, birds arrive well-nourished at their next destination and fertilize the area with nutrients. The toxicity of the current situation will be transferred by winged couriers to other locations and to populations of the Pacific Flyway for many generations to come.

In 1992 Congress mandated that all ships with a fuel capacity of 158,000 gallons or more be fitted with a double hull by 2015. This date was accelerated to no later than 2010 after the Erika incident in 1999 that shed over six million gallons of heavy fuel oil off the coast of France. With a fuel capacity of 1.8 million gallons, the Cosco Busan was far above the minimum for a double hull. This new disaster occurred only two years before the new mandate will take effect—and its impact will last for decades.

You can rest assured that you won’t win the Nobel Peace Prize with this book.

If there was any justice, I might. If the polar bears could vote, I would. I love the line from Gore Vidal after Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize: “One must never underestimate Scandinavian wit.”

How did the idea arise for doing a graphic book?

I’m friends with Stephanie McMillan, who did the graphics. We were talking one day about Al Gore’s movie and his ideas at the end, such as changing to compact fluorescents. The filmmaker who did What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire put together a map about what would happen if we did all the things Al Gore suggested at the end of An Inconvenient Truth. The trouble with the “fifty simple things” notion is that it leads to a decrease in agency and an increase in hopelessness because people see that they don’t do anything. I think they’re actually harmful.

We’d know what to do if space aliens came down to attack us, but we don’t know what to do with governments and corporations. In the book, if you just substitute corporations for aliens, you see how this works.

While the usual targets—Bush, corporations—come in for criticism, you pick on meditators, environmental nonprofits, Al Gore, and all the simplistic answers to combat global warming.

The meditator character’s dialogue was pretty much word for word from a guy who called in once when I was on KPFA. “We don’t have to worry about any of this stuff, about the death of the oceans, about global warming. We just have to meditate.” I got an email from a woman who told me I just seemed angry. I wanted to say how sad it is that I feel wounded at the death of the planet. There’s a tremendous fear of anger at the hands of the so-called resistance. She wanted me to meditate too. The salmon don’t give a shit about whether we meditate—they care about the dams.

As for nonprofits: Grassroots people hate mainstream environmental groups. They usually have more money, and they come in and co-opt the campaign by pumping in money. Once in the door, they say, “Well, this isn’t realistic. We need to do thus and so, ecotours of the Arctic. Yeah, let’s get behind ecotours!” And suddenly the whole campaign is down the drain.

I had a long talk at the airport with a man about Al Gore. An Inconvenient Truth is great as an introduction but it’s exclusionary. This is one step, but we need to do another 3,000 steps very soon. There’s this great book called The Nazi Doctors, questioning how people who took the Hippocratic oath could work at the death camps. Most actually cared about individuals in the death camps and did what they could to save them, but they didn’t question the existence of the camps themselves. We do what we can to save this or that creature, but we don’t question the superstructure that’s causing the problems in the first place. I used to work at Pelican Bay. I was fully aware that I was participating in the greatest gulag on the planet, but on the other hand, the only thing keeping the inmates sane was my class. So we need it all—reform and revolution. That’s the only thing that will save the planet.

The solutions I’ve heard are so interesting because they’re insane. They don’t take physical reality as a given, but instead the given is that we must save present-day society. We need to get back in the real world. The real world is being murdered before our eyes, like a video game that we can’t back up. I sometimes wake up and think, this can’t be happening. People can’t really just lose the ice caps. Let’s pretend you were talking to a seven-year-old: So, burning oil and coal and natural gas is causing global warming. What do you think we should do to stop global warming? Any reasonable seven-year-old can answer that question. Here’s carbon offsets: My house stinks because I keep shitting in the middle of the living room floor. I don’t like it. So maybe I can pay someone to shit in his living room instead.

I heard a radio show about the world-saving machine that can convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. The guy who runs Virgin airlines is going to give millions to develop this technology. We have it already. They’re called trees.

We need to think about what we want. I want to live in a world that has wild salmon. So the first question is what you want, and the second is what do you need for that to happen. The salmon need industrial logging to stop and the dams to be removed. And they need for industrial fishing to stop. They need industrial agriculture to stop creating giant dead zones, and they need global warming to stop, and they need the ocean not to be murdered. Polar bears need ice and seals. Then they’ll be happy. The problem is that there’s this awfully convenient worldview that presumes that you can consume a planet while you live on it. That’s why we took it out of the context of corporations and jobs and put it into the context of aliens eating the planet. These problems are not cognitively challenging. They’re not amenable to rational solutions.

A really good example of that is probably fifteen years ago, I interviewed Jonathan Livingston about the fallacy of wildlife conservation. He believed that evolution was based on cooperation and not competition. I remember looking at him and thinking, “He’s saying great things, but he’d kind of lost it—he’s old and senile.” Then later I found myself unable to conceive of how anyone could think that evolution was based on competition. Those creatures have survived in the long run. You don’t survive in the long run by destroying your habitat; you improve your habitat. It’s a whole big dance of cooperation. Normally I don’t share a lot of things about my life. I was a fundamentalist Christian as a kid. As a teen, I left that behind. I dated one woman through my twenties. I still remember the first thing that came into my head when I dated someone else: “Ohmigod, I didn’t die when I slept with the second woman.” Later on, I laughed at the power of that kind of thinking. Unquestioned assumptions are the real authority of any culture.

Do you think that people, like Nero, will lose hope and fiddle as the world burns? Or is that already happening?

A publisher sent me a book that they were considering. The book was about how to turn the death of the planet into a positive spiritual learning experience. There’s this disconnect.

I was fighting this developer. We’re doing all the reform stuff, changing county zoning and so on. At some point I talked at a meeting about how hope is really harmful. Hope is longing for a condition about which I have no agency. If your mom says to you, clean your room, and you say, I hope it gets done, your mom won’t be pleased. A man at the council meeting says, “You do ultimately have to hope that the developer doesn’t develop here. You can give your best shot but you have to leave it up to the county.” And I say, “If I wanted to, I could kill the developer.” Not that I would, of course, but we can do all sorts of things. I could develop a virus that kills all the people on the planet. The point is that people confuse what is acceptable to those in power with what is possible. We keep saying we have no agency. I’m going to do what it takes to save salmon.

What was your first activist moment?

As an adult, it would be well, this is one of the smartest things I ever did: In the mid-’80s I realized I wasn’t paying enough for gas. Every time I bought gas, I would give $10 to a local environmental organization, or I would pay myself $5 for activism. If I filled my tank with gas, that meant I owed two hours. I would write letters, participate in anti-fur demos. Finally I was having so much fun with activism that I could have bought myself a tanker. You don’t have to jump in and stop industrial civilization in one fell swoop. There’s something a little phony about As the World Burns. It implies there’s only one red button you could push to end civilization. There’s a thousand buttons. Where do we start?

Wild animals get the nod for finally taking action. Doesn’t that let people off the hook?

Bullshit. The phoebes, redwood trees, salmon are doing everything they can. We’re the ones who aren’t doing anything. Can you think of a better way to stop world trade than by raising the ocean and drowning ports? The world is already doing its work, and we need to join in. They’re fighting desperately, and they’re dying. We need to step up.

I’m not expecting that I’m going to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a bear. It’s a call to do whatever it takes. It’s a Malcolm X “do anything necessary.” The people who come after won’t care whether we were nonviolent or had real estate in Ohio. They’re going to care about whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. If you can’t breathe the air in this utopia, it won’t matter. The real world is what’s real. Any social construct, including industrial capitalism, is simply that—a social construct. What’s real are these huckleberries and redwood trees. Everything else is just a social structure: We all think that PG&E owns this power plant or that Weyerhauser owns this land. The cops will come in and protect this fantasy.

I’m not saying that we should throw away all cultural conventions. But we need to be able to question the cultural conventions. Once I discussed this with someone, and we ended up agreeing that no one should be allowed to clear-cut more than a quarter-mile from his physical home. If somebody wants to destroy his own home, that’s how it is. He and I were able to agree that absentee land ownership is really bad. When you see trees you see dollar bills. When I look at a fish, I give it respect. This doesn’t mean I don’t eat fish. But it’s a fundamental pact: If you consume the flesh of another, you take on responsibility for the continuation of that individual’s community.

One could read the book as a call for criminal actions. Dams are exploded, and a prison holding political activists broken into.

In the Eric McDavid case, in Sacramento, an FBI agent named Anna recruited McDavid and two other people into attempting to blow up something. She provided the material, the car, the house. They have her on tape exhorting them to follow through. She’s saying, “Aren’t you men?” He was found guilty, although no action was ever taken. The defense was entrapment, but it didn’t fly. In this trial, the person mentioned most often was me. I had exchanged a couple emails. I called an attorney and asked if I should be worried. And I got the sort of answer you don’t want—be very worried, call me immediately. Now, this man doesn’t know that I won’t do anything illegal. I would be a liability. I have three civil liberty attorneys who have volunteered to be on-call 24/7.

I’m always really explicit. I do not want kids to attempt to blow up a dam because Derrick Jensen says so. If it’s kids, I don’t know that I would be very happy about that. If it was somebody who’d thought about it on her own, and I was somebody who helped give her courage, that’s a different situation.

People ask me what to do. I say, I want you not to listen to me, I want you to go to the nearest river and ask what it wants. I want people to think. If you come to different conclusions, fine, as long as you’ve thought it through.I used to say I’m a recruiter for the revolution, and if I wanted I could manipulate people into doing what I wanted. I’m uncomfortable with that. I never wanted to do it. If some kid read this and tried to say that they blew up a dam because of me, that person is not taking responsibility. You need to do what you want to do. I desperately want dams to go, but I want people to think things through. I’ve discovered in relationships that if you try to get people to do something, it’s not sustainable. It just doesn’t work.

According to the state’s Climate Action Team, global warming is likely to play out in California’s water system in two major ways: a smaller snowpack will reduce our ready water supply, and wilder weather will heighten the risk of floods.

The Sierra snowpack has historically served as a natural reservoir, storing precipitation that falls as snow during the winter and releasing it slowly as it melts in the spring. With rising temperatures, more precipitation will instead fall as rain. The climate team predicts that the snowpack will be reduced by ten to forty percent by mid-century and from seventy to ninety percent by 2100, greatly reducing natural water storage.

An overlapping challenge will take place in the Delta, where even though overall flow in the Sacramento River is expected to decrease by about twenty percent by the 2050s, changing rainfall patterns will increase the risk of flooding. Severe storms are likely to damage already-compromised Delta levees and infrastructure.

Similarly, sea level is predicted to rise by 22 to 55 inches—or even more—by the year 2100. Rising sea levels will erode Delta levees and increase saltwater intrusion from San Francisco Bay, threatening the quality of water exports as well as of the Delta’s water itself.

Yet as the human population continues to grow, especially in the drier southern region, where is the water going to come from to serve not only California’s people but its agriculture, fish, and wildlife? And how can the state maintain control over its water supply in an era of climate change? While this gloomy conundrum has received attention lately, there is no agreement on what to do about it—not strange, considering the state’s always-fractious history of water management.

The solution proposed by California’s Department of Water Resources, and supported by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is to build more surface storage—management-speak for more dams and reservoirs. During high winter flows, reservoirs store water that would otherwise be “lost” to the hungry sea. But water storage has always been a juggling act; managers need to keep reservoirs relatively empty during the wet season so that they have enough capacity to store water and reduce downstream flooding, while still keeping enough water available during the dry summer and fall. Managers are pretty good at guessing when to switch from releasing to storing water, but as the climate changes huge storms will become more frequent, leading to more flooding.

One of the three reservoirs the department has proposed building would be fifteen miles west of the Sacramento River, at a location called Sites in the Antelope Valley. Sites was part of the governor’s nine-billion-dollar water bond proposal, which was rejected by the legislature last year. But building Sites, as well as its sister reservoirs, could still be put before voters as a ballot initiative.

The state is pitching the Sites reservoir as a tool to save fish and wildlife from global warming and to restore the Delta’s delicate ecosystem. Migratory fish need higher flows, and maintaining a heavy water flow counteracts saltwater intrusion. According to Steve Roberts, manager of the department’s surface storage investigations, the existing system is ill-equipped to address environmental needs. Sites would provide water managers with flexibility and “more knobs to turn” to meet both water supply and environmental obligations.

But others say the situation is more complex. Peter Gleick, a water policy expert and president of the Pacific Institute, believes that a reservoir could indeed provide the flexibility the state seeks, but he’s not convinced that Sites is the best solution. Gleick thinks that the state should first evaluate whether its existing system of reservoirs and aqueducts can be operated differently to address climate change impacts. “We shouldn’t spend money we don’t have on something that we’re not sure we need,” Gleick says. He believes cheaper means, such as water conservation and preventing more development in floodplains, are available to reduce vulnerability to extreme events.

Jonas Minton, who oversaw the Department of Water Resource’s surface storage studies until 2004, is now a water policy advisor with the Sacramento-based Planning and Conservation League. Minton says that although $100 million has been spent studying surface storage over the last seven years, the state agency hasn’t released a feasibility study because it hasn’t liked the results. When the agency evaluated Sites for agriculture and urban water supply, the project didn’t pencil out; high flow events are rare enough that it would be filled infrequently, so it’s not cost-effective. Minton says it’s like opening a very expensive savings account with no money to deposit.

Minton argues, in fact, that natural systems in the Sacramento River and Delta cannot spare water that would be stored in Sites. There is no “surplus” water except in extremely wet years—and fish need these occasional high flows that move sediment, fell trees, and cleanse spawning gravel. Moreover, some people worry that the Sacramento River itself could be degraded, since the state has not identified a flow threshold above which water would be diverted from it.

In fact, instead of mitigating climate change, the reservoir could contribute to it. Although energy would be produced as water is released, since water must be pumped uphill to it, Sites would still end up consuming more energy than it makes. Nearly a fifth of California’s electricity is already used to collect, store, and transport water. If conventional power is used, its generation would contribute to greenhouse gas emissions; however, the department is considering using wind power to reduce this impact. Construction, as well as the decomposing of flooded vegetation, would also produce greenhouse gases.

Construction costs will weigh in at four to six billion dollars, with the state picking up about half the tab, and operation would be another ten to 21 million dollars per year. So far, no water contractor or urban water district has indicated a willingness to foot even a portion of the bill. In fact, since 2000, when the state instituted a policy that the “beneficiary pays” for water supply projects, no water user has expressed a willingness to finance construction of any state surface water storage projects. Instead, many water agencies are investing in alternatives that generate benefits more quickly and at lower cost.

But consider what could happen if Sites is sold to voters as a necessary environmental fix for a Delta in crisis. Ostensibly water contractors would fund part of the cost, and it’s even possible that contractors might identify themselves once potential yield and costs are spelled out. But it’s hard to work out details until such contractors toss their hats into the ring. The language of a proposition would likely skate over the fact that no contractors have yet appeared, money in hand. Says Gleick: “The taxpayers are asked to pay for it, but they won’t know the benefits or the costs.”

Mark Cowin, the Department of Water Resources’ deputy director, thinks the process is not unusual. He explains that bond measures typically provide the framework and set conditions for use of general obligation bonds, while project details are defined later. Besides, the lead-time for reservoir planning, design, and construction is so long that the process has to be started well in advance of expected results. But Peter Gleick says there’s no point in getting the process moving if, in the end, the project won’t be useful: “That’s like saying we should do the wrong thing right away.”

Some water agencies, like the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, still aren’t sure what to think about Sites. The district represents a consortium of 26 cities and water districts that imports and sells water to eighteen million people over six counties. It is a likely candidate to buy water from the facility. But Timothy Brick, chairman of the district’s board, says that his agency has not taken a position on Sites despite all the years that it has been studied because “the plans have not been completed and we don’t have enough information to determine whether it’s viable.” The district wants to know whether the reservoir would enhance water supply reliability and improve conditions in the Delta. Brick says that although “proponents claim environmental benefits for Sites, we haven’t seen information on those benefits. We need to know how much water could be available, and if that water could be transported to Southern California. From our perspective, the Delta is broken and requires substantial improvements. We need to be responsible stewards of the Delta and river systems.”

This raises a tricky question: how will water stored at Sites be delivered to Southern California? Currently, the Delta is the hub of the state’s water delivery system, but it’s also the bottleneck: water exports through the Delta are constrained by water quality and endangered species concerns as well as frequent litigation. That’s why some, including the governor, are pushing for a new conveyance facility—the daughter of the peripheral canal that voters defeated in 1982—to divert Sacramento River water to Southern California farmers and cities, before that water ever reaches the Delta.

A peripheral canal would provide unconstrained delivery of any newly developed water, such as water stored at Sites, but would also raise other problems. Minton points out that the prospective routing of the canal overlaps with the Delta area most likely to be flooded by rising sea levels, in which case the canal could eventually be underwater. “Is this a good place to put expensive, public infrastructure?” he asks. Of course, the diversion of freshwater would also make the Delta saltier, modifying habitat and threatening Delta agriculture as well as drinking water in other areas.

The issue remains unresolved in the state legislature, where no water bills were passed in 2007. The Democrats want to separate the controversial issue of surface storage from other measures designed to restore the health of the Delta and to improve water supply reliability. On the other hand, the governor and Republican legislators prefer to bundle the issues together, which increases the chances of obtaining funding for reservoirs. The governor included a colorful pitch for reservoirs in his January State of the State address, saying, “Raging flood waters run wasted into the sea because they can’t be captured. We must expand water storage. We must build new water delivery systems. We must fix the Delta and restore its ecosystem.” Parties on both sides of the debate have indicated they may propose water bonds for the ballot, and some will support dam construction. Water managers fear that the window of opportunity for financing reservoirs is closing, especially now that the state faces a substantial deficit.

Yet there is plenty of opposition to reservoirs and a new canal. Last year, the Natural Resources Defense Council compared the different potential yields and costs of alternative water sources. It concluded that methods like increasing conservation, urban water efficiency, water recycling, groundwater storage, groundwater cleanup, and conjunctive use (combining surface and ground water systems to optimize them) are comparable to—or cheaper than—the estimated $370 per acre-foot it will cost to store water at Sites. (An acre-foot of water is 43,560 cubic feet, roughly the amount of water used by two families of four for a year.)

The water yielded by these alternatives could also be much more abundant than the anticipated Sites yield of 100,000-400,000 acre-feet per year. Alternatives could be implemented more quickly than construction of Sites, and could reduce both reliance on the Delta and the risk of levee failures. Groundwater storage in Southern California (rather than a northern location like Sites) might be the best option to “back up” water supplies in that region should the existing Delta system fail. Besides, says Minton, since moving water around is so energy-intensive, conservation could help reduce the state’s electricity demand and its attendant greenhouse gas emissions.

The Department of Water Resources’ Steve Roberts would prefer to have more options—the agency supports funding for a full array of water management tools including reservoirs. “It is my opinion that there is no ‘silver bullet.’ No one option can meet all of our needs,” says Roberts. “[We need] a diverse ‘portfolio’ of investment choices so we can better manage our limited water supplies.”

Minton likens the agency’s uncritical belief in reservoir benefits to a religion that doesn’t stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Besides, the agency is used to building dams. As Minton puts it, “If you’ve been doing something, you keep doing it. People tend to want monuments to their achievement. Politicians like to build major structures that you can put a brass plaque on.”

The state’s 2005 Water Plan indicates that water demand in California will increase through 2030. Although the Department of Water Resources predicts a modest decrease in agricultural water use, the agency anticipates that urban water use will increase by 1.5 to 5.8 million acre-feet per year. So where can that additional water come from?

Peter Gleick and his colleagues at the Pacific Institute published a 2005 study arguing that with very aggressive efforts, by 2030 human use of water in California could decline by as much as 20 percent from 2000 levels. This reduction could be accomplished using existing technologies while still supporting population growth, a healthy agricultural sector, and a vibrant economy, by making significant changes in how water is managed. The Pacific Institute advocates phasing out subsidies (for example, to corporate agriculture) to reflect the true costs of water, increasing the use of water-efficient technologies in urban systems and in agriculture, supporting water transfers that improve efficiency, including use of groundwater, and integrating water supply planning with land use planning.

Such a reduction could be costly and would likely not be popular with agricultural interests. But, Gleick argues, “Current water rights regimes in California, combined with inappropriate federal subsidies for water and certain crops, have locked in a higher level of waste and inefficiency than we can afford.” He says that we need an evolution in personal values to transfer to a water-efficient future: “Conservation needs to be redefined. It needn’t mean brown lawns, shorter showers, or mandatory rationing. It is about doing what we want but with less water.” Gleick thinks that California needs to be a leader in water conservation and efficiency. “The reality is that the narrow interests that might benefit from new dams aren’t willing to pay for them,” he says. “Taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize continued wasteful water practices.”

The California Chamber of Commerce has prepared versions of a water bond that could cost up to $12 billion, including over $3 billion for construction of new dams. The chamber says it will pursue a ballot initiative if the legislature fails to produce a water bond in time for the June statewide ballots. Minton says this is like “giving Imelda Marcos your credit card to shop for shoes.” Meanwhile, State Senator Pro Tem Don Perata has indicated that he and Senator Michael Machado, whose district includes the Delta, may place another initiative on the November 2008 ballot to address water quality and reliability issues, without asking for funding for surface storage.

Conventional wisdom says that when two bond measures compete, neither passes. That comes with a cost: this divisive issue threatens to derail needed investment in Delta sustainability and flood and earthquake protection, increased water recycling and conservation, and groundwater cleanup and storage. If a solution to the state’s water crisis is not found, water policy decisions will be made by courts responding to endangered species litigation, as additional species teeter on the brink of extinction.

Peter Gleick laments the lost opportunities. “The last ten years we have had relatively abundant water. This would have been a good time to develop rational policies for dry years,” he says. “It’s especially important that we not panic now and make bad decisions. Panic makes poor water policy.”

That ecosystem has been manipulated so much that only a shadow of its splendor remains. It’s been drained for agriculture, navigation channels have been straightened and dredged, homes are built along the sloughs, and much of the water has been diverted. The hub of the state’s complex water delivery system, the Delta’s narrow channels surround sunken flood-prone islands enclosed by fragile levees. The decline of the Delta ecosystem is attributable to a perfect storm of environmental changes: increased diversion of fresh water, loss and modification of habitats, introduction of exotic species, and poor water quality from pesticides and other pollutants.

As a result, the abundance of small planktonic species at the bottom of the Delta’s food web has plummeted. Many indigenous fish species have either disappeared or are threatened with extinction. These include most of the historic salmon runs and resident fish like the Delta smelt, a finger-sized fish that used to be extremely abundant. The abundance index for Delta smelt in the summer of 2007 was the second lowest ever measured. The survival of the species is so precarious that in 2007 a federal judge ordered a reduction in the amount of water pumped from the Delta during critical times to protect the species until new safeguards are in place. The judge’s ruling could reduce the volume of water sent south by up to a third.

Without dams or diversions, runoff from about forty percent of the state, an average of about thirty million acre-feet of water, would flow each year into the Delta from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and then into San Francisco Bay. Now, about eleven million acre-feet of water is diverted annually before reaching the Delta, primarily for agriculture. Another six million acre-feet is sucked out near Tracy by two giant pumping facilities operated by the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project. These water exports provide drinking water for millions of people and irrigation for three million acres in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. The pumps are so strong that at certain times of the year the northern San Joaquin River actually reverses course and flows towards them.

In 2007, Governor Schwarzenegger appointed a task force to develop a sustainable vision for the Delta that addresses the multiple challenges of statewide water use, governance, population growth, public safety, public service infrastructure, long-term climate change, ecosystem threats, and seismic risk. The task force has recommended “a significant increase in conservation and water system efficiency, new facilities to move and store water, and likely reductions in the amount of water taken out of the Delta watershed.” It also recommended study and analysis of a dual conveyance system—using both through-Delta and around-the-Delta conveyance of water to Southern California. An implementation plan is due later this year. See www.deltavision.ca.gov.

“I’ve become more aware of the need to educate people about where herbs are coming from,” says Joshua Muscat, herbalist and owner of the San Francisco Botanical Medicine Clinic, where he consults with clients suffering from arthritis, flu, urinary tract infections, and much else. “Often you’ll be shipping plants across the country when we have something just as good, if not better, here in Northern California. A good example is echinacea. We don’t have it in California, but we have tons of rudbeckia, an herb that does just as well for stimulating immune function.”

Muscat has been practicing Western herbal medicine for over thirteen years, using plants grown in California, many of which he harvests himself, a practice known as wildcrafting. He chose Western herbal medicine because he “couldn’t justify starting a practice where I would be shipping herbs across the world to help people with their health when I had plants available right here.”

He tallies up the inordinate use of resources involved in shipping herbs: “When you buy a bottle of Chinese medicine that came from China, those herbs are harvested and processed and then packaged into individual plastic bottles, then into boxes with cellophane wrappers, and then into larger boxes that are put into crates and sent to a distribution warehouse where they’re unpackaged and repackaged again several times before they get on the boat or plane. Consider all the fuel that’s used in getting them to this part of the world, and a person buys these little bottles that contain maybe a week or two of medicine. It’s like having the air that we breathe packaged in five inhale-by-portion disposable containers.”

With more people —approximately one in five—turning to holistic modalities, herbs now appear on chain grocery store and pharmacy shelves. Supplement companies are capitalizing on the public’s desire for natural alternatives, providing sub-par products at consumer-friendly prices. Many of these herbs are transported across the world before they find their way into your shopping cart. They may contain contaminants or something not stated on the label. For example, Pfizer, manufacturers of the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, recently conducted its own study of over 3,000 herbal male supplements and found that nearly seventy percent contained the active synthesized ingredient found in Viagra.

In the Bay Area, Chinese and Ayurvedic herbal medicine practices dominate. How are these herbs processed? “When people talk about herbs coming from China and India, we immediately think of chemicals and metals,” Muscat says. “Chemical use is pretty widespread in China, and organics are not common. But the truth is, it’s not a huge issue—people aren’t getting sick left and right from using these herbs. For the most part, Chinese and Ayurvedic herbs are not much worse in terms of contamination than the produce at your supermarket.”

That’s not good enough for the FDA. Recently the federal agency mandated quality control testing of foods and pharmaceutical products, including herbs, under the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) requirement, part of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Manufacturers and processors must pay for the tests, which are extremely expensive, thus favoring larger, multinational corporations over small, independent practitioners. “The FDA ultimately seeks to make it illegal for herbalists to practice medicine,” says Muscat. “The GMP requires a set of tests you must conduct on your medicines to ensure they’re not contaminated. It would cost my small pharmacy over $100,000 per year to do that kind of testing.”

The FDA also wants to tighten regulations on what consumers can purchase, prohibiting all but a few supplements which will only be permitted in very small doses. The European Union has already adopted these guidelines, known as the Codex Alimentarius.

Can herbs be dangerous? “I’m not saying people have never been hurt by herbs,” says Muscat, “but I think the confirmed cases of harm by herbs are few and far between compared to harm from over-the-counter or prescription medications. It’s such a miniscule number compared to drug side effects.” The Journal of the American Medical Association reported in 2007 that an estimated 106,000 hospitalized patients die each year from drugs that are properly prescribed and administered, while more than two million suffer serious side effects.

Muscat encourages those seeking herbal medicine to investigate how, where, and by whom the medicine was produced. “The medicine I give people, from the time it’s taken out of the ground to the time it’s given to the person, is under my careful attention,” he says. “That means the area it’s coming from has been treated well; no chemicals have been applied, the plants are healthy and are harvested or dried properly, processed correctly, and given out for the right reasons.” He suggests buying directly from people who do the harvesting and preparation rather than purchasing herbs from a store.

To make that easier, Muscat plans to launch a garden database so people can register their gardens and what they are growing. “The idea is that most people could take care of their health care needs locally,” he says. “We have the gardens and the wildlands; there is little reason why we shouldn’t use what we have. If you don’t have access to something, you can check the database and see who does.”

In an era of rising medical costs and a breakdown of health care, Muscat has his own vision. “I plan to keep on helping sick people,” he says, adding that no one is turned away from his clinic for lack of funds. He keeps consultation fees low—$25 for the initial visit, plus the cost of herbs. Clients can perform work in exchange for treatment, but if they are unable to work, Muscat will give his medicine and counsel free of charge. “The idea that a sick person would be turned away because they don’t have money is disgusting,” he says. “I feel that I have a responsibility to make this medicine available. Part of what it’s taught me is that people in health care expect too much in terms of compensation.”

Beyond his clinic, Muscat is focusing on education; he plans to conduct practitioner training to complement the database he is launching. “We need more people who can skillfully recommend herbs for simple things such as cold, flu, and urinary tract infections,” he says.

What’s the best way to find information about using herbs in your area? Muscat recommends the use of local networks, such as herb exchanges. The Sonoma County herb exchange is a membership association dedicated to sustainable and ecologically friendly growing practices; its Web site (www.sonomaherbs.com) includes an extensive resource guide, links, a forum, and a newsletter. When it comes to living a sustainable and healthful life, knowledge is power—and it’s possible that if the FDA has its way, going local may soon be our only choice.