CyberTran International, founded in 1998, is one of a dozen or so companies around the world that hope to make mass transit so much better that it could tip the scales of public sentiment away from favoring personal cars. Each company has its own specific plans, but the basic idea is the same: “You go into a station, you push a button, a vehicle comes and picks you up and takes you to your destination,” explains Neil Sinclair, CyberTran’s CEO and chairman. “You can bypass stops. In an elevator you don’t go from the second floor to the tenth floor and stop at every floor; you zip from the second to the tenth floor. That’s what this does horizontally.”

The technology has almost as many names as it does implementations: personal rapid transit (PRT), podcars, group rapid transit, or automated direct transportation. CyberTran calls its variation UltraLight Rail Transit. Sitting in the company’s front window was a scale model: a sleek, bullet-shaped car, like a silver Airstreamtrailer with pointed ends and large windows, running on an elevated guideway.

CyberTran’s late founder, civil engineer John Dearian, first developed the system in the 1990s as a research and development project within Idaho National Laboratory. In 1998, he and Sinclair took the technology out of the lab to form CyberTran, building and testing a full-sized prototype on a track in Alameda. The car held twenty riders in cushy, charter-bus style seats, facing forward in rows. (Other companies have designs that include smaller cars, some holding as few as two riders, and vehicles that hang below an overhead track like a ski lift.)

In a full implementation of the CyberTran system, the automated, driverless electric cars would run on a large network of tracks. Instead of following a preset path, as a train does, onboard computers would decide the optimum route to take you straight to your destination. Stations would be set off the main track, allowing cars to zip past at full speed. “We’ve redesigned the whole idea of a rail-based passenger transportation system,” Sinclair emphasizes. “We’re talking about an integrated network,” one that could include high-speed regional connections along with local service.

Most importantly, the technology is clean. CyberTran calculates that its system would use around 90 percent less energy and create 98 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile traveled than automobiles (although those figures, of course, depend on how the rail gets its electric power).

Such a system has serious advantages over traditional forms of public transportation. Passengers would be freed from memorizing schedules, long waits at stations or bus stops, or figuring out transfers between routes. Trips could be 14 to 125 percent faster stop-to-stop than on conventional buses or rail, according to calculations in a report on personal rapid transit created for the New Jersey state legislature. Because the vehicles are small, the track infrastructure would take less space and be much less expensive to build than traditional rail, even if tracks were elevated along parts of their routes to avoid interfering with cars. (The New Jersey report estimates a cost of $30 million to $50 million per mile for such systems; by comparison, the BART extension from Fremont to Silicon Valley is projected to cost around $375 million
per mile.) More affordable, smaller tracks allow for more stations, especially because more stops don’t mean slower trips as they do for buses and trains that pause at every one.

Put those factors together, and you begin to see the biggest advantage of systems like CyberTran’s: They might actually lure people out of their cars. “We’ve got an auto-dependent civilization,” Sinclair says, ruefully. “It’s killing us, and it’s killing the planet.” He’s right; transportation is responsible for 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States (in California, it’s 38 percent), and 70 percent of American oil consumption. While developing alternative fuels and increasing fuel efficiency play an important role in reducing those numbers, helping people avoid driving altogether is key.

“I can’t tell you how much I want this to happen,” says Peter Calthorpe, the San Francisco-based planning guru and New Urbanist pioneer. “In California, transportation is the 800-pound gorilla. Nothing comes close in terms of energy and carbon footprint.” The state’s successes in other areas (especially in boosting home energy efficiency) leave transportation as the biggest area of energy use that can be cut back. Even though public transit ridership hit an all-time high in 2008, personal vehicles still account for over eighty percent of daily trips nationwide. To make a dent in those numbers, public transportation must become an alluring alternative. “You can’t solve [climate change] without attacking vehicle-miles traveled,” says Calthorpe. “The idea that we’re going to move into the 21st century with 19th century transit technology is absurd to me.”

Though it seems futuristic, the basic ideas behind automated direct transit have been around for decades; the struggle has been in putting the theories into practice. In the mid-’70s, the Nixon administration funded research into the concept. The resulting investment produced a direct-transit line in Morgantown, West Virginia, that connects the three campuses of West Virginia University. The system has run for over thirty years, but cost overruns and construction delays tarnished the technology’s reputation
for decades. No full-scale system has been completed since, though a project is underway at Heathrow Airport in London, and several cities in Sweden are considering systems. Other proposed
projects have ended up in the dustbin because of concerns about costs or the readiness of the technology.

“There’s inertia in the transportation system,” points out Elizabeth Deakin, director of the University of California Transportation Research Center and professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley. “Lots of people don’t like big old clunky buses, but we’ve got them, we know how to operate them, we know how they work. It makes it hard to change even if change might be better.”

Despite the obstacles, several local governments think advanced direct transit might have something to offer their communities. The cities of San Jose and Santa Cruz have each begun to explore the possibility of making modern systems a reality in Northern California.

“Like most small communities in America, we’re being choked by the automobile,” explains Mike Rotkin, city councilmember and vice-mayor of Santa Cruz. Getting from the city’s downtown to its University of California campus presents a particular challenge, Rotkin says. “There’s not room for another car on those streets. There’s not another alternative solution, transportation-wise, other than something very much like PRT. It’s something that’s sort of tailor-made for our community.”

Since 2005, PRT supporters in Santa Cruz have been calling attention to the technology’s possibilities,
and in 2006 the city commissioned a feasibility study. The project is slowly moving forward; last summer, the city sent out a request for qualifications, offering to provide right-of-way to a company willing to build and finance a PRT system to connect the city’s downtown to its busy university area.

There are still many questions that need to be answered before anything gets built, Rotkin says: Would the project require a public subsidy? How much would a ride cost? Could the system handle a huge influx of students in a short period of time? What are the visual impacts? “We have these real serious blocks to moving to the next step,” he admits. “It’s not enough to like the concept in the total abstract. We’re at the point of wanting to know, ‘How would the system work in our town?’”

San Jose is asking the same questions. Spurred by Mayor Chuck Reed’s “Green Vision” initiative, which seeks to establish San Jose as a national leader on environmental issues, the city is considering how it can help get the idea of green mobility off the drawing board and onto the streets. Its “Automated Transit Network Demonstration Project” would start by connecting San Jose International Airport to nearby light-rail, Caltrain, and BART facilities.

Originally, the plan was to build a more traditional people-mover to do the job; it would have cost over $500 million for a two-mile system with three stations. Then it occurred to city planners that an advanced direct system might do a better job, not just of linking the airport to existing transit facilities, but creating a network of transportation to nearby destinations, including hotels, offices, and a planned soccer stadium.

“We see opportunities to create extended transit villages around our BART investments, our high-speed rail station, and our light-rail facilities,” explains Hans Larson, the city’s deputy director of transportation.
Plus, this new technology meshes well with San Jose’s vision of itself as an environmental and technological leader. “It’s innovative. This is the kind of thing that San Jose and Silicon Valley do well,” Larson says.

Last fall, San Jose solicited proposals for the project. An overwhelming seventeen responses arrived from around the world, including one from CyberTran, but none seemed quite shovel-ready. Instead of getting discouraged, though, city planners set their sights even higher. Now they’re seeking partnerships with the federal government, asking it to invest in setting technical standards and demonstrating that a system can work. The city hopes to collaborate with the departments of Energy and of Transportation, NASA Ames Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, as well as the aerospace industry. “We would like to not be behind the rest of the world in developing this,” Larson says. “We think Silicon Valley and San Jose is the place to start this as a national industry.”

There’s still some room for skepticism, though. “San Jose’s a pretty thin market,” warns UC Berkeley’s Deakin. She points out that the city is having a hard enough time paying for its existing transit commitments. And while she agrees that advanced transportation systems sound great on paper, she’s cautious about predicting what might happen in practice: “It’s really hard to say in general if this is going to work or not. The studies about whether there’s enough demand haven’t been done. Do people want this, or would they rather drive their cars? You can’t look at it as a pure technological gee-whiz kind of thing.”

Calthorpe, the urban planner, is glad to see municipalities taking direct transit seriously. But he, too, is cautious, having experienced firsthand how challenging it can be to convince governments to commit to PRT. “I constantly put it into my projects, and it gets constantly booted out,” he says. He thinks part of the problem is that there are still no existing examples of a working system. “People say, ‘We’re not going to be the first ones to test drive this stuff.’”

Another challenge is that these systems raise sticky political issues like land-use planning. “Transit doesn’t work at four units per acre,” a typical suburban layout, Calthorpe explains. And planning for the denser, more urban communities that complement rapid transit is difficult, even in the Bay Area. “In California, some people think the answer [to climate change] is vehicle efficiency; that we don’t need to change our lifestyle, we just need to drive Priuses. There’s going to be a giant political battle,” he predicts.

Still, Sinclair is hopeful that CyberTran’s moment has arrived as more people focus on combating climate change. The company has spent the last year working on its third-generation vehicle and software control, and has plans to use a large warehouse in Oakland as its product development center. “We’ve got the technology. There’s no new science necessary. This is entirely doable,” he says. All they need is funding.

The question is whether anyone with enough money to pay for the crucial next step, a demonstration project, will step forward—the New Jersey report estimates a demonstration of a PRT system would require at least a three-year, $50 million to $100 million investment. Right now, the federal government is about the only entity with enough money to spend, and at press time, none of the federal stimulus funds were heading towards direct rapid transit projects.

Perhaps attention from cities like Santa Cruz and San Jose will change that. “There needs to be a local government, grassroots demand for it,” Sinclair insists. “Little cities can’t do it, but what little cities can do is ask big Sacramento or big Washington to do it.” And if that doesn’t do the trick? Sinclair has a Plan B: “Any of you that have a rich uncle that wants to build a train, come talk to me.”

Over the past three years, Miller’s traversed the globe to find “cold spots,” areas with low incidences of chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, while investigating traditional diets in those areas. Her book offers a fascinating travel journal combined with information about time-tested, indigenous diets, including recipes, from five regions across the world.

In Copper Canyon, nestled in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, Miller discovered that the native Tarahumara Indians ward off diabetes with nopales (prickly pear cactus pads) which help regulate blood sugar; in Okinawa, Japan, a cold spot for breast and prostate cancers, she learned that mushrooms contain cancer-fighting substances. On the Greek island of Crete, she found that freshly foraged wild greens, fish, yogurt, olive oil, and a little wine are high in antioxidants and essential fatty acids, and that their anti-inflammatory properties prevent heart disease. Certain combinations of foods—like olive oil, lemon, and greens—eaten together have synergistic effects that make nutrients more bioavailable. She also visited Iceland and Africa, cold spots for depression and colon cancer.

Miller says that traditional diets always begin with seasonal, unprocessed whole foods, organic by default.
“People fare better on anything that’s not a processed, Western diet,” she says as she makes a quick survey of the stalls at Alemany. “Indigenous diets are really recipes for eating that are grounded in tradition. Cooks over centuries have refined these recipes for generations, using ingredients that grew near each other and tasted good but also kept people healthy.”

Even at this early hour, the market is bustling with shoppers and vendors meeting at stalls filled to the brim
with fresh greens, herbs, spotted eggs, and the beginnings of the season’s sweet strawberries. Engaging and bubbly, Miller tells me she’ll be shopping for a dinner party she’s hosting that evening. The feast draws upon the different diets she discusses in the book. On the menu are slow-cooked pork with mole sauce, potatoes, handmade tortillas, green salad, and those beautiful strawberries with freshly whipped cream for dessert.

We wander slowly through the market, chit-chatting about her favorite vendors. Soon we find a stall featuring nopales; Miller speaks to the vendor in fluent Spanish asking for the smaller, more tender pads. “The interesting thing about nopales is that they have a substance that is really close to Metformin, a drug that doctors use to lower blood sugar in patients with diabetes,” she explains. “Nopales are great for patients who need to gain better control of their blood sugar.”

The vendor demonstrates how to use a cheese grater to cut off the sharp spines. “I usually don’t use a cheese grater,” Miller, says, shaking her head. “I use a knife. This is a great trick! I wish I’d known this for my book.”

As we meander on, I ask about using food as medicine. “I feel that food has become this other religion that
people get crazy about,” Miller says cautiously. “At the end of the day, food is food. There are lovely ways to put food together that are healing and delicious, but one of the big risks I run as a physician who does this work is causing confusion. People think I’m proposing something like ‘medical food,’ and I’m not doing that—food is foremost for pleasure, but it so happens that I use its added benefits for healing.”

Diet has always been a topic of confusion and contradiction. From fat-free foods to the promise of weight
loss with bacon, diet plans are as faddish as pet rocks. In Miller’s practice, she sees patients whose weights yo-yo up and down on the latest hot diets. When she began to recommend traditional diets based on indigenous foods, those patients found success keeping weight off—though that quest soon became an adjunct to feeling more vital all around.

The traditional diets Miller uncovered on her travels share key components: Foods are always seasonal, fresh, and local; preparation techniques have been honed and passed down for centuries; food is shared communally and eaten for satiety, with observation paid to fasts and rituals; sugars and salts come from natural, unprocessed sources such as honey or sea vegetables; meat is used in small quantities, with fats more likely to come from nuts, seeds, and minimally processed oils such as olive or coconut; fermented foods are used as condiments, and spices such as cinnamon and cumin are likely to have healing properties
of their own.

Chronic disease rates skyrocketed when people migrated from rural areas to cities and began eating modern-day processed foods that gradually edged out traditional diets. It made sense to Miller that combinations of indigenous and unadulterated foods have health-promoting properties lacking in today’s refined foods. Whole foods provide the nutrients that prevent disease and lessen the effects of chronic illness.

So what separates Miller’s book from a fad diet book? “These foods and recipes make sense to people on an intuitive level,” Miller says. “[Readers] can manipulate the recipes to work with their food preferences.” And, she adds, “Everyone has a story about a grandmother or great-grandmother who used to cook, and those traditional recipes are passed from generation to generation.” Some of that information has found its way into Miller’s book, and “when people read it, they resonate with that wisdom,” she says.

Miller dashes away to score a beautiful head of lettuce. “I always get so distracted by food,” she says, apologizing for disappearing mid-thought. “I’ll serve this with a citrus and avocado dressing. Sound good?”

We approach a stall brimming with red, purple, brown, and yellow-skinned potatoes. “You’re looking at a whole range of glycemic indecies here,” she says as she gestures toward the colorful array. The glycemic index refers to a food’s effect on blood sugar levels; eating low on the glycemic index can help prevent diabetes and weight gain. But while ingredients are the foundation, explains Miller, “Different ways of cooking foods can give you different benefits.” In this case, the brown russets are much more starchy and release more sugar, making them less desirable, and the reds and purples are more waxy, so they release sugars much more slowly. “If you cook them and cool them before eating, it lowers their glycemic index,” she says. Miller learned this in Iceland, where smaller, waxy spuds are traditionally used.

After Miller selects potatoes, I ask her if an indigenous diet means eating according to one’s ethnicity—if I’m Japanese, should I stick to seaweed-and-fish-based meals? “That’s really a bunch of BS when you look at genetics,” Miller replies. “You can optimize your health no matter who you are just by eating healthy foods. Statistically, what’s killing us is the bad food we eat, the exercise we don’t get—and stress. I recommend that people follow their taste buds. I think the diets in the book can work for all people.”

I ask about her staple recipes and favorite cookbooks. “Recipes are short little poems for me,” she replies. “I read them the way people read magazines. I’m Jewish, so I cook a lot from Claudia Rodin’s Jewish cookbook. She provides amazing traditional recipes. It’s a microcosm of global cooking.” She mentions Alice Waters’ work and San Francisco’s Zuni Café cookbook. “There are about ten to fourteen recipes I cook around, and I make a lot of slow-cooked recipes where I’ll put everything in a pot on a low simmer.”

After the market, we head over to La Palma, a mexicatessen in the Mission District, where Miller looks for finely ground masa to make handmade corn tortillas. She explains that traditional tortilla preparation calls for treating the corn with lime, which makes the tortillas more nutrient-rich, a tip she learned in Copper Canyon.

As we cruise the aisles, Miller points out the reddish-hued dried corn grain used to make pozole, a thick Mexican stew traditionally served for holiday feasts. She orders the masa flour along with a fresh, warm, corn tortilla for me to sample—a real treat. It far surpasses store-bought varieties that may contain hydrogenated fats or preservatives.

After La Palma, we wander down the street to Dynamo, a little independent coffee stand famous for its inventive donuts, such as candied orange blossom or Meyer lemon huckleberry. Miller orders a cappuccino along with a maple bacon donut, a treat before she heads off for her weekly dance class. “Everything in moderation,” she says. “Sweetness is one of the five tastes, and dessert is wonderful but should be just that—dessert—and not used as an energy snack.”

As we wait for her coffee, we discuss the connection between health and diet. “When you become a doctor and learn how to use fancy drugs, you start to realize that medicine has limitations, and it’s really like putting a Band-Aid on things,” she says. “The minute you want to work with what’s causing the illness, you have to look at what the person eats.” Miller explains how very natural it was to bring diet and food into her practice: “That’s the definition of integrative.”

Our urban foraging for Miller’s dinner party also epitomizes the ideas behind slow food: shopping locally, eating organic and seasonally, and cooking recipes steeped in tradition with friends and family. “Food is pleasure, and if people start to embrace that, they’ll start to eat better,” Miller says. “I was just in Europe eating the most amazing meals with friends last week, and I watched them eat. They don’t pig out, and we spent two hours at the dinner table. Eating mindfully is part of it.”

She takes a sip of cappuccino and a bite of donut and tells me, “As a culture we’ve taken food to extremes—we’re obsessed with it or completely disassociated with it. I think that’s really unhealthy.”

No one’s quite sure why, but for the last six years, California has had a squid problem. “Invasions have been documented throughout the past century,” John Field, a researcher for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote in a recent paper, but “the spatial and temporal extent of the ongoing invasions appear to be unprecedented in the historical record.”

John McCosker, an eminent research scientist and director of the California Academy of Sciences aquatic biology program, is more blunt: “The squid are moving north, eating most everything in their path,” he says. “It’s like a horror movie.”

The squid’s encampment raises a host of unanswered questions: Does the shrinking of tuna and shark populations mean that there aren’t as many large predators to keep squid in check? Are squid reproducing here or just swimming up from more southerly breeding grounds? Will their eating habits depress local populations of commercially important fish like hake, rockfish, and smaller squid? Most glaringly: Will they ever go away?

One factor that may have prompted their invasion is the ongoing “shoaling” of low-oxygen zones in the Pacific Ocean. Parts of the ocean, particularly in warmer tropical waters, have always had a low oxygen level, but during the last decade, that zone has spread into shallower water along the West Coast. The squid appear to thrive in it—although no one’s certain why.

That’s maybe the most worrying thing about the squid invasion—the possibility that it’s a symptom of broader ocean changes that are altering the habitat for thousands of species. Scientists still lack definite proof, but recent news suggests that it’s a depressing time for ocean health: Warming. Acidification. Dying coral. Chemical and hormonal pollution. Doomed salmon fisheries. Beach-closing blooms of jellyfish.

Some scientists have even suggested that worldwide, we’re watching our oceans go backward 550 million years to the conditions of the Cambrian era, when invertebrates ruled the warm seas and bony fishes hadn’t been invented yet. Could the California squid invasion signal the dawning of the age of a warm ocean full of ill-tempered invertebrates? Or can our local back-boned species hang on, forestalling what some researchers worry may be the end of fish?

The Changing Ocean
About a year ago, Chris Harrold, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s conservation research director, and I stopped at the aquarium’s signature exhibit, the kelp forest tank: 340,000 gallons of what you would have seen scuba diving in pretty much any kelp forest in the state—thirty years ago. “Can you see this along the coast right now?” I asked.

Harrold paused for a moment. “If you dive the offshore Channel Islands or go down along the coast of Big Sur, to areas that are remote, those are sort of de facto marine reserves because people can’t get there,” he said. “Those kelps forests would look an awful lot like this one.”

“But,” he continued, echoing a common lament among California’s fishermen and divers, “if you dive in areas that are heavily dived, like along the coast of Monterey, it would be quite a bit more sparse. The fishes would be smaller, because scuba divers and recreational fishermen can fish there. And that leads to fewer fish and generally leads to smaller fish as well.”

Others will tell you that marine life isn’t as abundant as it used to be: Fishermen who now have to boat thirty miles to find fish tell stories of friends limiting out in an evening at the dock twenty years ago. Scuba divers talk of picked-over reefs and quiet kelp forests. Free divers and spear fishermen remember rocks plated with abalone and chasing after gigantic fish like white sea bass.

To scientists like Harrold, with decades of experience studying California’s marine environment, it’s clear that the Pacific Ocean is changing. But measuring how much, and which of these changes are normal, cyclical events and which are our fault, he says, “is just a very difficult nut to crack.”

The ocean, and the Pacific in particular, is always under stress. There are dramatic events like El Niño, as well as cyclical fluctuations in currents, temperature, oxygen levels and nutrient upwelling and that’s not even the half of it. “There are so many [factors] that we know,” Harrold says, “and we don’t even know how many we don’t know.”

Here’s what we do know: The ocean is warming, but what portion of that is random fluctuation and what’s long-term change is hard to say, particularly locally. Worldwide, the ocean is becoming more acidic, as the water takes carbon dioxide out of the air and turns it into carbonic acid. Its pH has dropped about a point, which scientists suspect is bad for coral reefs and shelled animals like mussels and oysters, because even a slight change is damaging to their shells.

Meanwhile, polluted water runoff from cities and farms has carried nitrogen and phosphorous out into the ocean, where, along with carbon dioxide from the air, it’s gobbled up by algae and bacteria that quickly suck up all the oxygen in an area, leading to red tides—giant algae blooms—and low or no-oxygen seas. The most famous example is the 20,000-square-kilometer “dead zone” at the mouth of the Mississippi River that appeared in the 1950s and has yawned out ever since.

These factors are leading towards huge changes in the function and constitution of the ocean. Still, it’s a big, resilient place, and since most of the human-caused ocean changes result from accommodating 21st century human needs—feeding and clothing ourselves, getting around—it’s likely we won’t stop without proof that we’re doing great harm. Unfortunately, it’s just as likely the damage won’t be completely evident until it’s done. Given how we rely on a healthy ocean, it isn’t a great place for conducting uncontrolled experiments.

“I don’t know if anyone can tell you if we’ve gone past the point of no return on any particular parameter, but I’m sure almost every scientist could tell you there are points of no return,” Harrold says. “We just don’t know where they are. And we may not find them until we’re there. That’s what’s scary.”

The Missing Salmon
Not long after I met with Harrold, I visited a longtime recreational fisherman who was selling his boat. He couldn’t fish for salmon—once the main reason to fish in California—because the population has entirely collapsed, leading authorities to ban salmon fishing for the last two years. For many Californians, this record low has been one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that fish are in trouble. But how much is the changing ocean behind the salmon’s disappearance?

A clue surfaced in the mid-1990s, when the National Marine Fisheries Service received a petition asking it to list Puget Sound salmon as an endangered species. The NMFS responded with a 1998 report reviewing the status of all salmon species throughout the western United States. Among them were the Central California salmon known as fall-run Chinook.

At the time, the fall-run Sacramento River Chinook appeared to be in good shape, with numbers possibly approaching historic highs. But many of the report’s authors felt those numbers were misleading. While the salmon weren’t immediately in danger of extinction, the report concluded, they were “likely to become so in the foreseeable future.”

Those danger signs weren’t enough to convince politicians to protect the salmon. “Back then there were a million fish, and squaring that with the idea they might go extinct, it just wasn’t possible,” says fisheries service biologist Steve Lindley, one of the report’s co-authors.

Almost exactly ten years later, the population collapsed. More than a million salmon once swam up the Sacramento River every year to spawn. As recently as 2006, there were hundreds of thousands. By the fall run of 2008, there were only 66,000.

That year, for the first time ever, the fisheries service closed the salmon fishing season throughout California. Conditions didn’t improve this year; the economic damage for 2008 has been estimated at more than $250 million and thousands of jobs. “We are feeling a bit vindicated,”  Lindley says.

Lindley, still at the NMFS, was the lead author of a recent report analyzing the salmon collapse and its causes. His report, much like his review a decade ago, portrays a species ill-equipped to deal with environmental change. Salmon have low genetic variability because almost all of them come from hatcheries. Those that don’t must make do with spawning habitat degraded by water pumping, development, pollution, and the arrival of invasive species like overbite clams. While none of these problems individually precipitated the collapse, they made the salmon’s existence precarious enough that a random change in ocean conditions could. It was left to Lindley and his NMFS colleagues to figure out where that change had occurred.

Their conclusion: In 2004 and 2005, the current off California, which usually drives a strong upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water, shifted, resulting in warmer water and changes in the food chain. Scientists watching the ocean that year noticed seabirds abandoning their Farallon Islands nests, emaciated gray whales, and sea lions swimming far offshore to find food. For that year’s doomed young salmon, the water warmed, and their favorite prey disappeared, just as they entered the ocean. Many starved to death, never returning to the river to spawn.

Ocean conditions returned to “normal” in 2006, so Lindley’s report predicts that the salmon population will probably rebound next year, and even more the year after. But while Lindley doesn’t believe the salmon face immediate extinction, he does think they face a problem with diminishing returns. Without environmental changes, such as improved spawning habitat and water flow, and reduced hatchery production to allow for greater genetic diversity, there are likely to be more of these boom-and-bust cycles as ocean conditions fluctuate.

After each bust, the recovering population will likely get a little smaller and a little more vulnerable. It’ll be like looking at a peak-and-valley line, with each peak a little lower and each valley a little deeper. “It’s just getting lower and lower, and eventually it’s going to crash,” Lindley says.

The Blooming of Jellyfish
Jeremy Jackson, an eminent marine scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has looked into the future and predicted the “rise of slime”—the end of vertebrate fish and a dawning era of microbes, algae, and jellyfish. In some parts of the world there do appear to be more jellyfish than there once were. The Mediterranean, where jellyfish seem to have all but displaced fish, is a favorite apocalyptic case study, but around the world, from Puerto Vallarta to Phuket, jellies’ stinging tentacles regularly close beaches.

Jellies’ success has been attributed, in part, to humans: Overfishing has reduced their predators and competitors, farm runoff has created low-oxygen dead zones favorable to jellies because, unlike fish, they don’t need much oxygen to move around, and ocean warming appears to foster their favored planktonic prey while harming the plankton that fish prefer. The Mediterranean in particular has lent itself to slime’s rise: As an enclosed sea, it’s more susceptible to the unholy trinity of water pollution, invasive species, and overfishing.

Algae and microbes thrive in similar conditions, especially in polluted runoff areas. They so rapidly consume the water’s oxygen that their massive blooms leave giant dead zones. Fish swim in…but don’t swim out.

Nothing seems to inspire hyperbole quite like microbes and jellyfish. Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, has said that with oceans turning into a microbial soup, his kids will tell their kids, “Eat your jellyfish!” A similarly bleak report in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution earlier this year, written by an international team of scientists from Australia, Africa, and America, was titled “The Jellyfish Joyride.”

But while the idea of a future ocean so thickly filled with creeping jellies that you could walk across them may get scientists giddy, locally, we’re doing okay. “I’m not prepared to say we’ve seen a jellyfish increase,” says Steve Haddock, a jellyfish expert at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “I don’t think there’s any quantitative evidence that shows that.”

After all, he points out, jellyfish come in a huge variety of types, sizes, habits and politeness levels—there are hundreds of species—and they’re probably just as fragile as other parts of the ecosystem. Haddock has read news stories from India, where researchers are worried about jellies disappearing because they are the main food source for endangered turtles, and from China, where researchers are seeding the ocean with jellyfish to ensure a continued viable jelly fishery.

In fact, counting how many jellyfish are actually out there is tricky. That’s the thing about studying jellyfish:
It’s hard. Or rather, too soft. Those much-maligned slime are tough to capture, tag and track, or even find. Jellies live out of the view of remote sensing equipment and don’t show up much in the fossil record.

Researchers resort to approaches like counting them from airplanes, but you can guess at the uncertainties involved in doing that. And even though jellyfish blooms seem startling, they, too, are cyclical. Haddock says he’s seen reports of a massive jelly bloom that closed fisheries in the North Sea, off the coast of Holland—except that this one occurred in the 1700s. Huge blooms have similarly been recorded in the Mediterranean going back a hundred years.

But what is not part of the cyclical pattern, Haddock says, is the arrival of invasive species. Humans are quite talented at doing the Johnny Appleseed thing—ocean-going ships that carry ballast water transplant critters all over the world, including introducing jellyfish to areas where they’ve bloomed like crazy, along with other species that have paved the way for native jellyfish to go nuts. “Anything you do that throws off the balance of the ecosystem is going to have these kind of cascading and probably unanticipated effects,” Haddock says.

Nevertheless, he’s not worried about the rise of slime: “I don’t go into the ‘destroy all evil jellyfish’ camp—they’re kind of part of the ecosystem.” But, Haddock says, “I am worried that when I go scuba diving there’s no big fish, and everything’s totally picked over, and the environment is obviously being degraded by human activity.”

Which raises another question: How overfished is California?

The Plight of the Bony Fish
Overfishing has been rightfully blamed for many of the ocean’s ills. Books like The End of the Line or The Empty Ocean report that the North Atlantic has been picked clean, and that governments in Europe, Africa, and Asia have denied or delayed action while maximizing their harvest to the point of collapse. In California, the question of overfishing is more nuanced—it depends on the species.
First, though, what counts as a California fish?

It’s a surprisingly complex question. There are around one thousand different kinds of fish off the
Pacific Coast, most sharing the common characteristics of the animals that have lived here for the last 500 million years: backbones, gills, scales—although there are some exceptions.

Yet California-specific fish—the kinds you see in aquarium kelp forest tanks—vary wildly. There are native
fish everyone recognizes: salmon, rockfish, halibut, white sea bass, and bright orange garibaldi (the state marine fish, which, despite its diminutive size, is one of the most aggressive creatures in the sea). There’s the stuff the food chain is made of—mackerel, sardines, anchovies, pollock, hake. Then there’s the kind no one except marine biologists doing dissertations have ever heard of—infinite varieties of perch, smelt, gobies and things with funny names like the shortspine thornyfish (also known as the “idiotfish”).

To survey the health of every kind of fish in the ocean would be impossible, but the numbers for one kind of native fish tell a compelling story. Commercial fishing drove the state’s smaller, near-shore fish species, like rockfish, to record lows in the early 1990s. Fishermen took more than 16,700 tons of rockfish in 1991, the peak fishing year since the National Marine Fisheries Service started keeping data in 1950, when the commercial haul was only 3,700 tons.

But things have turned around since the ‘90s, thanks to stricter regulations. Bottom trawling—dragging a net across the seafloor and pulling up everything in it—is banned here. (The US government bans trawl-fishing in West Coast federal waters, as well.) The state has a number of no-fishing marine reserves; regulators are now working on a funding-and-controversy-plagued, but visionary, network of reserves that would be as effective a plan as any at conserving local species. As for the rockfish, the commercial haul in 2007 was only 640 tons. Today, scientists say, groundfish populations—fish, like the rockfish, that live near the bottom in the coastal zone, in roughly ten to one hundred feet of water—appear to be doubling or even tripling.

This is good news—but it only applies to species whose habitat is covered by California or US regulations.
The news for the globetrotting species that visit our waters like tuna, swordfish, and sharks is extremely bad. Bluefin tuna, for example, which can swim back and forth between California and Japan in months, are on the sushi boat to extinction. It’s simply impossible to convince a tuna or shark to stick around in California where the weather’s nice and the fishing regulations severe.

So while the outlook for open-ocean fish is dire, for California’s kelp forest natives, it isn’t too bad. “As long as we’re fishing, and continuing to impact the ocean through warming and other things, it’s not going to be pristine,” says John Field, a researcher at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Center, of the possibility that the coastline will return to the aquarium-like conditions that people remember. “But certainly in reserve areas things should look as close to pristine as possible.”

The Squid Invasion
In 2005, Field was out in Monterey Bay doing population surveys of shortbelly rockfish—or at least he was trying to, but his nets kept coming up filled with squid. Field wondered what the squid were eating, so he cut a few open and, sure enough, they’d been dining on shortbelly rockfish. “I thought, ‘Well, new source of mortality,’” Field says. “I’d better study this.”

The squid invasion is an international concern: They moved north from their traditional home off Central America, and south, too, into Peru and Chile. Many Chilean fishermen blame the squid for a hugely reduced catch of hake, and Field would like to know whether that’s true, and to what extent that applies up here as well. (Hake are an important and declining fishery in California.) There’s also recent, intriguing work done with remote hydroacoustic sensors showing that squid are chasing hake and changing their schooling behavior.

Squid may be bothering other species, as well. Although Field doesn’t think it likely that a squid could catch an adult salmon, researchers have discussed—and found plausible—the idea that marauding squid could disrupt salmon schools.

But the squid have predators—sharks, billfish, and tuna may benefit from the invasion. “There’d be winners and losers,” says Field. “Shortbelly rockfish and hake might be on the losing end, and sharks and marine mammals might be on the winning end.”

There’s a qualifier on that, though: It takes a big tuna to catch a big squid, and big tuna are increasingly
scarce. Sharks, tuna, and billfish have been fished to the point where there aren’t many big ol’ honkers around—and that may be one reason the squid are here in the first place.

Are squid here to stay? Settling in to raise a family constitutes a bad sign, but no one’s sure if that’s happening yet. Louis Zeidberg, a postdoctoral researcher at the Hopkins Marine Lab, spent the last year searching for squid babies and actually tried breeding them using in vitro fertilization. He hasn’t had any luck at the water temperatures commonly found in Northern California. “We have been able to do in vitro fertilization at 17 degrees [Celsius], maybe even 15, but I don’t think we’ve been able to do it at 12, which is a typical temperature up here,” Zeidberg says. “However, we are still refining our techniques for fertilization. It’s not a rule-out yet.”
T

he other conundrum is why the squid invasion appears to correspond with the expansion of the low-oxygen zone off of California’s coast. Technically, squid should do worse in those areas—scientists have always thought that squid need more oxygen than fish. But Zeidberg said recent tagging data indicates that instead of swimming willy-nilly after prey, the squid are swimming straight up out of the low-oxygen zone, and then gliding down through the water column—a energy-saving movement, like a human swimmer coming up to breathe and then drifting downward to conserve air—allowing them to thrive in low-oxygen water. Most fish, on the other hand, can’t swim in those zones very well, so the prey there is off-limits; fish that do swim through are often sluggish from lack of oxygen and can become prey themselves.

The squid have long followed the movement of the low-oxygen zone, but it’s changed shape in the last decade, covering more shallow water throughout the eastern Pacific Ocean. It’s happened before, most recently in the 1950s and 1960s. This time, though, the zone appears to be slightly larger. And that’s a reason to worry: Even though many of the events that are fostering the squid’s rise are normal and cyclical, they’re happening with increased intensity, or lasting longer.

“We are noticing very subtle signs everywhere that indicate that things aren’t in balance the way they used [to be],” Zeidberg says. “Maybe the squid’s only going to be here for ten years. But if the typical predator load and typical oxygen levels were in existence the way they were in the 1930s, they should’ve only been here for two years instead of ten. We see these little subtle examples that are pretty indicative of a low level of health for the Earth’s ecosystem. And [the evidence] is not going to be very straightforward until things are really bad.”

The End of Fish?

So here’s the big question. Fish: screwed, or not?

There’s good news: Salmon are expected to—at least temporarily—recover from their collapse. Habitat restoration in the Sacramento River and Delta could help ensure their survival. Groundfish are recovering. California can protect the marine environment and address the acidification and warming issues that go hand-in-hand with climate change. Even the squid invasion may not be the end of the world for fish—or at least for the kinds big enough to bite back.

But big-picture marine scientists are more pessimistic about ocean health and the future of fish than you might imagine. “The ocean you and I inherited was probably better than what we will leave for our children, or grandchildren,” says John McCosker of the California Academy of Sciences, “However, it’s not too late.”

McCosker says the best reason for optimism is that President Obama appears to have placed greater value on the work of scientists, which means that government will more carefully weigh the probable outcomes of our actions— like the “rise of slime” Jeremy Jackson warns about. (For his own part, McCosker has predicted that in Europe and Asia, hit worse by overfishing and jellyfish/microbe takeovers, “the future is muck.”) The Obama administration’s NOAA administrator, Jane Lubchenco, is a marine scientist who’s well-respected by her peers, and McCosker, Chris Harrold and others said they hope the change will mark the end of political interference with ocean science.

But even if Obama’s administration makes changes, the ocean moves slowly, and it may take years before its health improves. For endangered species, “years” is a long time to wait. “I’m hoping that nothing will go extinct in the meantime,” McCosker says. Chris Harrold doesn’t believe that this is the end of fish, but he’s not entirely optimistic either. “Fishes have been around for 500 million years,” he says. “I’ve got to think that humans would go extinct long before fishes or other marine life would. But there are some very disturbing trends, and I don’t think anybody can extrapolate where these trends will take us, because
the ocean is just too complicated.”

Meanwhile, as the conservation research director at one of the world’s largest aquariums—a place that has introduced millions of visitors to the idea of healing the ocean—Harrold has to find a way to keep the customers upbeat. “What hope can we give people?” he asks. “I guess I do believe that the damage that we’re doing is reversible. But the trend and our behavior is not yet there.”

Since 2000, TOPP has involved some eighty scientists who have tagged more than 4,000 animals, collecting more than a trillion individual data points recording the movements of 23 predatory species like white sharks, bluefin tuna, and elephant seals. Why only predators? Imagine observing the Serengeti, says TOPP marine biologist Randy Kochevar: If you followed the lions and hyenas, you would also find their herbivore prey, who would in turn lead you to the landscape’s resources, like watering holes and plant life. “Our theory is that we can do the same thing in the ocean,” Kochevar says. “If you just focus on these apex predators you really start to get a sense of how the whole ecosystem is working.”

TOPP data shows that the Pacific Ocean contains the equivalent of “watering holes,” or multi-species hot spots where animals gather to eat and breed. These hot spots coalesce where upwellings of nutrients cause plankton to bloom, in turn attracting small fish, then bigger fish, and so on up the food chain. Between these hot spots are migratory corridors, the highways of the underwater world. Until recently, humans didn’t know much about the travels of highly migratory animals like sharks and tuna, most often spotting them where these highways run close to the coasts. But that, says Kochevar, is “like standing in your backyard and watching a jet fly over—you’re just getting a glimpse of a much larger journey.” With the tags, he says, “It really opens up a whole new world because you start being able to see where the animals are day to day.”

Scientists are now overlaying this tracking data with other oceanographic information like water temperature, sea surface height, and currents, to better understand why animals roam where they do, and which areas are particularly important to their survival. Up until now, regulators working with limited data have attempted to protect species via fairly blunt mechanisms like limiting catch—but as Kochevar points out, these policies are “oftentimes not necessarily based in a good understanding of the animal’s life history, or where they are when, or what’s critical habitat.” Instead, TOPP scientists hope that providing very specific data about how animals use the ocean will help us protect them, perhaps by influencing where we site shipping lanes, Marine Protected Areas, offshore drilling or wave energy plants, showing where we must control pollution and shoreline development, and helping us be smarter about how we fish.

Take, for example, the case of the rapidly disappearing leatherback turtles. “They are the ancient mariner of the sea turtle world—the widest ranging, largest existing sea turtle, the most prolific breeders that dive to the deepest depths, and swim in the coldest waters,” says Stanford researcher George Shillinger, who started tagging them for TOPP in 2003. “They’re just enigmatic and beautiful creatures.”

Indeed, the life of the leatherback is mysterious—although they live for forty years, most of that is spent at sea. Humans don’t see them except during their brief onshore nesting periods. “You see them as little hatchlings and then they disappear for ten to twelve years,” Shillinger explains. “Somehow or another, against all odds, they return [to breed], and then they go away again. For [another] four years they disappear out into the vast expansive blue, and then they come back. How do they do that? It’s incredible!”

Yet leatherbacks are in serious trouble. Shillinger says that over the last two decades the Pacific basin population has declined by over ninety percent. (The World Wildlife Fund estimates that only 2,300 adult females remain in the Pacific, and around 34,000 worldwide.) In the hope of figuring out how best to aid them, Shillinger has been tagging turtles on Costa Rica’s Playa Grande, their last remaining viable nesting colony in the eastern Pacific. Even there, the turtles are threatened by the harvest of eggs from their nesting
spots, habitat loss due to coastal development, light pollution that confuses them as they swim to sea, and deaths from eating plastic, which the turtles mistake for their favored prey, jellyfish.

But their biggest threat is fishermen. “The advent of cheaper fuel and new fisheries technologies has pushed a lot of fleets offshore, where the migrating turtles, when they head out to their foraging grounds, interact with fisheries in distant areas. They are hooked by long liners or they drown in gill nets,” says Shillinger. The loss of a single adult female is “a tragedy for the turtles,” he says, because of their low reproductive rate: A female may produce 2,400 eggs in her lifetime, of which only two will survive to adulthood. The irony, says Shillinger, is that nobody wants to kill leatherbacks; there isn’t a market for them, and when fishermen do hook them it causes a work slowdown and a PR embarrassment. Shillinger hopes to use the TOPP data to keep the turtles and the fishermen out of each other’s way.

This might not be so hard: tagging data shows that after their nesting period, the Playa Grande turtles follow a consistent path from beach to sea. “That in and of itself affords a fantastic opportunity for conservation,” says Shillinger; options include closing off that corridor to fishing fleets for the three months it takes the turtles to migrate across it, or just shutting down smaller sections while the turtles are passing through. Alternatively, tagging data showing the depths in which the turtles prefer to swim could be used to help fishermen to adjust the lengths of their lines to avoid hooking them. None of these solutions is as drastic as creating a permanent no-fishing zone; TOPP scientists hope highly targeted, short-term adjustments like these will be more palatable to the fishing industry, since it won’t eliminate anyone’s livelihood.

In April, Shillinger headed to Costa Rica to discuss his data with representatives from the ministry of environment, the parks service, and the fishing industry. He hopes to eventually see a regional conservation effort involving the nearby nations of Ecuador, Panama, Nicaragua, and Colombia, because as he puts it, “These animals obviously don’t abide by political boundaries.” He thinks international conservation efforts should also start looking ahead to future issues, like the effects global warming could have on leatherbacks. Sea level rise might be bad news for Playa Grande, and “If we don’t anticipate where the next great nesting beach might be, they might not have anywhere to go, especially with runaway development along the coastal areas,” he says.

But while the TOPP data hints at a way to help the leatherbacks, it’s also given us some gloomy news about other species. For example, TOPP pays a small fee to fishermen who return the tags from any tuna they’ve hooked; an unexpectedly high percentage of tags are being returned soon after deployment, suggesting that they are being harvested more intensively than previously thought. Even with animals that aren’t commercially fished, like white sharks, Kochevar says, the tagging team is “finding that we’re seeing the same animals again and again and again. … It suggests that, you know what, maybe there aren’t really that many white sharks.”

So as TOPP winds up its first phase, it faces two new challenges: communicating its findings to people who can push through conservation measures, especially for animals that are critically endangered, and broadening its efforts internationally. Its successor is a new project called GTOPP, or the Global Tagging of Pelagic Predators, which will invite scientists from around the world—not just California’s side of the Pacific—to pool their tracking data via Google Earth, the massive digital mapping project devoted to “annotating the globe.” Google Earth’s ocean maps (downloadable at www.earth.google.com/ocean) provide 3-D topographic images that allow viewers to “swim” around the underwater geography. TOPP is overlaying its animal tracking data onto these maps; click on the image of a shark or a leatherback and you can see where it’s been. Come back tomorrow, and see if it’s moved. Using Google is a way for scientists to easily exchange information—but it’s also a way to communicate with another ocean policy stakeholder: you.

“It seems like an interesting way to grab people’s attention and get them to be excited about exploring the planet,” says Google’s Steve Miller, who is working on the GTOPP project. Making data publicly accessible in real time will let people feel that they are “watching the experiment in progress,” says Kochevar, and has great potential for environmental education because so many of the tagged animals are sharks, tuna, and other “charismatic megafauna”—that’s scientist-speak for “really cool big animals” that capture the public’s imagination and arouse compassion. Since the data about those animal’s lives will always be updating, says Miller, “If a kid happens to fall in love with a particular whale shark, he ought to be able to come in every day and see where it’s going,” and maybe learn about its environment and challenges in the process.

For policymakers, dynamic mapping could make it easier to visualize and debate complicated conservation issues. This spring, Miller and other Google representatives met with congressional staffers on commerce, science, and natural resources subcommittees who were interested in using digital maps to help legislators evaluate the potential impacts of, for example, offshore wind, gas, or oil developments.

Google Earth’s maps have already been useful tools for environmental activists with more terrestrial concerns: In the Santa Cruz mountains, Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging (NAIL), used Google Earth to illustrate how a proposed logging zone would encroach on residential areas; in North Carolina the group Appalachian Voices created a virtual tour within Google Earth showing the effects of mountaintop removal coal mining. Making TOPP’s tracking data public could be a boon for ocean conservation groups; Miller points out that UC Santa Barbara scientists have been using Google Earth’s ocean maps to discuss Marine Protected Areas.

TOPP’s tracking data is giving us our clearest picture yet of life in the Pacific—will better data ultimately mean better ocean health? Kochevar thinks so: “The only way that conservation can really work,” he says, “is if you’re working with the right information at your fingertips.”

Issued by the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) as a warning to immigrant fishermen who depend on the Bay Area’s waterways for food, the bulletin is also available in English, Spanish, Cambodian, Korean, Chinese, Laotian, Russian, and Vietnamese.
Each version includes the same color-coded warning levels, the same drawing to illustrate proper serving portions (for adults, a bit more than palm-size; for kids, slightly less), and the same image of a shark superimposed by a red circle and slash, accompanied by the words—in every language—“Do not eat.” Along with halibut, a popular catch at the Berkeley Marina, shark and king mackerel consistently register high levels of neurotoxins.

“Bigger fish tend to accumulate more contaminants,” as do long-lived fish and predators, says marine scientist Timothy Fitzgerald of the Environmental Defense Fund. If such species can be unsafe to eat even when they’re caught far out at sea, those caught in densely populated environments such as the Bay Area present what Fitzgerald calls “an interesting dilemma.” Because seafood is high in protein, calcium, iodine, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamins A and D, “we want people to eat more fish,” he says. “But waterways near big cities contain a greater number of contaminants.” Any urban bay, lake or river is a virtual “cocktail of mean and nasties.”

Big American cities are also home to ethnic populations who love seafood and are accustomed to catching what they eat, rather than buying it retail. Many subsistence fisherfolk living in Northern California see no reason to break cultural tradition, especially during an economic downturn when passing up free meals feels like madness.

“Our clients definitely do a lot of fishing,” says Taearun Lopez of San Francisco’s Cambodian Family Services. “They pick up crab and other things. They come in here talking about what they caught.” Like most community organizers, she is well aware of the health risks but also knows that for many people, the lure of free fish is nearly irresistible when types popular among Southeast Asians “are so expensive in the store—like six dollars a pound.” A fish-advisory sign printed in the Cambodian language has been posted in the CFS office for several years now, and Lopez says it has slowly raised awareness. “And, personally, I try to advocate to our clients not to eat too much fish.”

It’s an uphill battle, because seafood plays a key role in Cambodian cuisine. “Last Friday night,” Lopez remembers, “a client invited me to come and eat Cambodian food. I said, ‘Where did you get that fish you’ll eat?’ They said, ‘Oh, my brother caught a big one.’ But I don’t know where they’re fishing. … I said, ‘Ah, no thank you.’”

Such circumstances comprise “a double whammy,” Fitzgerald laments, “because you’re talking about people who are not only catching more fish but eating more fish. And [the message is] not culturally ingrained that the fish you catch might be a danger to yourself or your family, and that certain things”—such as species and locale—“can elevate that risk. It may not be that the fish in their native areas was any less dangerous than it is here, but maybe the testing back there wasn’t as thorough as it is here.”

Or perhaps, their government agencies don’t report the results of those tests as exhaustively as ours do. OEHHA issues advisories in different languages for waterways such as San Francisco Bay, Folsom Lake, the Sacramento River, the San Joaquin River, and the Delta. (The OEHHA’s San Francisco Bay advisory recommends eating bay-caught fish no more than twice a month.) California’s Department of Fish & Game posts multilingual warning signs in areas known to be popular with immigrant recreational anglers.

“We’re trying to help them understand the potential health risks,” says Fish & Game communications officer Harry Morse, “and to understand that we have a completely different set of laws than other countries about what you can and cannot keep. We’ve done extensive postings up and down the rivers and around the bay, trying to cover specific areas where our wardens encounter especially high numbers of new migrants.” Outreach to Chinese speakers, Morse says, has been a major focus lately.

Graphic designer Lauren Wohl-Sanchez, who created fish-advisory brochures and signs in Lao, Vietnamese, Chinese, and other languages for the state’s Environmental Health Investigations Branch, says the process entailed “dozens of iterations.” Bilingual EHIB personnel visited popular Bay Area urban-fishing spots to interview fishermen at work. “They would bring notebooks showing the various options for the graphics,” Wohl-Sanchez says, “such as how the hands were portrayed” in the images
specifying portion size. “The fishermen were asked, ‘What does this mean to you?’

“Any field-testing process is a very useful, eye-opening process,” she says. “And it always yields surprises in terms of people interpreting things in ways we would never expect them to be interpreted.” One example was a diagram intended to indicate the relative degrees of toxicity in fish: low, medium, and high. Many of the respondents believed that the drawing indicated the depths at which various species could be caught.

Other agencies are mounting similar efforts. The California Department of Health Services produces postcards and signs for posting at fishing sites, bearing warnings in thirteen languages. The signs and cards are designated “low-literacy,” using sparse and simple wording in order to reach as many anglers as possible. The San Francisco Estuary Institute, an Oakland-based nonprofit founded in 1986 to bridge the gap between research and policy, also provides advisories and educational materials in multiple languages.

Following ancient tradition, Richmond’s Laotian immigrants practice subsistence fishing from local piers—but West Contra Costa County offers an even stronger toxic cocktail than most; the area is riddled with over 350 industrial sites and chemical hazards, according to the Oakland- based Asian Pacific Environmental Network. APEN launched its Laotian Organizing Project fourteen years ago to raise awareness within the community about these risks. But signs and fliers, an APEN bulletin laments, have little effect on immigrant Laotian anglers “since few are literate in their own language or in English.”

This environmental-justice issue festers wherever immigrant populations settle near urban waterways. A comprehensive study conducted recently by the New York State Department of Health yields troubling statistics: Fewer than half of the recreational anglers surveyed along the Hudson River and New York Harbor were aware of fishing bans and health advisories; the level of awareness was lowest among ethnic minorities. The survey also found that the fish most commonly eaten by members of these communities were the most highly contaminated species. Over half of the anglers surveyed reported eating the fish they catch, and most said they shared their catches with children and with women of child-bearing age.

Another study conducted by researchers from the Mount Sinai Center for Children’s Health and the Environment found that the bodies of individuals who eat fish from the lower Hudson River and New York Harbor contain higher levels of PCBs than people from the same communities who do not eat such fish. The more such fish are eaten, the higher the levels. Latinos and African-Americans—
many of whom are immigrants from Caribbean islands where subsistence fishing is commonplace—were found to have higher DDT levels than Caucasians.

The sneaky thing about developmental neurotoxins is that their effects don’t manifest immediately, so you can eat a bay-caught shark-steak lunch and feel fit to jog a mile fifteen minutes later. Consuming contaminated fish won’t make adults sick overnight “the way a bad oyster will,” Fitzgerald says. “The risk is from eating it repeatedly, which can have neurological effects or effects on your motor function and memory—not stuff you want.” Bit by bit, mercury poisoning can cause permanent hearing and vision impairment, hypertension, serious skin problems, and loss of coordination. In children and fetuses, mercury stunts brain growth.

While mercury is a metal, other classes of contaminants such as PCBs and dioxins are organic chlorines. These accumulate in fat, “so a lot of them have very long half-lives,” Fitzgerald says, “and take a very long time to break down once they’re in the environment.” PCBs, which a growing mass of evidence now links to fetal brain damage, “were developed to withstand high pressure in industrial settings,” he explains. In other words, PCBs were built to last, and they sure do—in the tissue of whatever living creatures ingest them, including babies who consume them via breast milk. “It’s ironic,” Fitzgerald says, “that what makes this substance desirable is the exact same thing that makes it impossible to clean up.”

Recent studies on fish yield an ever-longer contaminant checklist. Now in your sweet-and-sour sea bass: flame retardants. And in your ceviche: the components of personal-care products. “These are things that don’t get filtered out of water,” Fitzgerald says. Prozac and birth control drugs have been showing up in seafood as well, he says, especially in urban areas that are “closer to the source of contamination.” The long-term effects on humans cannot yet be determined, “but it is very telling about our society that we’re putting all these substances into our systems intentionally at first and getting them unintentionally
on the back end from something we never thought of.” And given the findings of those New York surveys, we know who will be hit hardest of all.

Even though California’s fish-advisory programs are hailed as being among the nation’s best, Fish & Game’s Harry Morse raises a troublesome point: Will anglers believe what they read? “For many fishermen,” Morse muses, “their most relied-upon source of information is the guy fishing next to them at the pier—the guy who says, ‘Don’t worry, I eat this stuff all the time and I’m fine.’ It’s their friend, their brother, their cousin whom they trust. It’s not the government.”

Knowles would know. Over the past fifteen years he has visited this particular cove, located directly behind the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, hundreds of times to harvest wild seaweed. Knowles’ small company, Rising Tide Sea Vegetables, is one of a handful of ecologically minded businesses in Northern California that specialize in wild-crafting sea vegetables—harvesting seaweed from its natural habitat—for human consumption. Started in 1981 by his ex-girlfriend Kate Marianchild, Rising Tide has been sustainably harvesting, drying, and selling highly nutritious seaweed, including nori, wakame, kombu, sea palm, and Fucus, for 28 years.

The Mendocino coast’s rough, cold waters, and the high nutrient content of its intertidal zones, make it uniquely conditioned for sea vegetable growth. Knowles, perching on a rock, explains that the ocean’s turbulence increases photosynthesis and cohabitation among different species, and says that sea palms have evolved to grow in the harsh waves. As Knowles talks about the importance of the lunar cycle and tides, praising the violence of the ocean and the chill of its relatively unpolluted waters, he pinches a small piece of early-season Fucus off a rock and offers it to me. It is succulent, crunchy and has a pleasantly salty, nutty taste.

For thousands of years, humans have benefited from sea vegetables’ abundance. Edible ocean-growing
algae are full of essential vitamins and minerals—including calcium, iron, iodine and phosphorus—and offer high levels of protein and unsaturated fatty acids. Studies show that kombu and wakame contain sodium alginate (algin), which strips radioactive particles and heavy metals from the body.

Knowles’ company strives to make seaweed more accessible for mainstream eaters by offering blended packages of sea vegetables and prepared snacks. Dried wakame, sea palm and kombu can be added to stews, or rehydrated and tossed into salads. Nori, the same seaweed used to wrap sushi, has a nutty and salty flavor when crisped up in the oven and can be crumpled over rice and stir-fries. Rising Tide also sells small packages of a dried sea palm and almond mixture, and maple wakame and sesame seed bars. All of their products have the distinct taste of the ocean.

Knowles and his two employees are able to trim fronds from most of the sea vegetables on foot. Wearing wetsuits, they wade in—sometimes up to their chests—or jump along the jagged rocks during low tide. To reach spots farther offshore, they paddle around in kayaks. The job is not without its perils. Large, unexpected waves occasionally knock the harvesters from their rocks, and the sharp knives they use to cut the algae can slip in the wet conditions. So far Knowles is the only member of his company who has been hurt, yet he remains endlessly enthusiastic about the job that takes him to the water at dawn all summer long.

Yet Knowles worries that his business may never reach its thirtieth anniversary. Although the sea vegetable
supply remains robust, state law may deny sea vegetable wild-crafters access to the coast as soon as 2010.
The Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), adopted by the California legislature in 1999, directs the state to reevaluate its existing protections and to establish Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) up and down the coast. These protected areas are “no-take zones,” meaning that the removal of certain marine life—or all marine life in highly protected areas—will be illegal. If the act is enforced as planned, around eighteen percent of the coast will be off-limits to seaweed wild-crafters, despite the fact that hand-harvesting does no harm to the seaweed or the surrounding ecosystem.

Motivated by a desire to assure the quality of their product and by a love for the ocean ecosystem with which they are so closely attached, sea vegetable wild-crafters strive to maintain a harmonious relationship with the marine life around them. They began using words like “sustainable” and “ecosystem” in the 1980s, before such terms entered common discourse. Now, after decades of dedicated ocean stewardship and long fights to keep the Mendocino area free of oil interests and polluting industries, Knowles and his fellow sea vegetable aficionados have a new, unlikely adversary: other environmentalists.

The Marine Life Protection Act is a relatively straightforward piece of legislation. Only ten pages long, it seeks to evaluate, expand and unify the hodge-podge of existing Marine Protected Areas along the California coastline and provide greater protection to native marine species. It also gives the California Department of Fish & Game authority over the act’s implementation and enforcement, and specifically calls for regional decision-making processes and increased conservation based on the best available science.Yet despite the simplicity of the legislation, beneath the surface lie controversies, bureaucratic struggles, and a multitude of special interests. (For Terrain’s previous coverage of the controversy surrounding California’s Marine Protected Areas, see “Marine Reserves Generate Plans, Passions… and Perhaps Fish,” Summer 2008.)

After several attempts to implement the Marine Life Protection Act failed due to lack of funding and protests from stakeholders—commercial and recreational fishermen, sea vegetable wild-crafters, abalone divers, and oyster harvesters among them—in 2004, private, nonprofit interests led primarily by the Packard Foundation and the Resource Legacy Foundation Fund allocated around $18 million to support the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative, the best-funded and most decisive attempt to create a MPA system. The California coast was divided into five sub-regions: South Coast, Central Coast, North Central Coast, North Coast, and the San Francisco Bay.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered the California Resources Agency Secretary, Mike Chrisman, to select experts in policy, environmental law, and resource management to oversee the process and advise the Department of Fish & Game. These “Blue Ribbon Task Forces” are made up of volunteer appointees, and are intended to help promote compromise and transparency while expediting the act’s implementation.

The North Central Coast area, representing the area from Point Arena to Pigeon Point and the southern boundary of the sea vegetable wild-crafters’ harvesting zone, was the second region to embark on its research. Over the last year, stakeholder representatives and participating preservationists attended hundreds of hours of meetings, discussions, presentations, and workshops. They drew new Marine Protected Areas, redrew existing ones, and argued over the protective level of each.

The resulting plan, dubbed the Integrated Preferred Alternative (IPA), is a patchwork of 31 Marine Protected Areas of varying levels of protection. Environmental advocacy groups and the Blue Ribbon Task Force, mostly pleased with the outcome, are pressuring Fish & Game to accept the plan with no further changes or compromises.

Some environmental groups have lauded this effort as inclusive and effective. Kaitilin Gaffney, Central Coast program manager for the Ocean Conservancy, has been following the process for five years and believes it is one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation in California. She feels that the process has been more than fair: “I would say the MLPA is clearly the most participatory and inclusive process that I’ve ever participated in.”

Yet some local stakeholders who use the ocean as a subsistence food source and were not selected for a decision- making position feel steamrolled. Jim Martin, the West Coast Regional Director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, who has been involved with various MLPA plans for ten years, feels that the process wasn’t as inclusive as it’s been made out to be: “That is complete BS. It’s open in the sense that there are a lot of meetings to go to and a lot of things to read and speakers to listen to. But when it comes to public comment, you get one minute.”

Both sides of the dispute care deeply about conserving Northern California’s ocean ecosystems, but they disagree about the best way to achieve that goal. For Gaffney, the act offers an opportunity for the complete preservation of some areas, promoting research and hopefully spurring the resurgence of some key marine species. Yet local stakeholders like Martin, Knowles, and John Lewallen—one of the first seaweed wild-crafting enthusiasts on the West Coast, who started his Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company in 1980—feel that the act fails to address one of the most pressing threats to the marine life—water pollution—and disregards the importance of the ocean to the local food supply. “Our job is to tell the truth to the environmental movement, because I think they have lost sight that humans are part of the ecosystem,” says Lewallen. “We should strive for stewardship and sustainable harvesting.”

Knowles feels similarly: “There are people who are very environmentally aware and are concerned about preservation. They think about saving ecosystems and polar bears and sensitive animal species, but they don’t think well about human communities. And it looks to me like that process is geared more towards what I would consider an owning-class preservationist policy rather than thinking well about natural ecosystems and human ecosystems and local economies.”

For the seaweed wild-crafters, the prospect of being barred from protected areas is particularly frustrating because their hand-harvesting business does no harm. Although the depletion of fish, abalone,
crab, and oyster populations is an increasing problem,and perhaps well-placed no-take zones could boost their numbers, trimming a nori frond neither kills the plant nor decreases its future growth. Highly protected no-take zones don’t make such subtle distinctions.

In defense of the no-take zones, Gaffney asserts that the point of a Marine Protected Area is to provide complete protection for the ecosystem, and that since seaweed is part of the ecosystem, it should remain untouched. “I am not saying that seaweed harvest harms the California ocean ecosystem,” Gaffney explains.“What I’m saying is the main idea of the reserves is to protect the ocean ecosystem in all its pieces. Most of the coast is still about sustainable use, but in those few areas, it should be fully protected as part of that ecosystem.”

The sea vegetablers say this type of all-or-nothing approach may put all the wild-crafters in the Mendocino area out of business. The most accessible spots along the coast, and therefore the best for seaweed harvesting, are also the places where the MLPA focuses its protection. Highly protective MPAs will also deny long-cherished fishing spots to recreational hook and line fishermen who primarily
fish to feed their families and are already regulated by Fish & Game.

For Mendocino natives, the most pressing concern is local control: Many feel deep resentment over the privately funded process, believing corporate money is pushing the process through in an aggressive and single-minded manner. “We are Californians,” says Lewallen. “We want a clean ecosystem and a sustainable source of food and instead it’s moving towards industrialization and gentrification of the coast… The MLPA has us fighting each other. It couldn’t be set up by the people. It couldn’t be set up by the state. It’s corporate!”

The seaweed harvesters are particularly concerned that the MPA system may give the illusion of complete ocean conservation, but through its selective protection of marine life will undermine local calls for the stewardship of the entire Mendocino Coast. The area has remained pristine, they say, because local stakeholders have invested in the ocean and have fought for decades to keep industry and oil interests out. They want to know who will carry on the battle if the small, local businesses close down.

Gaffney is quick to point out that the MLPA is just one important part of ocean conservation and that other legislation will be needed to protect water quality and limit the industrialization of the coastline. But that answer is not good enough for the sea vegetable wild-crafters who envision a future in which they will be denied access to seaweed, but Pacific Gas & Electric will be allowed—even encouraged—to harvest wave energy in areas adjacent to the MPAs. PG&E recently invested millions of dollars in wave energy research off the coast of Fort Bragg—the company was just approved for $4.8 million in funding by the California Public Utilities Commission and $1.2 million from the Department of Energy for their 40 megawatt WaveConnect project. Knowles fears that a wave energy program of this size will cause irreparable damage to the intertidal zone.

“This is the irony of the situation,” Knowles explains. “They’re talking about getting these no-take zones where it is a controlled situation, but of course you get these wave energy [plants] anywhere from five miles long with 100 wave machines… That is absolutely going to impact the near shore ecosystem.”

The final controversy surrounding the MLPA involves enforcement and funding. After the foundation’s money runs out, it remains unclear how Fish & Game will pay to enforce the levels of protection in each Marine Protected Area. Environmentalists seem confident that there is enough public and private interest in the act to assure future funding. But if enforcement is lax the opportunity for poaching will increase, and then everyone will lose.

Despite concern over new rules that may limit their collecting next year, the sea vegetable wild-crafters began harvesting in May and will continue through August. Lewallen says that the marine ecosystems where he harvests are in excellent condition, despite the absence of strict no-take zones: “The seaweed is in great shape. Last year was better than ever. And the water is clean.”

For Knowles, the key is to balance the human need for sustenance with responsible care for the ocean’s health. “We watch the growth patterns and harvesting patterns to reduce our impact,” he explains. “We have to think past sustainable, and start thinking about systems, as opposed to one species. That’s our philosophy.”

One section of the town, along coastal Beach Boulevard, is bounded by a stretch of vertical seawall, intended to protect the buildings just behind it from the force of the Pacific. The wall itself is protected from the ocean by pile after pile of rocks and boulders, called riprap. This afternoon, the tide only reaches to the bottom of the wall, but Battalio points out that the ocean will at times overtop it, creating huge sprays of water that attract television news cameras from miles around. He also indicates smaller walls just inland of the seawall—erected, he says, to further protect nearby buildings. Battalio and Revell lean over the side of the pier to show where the metal wall directly beneath the pier’s snack shop has been worn away by the power of the surf combined with the sand that the waves throw at it. Battalio waves his arm across the scene. “This place is a one-stop coastal process training area,” he says.

He and Revell are part of a team of engineers and scientists from Philip Williams and Associates, a San Francisco environmental hydrology firm that recently looked at the potential effects of rising sea level on coastal erosion in California. Their work is part of a larger report produced by the Pacific Institute examining the physical and economic effects of sea-level rise on the state, which itself was one of almost forty produced for a biennial assessment by California’s Climate Action Team.

The results of the Pacific Institute report are startling. As the sea level rises, it will enlarge areas at risk of flooding while also increasing erosion risk; the report projects potential infrastructure loss statewide and wholesale disappearance of coastline along the central and northern coasts by the year 2100. Almost a half million people may have to live with increased flooding risks, which will also affect power plants, hospitals, and schools. Meanwhile, the ocean’s natural forces of erosion will increase with sea level—calculations suggest that northern and central California’s sandy coastal dunes could retreat an average of 170 meters by 2100, and cliffs could be cut back an average of 66 meters. The Bay Area, with its concentrated coastline and low-lying areas surrounding it, will be affected perhaps more than any other region. As the sea rises, Californians will be forced to decide: Should we adapt to the changing environment, or should we try to make it adapt to us?

Rather than letting the physical relationship for millions of years—which would require moving people, buildings, and infrastructure away from the ocean’s advance—planners and engineers have tried to arrest the natural order. As a result, any beach that might exist along that stretch of coast has no chance of surviving, because the sea consumes it from one side while development prevents natural resupply of sediments from the other.

Battalio and Revell expect similar tensions to play out in other parts of California, as communities make choices about whether to alter nature to preserve development along the coastline, or to accommodate erosion as the sea level changes. They believe that some of what makes coastal California special hangs in the balance. “Beaches and palm trees will be gone” in some places as the buffer between ocean and cities shrinks, Revell says, just as along Pacifica’s seawall, the beach was sacrificed for the buildings. “It adds a lot of passion to what we do,” says Battalio, “because it’s our future.”

The Pacific Institute’s draft report released this spring, called “The Impacts of Sea-level Rise on the California Coast,” attempts to provide a concrete perspective on what to many has been an abstract question: What will climate change mean to a developed society?

The scientific roots of this study (www.PacInst.org) can be found in a pair of small buildings perched above the San Francisco Bay waters just inside of the Golden Gate. These whitewashed structures with their red roofs look unremarkable, but the site, at the end of a locked boardwalk, is part of the National Ocean Service’s network of tide gauges. A series of sophisticated chines have been measuring the bay’s tides since 1854, making this the longest continuous tide record in the western hemisphere. These 155 years of data show that since 1900, the mean sea level has been rising slightly more than two millimeters a year—eight inches in the last century. “We’re fairly certain that it’s going to continue rising,” says Matthew Heberger, a hydrologist and research associate at the Pacific Institute, “but that the rate is going to increase.”

Heberger performed some of the geographic information system analyses that underpin the report’s findings, using sea level rise and flood projections worked out by researchers at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the US Geological Survey, as well as topographic data for the coasts. Heberger and his colleagues concluded that the greatest threat from sea-level rise would come not from steadily creeping changes, but from occasional inundations in what are called “hundred-year flood zones,” which they expect will shift with the sea level. (The name comes from the idea that there’s a one-in-a-hundred chance that a flood could occur in this area during any given year.)

As sea level rise pushes the hundred-year flood zone boundaries higher, communities and infrastructure in
areas once thought safe will be at increased risk, including Fisherman’s Wharf, Crissy Field, Treasure Island, and the Bay Bridge toll plaza. Additionally, since it will take years for these flood zones to shift, people may build new roads and homes in areas that are considered fine now but will eventually be at risk.

“If you think about where we permit development,” Heberger explains, “you’re not supposed to build in a floodplain. … You’re supposed to build houses and factories and fires stations and all that stuff above the hundred-year-flood elevation.” However, he continues, “We’ve collectively, as a society, decided the one-percent annual chance flood—the so-called hundred-year flood—is what we use for a lot of our risk assessment and land-use planning.”

But figuring out exactly how much the sea might rise is tricky, especially since most reports on climate change scenarios have focused more on greenhouse gas emissions and surface air temperatures than on sea level. To predict sea level rise, says Heberger, a model has to account for other factors. “The big component of that is thermal expansion of the oceans. As water warms, it takes up more space. And the ice sheets, as they melt, they’re just putting more water in the ocean,” he says. “And that’s why there’s kind of a wide range of estimates. Because, first of all, we don’t know what the warming’s going to be because it depends a lot on what we do in the next year, ten years, twenty years, century.”

For the Pacific Institute study, researchers at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography provided projections based on the International Panel for Climate Change’s so-called A2 and B1 warming scenarios. Heberger describes the A2 scenario as “sort of a medium-high scenario. It’s one that a lot of people think is likely”—in it the sea rises 1.4 meters, or about four and a half feet, by the year 2100. The B1 scenario would be less severe, a one-meter rise. Heberger and his colleagues then mapped this potential sea level rise onto the areas at risk for hundred-year-floods to find out which elevations were at most risk of inundation.

If nothing is done to protect California’s infrastructure, and we get a 1.4 meter sea-level rise, several grim outcomes may be in store for the Bay Area. The Pacific Institute estimates some $100 billion in property would be at risk statewide; two-thirds of that is on San Francisco Bay, most of it residential. About 480,000 people will be exposed to the flooding, particularly in San Mateo, Alameda, and Orange counties; many of the most vulnerable may be in low-income households or minority communities along the bay, including portions of West and East Oakland and Richmond.

A good deal of the Bay Area’s public infrastructure would also be at risk, including the San Francisco and Oakland airports, more than 300 hazardous waste facilities or sites, thirty power plants, and 22 water treatment plants, as well as dozens of schools, firehouses and police stations. More than three thousand miles of road could also go under.

The damage would not only be to the built environment, but the natural one as well. This projected rise in sea level may expose 14,000 Californians who live near coasts to erosion hazards, and could mean the loss of 41 square miles of sandy dunes and cliffs. About 150 square miles of wetlands could be flooded. The Pacific Institute study’s authors point out that wetlands may “migrate” inland as the sea level rises; indeed the report recommends setting aside land near wetlands so that they can “migrate” as their shore boundary is eroded.

Terry Root, a biologist at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment who has studied climate change’s effects on wildlife and habitats, says she worries that bay wetlands will be lost. “What’s going to happen to the estuaries, which are the coral reefs of terrestrial areas?” she asks. Like the beaches, with development on one side and a rising tide on the other, some wetlands may be squeezed in the middle and flooded out of existence. Even if they do persist, the species that rely on them, such as the clapper rail, an endangered marsh bird, may not.

If the sea level doesn’t rise quite as high as 1.4 meters within the century, it is still expected to change in the coming years. “Even if we brought our carbon emissions to zero miraculously today,” says Heberger, “there’s still a certain amount of sea level rise that’s going to occur. There’s this long time-lag effect, because the oceans are massive and they’re slow to respond.”

Policymakers and land managers are going to have to figure out how Californians will live with a rising sea. One possibility recommended by the Pacific Institute report is “coastal armoring”—engineering against the forces of the sea with seawalls, riprap revetments, levees, and other structures. The institute calculates that protecting threatened areas from flooding by installing such measures would cost $14 billion (the average seawall costs $5,300 per linear foot), plus an additional $1.4 billion in annual upkeep. But the authors remind us that there may be non-monetary costs, such as loss of beaches, coastal access, or habitats.

Beyond this kind of short-term fix, Californians will need to consider broader solutions that would make communities more adaptable to sea-level rise and more resilient if disaster occurs. These include fundamental changes like limiting development in at-risk areas, and creating insurance polices and planning strategies that accept the possibility of flooding. For example, if development
is allowed in at-risk areas, permits might mandate that after flooding, the area be allowed to return to its natural conditions. “You say, ‘Okay, you’re allowed to develop,’ and you have certain codes for flood-proofing and for raising structures—buildings on stilts, stuff like that on the coast—allowing for them to benefit economically from that now, but at some point in the future realizing that it’s going to need to be abandoned,” suggests Heberger.

Heberger also mentions the principle of “no repetitive loss,” which is taking hold in the risk management and insurance world. “Some properties just get flooded, make a claim, get flooded, make another claim. So they keep getting bailed out again and again and again, which isn’t sustainable,” he says. Instead, an insurer confronted with a property owner who has filed for several losses might decide to buy the owner out or declare the property derelict. “Otherwise,” points out Heberger, “it’s either taxpayers or other insurance premium payers that are bearing the burden for an unacceptably high level of risk.”

But the most radical idea for dealing with sea level rise would be to simply let erosion take its course. If you know that a house on the edge of a cliff is going to fall off in ten years, says Heberger, “Why not allow [the residents] to live there for the next ten years and experience the benefits of that? And then at the end of ten years, say, ‘Well, you had a good run.’” He chuckles. “Instead of building a massive engineering structure, or spending millions of dollars trying to replenish the sand or put boulders and riprap in front of it, which is potentially harmful for the other things we value about the coast, just allow natural processes to occur. Allow that erosion to happen. Allow it to come back into this balance that takes place.”

So far, it’s hard to tell whether ideas like these are making a dent in local planning policies. Susanne Moser, a geographer in Santa Cruz who has studied the relationship between climate science and local policy, surveyed coastal managers a couple of years ago about their policy views on climate change. “Some of them said, ‘Until I hear from Sacramento, sorry, I’m busy,’” Moser says. The problems such policy-makers typically face—the usual bureaucratic issues of budgeting and staffing—along with uncertainty about what climate change and sea-level rise might physically mean to their local jurisdictions, has slowed the incorporation of climate considerations into planning decisions.

This may be poised to change—after all, the Pacific Institute’s study was carried out in light of Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2005 directive to report on climate change mitigation and adaptation plans, and the state’s Climate Action Team is due to release another report this summer. A few agencies are ahead of the curve; for example, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission is sponsoring the Rising Tides international design competition for how best to develop in an estuary in an environment subject to sea-level rise.

Still, there is, as Heberger points out, a kind of null hypothesis: “One choice is do nothing,” he says. “Whether that’s what a community decides to do or does by default, that may mean setting themselves up for increased flood damage, loss of life, closing critical facilities, roads, things like that. That’s [what] we’re trying to avoid.”

In Pacifica, Dave Revell and Bob Battalio stand on the edge of a bluff. The sea reflects the silvery sky. They have just shown me the eroding bluffs overlooking Mussel Rock, where the San Andreas fault sideswipes
Daly City as it reaches the Pacific Ocean. “The landscape is timeless,” Battalio says. “The vegetation, the topography—it just retreats along with the coast, unless you change the geometry,” by, for instance, putting in a seawall or dumping riprap at the base of an eroding bluff.

“In some ways, the solution is easy,” Battalio continues. ”All one has to do is get out of the way and let erosion occur,” allowing natural processes, such as beach formation, to play out on their own. But, he continues, “The hard thing is we have all flocked to the coast and staked our claims,” like the rows of little pastel pink and green houses that stand precariously at the bluff’s edge. The whole area is a complex of landslides. The engineers explain that erosion propagates up a bluff. “It’s just like digging at the base of a pile of sand at the beach,” says Revell. “The slope above it continues to fail.” If the sea-level rises and starts eating away at higher points on the bluffs, eventually the solid ground under these houses with commanding Pacific overlooks will crumble away.

“They’ve got a nice view, though,” says Battalio, cautioning against unfair judgment of whoever planned sites like these. After all, he says, they were, making decisions based on what people knew at the time.

Before we part ways, Battalio and Revell take me to Linda Mar, also called Pacifica State Beach. It’s a popular spot, especially on weekends, where people come to sunbathe and surf. Battalio was involved in a restoration project there several years ago, in partnership with the city of Pacifica and other organizations, because nearby infrastructure and oceanfront buildings had become threatened by the Pacific’s erosive forces. Battalio’s firm helped carry out a “managed retreat” strategy that would allow the beach to push inland naturally. They removed fill, demolished the sections of parking lot that impinged on the beach, bought and tore down a couple of beach houses, and restored native plants to stabilize sand dunes that once encroached on the nearby Highway 1. As we watch, birds fly out of a fourteen-acre wetland at the southern end of the beach, also part of the project. In this area, at least, Pacifica decided that rather than try to battle the ocean, it would get out of the way.

“This project gives the beach another ten to thirty years of recreation use,” says Revell. “If you could put a dollar amount on this, you’d have a lot more up and down the coast.” Moreover, the ocean has not encroached as much as expected.

Finding that balance that lets people make use of California’s beloved coastlines, yet deals with the physical realities of climate change, is still a work in progress. “A certain amount of change is inevitable. We are going to have to take steps to protect our built environment—and there are risks to the natural environment as well,” Matthew Heberger had told me at the Pacific Institute. “Preserving the built environment versus the natural environment are oftentimes at cross-purposes with one another. We need to come together to decide, in each community, what it is we value about the coast—whether that’s fishing, boating, beaches, habitat, recreation, wildlife, shipping—because you’re not going to be able to preserve all those values.”

There is an irony in the urgent situation Californians face now—after all, erosion and flooding are nothing new. For millennia, people have sited homes and roads based on nature’s dictates, or, sometimes, in spite of them. No matter what we do, there is a consequence down the line. You could install coastal armoring to hold back the ocean to preserve a road, but you might lose a beach. Buy that house with a million-dollar view overlooking the ocean, but if the bluff starts to give out from below, would you be prepared to simply give it up and let it return to nature? Erosion and flooding seem like such elementary forces of nature, but their patterns are being altered by climate change—a process to which human activity contributes. If our choices now have new and more alarming consequences, that is partly our own fault.

It’s a sunny morning in mid-April, and about sixty Northern California “water people,” as the speakers affectionately call themselves—managers, attorneys, and specialists in all things water-related—are gathered in a hotel conference room in San Francisco to discuss the condition of the state’s water system. Between the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009—the start of the state’s “water year”—California had almost no rain. It was the state’s third straight dry year. Officials and water managers were panicked; districts across the state began imposing mandatory rationing and long lists of rules for water use.

But then, in February, it rained. In March, it rained more. By the beginning of April, most regions of the state had received slightly less precipitation than average—it wasn’t overly wet, but neither was it critically dry. The worst, it seemed, had passed.

Wendy Martin is not so sure. As the drought coordinator for the California Department of Water Resources, her job is to look beyond the rain’s immediate effects. “We have to be careful,” she tells the group. “We cannot give people a sense of relief that the crisis has passed. Because it hasn’t.”

While this may be obvious to the “water people,” it’s not so easy to sell the public, in part because the rain really did make a difference. While the state’s biggest reservoirs are far from full, they’re fairly close to average for this time of year. Add in a solid snowpack, and there’s more water available for the coming year than anyone thought there would be.

But the longer-term picture isn’t pretty. An increasing population and expanding agricultural needs, not to mention the wild card of climate change, are all putting pressure on the state’s water system. Conservation and efficiency must become the norm. The problem is how to get people to look past the last big rainstorm.
The door to the conference room is open, and across the hall a floor-to-ceiling window offers a panoramic view of the blue bay, the sky above it crisscrossed by planes arriving and departing San Francisco Airport. The scene is a fitting backdrop for a conference devoted to a fundamental California paradox: Even when you can see nothing but water, you still don’t have enough.

In 1933, the California Supreme Court wrote in a landmark water rights decision that “it requires no extraordinary foresight to envision the great and increasing population of the state and its further agricultural and industrial enterprises dependent upon stored water.” The court continued, “The conservation of the waters of the state is of transcendent importance.”

Nearly eight decades later, California is still struggling to find ways to put that sentiment into practice. The state’s population has more than tripled in the last fifty years, driving up demand as supply remained relatively constant. Agricultural production increased as well: California now produces close to half of the nation’s domestic fruits and vegetables and nearly a quarter of its milk. All told, the state demands billions of gallons of water every day.

Yet the state is drier than ever. After suffering severe droughts in the late ‘70s and early ‘90s, California entered another dry spell in 2006. A dry year is one in which the state receives less water than normal from at least one of its main sources: precipitation, snowpack, runoff, and reservoirs. Local water districts can also run short for regulatory reasons—for example, when the state or federal government restricts pumping in order to protect fish stocks.

Water districts typically encourage conservation in dry years, shying away from mandatory restrictions unless they’re absolutely necessary. But last summer, the combination of dry weather and pumping restrictions meant to protect fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta led Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a statewide drought for the first time in California’s history. As recently as this January, water districts around the state were instituting water rationing programs, drastic rate hikes, and supply cutbacks. San Diego encouraged residents to tattle on profligate neighbors. In the North Bay, the town of Bolinas threatened to cut off water to serial wasters. At the time of the drought conference in April, farmers in the Central Valley had just embarked on a four-day march to protest the state and federal regulations that, along with the dry weather, forced many farms to lie fallow.

The environmental and economic effects of the current drought will be felt for years. Over 16,000 fires burned more than 1.5 million acres of land and cost the state a billion dollars to fight; the state also suffered nearly $400 million in agricultural losses, and more than 100,000 acres were left unplanted. Related job losses are projected to reach 23,000 this year.

Fortunately, February and March saw significantly more rainfall than expected—about eighty percent of the normal amount. In the Bay Area, it was enough that EBMUD, the East Bay’s water district, voted to repeal drought rates and stop requiring mandatory conservation as of July 1. Even Bolinas lifted all of its restrictions.

But the relief was short-lived. Rainfall in April was again below average, and at the end of the month, two of the state’s largest reservoirs, Shasta and Oroville, were at barely three-quarters of their average storage. The third reservoir, San Luis, was at just over half its average and significantly lower than last year. State and federal water allocations have been reduced as well, and in some cases cut off entirely. “We’re really thankful for February and March,” says Richard Harris, EBMUD’s water conservation manager. “Even May has started out with a bang. But we’re still below normal, and this is still the third year in a row.”
For Harris and the rest of the state’s water managers, the challenge now is to convince residents that the drought is just a symptom of a larger problem, one that won’t wash away with the rain. To create lasting change, people will have to adjust the way they think about water. Wendy Martin believes that this year’s restrictions, and the public awareness campaigns that accompanied them, present a unique opportunity to catch people’s attention. “This is about changing, long-term, what we do,” she tells the water managers at the drought conference. “We have to be more frugal.”

For water districts, conservation is a double-edged sword. As one speaker at the conference put it, “conservation is good, but so is revenue.” Water districts have a mandate to supply water to their customers, so it’s in their interest to conserve and make sure everyone gets enough. But when people use less water, the district makes less money. Higher drought rates can make up some of the shortfall, but not always enough to cover costs.

In early April, at the meeting where EBMUD voted to lift its drought rates, board members debated for some time about whether to leave them in place over the summer to make up the money they lost by imposing mandatory conservation—customers had reduced water use by an average of thirteen percent. Ultimately, the board decided it couldn’t justify continuing an emergency rate structure without an emergency. The board hopes that people will use more water than they did under mandatory conservation, but less than they would if supply were no concern at all.

Complicating matters in the East Bay is the fact that around the time the drought charges disappear, a regular rate hike of 7.5 percent will start appearing on bills. Customers will pay less than they did under drought rates but more than they did before the drought began. Harris acknowledges that some customers may feel that their conservation doesn’t mean anything if their bills don’t change. But, he says, relative to most other necessities, water is cheap. “Water is still very, very inexpensive,” he says. “It’s still one of the best bargains going.”

The fact that it’s a bargain may be part of the problem, says David Zetland, a UC Berkeley economist who studies California’s water: “Pricing should reflect the scarcity of water,” he says. Zetland, who keeps a blog about water economics at Aguanomics.com, thinks that until prices reflect demand, the state will continue to run short because no one has an incentive to conserve. “Eighty percent of the people do not care,” he says. “It’s just not worth their time. And they will only use less when it comes down to price.”
Harris says that in many cases, people don’t even have to conserve. If they fixed leaks and installed new appliances, they would save significantly without having to alter their lifestyles. Still, Harris says that
lifting the drought restrictions will ease up on the need for some conservation measures that people considered truly drastic, like letting their lawns go brown and taking shorter showers. “People will relax on some of those changes that are considered doable, but a little uncomfortable,” he says.

Art Jensen would like to find a happy medium. As the general manager for the Bay Area Water Supply & Conservation Agency, he oversees the water for 27 cities around the bay. One of the last people to speak at the April conference, Jensen is witty and able to get a rise out of the crowd, even at the end of the day. Over the long term, he tells them, there isn’t enough water; he worries that people will have to migrate out of population centers and into areas where water is more abundant, and he believes that Californians can no longer “build our way out” of water shortages by constructing more dams and pumps to haul it longer distances.

But in the short term, he advocates a more moderate, flexible approach to saving water. His district, for example, has reduced water use sixteen percent over the last two years, and has purchased the same amount of water for nearly two decades, despite population growth. But as he’s keen to point out, users’ behavior isn’t uniform: In his district, per capita consumption ranges from 50 to 338 gallons a day. “Should everybody be made to live the same way?” he asks. “This country hasn’t adopted that kind of a philosophy. And yet, when we’re talking about limited resources, it can’t just be ‘as much as you want.’ Because that much doesn’t exist.”

Although Jensen agrees that some change is necessary, “we don’t have to change our lifestyles dramatically,” he says. “I don’t think we have to disadvantage ourselves.” Instead, he urges compromise. For example, he says, you don’t have to sacrifice having a yard; a homeowner could skip the moisture-sucking rhododendrons, planting drought-tolerant or native plants instead. Combined with high-efficiency appliances and sensible watering patterns, that homeowner would conserve a good deal. “A low water-use yard doesn’t have to be ugly,” Jensen stresses. “You can still have blooms and nice smells all year around. I think that’s important.” (He’s a little less flexible about another conservation issue, though: “I think we have to spend the public’s money on replacing toilets,” he tells the crowd at the conference. “Even if we have to break into their homes to do it.”)

In his district, Jensen is pursuing long-term solutions: landscape audits for corporate clients, city conservation ordinances, and massive outreach and education campaigns that seek to make conservation the norm. These kinds of approaches would give people some breathing room, he says, and help them feel like they’re making their own choices rather than being forced to live a certain way.

At EBMUD, Harris says conservation workers will continue to pursue many of the strategies they already use: targeting heavy water users for outreach and education, giving out rebates for high-efficiency washing machines and toilets, conducting public education campaigns, and encouraging people to voluntarily cut their use by ten to fifteen percent. “It’s a testament to our customers that we’re able to pull out of this early,” he says, referring to the drought restrictions. “But we’re not out of the woods yet. We still need you to continue to do what you did two years ago, so we can stretch next year’s supply and avoid mandatory rationing if we have a fourth dry year.”

While Harris doubts everyone will participate, he believes that once acquired, conservation habits die hard. In the long term, it’s all about perception. “I think people have to view the resource differently,” he says. “They shouldn’t see [conservation] as a hardship or a takeaway. We want people to see this as a solution.”
As an example of water frugality, Wendy Martin cites Australia, which has suffered from a decade-long drought. Some regions limit citizens to thirty or forty gallons of water each day, mandate four-minute showers and graywater systems, and forbid outdoor watering. At the conference, these numbers provoke a collective gasp; “low use” in California is more in the range of 100-150 gallons per day.

California’s situation is not yet as dire as Australia’s—but it could be. Martin believes that achieving Australia-like savings would require people to view water scarcity as a permanent condition, rather than a temporary inconvenience. “When it’s abundant, we use it,” she says. “That’s human nature.” Although Martin admits she would have a hard time managing an Australian-style shower, she thinks it’s a matter of perspective. “There are places where people don’t have water to drink,” she says. “Decadence is a twenty-minute shower.”

Even among water people, perceptions of decadence are relative. Martin recalls that an Australian water official recently insisted to her that California didn’t have a water shortage. “He said, ‘You have turf everywhere,’” she explains, referring to the ubiquitous lawn. The Australian official reasoned that if all the water devoted to outdoor landscaping went to personal consumption, hygiene and agriculture, California would be out of its drought.

But will Californians buy into conservation as a lifestyle? For now, the state is back from the brink. But that edge is still visible, even if Martin sees it more clearly than the millions of water users she seeks to protect. “As a state, we need to start developing strategies,” she says. “There’s not going to be more water.”

Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees
Nalini Nadkarni
University of California Press, 2008
$24.95 hardcover, $17.95 paper

These two books published in the same year by UC Press could hardly be more inspiring. As classroom texts, they could jumpstart the next generation of career treehuggers, in the arts as well as the sciences. Trees has the immediate appeal of fabulous photographs on every single page, though it is trying hard to be a botany textbook. The book’s cover says it all: on the front, vibrant photographs that make you want to sit and stare for hours; on the back, a labeled diagram titled “Plant Tissues in a Tree Trunk.”

The text contains annoying moments: In the introduction, the authors ask the reader to stand below any
tree and “think of how many leaves it has; what might be the total area of leaf surface, and how much light this intercepts.” No information follows—the entire exercise is left to the reader’s computational skills. How
much more compelling it is when Nalini Nadkarni, in Between Earth and Sky, explains exactly how she measured the windblown movements of tiny branchlets to arrive at the conclusion that a 100-foot-tall Douglas fir moves in the wind an equivalent of 186,400 miles a year.

Trees does provide a serviceable, if rarely riveting, introduction to the botany of trees, especially in its coverage of the major classification changes of the past decade. The guide to 99 “remarkable trees of the world” is a fascinating tour, and the occasional mind-blowing detail makes reading all the way through worthwhile. (One example: The Swollen Thorn Acacia grows little packets of nutrients at its leaflet tips whose only known function is as food gathered by a particular ant species for its larvae.) The “Trees and
the Human World” section is a bit obvious to any human already living in the world, and the concluding chapter on the planetary importance of trees to climate stability lost me with: “If the proposed climate warming occurs, sea levels will rise over the next decade as ice caps at the poles, along with ice flows such as glaciers, melt.” Last I heard, this “proposed” climate warming, complete with melting
ice caps and glaciers, was well under way.

So maybe reading Trees is not a transcendent experience, but I guarantee looking at the pages can be. In addition to majestic landscapes and startling details of leaf and flower, there are many gorgeous scanning electron microscope images. Even non-readers and pre-reading age children will enjoy this book.

Between Earth and Sky is the perfect companion to Trees, providing intellectual complexity, informational
detail, and global vision to match the coffee-table textbook’s eloquent visual engagement. Nadkarni is a
wonder. Her first book, an edition of one, written when the author was nine years old, was Be Among the Birds: My Guide to Climbing Trees.

This volume expands on Nadkarni’s tree-climbing experiences (she’s become a world-renowned canopy biologist), and covers an astonishing array of links between trees and humans, from our use of trees as food, shelter, and medicine all the way to the role of trees in art, literature, and spirituality.

Nadkarni is one of those people who can generate interest in any subject from the rolling momentum of her
own enthusiasm, so every page enthralls. The text veers unexpectedly from personal anecdote to scientific study to poetry with many unnamable places between. To Nadkarni, everything is fascinating, everything is related, and everything relates to trees. As she explains it at the start: “Although we are not of the same family, trees and humans are in a sense married into each other’s families, with all the challenges, responsibilities, and benefits that come from being so linked.”

In her chapter on spirituality and trees, Nadkarni gets right to the heart of the matter with a story that takes
place at an Olympia, Washington, synagogue where she was giving a talk on, yes, spirituality and trees. As she tells it: “One man sat in the very back row. He was elderly and blind, and everything he owned appeared to be resting damply in a shopping bag beside him. After the discussion, he stood up and directed his unseeing eyes upward. ‘When it is cold and raining, like tonight,’ he said, ‘and I stand under a tree, I stay dryer and warmer than when I am out in the open. Trees protect me.’ He paused. ‘Sort
of like God.’”

The ban was launched as part of the market’s “zero waste” efforts. No longer will customers find plastic
bags conveniently hanging from booths. Instead, at the customer’s request, vendors will sell BioBags,
compostable non-GMO cornstarch-based bags, for twenty-five cents each. Because the bags are not as
readily accessible, and because customers pay for the extra resource, it’s hoped that people will reconsider
what they’re consuming: that they’re paying not just for the product, but for the package.

Customers are also encouraged to bring their own canvas or brown bags, wash and reuse plastic bags from
prior purchases, rummage through the reusable bag bins placed at either end of the market, or get crafty and make their own bags at home. So far, customers have expressed overwhelming support for the markets’ movement toward zero waste.

But some farmers are frustrated with the change. “These paper bags are terrible,” grape grower Jim Schmidt says about the brown bags he now uses to serve his customers raisins in bulk. Because paper bags draw moisture out of raisins and dry them out after just a few hours, Schmidt recommends that customers quickly transfer the raisins to a glass jar as soon as they get home.

Schmidt confides that if he had the choice, he would rather use his USA-made plastic bags, which, when reused properly, can last a whole year, and he points out that BioBags are simply not as sturdy or durable as plastic. Although brown bags are biodegradable, and, when composted, they divert material from the landfill, Schmidt implores market management to consider how much more water and resources are required to manufacture paper bags than plastic ones.

Furthermore, paper bags cost three times as much as the plastic ones they replace. Schmidt believes a better alternative to requesting brown bags or BioBags at the markets would be to reuse plastic bags or bring glass jars, practices he has always encouraged his customers to follow—his customers receive an extra ounce of raisins if they bring their own bags.

Some farmers face additional challenges. For example, because Jim and Corie Brooks, who sell sprouts and wheatgrass juice at the Tuesday and Saturday markets, use a number of different containers for their
products, they now must purchase packaging materials from four different suppliers in order to comply with the plastics ban. For sprouts, they replaced their clear plastic bags with cellophane and also carry BioBags behind the table for anyone who requests them. They also adjusted the sizes and prices of their wheatgrass and barley grass shots according to the size of compostable packaging that was available from their new supplier. To accomplish this packaging change, they also had to change their signage and the way they pack the truck.

“It’s ironic when you consider the level of difficulty to adapt [to the new market policies],” Corie reflects.
She compares her small business to that of some of the larger farms that sell at the markets, noting that the
plastics ban is hitting the smaller businesses harder, both in terms of finances and organization. “The level
of expense is different for different vendors. The level of difficulty [for small businesses] is intense, and makes me wonder if the [environmental] impact these changes are making is significant enough to make up for the effort.” For example, Corie notes that thirty Ziplock bags make up less than an ounce of plastic—the couple will still use the Ziplock bags for presprouted legumes until an alternative is found. The alternative materials are not perfect either: BioBags melt when exposed to prolonged sunlight, and cellophane rips easily. As for expense, it costs thirteen cents for each new cellophane bag the couple purchases, compared to one cent for plastic bags.

Still, Corie is pleased about the market’s zero waste efforts: “The customers are thrilled once they learn the
explanation of why the price increased for wheatgrass juice. And Jim and I have been really excited to make
the changes.” As the couple continues to brainstorm ways to replace their remaining plastic packaging
with biodegradable alternatives, they hope that both customers and market management will not just
focus on going “zero, zero, zero waste,” but appreciate what the vendors are already doing to be more
environmentally mindful. The Brookses set up a compost bucket for the new biodegradable wheatgrass juice containers. They charge a deposit for wheatgrass trays and see customers bringing trays back for reuse. Both Schmidt and the Brookses want to see more customers bringing their own containers for reuse. It’s cheaper for the farmer, uses no new resources, and diverts more waste than recycling or composting.

Come to the Berkeley Farmers’ Markets and join the race to zero waste! And before reaching for that
BioBag, paper plate, or compostable tableware, why not bring your own utensils and Tupperware from home? It’s often said that “you vote with your dollars,” but it’s also true that you vote with the money you don’t spend on new resources. The farmers have done their part for zero waste—now, it’s up to the customers to take the next step.