Muir rallied a burgeoning preservation movement in his effort to prevent the 1913 Raker Act and save Hetch Hetchy, which he called “a wonderfully exact counterpart of the great Yosemite,” the valley that lies less than twenty miles to the southeast. After a years-long public battle, fought in Congress and on editorial pages across the country, San Francisco got its Sierra reservoir.

Now, as the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission undertakes a $3.6 billion seismic upgrade and expansion of its water system, dam critics are again pointing a national spotlight on Hetch Hetchy. Their efforts may soon confront an opposition as fierce as Muir’s.

In September 2004, Environmental Defense issued the study “Paradise Regained,” a detailed survey of water and hydroelectric power alternatives for the Hetch Hetchy system. The report concludes that SFPUC upgrades are compatible with the restoration of the valley, and that water could be stored in other reservoirs. That study came on the heels of a UC Davis graduate thesis that used water modeling software to suggest that the SFPUC could meet customer demand without Hetch Hetchy.

In November, state resources secretary Mike Chrisman gave valley advocates a boost when he authorized a survey of recent restoration studies and older proposals—including a Reagan-era Bureau of Reclamation study vigorously opposed by Dianne Feinstein, then San Francisco’s mayor. The state will also partner with the National Park Service to look at the economic benefits of a revitalized valley.

Chrisman says he is uncertain whether the state assessment will make a specific recommendation. “Hopefully we’re going to set up an informed public dialogue on what the choices are—and if we do this, how we go about it,” he says.

Meanwhile, SFPUC officials are dubious. “It’s easy to get excited about romantic ideas; we all do,” says spokesman Tony Winnicker. “We sympathize and understand the energy around a proposal like this. Our main responsibility and our mission is to deliver safe, reliable, high-quality drinking water∧ any proposal that threatens or jeopardizes that mission is going to cause us grave concern and alarm and potentially would be something that we would oppose.”

Jennifer Witherspoon, communications director for the California office of Environmental Defense, says there are “entrenched interests” that are defending the Hetch Hetchy system. “If they don’t have to, they’re not going to budge, so that’s the point of getting the public involved,” says Witherspoon.

Ron Good, of the advocacy group Restore Hetch Hetchy—which will soon issue its own engineering study, including suggestions for how to remove the dam—is quick to say the debate is not antagonistic. “We don’t look at it as a battle or a fight; it’s an educational process,” he explains.

“Our goal is to develop a scenario that is broadly accepted by San Francisco and its customers, including the PUC,” says Environmental Defense regional director Tom Graff, a thirty-year veteran of California’s water wars. Both Graff and Good point to the efforts of the Mono Lake Committee, which worked with the needs of Los Angeles water users and was able to restore water flows into long-deprived Mono Lake.

It took twenty years of litigation to restore Mono. Graff says he hopes to celebrate the decision to restore Hetch Hetchy on the 100th anniversary of the Raker Act, in 2013.

Beyond water and power technicalities, Environmental Defense’s study makes future policy hurdles clear. Not only would restoration be very expensive in a time of tight budgets, advocates would need both state and federal legislation—which could only come with broad public support. Perhaps more importantly, the SFPUC would have to renegotiate contracts with the Turlock and Modesto Irrigation Districts, which have senior water rights on the Tuolumne River. Officials for the districts wrote an editorial skeptical of restoration in the Sacramento Bee this fall.

Nonetheless, the political environment has not been as dismissive of a restored valley as in the past. “What’s extraordinary is how receptive it already is,” says Graff.

Ron Good takes a broader view. “The laws of gravity are with us,” he says. “Not one drop of water is going to be lost in any of these scenarios. Water will still flow downhill without O’Shaughnessy Dam.”

Between 1999 and 2002, Captain Charles Moore and researchers with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation made several trips to the Pacific Ocean halfway between San Francisco and Hawai’i to study the situation. What he has found is startling.

Dragging trawlers behind his ship, Moore and his researchers took samples to assess the effects of the plastic on sea life. They compared the mass of zooplankton to the mass of plastic and found that for every pound of zooplankton, there were six pounds of plastic.

Plastics accumulate in this region because of the subtropical high, a system of spiraling warm winds travelling from the Equator to the North Pole that produces a funnel-like current. This current pulls in plastics that make their way to sea from street litter of towns and cities all along the Pacific Rim. “It’s possible some of these plastics have been there since the beginning of the plastics era in the ’50s,” says Moore.

California’s coastal wind conditions combine with the winds of the Synthetic Sea to create our own polymer-laden surf, explains Moore. Any waste from the Synthetic Sea that breaks away and gets within fifty miles from the shore is blown onto our bays and beaches. Likewise, debris that is unable to get more than fifty miles offshore gets blown back, where it wreaks havoc with local ecosystems.

Plastics in the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean trap, sicken, and otherwise disable an average of 25 sea lions, harbor seals, and other mammals locally each year, says Jennifer Witherspoon, formerly with the Marine Mammal Center. “Some get tangled in discarded fishing nets and packing strap, and we do save some,” she explains. “We autopsy those who die, and we’ve found plastics and, in one instance, a sock.”

Externally, they can maim wildlife. Witherspoon recalls “Michelin,” a sea lion found with a rubber tube around his neck; researchers had to euthanize him. An elephant seal with packing strap around her middle was lucky. “We cut the strap, and she doubled in size,” says Witherspoon. “She hadn’t been able to take a breath in some time.”

Researchers at the San Francisco Estuary Institute are trying to learn more about the effects of plastic. In a 2002 study, “Identification and Evaluation of Unidentified Organic Compounds,” the Institute looked at a number of pollutants and found five different phthalate compounds around the Bay. Recently the Institute has begun sampling water, sediment, and tissues in bay dwellers like mussels to develop a more complete picture of phthalates, a ubiquitous polymer found in plastics ranging from medical tubing to children’s toys and pacifiers.

Plastics pose many dangers to the ocean. They remain present in perpetuity because of their chemical makeup—the polymers never completely break down on their own, and there is no organism that can help break them down.

Sea-dwelling birds and other species do not distinguish between food and small pieces of plastic. That’s because many of the plastic pieces are small and tan, resembling krill. Resin beads, or nurdles, resemble fish eggs. Birds and other animals ingest these particles, which make them feel sated, robbing them of the drive to find real food and depriving them of nutrients. Some birds, such as the albatross, regurgitate this polymer-laced meal to feed their chicks. Researchers have found shampoo bottle caps and electric wire plugs in the remains of albatross chicks.

Plastics themselves contain endocrine-disrupting compounds such as Bisphenol A or Di-n-butyphthalate. Endocrine disrupters are compounds with chemical structures close to natural hormones. They bind with hormone receptors in species ranging from fish to reptiles to mammals, and can inhibit biological functions such as sexual development and reproduction, and compromise immune systems.

Moore says it is possible to make plastics from row crops and compounds that are biodegradable. He will soon have a platform in which to make his case. The Algalita Marine Research Foundation is currently working under a $482,183 California State Water Resources Control Board grant to research industrial sites and sources of plastic waste in the Los Angeles and San Gabriel River watersheds, where a recent proposal by the regional water board to establish a “TMDL”—or Total Maximum Daily Load—for trash is the target of a lawsuit by the cities the board seeks to regulate. Moore’s foundation is expected to discuss its findings and actions to be taken at the state and local level at an as-yet unscheduled statewide conference set for this year.

The plan increases the governor’s power and hands many state responsibilities over to private industry. “State government in California is broken, there’s no question about it,” says UCLA professor Stephanie Pincetl, author of Transforming California. “But is privatizing it the solution? ”

Interim director of the Department of Motor Vehicles Chon Gutierrez picked 275 state employees to put together over 1,200 recommendations, including eliminating 117 boards and commissions ranging from the Commission on the Status of Women to the air and water quality boards. The report boasts that its recommendations will save the state $34 billion yet make government more “customer-friendly.” The Legislative Analyst’s Office later moved the estimate down to between $10 and $15 billion.

While the report is undeniably mammoth, the voices of environmental advocates are nearly absent. “I haven’t heard people say the paper is imbalanced,” says Chris Reynolds, who oversaw its drafting. “I take issue with the characterization of the paper as imbalanced.”

When asked about the lack of consultation with environmentalists, Reynolds says that the CPR team met with about seven or eight environmentalists. “We called Bill Magavern from the Sierra Club and said ‘Can you help us? We want to reach out to the environmental community.’ Bill set up a meeting,” Reynolds reports.

“That is accurate only in the sense that their entire outreach to the environmental community was one phone call to me,” says Magavern, the Sierra Club’s legislative advocate.

Magavern says he received a call from Don Johnson of the CPR staff. “But Don never said ‘We’d like to meet with all the environmental community.’ He said, ‘I’d like to meet with you.’ I took it on my own initiative to invite colleagues. We never claimed to be speaking for the whole range of environmentalists. And the report itself was written in almost utter secrecy, and it is clear that industry lobbyists were consulted much more extensively than we were.”

J.J. Jelincic, a commission member charged with taking public comment, calls the report’s focus on savings misguided. “We asked the wrong question,” he says. “We asked, ‘How do we do things cheaper?’ when we should have asked, ‘What kind of world do we want to leave our kids?’ That’s the debate we should be having.”

The CPR review commission held seven public hearings across the state between mid-August and late-September. The hearings included presentations by CPR staff and several hours of comments by invited speakers. Public comment often was put off until the last hour. Some individuals who had waited for hours to make comments were turned away.

“As commissioners I think our function has been to create the illusion of openness,” says Jelincic. “In many ways our function was to identify those things that would have such high political costs as to be undoable.”

And they did just that. Although the decisions of regional air and water quality boards aren’t to everyone’s liking, most environmentalists believe the boards are the only bodies with local knowledge that conduct meetings in public. “If we lose those regional boards we’d lose the one way the public can impact regulatory decision-making,” says Juliet Lamont, vice-chair of the Sierra Club’s Bay Area Chapter. “We’d be trying to get the attention of a single individual in Sacramento, and that’s the kind of thing that leads to bad environmental decisions.”

The CPR’s proposal to ax California’s regional air and water quality control boards generated such vehement opposition that the commissioners agreed that the governor should back off. Schwarzenegger seems to have heeded their advice: he did not include the two in the list of nearly a hundred “unnecessary boards and commissions” slated for elimination.

The CPR report will still keep water policy wonks up at night. It suggests dissolving the Department of Water Resources and folding its activities into a newly created Department of Infrastructure. The California State Water Project, or SWP as it is known in water-speak, would be contracted out to a quasi-public agency—The State Water Project Contractors Authority—whose most powerful members, the Kern County Water Agency and the Metropolitan Water District, serve Central Valley agribusiness interests.

The contractors who want to manage the SWP make it seem as if they would simply be stepping in to aid the clumsy state bureaucracy in carrying out day-to-day operations. But the language of the CPR report and the State Water Project Contractors Authority grant them authority to make decisions such as “acquiring water and water rights.”

“It’s an ideology of government as management,” says Pincetl. “It’s post-Prop 13 privatization, privatizing assets. Government is not only cast as managerial, it erodes public participation. It really is the privatization of democracy.”

At his State of the State address on January 5, 2005, Schwarzenegger gave a blanket endorsement of the CPR. “A year ago, I told you that I wanted to blow up the boxes. Well, we have lit the fuse.”

The controversial proposal has already generated two lawsuits against the city of Richmond, from the East Bay Regional Park District and Citizens for East Shore Parks. Both groups claim the city violated state environmental laws when it failed to fully and publicly examine alternate proposals for Point Molate, which they say should be preserved as a park.

Robert Cheasty, president of Citizens for East Shore Parks, says the Upstream plan is “an abominable use of the space,” and that the casino is a “move of desperation” for cash-strapped Richmond. Cheasty’s group, along with the Park District, supported a last-minute bid for Point Molate from Chevron, which the city council rejected. That proposal appeared to favor open space over new development.

Councilman Tom Butt, who voted in favor of Upstream, says Chevron was not specific enough about what would happen to the land. “They were unwilling to make any commitments about how much open space there would be, where it would be, who would control it, who would pay for its improvement and maintenance.”

Upstream has promised to maintain public access to a 33-acre shoreline park and will build and maintain the portion of the Bay Trail that runs through the property, says Don Gosney, Community co-chair of the Point Molate Restoration Advisory Board, which facilitated the transfer and cleanup of the Navy land to the city of Richmond. In addition, Gosney says, the complex will provide 6,500 union jobs and $18-20 million dollars in yearly payments to the city of Richmond. “It’s a win-win situation,” he concludes.

Point Molate joins a list of at least three proposed gaming sites in western Contra Costa County. The nearest to completion is Casino San Pablo, which awaits approval by the state legislature of the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians’ gaming compact. Assemblymember Loni Hancock’s district includes Point Molate and Casino San Pablo, as well as a proposed casino in North Richmond. Hancock’s office has attempted to survey every household in her district, and preliminary results show “overwhelming opposition” to casino development, says Hancock legislative aide Armando Viramontes.

“This is going to turn the East Bay into Reno overnight,” warns Viramontes. “It’s going to become the gaming capital of the state.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No Human Health Hazard Detected”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecological Restoration or Economic Manipulation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two respected UC Davis scientists, a geologist and a fisheries biologist, are sounding the alarm. Geologist Jeff Mount says there’s a forty percent chance that in the next fifty years, a hundred-year flood (those whoppers that statistically occur once in a hundred years) will cause widespread island flooding. The chance is the same that we’ll have a huge earthquake, with multiple levees failing—several active faults run along the west side of the Delta. The odds of both an earthquake and a big flood are one in six. The odds that one or the other will occur in the next fifty years? Two in three.

These predictions, says Mount, are based on CALFED and Department of Water Resources literature, his own research, and sea-level rise data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The predictions assume that we will continue to manage the Delta the way we have been—that is, acting as if it’s a stable landscape. What would happen if the Delta failed? Consider what it does now: massive pumps suck in water, which is piped to the Central Valley and Southern California for drinking, and closer to home, the Contra Costa Water District. If sinking and levee breaks allow salt water from the bay to enter the Delta, that water becomes unsuitable for drinking and agriculture.

Mount stresses that the failure odds he cited are actually conservative because they don’t include cascade or threshold effects. “Cascade effects in the Delta are well known but not talked about,” he says. “If an island levee fails, the likelihood that adjacent island levees will fail increases significantly. This is because once the island fills with water, its entire levee perimeter is at risk from wind waves.” When the remaining levees begin to fail, explains Mount, the process accelerates (like a cascade) because human efforts to fight the floods can’t keep up. Says Mount, “As an example, on the Jones Tract failure this past summer, there was a heroic fight to save the levee along Trapper slough. Settling of that levee, coupled with highly erosive wind waves, could have breached it. And we barely won that fight.” If a second breach had opened up on Jones Tract, says Mount, there would have been no way to drive trucks around the island to fight the flood. “Once you lose that ability,” says Mount, “everything has to be done by boat, which is too slow to win the fight.”

And though the state’s resource managers assume a steady increase in the risk of failure as sea level rises and sinking continues—much of the Delta is now twenty feet below sea level—there can be points or “thresholds” at which the risk of failure increases substantially, even abruptly. As the Delta continues to sink, the more likely it is that the levees will fail even absent earthquakes and floods, says Mount. He believes we need to worry about both sea level rise and climate change, even though they may seem slow in our eyes. “We’re looking at rises of several feet in a couple of generations,” he explains. The problem, says Mount, is that sea level rise and climate change exceed the normal human life cycle, so no one—including politicians and planners—wants to deal with those threats. “No one has thought through the ‘what if’ questions. You’ve got landscape-level threats to the Delta that operate on large space and time scales. Those tend to fall out of the sphere of influence of the typical political lifecycle.”

We’ve forgotten what the Delta really is, says Mount. “The Delta is by most definitions not a delta but an estuary. It’s a drowned river, a complex mosaic of freshwater and brackish water tidal marshes. It probably had a few moderate-elevation forested islands in a vast sea of wetlands.” Today’s islands were created by diking and draining, says Mount, activities that tried to make an evolving landscape hold still. “We’re saying to this once very dynamic landscape, ‘Don’t move! Cause if you do, it really messes things up.’”

Meanwhile, fisheries biologist Peter Moyle worries about human safety and our native fishery. Based on climate change models, Moyle predicts snow will melt earlier, the snow pack will be reduced, rain will increase, winter floods worsen, and sea levels continue to rise. These phenomena will not be a constant, he says, but will vary with storms and El Ni&o events, putting additional stress on the Delta and its levee system. All of these changes will have impacts on fish, as will the growth of California’s population—80 million people by 2050. That, says Moyle, means that there will be greater demand for water for human consumption, greater demand for storage of that water, and greater demand for the construction of more and bigger levees. Moyle predicts that as the demand for water grows and supply becomes more variable, there will be less water for fish in our streams, and more native fish will go extinct. He thinks we will see wildlife habitat decrease, our salmon fishery decline, and non-native fish increase.

How are we responding to these threats? We continue to build subdivisions in the outer Delta, without regard to the fact that it is continuing to sink. We continue to build bigger, “super” levees to protect those subdivisions, a cycle that encourages further sinking, according to the Department of Water Resources’ Chris Enright, a biologist who has studied the Delta extensively. He says the biggest lesson we are not learning is that sinking and levees are “tied at the hip. Every increment of elevation lost of the land surface is another increment of levee strength that needs to be added.”

One example is an 11,000-home subdivision/mixed-use development called River Islands, approved by the city of Lathrop in 1996. The project, still awaiting its permits from the state Reclamation Board and the US Army Corps of Engineers, will include a 300-foot-wide “super levee” to protect it from the theoretical 200-year flood. The odds are that it will get those permits, says the Sierra Club’s Eric Parfrey, whose group sued three times over the project and finally settled out of court in exchange, in part, for funding for agricultural conservation easements. “When I started counting up the amount of development in the outer Delta, I realized that few people are looking at the cumulative effects of all of this,” says Parfrey. According to his calculations, there are 94,000 homes planned for southern San Joaquin County (including Tracy, Lathrop, Manteca, and West Stockton)—enough housing for almost 300,000 people. In eastern Contra Costa County (Brentwood, Oakley, Antioch, and Pittsburg), approximately 75,000 homes are under construction or in the planning stages. “This is a dangerous period for the Delta,” says Parfrey.

While environmentalists battle suburban sprawl, the Delta’s plumbing is the hot topic among scientists and state bureaucrats. Mount and Moyle, among others, have been using “the P word”—the dreaded peripheral canal— as a possible solution to the threat of levee breaks and Delta sinking. While the notion of a peripheral canal revives fears that Southern California will suck Northern California dry—a fear that led to several statewide voter defeats in the 1980s—some scientists are saying it’s time to look at such a canal with fresh eyes. “The reality of the Delta is that it is subsided,” says Enright, who adds that most farming operations in the Delta today are marginal with farmers lacking money to maintain the levees. If we don’t build some kind of peripheral canal that bypasses the Delta and its water delivery system, says Enright, we will have to make massive levee improvements to protect water supply and quality. On the other hand, if we do build a canal, he says, “The need for levee integrity to protect water supply goes away, and the likelihood of fundamental landscape change increases—that is, a future with thousands of acres of open water habitat.” In other words, islands would be submerged, creating a new ecosystem of open shallow water. The ultimate environmental consequences, says Enright, are unknown, except that “there would be fish where there is now air. The Delta would be relatively more salty, with a greater tidal prism and stronger tidal currents.”

If we are going to build a canal, says Parfrey, sooner would be better since the Delta is getting so built out, particularly as you go towards Stockton. Acquiring already developed land would make building a canal prohibitively expensive.

Department of Water Resources Deputy Director Jerry Johns warns that we need to “take one step back and come up with a comprehensive strategic plan before we do anything else.” Johns has faith that the CALFED process—the state/federal effort to ensure water supply while at the same time restoring Bay-Delta watersheds—will come through with solutions. “That’s what the CALFED finance plan is settling in on,” says Johns. “It’s trying to develop a funding strategy—but before we go out and put a whole bunch of hard dollars into what we need, let’s figure out what it is we need.”

In the interim, says Johns, we know that if certain islands—Sherman or Twitchell for example—were to fail, there would be drastic impacts on the state’s ability to deliver water. “Those kinds of places we need to stabilize,” he says.

Johns isn’t convinced all the data is in on the Delta. “The nice thing about the Delta is that it is not as seismically active as some parts of California.” Although he doesn’t believe the Department of Water Resources should take the lead on a new peripheral canal—”We shouldn’t be afraid to look at it, but we shouldn’t push it either”—he thinks scrutiny of future impacts on the Delta needs to be a priority. “If what we’re doing now isn’t going to work long-term, shouldn’t we know now?” he asks. “I don’t think moving water in California is going to stop being important. We ought to be willing to ask what’s sustainable on a long-term basis. Otherwise, I don’t think we’re doing our kids any favor.”

But will we be doing our native fish a favor by building a new pipe? While some species might benefit from a pipe—particularly if it reduced the amount of water sucked by the Delta’s giant pumps—the EPA’s Bruce Herbold, another fisheries biologist, is worried that Sacramento River winter- and spring-run salmon and steelhead, could be at greater risk from fish screens on a pipe farther upstream. “If you have too big a facility the screens get too big for the fish to get by, then you have to start salvaging them—collecting and trucking them around,” he explains. “It all depends on how big the canal would be—once you make those decisions, you can start talking about what the impacts on fish would be.”

Herbold says that at the very least we need to start talking. “Do we plan on losing the Delta and start building something environmentally safe or safer now? Or do we try to keep everything the way it is, keep ag happy, recognize that we’re running the risk that we’re going to lose [the Delta] and that we’re going to have backhoes out there trying to get water to Southern California in an emergency situation, with no consideration of the best way to do it, no environmental review?”

While our memories of natural disasters mimic our life spans, negative ideas about the peripheral canal—or the necessity to supply water to Southern California—may outlive us all. “People’s perceptions are really strong—you can talk to people who don’t really know what the canal was, but they still have strong opinions about it,” says Herbold. It may be time to get beyond those opinions and reexamine the topic if we are to keep our heads above water. “There’s convincing evidence that California’s climate is changing,” says Herbold. “And that’s likely to increase flooding. I’m being nudged toward a canal. All I want is for everyone to say ‘I don’t know,’ so we can start talking about it again. Since we have the luxury of planning fifty years ahead—unlike the tsunami victims—let’s put some brains to work.”

“It’s a family event,” quips volunteer Shane Nichols as he collects the jugs. The sky-blue shed, called the water hole, is connected to a 5,000-gallon mobile tank that stores mountain spring water hauled in from sixty miles away. Angelica Martinez—a high school senior who volunteers here with Nichols every Saturday—places the boys’ plastic jugs under a row of spigots and turns on the water. The shed’s thin metal walls reverberate with the sound of water falling into plastic.

The citizens of this farming community, tucked into emerald fields of irrigated alfalfa in the southwestern corner of Tulare County, live in a reverse oasis, dry and thirsty in the midst of green. Their groundwater has high concentrations of arsenic and nitrates, and of three town wells, one is permanently defunct, another has a broken pump, and the third is still under construction. The water hole is Alpaugh’s sole source of safe drinking water. Three times a week volunteers unlock the shed door and help residents fill jugs to take back to their homes.

Arsenic occurs naturally in the alluvial sediment throughout much of the San Joaquin Valley. Among the most toxic substances commonly found in drinking water, it can lead to lung, bladder, and other forms of cancer. The California Environmental Protection Agency recently reset the state’s arsenic standards to four parts per trillion, 2,500 times more stringent than the federal standard of 10 parts per billion—a change to take effect in 2006. But the town well, which residents use for showering and other non-drinking needs, has an arsenic level of 74 parts per million.

Two years ago the long-corroded casing collapsed in the town’s main well. From that time until the spring of 2004, residents survived on water from an irrigation well. When the pump broke on that well, the community had to turn to the well still being built. Luckily by that time they were already filling up their jugs at the water hole.

“Now we’re surviving on a half-constructed well,” says Sandra Meraz, who has been advocating up and down the state to get water to the town. The community of 760 depends on the new well for showers and toilets, but until the well is completed—sealed from contamination and dug deep enough to reduce arsenic levels to state-mandated limits—residents are not supposed to drink its water. “If it stops we’re completely waterless,” Meraz says. “We’ve let school out at noon two days in a row because there was no water.”

“We use bottled water to brush our teeth,” Martinez adds, “but we shower with the tap water. Your skin gets dry, but you get used to it.” Still, when it gets desperately hot, as it does often in Alpaugh, some do drink the tap water.

Alpaugh’s situation is complicated by the bureaucratic structure that governs its water: the community operates within a bureaucratic tangle of three different water agencies. Meraz sits on the board of the Joint Powers Authority, the agency responsible for overseeing the town’s drinking water. The authority advises stubborn or desperate residents to boil their tap water or add 8 drops per gallon of “fresh liquid household bleach.”

“The boiled water order is a coliform bacteria order, but people don’t understand about the arsenic,” Meraz says. “If they boil the water for soup, coffee, or tea they’ll kill the bacteria, but they don’t know they’ll just concentrate the arsenic.”

Land of plenty

“Just don’t mind my truck,” Meraz tells me as I climb in the passenger seat. “It’s my home office.” Meraz, who moved from the Cabezon Reservation to Alpaugh 45 years ago, won the small white pickup in a bingo tournament in 1996 and uses it for a host of community activities such as delivering food donations and taking senior citizens to buy water in Delano. The dash and seat are covered with papers, files, pens and pencils, several inches thick in all directions. We drive through paved and unpaved streets, passing dilapidated trailers and the skeletal remains of mobile homes that eerily resemble jagged ribcages, pale and cracking under the sun.

Ironies abound in this land—although Alpaugh’s Tulare County is the number two ag-producing county in the country, its citizens face such levels of poverty that international famine relief charities like Feed the Children are choosing to start new projects here.

And in the oven-like heat of the San Joaquin Valley, no disparity is more immediate than between those who have water and those who do not. California sends eighty percent of its captured water to agriculture through a daunting collection of dams, canals, pipes, and pumps built to interrupt, hold, and redirect the flow of entire rivers. Yet a few miles from valley aqueducts that carry Sierra snowmelt to irrigate desert fields, small towns and unincorporated communities cannot drink their own water.

Two hundred years ago—a mere blink—the San Joaquin Valley was an expansive seasonal wetland that housed the largest inland body of fresh water in the western United States. Tulare Lake, once fed by the rivers running down from the central Sierra Nevada and covering nearly 800 square miles, now exists only in the ink of history texts. The herds of elk and antelope that once darkened the horizon have long been replaced by tractors and mechanical harvesters.

The valley’s metamorphosis from wetlands to agricultural semi-desert owes its transformation to the politics of profit. From the US takeover of the Spanish land grants in 1848 to the endemic abuse of federal flood policy, to the special grants to railroad corporations, land speculation fueled California’s carving up of millions of its best acres into vast private estates. With a firm control over land, speculators developed irrigation systems and policies explicitly designed to protect their land holdings and to thwart small family farms.

The creation of irrigation districts and later, water agencies as quasi-public authorities, cemented a system of landowner favoritism. These districts and agencies can issue bonds and levy taxes to fund irrigation projects. In most cases, only landowners can sit on the boards of directors and vote on policy issues affecting the district. Landowners benefited themselves while billing a broad base of taxpayers for the costs.

Early irrigation projects used pumps to pull water from the underlying aquifers. The pace of agricultural expansion in the first decades of the 20th century over-drafted these aquifers, causing the valley floor to sink as much as thirty feet in some areas. Aware that the groundwater resources would not fuel the dizzying rate of growth they desired, the area’s largest landowners—such as Southern Pacific Railroad and the Kern County Land Company—lobbied state and federal officials to fund projects to dam rivers deep within the northern and central Sierra Nevada and deliver water to their lands. The two projects that sprouted from these efforts—the federal Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project—now comprise nearly forty dams and about a thousand miles of aqueducts costing billions of dollars to taxpayers across the state and the country.

With funding secured and projects built, landowners sitting on the regional governing bodies were able to permit themselves exemptions to size restrictions to receive federally subsidized water. One hundred years of law-breaking, typically referred to as “noncompliance,” lies at the core of California’s gargantuan and vastly wealthy agricultural economy.

The projects were planned to serve agriculture—acres of lettuce and cotton, dairies, orchards—not the small rural communities that sprang up to provide labor for those fields and dairies. Residents in small towns like Alpaugh struggle for clean water amidst the pipes and canals of the largest and most expensive public water system in the world.

Heavy lifting

Shane Nichols has worked at the water hole in Alpaugh since November 2003. He is jovial and talkative, providing nonstop comic relief under the oppressive valley heat. He periodically takes up the hose connected to the well under construction to spray down the floor of the shed and the outside walls of the tank itself, cooling off the hot air in the shed.

“All the water’s bad,” he says. “All the water has arsenic, all over the county. But Alpaugh is the worst hit right now in terms of not having drinking water. That’s why we got the grants.” In 2002, United Farm Workers representative Martha Guzman brought Alpaugh’s plight to the attention of its state Assemblymember, Nicole Parra. Parra secured donations that resulted in the 5,000-gallon tank and water to fill it; she also managed to nail down long-sought-after grants from the California Department of Water Resources and the United States Department of Agriculture to begin construction on the new well.

Nichols does the heavy lifting for children and seniors. “A five-gallon jug weighs 38.7 pounds when full,” he says, adding, “I weighed it one day.”

By two o’clock twenty families had come to collect water. “Most people are still working at this time, even on Saturday,” says Angelica Martinez, who was born and raised in Alpaugh. Both of her parents are migrant farm workers from Michoacan, Mexico, who follow work in the fields, commuting up and down the valley. Before the water tank was parked a few blocks from her house, her family bought vended water from reverse osmosis machines twenty miles away: “On Sundays we’d drive to Delano and buy water at the store. We’d fill up about eight five-gallon jugs.”

Residents in small towns like Alpaugh and Earlimart, Lindsay and Tonyville purchase either bottled or vended water for drinking and cooking needs. Julio Villa, from the Peruvian Andes, has been in Alpaugh for about a year, working sixty hours for only $200 at a dairy. He used to spend $35 a month filling his water jugs in stores in Corcoran before the water hole was up and running. “Sometimes we didn’t have time to drive and pick up water for the week, so we’d drink from the tap after boiling it,” he says. At work they still sometimes drink the tap water: “When our bottled water runs out, we can’t take the heat.” As debates rage in cities like Stockton over municipal water privatization, the water supply for most residents in Tulare County has already effectively been privatized.

Yet the vended water from machines is often not tested by health officials. “It is appalling that tens of thousands of Latinos working in California’s agricultural industry have no choice but to buy bottled and vended water to drink at home and at work,” says Paola Ramos, a policy analyst with the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water in Oakland. “But it is totally unacceptable for the main source of drinking water for these communities to go without health inspections. It seems like discrimination to me when Latinos and other communities of color don’t receive the same quality water. It goes beyond discrimination, when cotton and alfalfa get better quality water than people.”

Blue Christmas

Several months later, the valley’s winter sky is thick with fog. Sandra Meraz steps from her truck at one o’clock sharp and walks through the mist to struggle with the bolt on the blue metal door for the last time. “We can’t do it any more,” she says as she enters the shed. “I’m proud of all I’ve done, but I’m exhausted. Seniors cannot carry their own food, much less five-gallon water jugs.”

A little more than a year after the opening of the water hole, Alpaugh residents face a New Year’s with no blue shed—and no new well, either. The money donated to pay for the spring water ran out in early November, and the new well, which should have been up and running, was improperly installed. George Anderson of the Mountain Springs Water Company personally donated 5,000 gallons to fill up the tank in mid-November so the community would have water for Thanksgiving. But December 15 was the last day for Alpaugh’s water hole.

Alpaugh was supposed to be a success story: community advocates hoped the attention to the town’s troubles would influence state lawmakers and water agencies to direct much-needed funding to other valley communities facing similar problems. Now it appears as if Alpaugh’s emergency grants may have gone to waste.

The irrigation district charged with building the well chose a local engineering firm—Whitten Pumps—that filed for bankruptcy only a few months after the contract was signed; the company is over a million dollars in debt. Whitten left the top of the Alpaugh well unsealed, vulnerable to tampering and contamination from animals. As a result, the state health department refuses to lift a boiled water order.

The irrigation district claimed that it would cost $4,600 to seal the well and pass state safety requirements. That was money the community didn’t have, at least until a Los Angeles Times reporter started calling around to find out why the well was not yet operable. Within days of the reporter’s calls, Steve Martin, irrigation district board member and owner of the land on which the wells are located, said that they found the money and that “No matter what, we’re going to go ahead and seal it.”

Caroline Farrell, an attorney with the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment in Delano, says that incompetence is a major problem in rural water management. “People have not been trained for the positions they hold and they make decisions without knowing the consequences of those decisions.”

On the water hole’s last day, the residents begin to arrive a few minutes after one. Former US Marine and mechanic Asa Massey rolls in on an electric motor chair with two empty gallon jugs in the front basket. He has come to get water at the tanker “ever since they put it up.” Before, he would travel seventeen miles to Corcoran to buy bottled water. Jerry Calvert drives up on a flat-bed three-wheeler to fill up three five-gallon jugs to take home. Families arrive in pickups and dispatch their teenagers and older children to fill the jugs. Meraz and volunteers help cart the heavy containers while informing residents that after today, they’ll have to drive out of town to get drinking water.

At the end of the afternoon, Meraz takes down the “Open” sign and carries it to her truck to add to the stacks of papers and pens on the passenger seat. “Rural America is endangered,” she says. “We are the forgotten people.”

Private water utilities serve 10 percent of the world’s population, 15 percent of the US population, and 22 percent of California’s. Three hundred million people across the globe now receive their water from a private source.

Water for profit is a $500 billion industry, projected to grow to $3 trillion within the next few years. In 1990, just 12 countries had private drinking water operations; today there are 56.

The three largest waterworks companies—Suez and Vivendi of France and RWE-AG of Germany—are among the top 100 corporations in the world.

The IMF and World Bank encourage water privatization, claiming that it increases water access for the poor. Through its use of “structural adjustment loans,” which stipulate specific conditions be met to receive funds, the World Bank pressures countries to privatize. In recent years, 60 percent of these loans required countries to privatize either government services or water utilities. Countries desperate for funds relinquish control of their often-troubled water systems to pay off their debts.

Rate agreements between water companies and governments ensure a certain margin of profit for the corporations, minimizing their risk but increasing the cost of water. Rates increased in Pekins, Illinois by 204 percent over the 18 years that Illinois-American, a subsidiary of American Water Works, ran that city’s water system. The CEO for American Water Works had a salary of over $2 million in 2000.

In most cases bidding for water contracts occurs behind closed doors, and the selected company signs a long-term contract, usually 25-30 years, the details of which are often not made available to the public.

When water systems go private, citizens end up financing the costs, meanwhile guaranteeing the companies’ profit margins by paying higher rates. Water companies are beholden to their shareholders—in contrast to officials’ being held accountable by citizens of a municipality.

In Buenos Aires, private water companies promised a 27 percent decrease in water rates. But after privatization rates rose by 20 percent, leading to a 30 percent non-payment rate. As a result of the private company’s failure to fulfill its contractual agreement to build a new sewage treatment facility, 95 percent of the city’s sewage flows straight into the Rio Plata River.

Unable to afford privatized tap water, residents turn to untreated sources. Ten million South Africans had their water cut off following privatization, causing that nation’s worst cholera epidemic, which infected 250,000 people and left 300 dead.

The British water conglomerate Biwater was awarded a 30-year water concession in Nelspruit, South Africa in 1999. In some townships, Biwater turns on the water for only three hours a day. People sometimes get nothing but air in their pipes for up to 90 minutes—despite the fact that the meters are running.

In Cochabamba, Bolivia, Bechtel subsidiary Aguas del Tunari raised water rates by 50 percent. Some bills rose by 200 percent. The rate hikes were to cover Aguas del Tunari’s $35-million-dollar inherited debt, future infrastructure, and a 16 percent annual profit rate.

Earning an average $67 a month, Bolivians were spending 30 percent of their incomes on water. In April 2000, five months after the signing of the 40-year water and sanitation contract, hundreds of thousands of Bolivians protested, leading to violence that injured 175 and killed one. Forced to cancel the contract, the government returned the utility to a public entity headed by the protest leader.

On January 19 of this year, Bolivians won Water War 2, forcing Suez and minor owners including the World Bank, out of El Alto, a town of 800,000. A quarter of the population had no water.

In the United States, private water industry advocates lobby Congress and the EPA to block higher water quality standards and allow the industry access to the same low interest rates public agencies can obtain. The industry group believes clean-water regulations should be based on a cost-benefit analysis: $10 million is a reasonable sum to eliminate a deadly contaminant but not one that poses a serious, non-fatal health risk.

In the United Kingdom, the Thatcher government transformed ten regional water authorities into ten for-profit ventures, selling them as 25-year concessions on the stock market. These private companies now have monopolies in all regions of the United Kingdom except Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The November air was crisp, a few dark clouds punctuating the blue high over the ridge. I used to jog that land, in the hills west of Gilroy, and I always looked forward to fall—the chill in the air, the rich colors, a heightened sense of things. The trails and old ranch roads crossed through meadows and went high in the canyons. I knew where I’d see wildlife and waterfalls, recognize trees, make connections I didn’t really understand. Then the land was approved for development, and the bulldozers arrived like a conquering army.

Now they were here, at the last untouched places. By the creek, the land’s skin was scraped away; the exposed reds, tans, and grays gaped from holes, waited in piles. Day after day while the machines did their work, the cars rushed past on Santa Teresa Boulevard. To the drivers, the grass and trees and canyon were nothing, images on an old photograph in the basement.

Soon, two-story boxes would occupy the slope with lights, curbs, roof lines. For a while I felt like the only person who knew something good was being killed. Then I met Chris Thomas, who lived at the foot of a big canyon that rose up behind his old barn, and discovered I wasn’t the only one clinging to the land.

When Chris first took me behind the barn to see what the developer was doing, he still hoped something would stop them. Shapell Industries had systematically moved down the range from Hecker Pass, inserting houses into every canyon and draw. Now they had approval for 13 houses on the meadows below the two last canyons

Those canyons behind Chris’ place always stopped me when I came around the curve—the blanket of oaks, bays, and redwoods were backlit by the sun, an illuminated backdrop for the ranch buildings and the small pear orchard.

Chris and I met at a Gilroy city council meeting. He was 17 then. He walked up to the podium to speak to a packed chamber, trying to persuade the city to spare Babbs Creek, the little brook that came out of the twin canyons behind his place, where his family had lived for 70 years. Shapell Industries now owned most of it, all except Chris’ place and Celia McCormack’s meadow across the road. The council had been as polite as church people when they said no.

I’d often see old Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, Chris’ grandparents, out working the pears. The old man wore coveralls and moved slowly and deliberately between the trees, pruning, an old dog following him. There was a wood manger by the creek and a few sheep that nibbled the fruit. Chris’ grandmother would stand on the little porch watching it all. The farmhouse was small and white with weathered tiles and a stone chimney

This day, Chris had a wrenched look that did not match his smile. We stood behind the barn and ranch house, and I got my first look at the meadows below the two canyons. The meadows were scraped clean, festooned with grading lathes, yellow flags fluttering on the breeze. Chris pointed out a tree house on the grass hill where he and his friends slept on summer nights and the line of green where a water pipe ran across the meadow from a spring high in the canyon wall. He talked about the deer and hunting and about bringing cows out of the canyons for a rancher over in Castro Valley.

Where we stood, plastic orange netting was pulled across the width of the property, maybe eighty yards. Chris pointed and said, “They just cut those trees.” I saw two live oaks prone on the meadow. The leaves still had a shiny green gloss. He looked at me with a flicker of hope. “Do you know Celia?”

I knew her. Celia McCormack owned the land across the road. Babbs Creek cut through her large meadow. A teacher at the local high school, she had mounted the effort to save the creek.

“Celia told them she’d trade her land for these meadows,” he said. He added quietly, “to save them.” He fingered the plastic netting, his shoulders tense. “There’s fox and mountain lion in there,” he said with that sad grin. “Coyotes.” You could see the crookedness of the creeks behind him by the lines of tall spiky bay trees that lined them. “Do you think we can do something to save it?”

I had no good answer to this. It seemed well past the time for changing what was begun. Whatever had been on the land, the meadow voles and squirrels, the animals above them in the food chain, the insects below them, were gone, or soon would be. The coyotes might come down still, but only to cross a road. Even the rolls of the meadows were as good as gone.

I dropped by Chris’ a few days later. We walked to the orange netting. Just across, two men were at work, and I saw that the creek was now stripped of the willows and buckbrush and a young oak. There was a new trench beside the stripped creek bed and a pile of vegetation on the south meadow. The downed oaks’ leaves had turned dull.

The creek bed lay passively like someone anesthetized and shaved, ready for surgery. One of the men stood across the creek bed taking a reading through a surveying scope. The other guy was in the trench with a tape measure. Chris said his girlfriend was passing around a new petition to save Babbs Creek. Had I seen it? He said Shapell had taken down an old fence and moved the property line. The generator and work truck now had possession of that piece. The man with his eye to the scope was less than thirty feet from us. A generator buzzed from the back of a white truck.

“He said he was really sorry,” Chris said. “He said he was only doing his job.” Chris watched me. “Do you think he tells that to everyone?”

“Maybe he is really sorry,” was all I could say.

Chris asked if I knew about groups that buy land to preserve it. I could not say the obvious, that he should get hard to the idea, that the land and all that it means was gone.

I didn’t know what to say. I only stood and looked out, saw how the land rolled. It seemed to be going somewhere, like a swell in the ocean. I saw a coyote trotting past, saw it sniff the air, facing the holes in the creek bank where the mice and squirrels nested.

The work Shapell was doing behind the Thomas place was the close of an 850-house project along the base of the hills that funnel into Hecker Pass. Billboards along Santa Teresa Boulevard advertised history, a golf course, all emblazoned with a 15-foot-high picture of an eagle soaring over the ridges. The guards at the entrance let people in who belonged, and no one else.

I would stand every few days with Chris, his friend Salvador, Chris’ aunt, mother, and girlfriend, whoever came to witness at the orange netting. We’d watch the subcontractors, who told us again that they were sorry. Chris’ mother and aunt talked about how they’d believed that Shapell would not build here, that the campaign to save Babbs Creek had been successful. I found out later from Celia McCormack that Shapell had only agreed to cut back the number of houses.t

Once all of us stood together in the shade of the small oak near the little creek. The trench beside the stretch of creek bed was ready for cement. The forms were braced, the rebar tied. A second trench was half excavated on the opposite side. More brush and trees were piled on the southern flank. The generator was going full throttle; we had to speak loudly.

“It’s a sad day,” Chris’ Aunt Patti said. A big NO TRESPASSING sign in foot-high letters faced the Thomas place. “We used to have parties here,” she said, “Easter egg hunts.” Her eyes glistened. Chris prowled the orange netting like a dog who wants out.

When Julia, Chris’ girlfriend, arrived, one of the workmen came over with a big grin for the women. He explained that the footings they would pour would buttress a culvert. None of us was sure what a culvert was. They would pour the concrete for the giant footings on Friday, he said.

The worker in the opposite trench began jack-hammering, not concrete, but earth. He was struggling mightily.

Julia wrapped her arms against herself and stood still, her shoulders braced as she looked across the rolls in the land. “It was so beautiful.” There were only 50 or 60 yards of land where the houses would be, then the hills rose quickly behind it. She said, “It was full of wildflowers.” She stiffened. “It was worse when they cut the trees down.”

When everyone wandered to the house, I stayed to watch the worker with the jackhammer. He was long-haired, his bushy gray hair tied at the back of his neck. He was in the trench across the creek bed, trying to loosen a chunk of earth up on the back of the wall. He forced the hammer into the earth with his legs back and his hands at his chest, heaving forward while the hammer jolted his shoulders.

The orange webbing across the back of the two properties was wrapped tightly around the trunk of the small oak that leaned over the trench. Two large boughs had been sheared off and the interior wood showed red. Still, it shaded much of the streambed and the trench. I can’t say why, but the little tree was love incarnate to me then, smiling on us all. Then I saw it everywhere, the land, the man, the light, the rest of the trees. Why had I never noticed it before?

I kept going back, talking with other people: Celia McCormack said the work going on behind the Thomases was polluting her pond and that she and her family were thinking of selling. I talked with the city planners. They had bought into the Shapell project years earlier; developments like this guaranteed their jobs.

The last time I saw Chris, work on Babbs Creek was about done. A big bridge, prefab, was bolted to the concrete footings. It stood about 20 feet high and 30 feet long, dominating the creek and meadow. You could imagine the cars going over it. The little oak by the orange netting brushed against the concrete. Wedged under a low half-oval on the underside of the bridge, silent and still, was the small section of creek bed that remained. A couple of new workers were squirting goop in the cracks in the concrete. Empty goop buckets were tossed on the south meadow.

Chris and I stood at the orange netting. The Thomas family was still in court with Shapell. His attorney was urging them to sign some agreement. Chris didn’t want to but his parents needed the money for attorney fees. He said his attorney mentioned working in the same office with an attorney for Shapell. I ended up apologizing for an outburst, but Chris waved it off.

A couple of new guys were working over near the north meadow. Large backhoes with glass-enclosed cabs sat near trucks with boom arms rising at angles from their beds.

I crossed the side yard of yellow grass. A large cube of iron lay on the edge of the meadow near the trucks. One worker stood inside, a welder’s shield propped on his forehead. When he saw me, he stopped what he was doing and came over. The second worker made a beeline to the orange netting too. They had friendly faces, with good big smiles.

“How are you doing today?” the young one asked. “You ready to welcome the neighbors?”

When I told them I was just visiting, the old one said, “I bet they been here a good long time,” nodding at the ranch house. I told them what Chris had told me, that his grandfather and great-grandfather had ranched the hills and canyons, that the great-grandfather had sold fruit in wood crates labeled Glen View Peaches, that he had a dance band back before World War II. The two guys were eager for more. Their coveralls were bright orange like the netting. They told me they were putting in the storm drains and the sewer and water lines.

“We think it’s a shame what’s going on here,” the older one said. He shook his head and explained, “This is all that’s driving the economy right now.”

The young one said Shapell was making a killing. I told him they were putting in 12 or 13 houses. The young one said, “Cramming all that in here? And for a million each? Hell, what am I saying? It’ll be a lot more than a million!”

The old one nodded to the barn. “We’re more that kind of people than this kind,” he said with a glance over his shoulder. “If it was me, I’d keep that old house forever. We feel bad for what’s happening here.” They wished me a good day and went back to work.