Western snowy plovers are small shorebirds about the size of sparrows, with ashen-colored wings and backs, white bellies, and black-trimmed faces. These plovers, which nest along the Pacific Coast, are behaviorally different from the plover populations in the interior West, and are considered a subspecies. They were listed as threatened by the federal government in 1993 due to low population and decreased habitat; in 2007, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that there were only about 2,100 snowy plovers breeding on the Pacific Coast, and that the number of major nesting areas was down to 28. Today there are fewer than 150 plovers nesting in the San Francisco Bay salt ponds.

“The western snowy plover population is declining for several reasons,” says Caitlin Robinson, director of the SFBBO’s waterbird program, which is heading up the observatory’s plover project. “Their primary nesting habitat has been encroached upon by human development, especially buildings right on the beach and the disturbance caused by recreation activities on beaches,” she says.

Worse, she adds, “Along with the human development on beaches also come more predators.” Snowy plovers have natural predators such as red-tailed hawks, northern harriers, raccoons, coyotes, and owls, but people have introduced—or the human population has attracted—other predators including crows, common ravens, red foxes, and domestic dogs.

Founded in 1981 by a group of biology graduates from San Jose State University, the SFBBO is a nonprofit research and education organization that works to conserve birds and their habitats. The objective of the Snowy Plover Recovery Project is to identify the plovers’ foraging or nesting sites, and to find ways to optimize their habitat on the dry salt ponds, in the hope of boosting the Bay Area’s population of adult plovers to 500. Hitting this target number for the San Francisco Bay would serve as a step towards getting the birds delisted as a threatened species.

But before the researchers can count the birds, first they have to find them—and that’s harder than it sounds. First of all, the birds usually avoid humans, setting up their nesting and breeding areas far from human disturbance, and in large, open areas like the salt flats where they can forage for brine flies. The pale plovers also naturally blend in with the shoreline around them; they like areas with light-colored soil and objects that can camouflage them and their nests while providing cover for chicks. “Their bellies are fat and white like salt,” says Jocelyn Davidson, an assistant on the Snowy Plover Recovery Project, “and their backs are light brown like the dirt.”

So this year to aid them in distinguishing bird from background, the researchers began using Kowa and Swarovski “spotting scopes” designed to help them see natural colors precisely and in high contrast. The tripod-mounted scopes have high-definition lenses that contain fluoride, and have a much higher magnification power than ordinary binoculars. With these high-power lenses, the researchers hope to spot not only the plovers, but also the nests they build in the ground, called scrapes. These are just small divots in the substrate, decorated with small sticks or pieces of shell, but it’s important to find them because they can tell the researchers a lot about the birds’ nesting success and the impact that predators are having on their population.

Each researcher has to cover quite a bit of turf—the research area includes salt flats in Hayward, Fremont, Alviso, and East Palo Alto. “When we go out to find the plovers we are given an area of about one to five salt ponds to survey, depending on their size,” says Davidson. “We drive the levees around the salt pond and use the scopes, and write what we see in our field notebooks.”

With some high-tech help from the scopes, assistants can see everything from nesting areas to, well, other things. “It’s easy to tell when the plovers are copulating,” says Davidson. After the male and the female meet, she explains, “He goes to work building a scrape. When he is done and the girl is interested, she tries out the scrape by sitting in it and seeing if she ‘fits’ and likes it.’ If so, then she gets out and they copulate. If not, she runs away…and then the male will try again.”

After Cinderella finds her scrape, the researchers use the scopes to determine if the plovers are sitting on an empty nest, a brood, or simply chilling out, plover-style. This helps them determine where plovers like to nest. It is not yet known why females prefer one scrape over another—researchers believe the choice may have something to do with location—but identifying the nests early on tells scientists which areas to keep monitoring.

Western snowy plovers usually lay three eggs. Once the eggs are laid, “The female incubates during the day and switches off at night with the male,” says Davidson. “The dad takes over when they hatch.” But these eggs are very small—much too small to see from a distance, even with a scope—so researchers have to rely on watching plover behavior to find the nests. For example, when plovers are incubating, they sit lower to the ground and look puffed out to keep the eggs warm. But this is not always an exact science. “If they have a nest and perceive a threat, they will start sitting in random areas to confuse you [about where the eggs are]. We’re always complaining about the ‘sneaky’ plovers,” says Davidson.

Once a nest is found, an assistant floats the eggs in a water bath to test their age. If an egg floats at an angle, it means the chicks are under a week old, but if the top of the egg is exposed while floating, the chicks are almost here. The number of eggs discovered tells the researchers how well the plovers are reproducing, as well as when the plovers are using the pond for mating.

Determining the age of the eggs is important, because the researchers want to band the chicks within a few hours of hatching. During the spring of 2008, the observatory teamed with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to band snowy plover chicks, each with an individually identifiable color combination, to track their survival rate and their movements. But the chicks are precocial, which means they are up and running within a few hours and can feed themselves, much like ducklings, so there isn’t much time to band them before they can get away.

By estimating when the eggs will hatch, researchers can also know whether to blame disappearing eggs on chicks hatching or on predators raiding the nest. “Sometimes it’s an obvious predation with egg yolk everywhere,” says Davidson. But sometimes predators eat the egg whole, leaving no sign of their presence.

“One of the key factors limiting Western snowy plover population growth is poor reproductive success due to predators and human disturbance,” says Robinson. “Identifying nest predators can often be difficult if researchers do not observe the predation event or predators do not leave tracks around the nest.” As a result, SFBBO researchers have also started using remote camera monitoring at the salt flats to identify these elusive nest predators and capture footage of them stealing the eggs. The cameras have night vision and work from up to thirty meters away; they can record continuous footage of plovers incubating their nests. The cameras are camouflaged and connected by a thousand feet of cable to DVR systems that record the footage. The long cable allows the researchers to change the batteries and swap out the entire DVR without disturbing the incubating plover.

The preliminary data is already exciting, says Robinson. “During the 2009 pilot season of this project, we recorded footage of red-tailed hawks, common ravens, northern harriers, and California gulls depredating snowy plover nests,” she says. “We also captured footage of a California gull depredating newly hatched snowy plover chicks. By knowing what predators are depredating snowy plover nests and chicks, we will be able to manage snowy plover nesting areas to accommodate plover’s needs more effectively.”

As the study progresses, the observatory researchers will be continuing the camera observations, banding the newly hatched chicks, monitoring how many chicks survive the year, and watching how the plovers move around the salt ponds. They have also made a simple change to the landscape to aid the birds—after careful scientific research to determine the plovers’ proclivities, researchers and volunteers from SFBBO added oyster shells to the bottoms of the salt ponds to make the soil, which is usually dark brown or red, a lighter color that will help the plover avoid predators. The team hopes to continue their project until the plovers have been delisted—and then maybe the birds can get a little privacy.

Late this September, the state’s scientific review panel meeting drew a crowd to Sacramento for a day and a half of hearings, during which the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) presented its report on the pesticide’s health effects. Although the chairman, John Froines, professor of chemical toxicology at UCLA, admonished the audience that his charter was merely to critique the science behind the DPR’s report, not to approve or reject the chemical’s use, during the public comment period farmers and others spoke passionately for or against the controversial pesticide.

About fifty people spoke, with some growers arguing that they desperately needed the pesticide to replace methyl bromide, which two decades ago was scheduled to be phased out under the Montreal Protocol as an ozone-depleting gas. “We need all the tools possible to survive today,” said Will Scott of the African-American Farmers of Calfornia.

Arysta LifeScience Corporation, the chemical’s Tokyobased manufacturer, says that adopting methyl iodide may decrease environmental damage. Methyl iodide is slightly stronger, pound for pound, than methyl bromide, and Arysta estimates that using it instead could cut the pounds of pesticide applied by thirty to fifty percent.

It’s an argument that’s extremely seductive to farmers. Many loved methyl bromide because it was the ultimate kill-all chemical for all kinds of soil pests, and strawberries and other high-value crops grow and yield quickly after chemical soil sterilization. Indeed, the soil is so devoid of life after sterilization that lettuce producers rent fumigated fields two years later, because such soil is still likely to be free of the pests that plague leafy greens.

However, a 2007 letter signed by 54 scientists, including four Nobel laureates, pointed out the health hazards of using these powerful chemicals. “Alkylating agents like methyl iodide are extraordinarily well-known cancer hazards in the chemical community because of their ability to modify the chemist’s own DNA, as well as the target molecule in the flask, leading to mutations that are potentially very harmful,” reads the letter, addressed to administrator Stephen Johnson of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

“Because of this potential toxicity, chemists who work with this material use the smallest amounts possible and take great precautions to avoid exposure,” the letter continues. “Because of methyl iodide’s high volatility and water solubility, broad use of this chemical in agriculture will guarantee substantial releases to air, surface waters and groundwater, and will result in exposures for many people. In addition to the potential for increased cancer incidence, US EPA’s own evaluation of the chemical also indicates that methyl iodide causes thyroid toxicity, permanent neurological damage, and fetal losses in experimental animals.”

At the September hearing, the panel of eight health scientists heard technical testimony from the preparers of the DPR draft report, Arysta representatives, the US EPA, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, and the Pesticide Action Network of North America. A scientific meeting, which preceded public comment, included discussion of groundwater contamination, fetal defects, nervous system toxicity, thyroid damage, cancer induced by genetic damage to DNA, and how big the safety factors for methyl iodide should be. These include determining buffer zones, application rates, and other considerations, although one panelist, Dr. Paul Blanc, argued that the evidence presented was sketchy enough that the term “safe level” was misleading, since so much about the chemical is still unknown.

Thomas McKone, an expert in air modeling and exposure assessment at the University of California at Berkeley, agreed, calling the data regarding chemical leaching “rather alarming, particularly since the uncertainties are large and we don’t know what a safe dose is.”

Theodore Slotkin, professor of neurodevelopmental toxicology at Duke University, stunned many in the audience when he said that he was “worried about late developing, irreversible brain damage,” which he said was not addressed adequately in the existing reports.

The report will be used in the DPR’s decision about whether to register the chemical for use and will also factor into whether the US EPA will reconsider its own decision to allow registration across the United States. Presently, each state is allowed to make its own decision, and California, Washington, and New York are the last holdouts against its use. If the EPA reverses its decision, the chemical would be banned across the nation.

The environmental movement has long been divided over the replacement of one of the world’s worst ozone depleters. Because of exemptions that substantially weakened the Montreal Protocol and kept extending the date for final phaseout, methyl bromide is still used at the rate of about ten million pounds per year in the United States alone. Worldwide, more than 42 million pounds were used in 2008. Since substantial ozone damage can take generations to heal, the chance to permanently squelch a chemical whose final phaseout date has been a moving target since 1991 is undeniably appealing.

It was only recently that the National Resources Defense Council publicly took a position against the use of methyl iodide, a development that many activists consider significant. The organization is determined to stop the dissemination of millions of pounds of methyl bromide, which is still being used at about a fifth of pre-Montreal levels, but not by exposing the environment to enormous amounts of methyl iodide. Many activists are acutely aware that there is only one difference between the limited success they’ve had banning methyl bromide versus the many failures to stop other chemicals: The whole world hates ozone-depleters. They fear that methyl iodide, which poses no ozone threat, will be applied with abandon throughout the state’s farms and nurseries, which generate about $25 billion of California’s annual revenues.

Susan Kegley, a senior scientific consultant for the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), warns, “About the only thing to like about methyl iodide is that it’s not an ozone-depleter. Methyl iodide is just as toxic as methyl bromide, maybe more so, and in the laboratory, it must be handled as a dangerous chemical. Should we be applying thousands of tons of it to California farms?” Each year, says Kegley, California agriculture already uses between 30 and 35 million pounds of pesticides.

At stake is the health of anyone who comes into contact with the chemical, particularly in the Central Valley, where subdivisions have sprung up faster than weeds. Arysta’s label specifies quarter-mile buffer zones, but a drive through these communities reveals subdivision fences bordering strawberry fields. If approved, the chemical could be applied at a rate of up to 175 pounds per acre, including in California vineyards.

During the public comment period at the September hearing, Santa Cruz organic strawberry grower Jim Cochran of Swanton Berry Farm argued for organic strawberry production. “When I started growing strawberries organically a few years ago, I was one hundred percent of the organic growers,” he told the panel. “Now I grow about one to three percent. It is possible to grow them organically.” (About 87 percent of the nation’s estimated 525 million pounds of strawberries are grown in California.)

Some farm workers also said that they worried about the health effects of working in fumigated fields, but felt compelled to do so because their jobs are dependent upon the success of California crops, such as strawberries, that are frequently grown by fumigating crops under vast acreages of plastic tarps.

Horracio Ramirez, an agricultural worker who has planted crops by slitting holes in the plastic sheeting that covers fumigated fields, said through a translator, “Tarp removers have gotten sick from the chemicals we already have, and this will be even worse. Not all of us workers get the protection we need.”

“When we plant something, we punch holes in the plastic,” he continued. “[The pesticide] comes out when you open a hole. I told my foreman, but he said it was only soap.” Ramirez said that he doesn’t believe that he was only exposed to soap.

Julian Cruz, another field worker, said that dangerous chemicals are already in the strawberry fields. “Your eyes water all day long, and you get nosebleeds,” he said. “If this is a stronger chemical than what we have already, what will it be like for us if it’s approved?” Currently, chloropicrin, metam sodium, and methyl bromide are the most commonly used strawberry pesticides.

Enrique Hernandez, another agricultural worker, spoke of his dilemma: “I know that the chemical is dangerous, but people need to work.”

When Hernandez and others said that they used the protections that Arysta specifies, several panel members questioned them about what kind of masks they wore. “Were they white, black, or brown?” the doctors asked. Most of the workers answered that they were white, indicating that they were not respirators but throwaway masks like those used in paint shops, which are ineffective against fumigants.

Perhaps most surprising was that when the panel asked for details on the chemical’s underlying mechanism, nobody at the meeting—attended by Arysta representatives, agricultural experts, chemists, and even one of the chemical’s co-inventors—could explain how methyl iodide kills pests such as nematodes.

The panel’s consensus appeared to be that DPR had done an admirable first draft, but that additions to address groundwater contamination, safety margins, neurotoxicity, birth defects, and thyroid damage were necessary before the report could be issued in final form. The licensing decision is expected in 2010 or later. A representative from Washington state also spoke at the meeting, indicating that the state is watching the California fight closely. Whether Washington will continue to join New York in holding out against methyl iodide is still an open question. If the EPA were to reverse its decision on methyl iodide, the chemical would join a very short list of pesticides whose use was first approved but later banned.

Copies of the report, as well as other information on methyl iodide, can be found on the DPR’s Web site: www.cdpr.ca.gov

It sounds innocuous enough: You want to eat local, support small family farms, and consume products from animals that have been raised without hormones and antibiotics, and slaughtered away from the horrific conditions of typical slaughterhouses. But your seller doesn’t have a license to distribute the dairy or meat, and they haven’t taken the animal to a federally-inspected slaughterhouse. The meat isn’t USDA-approved, and the milk has not been tested for pathogens. The USDA says you are playing Russian Roulette with your health, and if the farmer gets busted, he could be charged with a felony, serve jail time, and be required to pay huge fines. Why take the risk?

“People want the health benefits, and they want to know where their food comes from, how the animals were raised, and what they ate, especially in light of the recent tainted meat scares,” says “Melanie,” who illegally distributes raw milk and meat out of the back of her Northern California store, some from animals she’s raised on her small farm. “People also want to buy local and keep commerce in the neighborhood,” she continues.

Melanie is part of a growing milk and meat black market. These renegades hope to shift food production towards local farmers, and away from unsafe and unclean large-scale factory farms that ship meat across state—and national—borders. “I come by this honestly and am interested in honest food production,” Melanie says. “I’m starting at the bottom, close to home, to change the food model.”

Melanie raises beef, pork, lamb, and the occasional chicken on her hundred or so acres. Currently she has about ten cows and twenty sheep, either born on her property or bought from other people she knows who raise animals in the same manner she would. “Essentially, I raise them with no intervention except for feeding them good and being nice to them,” she says. “They don’t need blankets and pillows, but I keep things clean and give them a varied diet.” She believes that she is participating in the animal’s entire lifecycle, from birth to death.

Melanie kills the chickens herself, but she takes her other animals to a nearby, non-USDA-inspected facility to be slaughtered. (Her closest USDA-approved facility is a four-hour drive, round-trip.) “He has a really nice place and he does a good job,” she says of her butcher, who processes, wraps, and returns the meat to her for around the same price as the USDA-approved facility. “If I had a nice facility at my place I’d rather do it myself, but I don’t know how to butcher,” she says.

She uses all parts of the animal, a practice she wishes more people would adopt. “People are out of the habit of using all the weird bits, like organ meats,” Melanie says. “They want the T-bone and the easy parts. We need to get back into the habit of using all of it.” She says that some people buy organ meats to eat, but most often, she sells those parts to people to use for pet food.

I ask how she fell into black market distribution. After acquiring some goats and using their milk herself—“long enough ago that no one was even into the raw milk thing,” she says—Melanie saved an older dairy cow from slaughter and started getting several gallons from her daily. “I began telling people, ‘I got more than I need, and you got some money,’ and that’s how we got started,” she says. “Plus, I grew up as a vegetarian and when I decided to eat meat, I decided it would be local, and I wanted to know exactly where it came from.” Recently she began selling meat from the animals she raises on her farm, and she also sells raw goat’s milk for an area farmer who drops it off at her storefront.

Melanie says that legalizing her meat and milk sales would be onerous. Although her farm is small, she is required to adhere to the same laws as industrial farms; she says the process to obtain licensing is “lengthy and complicated.” After getting her license, her farm would need to undergo routine inspections, and she’d have to use the USDA-inspected slaughterhouse.

Selling raw milk is even more difficult.  Raw milk distribution is legal in California and 25 other states, but there is no federal standard for raw milk, so each state handles its distribution differently. In California, it must undergo rigorous testing to adhere to more stringent standards than pasteurized milk must meet, and the products require warning labels. Conventional milk suppliers use the pasteurization process to kill pathogens, so there is no requirement to test batches before they are released. Raw milk, on the other hand, must be tested for pathogens at several different steps before it can be sold.

According to Melanie, it’s not worth the hassle for a smaller producer, and she says meeting the required standards is purposely difficult, to discourage small farmers from distribution. “It’s just too hard,” she says. “It’s way more difficult than meat, with more rules and more inspections. You must constantly test the milk.”

In states where raw milk is illegal, or for distributors who do not have the means to meet the stringent requirements, raw milk is often sold with a “pet food only” label, even though consumers purchase it for human use. Select Whole Foods Market stores carry such products, but in early October, sixteen Whole Foods stores in Florida decided to pull their raw milk “pet food” from shelves.

Raw milk is touted for its health benefits, mainly its immunoglobulins and beneficial bacteria that bolster the immune system, and because it contains lactase, an enzyme that helps people digest milk. Some people experience allergies or difficulty digesting pasteurized milk because the heat used in this process destroys lactase.

Melanie feels that the meat she sells has its own health benefits; she believes that the butcher she deals with poses less of a contamination risk than larger-scale slaughter facilities, and she says her own farm is much cleaner than industrial feedlots. According to a recent New York Times article, so far in 2009, almost half a million pounds of E. coli-infected ground beef have been recalled nationwide, and a single hamburger can include various grades of meat from hundreds of different cows—even from different slaughterhouses. Amazingly, there is no federal requirement for meat grinders to test their beef for pathogens.

To add to confusion, meat labeling can be misleading. “Organic” does not imply humane slaughter, and “grass-fed” does not mean the animal was not also given hormones or antibiotics. Use of these two terms is USDA regulated and sometimes third party–approved, meaning audits from animal welfare or food safety manufacturing organizations take place in the slaughter or processing facility. “Free-range” applies only to poultry and is more of a marketing claim; there is no enforcement from the USDA or other agencies.

“It is surprising how little inspection there is when you take an animal to be [legally] slaughtered,” Melanie says. “When you take it to slaughter, they don’t ask you how you raised that animal, what meds you gave it, how you fed it, anything.” She believes that her slaughtering process is more humane; she says after bringing her animals to her black market butcher, he will let the animals sit on his lot for a day or two to calm down after transport, a practice she says results in better-tasting meat. “If the animal is less traumatized the meat comes out better,” she says.

Word is spreading about Melanie, and so is demand. But she is truly afraid about being caught. “You can really get in a lot of trouble,” she says. When I press her for details, she replies, “I’ve heard of people losing a lot and being fined a lot but I’ve pretty much tried to stay out of it and not ask. I don’t even want to know.”

Indeed, the California Department of Food & Agriculture (CDFA), which inspects meat and produce and regulates farm safety and management practices, is serious about halting illegal sales. Steve Lyle, the agency’s director of public affairs, says that state and federal laws “provide food safety for consumers. While both milk and meat have substantial nutritional benefits, if not handled properly, they also can be easily contaminated.”

Pathogens that cause food-borne illness may contaminate meat or milk that is improperly handled (not wrapped tightly enough, for example), or stored at temperatures that are warm enough for bacteria to proliferate. The most common are Salmonella and Campylobacter, which can cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

“Illegal meat and milk processing has led to serious illness and even death,” Lyle continues. “That is why the handling of these particular food products is carefully regulated.” Salmonella causes about 550 deaths per year in the US.

Lyle says that CDFA investigators make an average of two arrests or prosecutions per month across the state, typically for the unlicensed manufacture or sale of raw milk products, including cheeses. “Manufacturing or processing for resale of any milk or milk product in a facility not licensed by CDFA is technically a felony,” he says. Can you get in trouble for buying the products? “We usually focus on unlicensed sellers, and strive to educate consumers,” says Lyle. Regulation at the county level may be more lax—the environmental health department worker I spoke to says his department rarely makes arrests for unlawful meat or milk distribution. Then again, he says, because the offense is considered so serious, most cases are handled directly by the CDFA.

To date, there are only two legal raw dairy producers in California: Organic Pastures, near Fresno, and Claravale Farm in Panoche. Organic Pastures sells raw dairy products from pasture-raised cows. On this 500-acre farm, no environmentally unfriendly pesticides are used, and its 350 cows are not fed hormones, antibiotics, or soy. Pasture-raising cattle is considered more beneficial for the cow, the milk, and the environment—unlike conventional dairies, there is no accumulation of manure in a concentrated area, lessening runoff and pollution.

Organic Pastures CEO Mark McAfee explains that because of California state standards for legal raw milk, he must “go the extra marathon” to test every step of the way to show that his milk is free from bacteria and pathogens. “Our protocols are pretty intense here,” says McAfee. “A lot of testing and cleaning. We can’t be sloppy. It’s not the bacteria coming off or out of the cow that is the concern; it’s how the milk is handled after it’s been milked.”

McAfee says that because raw milk is a live food that contains beneficial bacteria, it does not putrefy; rather, its cultures ferment into another usable form such as kefir or sour cream. With pasteurized milk, beneficial cultures have been killed during the heating process, but it contains spoilage bacteria that render it unusable after its expiration date.

All the testing is worth it for the relationship his dairy has with its customers, McAfee says. “We want to be an example,” he says. “If you look at our food chain that we have here, there is a very intimate relationship with our consumer. There is no one between the consumer and myself, and they visit us directly. Other dairies do not know their consumers. They get paid poorly, and the consumers get poor nutrition. We get paid very well, and our consumers get incredible nutrition from a short food chain.”

But in many areas, it can be hard for consumers to find legal raw milk or local meat-sellers who have complied with the USDA’s rules. To circumvent food regulations—or a retail middleman like Melanie—some consumers are chipping in to collectively buy an animal, paying a farmer for its care and upkeep, and divvying up the milk, organs, meat, and other byproducts. (There is no law against using raw milk or meat from an animal you own.) Depending on the county or municipality, you can keep chickens or even goats in your backyard, a practice that is growing in popularity. “You’re lucky if you live somewhere where you can raise animals in your backyard, but you can’t do that everywhere,” Melanie points out.

Meanwhile, the black market provides a compelling alternative for Melanie’s customers, although she admits she is considering going legit. “With a little more effort I could probably be totally legal, but I’m just lazy,” she says. “I need an inspected freezer and a clean, tidy little section, but everything would have to go [to the USDA-inspected facility] to be slaughtered, which takes forever.” For now, she is flying under the radar, and business is booming.

Since the US housing market began its collapse in mid-2007, foreclosures have forced millions of people from their homes. Families leave behind neighbors, possessions, even pets in ever-growing ghost towns. Then there are the thousands of homes that were never filled in the first place: swaying high-rise towers and cookie-cutter single-family houses built for residents who never came. Nationwide, about three percent of homes sit vacant. For homes built since 2000—the beginning of the boom—the vacancy rate is nearly ten percent.

What to do with these empty spaces? And who should be in charge of doing it? The sheer scale of the task makes it a daunting problem. To try to sort it out, I talked to Allison Arieff, editor-at-large for Menlo Park-based Sunset magazine and author of the New York Times’ “By Design” blog.

Arieff has a background in architecture, and she has been keeping an eye on the American landscape for some time. Earlier this year, she wrote two long “By Design” columns surveying the state of the suburbs and contemplating their future. A solution won’t be easy to figure out, she wrote: The American suburb is not only vast and decentralized, it’s often connected only to vast and decentralized supply chains. It’s much easier to build a Wal-Mart on top of farmland than it is to tear down that Wal-Mart and put a local food source in its place, especially when the customer base has all but evaporated. “I feel really, really bad for anyone who bought a home in the first phase of a development that then didn’t continue,” Arieff tells me. “Because they’re never going to sell what they’re in, so they can’t leave, and it’s tragic.”

This is a key point: despite all the problems with the suburbs, Arieff doesn’t advocate abandoning them altogether. Her hope, she says, is that those spaces can become more livable for the people who remain there; that the foreclosure crisis, awful as it is, represents an opportunity. “I still dream that some major overhaul can occur: that a self-sufficient mixed-use neighborhood can emerge,” she wrote in one of her columns. “That three-car-garaged McMansions can be subdivided into rental units with streetfront cafés, shops, and other local businesses. In short, that creative ways are found not just to rehabilitate these homes and communities, but to keep people in them.”

Since Arieff published her musings in early 2009, things have only gotten bleaker. Is there still hope for a suburban turnaround? I spoke with Arieff in mid-October to find out.

What do you find most striking about abandoned developments?
It was pretty striking even before things started to get bad. I’ve visited a wide range of master-planned developments, mostly in Phoenix and Tampa, and I remember thinking, “God, they’re building an awful lot of these!” There were things that just intuitively made no sense. People in Phoenix telling us how much they loved their water view, but their water view was a man-made lake. It was wrong on every level. The ones I’ve visited more recently are around Merced, which I think has the highest foreclosure rate in California. And what’s amazing is just how much a lack there was of any kind of thought or planning. In some of these places, what’s as bad as the empty houses is the amount of land that was prepared for houses to be built but where no houses have gone up. It’s ravaged land. I went to developments where it was like, “We’re going to have ten thousand houses here,” and maybe two thousand were built, but they went ahead and prepared for the rest of them anyway. There are roads, maybe even signs, but no houses.

Do you have a sense of how Northern California’s suburbs compare to those elsewhere? Are we in better or worse shape than, say, Phoenix, and why?
Northern California is vast. Marin County is doing great, for example, while Modesto is falling apart. Phoenix is probably worse, though equal to the Central Valley. The potential for reuse is different here and everywhere else throughout the country. So much depends on cost of living, climate, codes, etc.

What are some of the other barriers to reuse? What would it take to repurpose the land and/or the buildings into, say, multi-unit apartments?
I’ve come across some innovative ideas but the costs are often so high so real transformation is difficult: If you build a four thousand-square-foot house that has one kitchen, turning it into apartments is not just a matter of putting on a few new doors. So not a lot of change has happened yet. But the biggest problem for the majority of the houses is that they weren’t built with the greatest materials. There’s not a lot of flexibility for repurposing when the buildings were not constructed well to begin with, or with healthy or recyclable materials. It’s not like you can repurpose vinyl siding.

In a perfect world, someone would sit down, look at the community plan, and say, “What can we do to make this more sustainable? Can we add retail, can one of those buildings be turned into a school?” It’s expensive, obviously, but it just seems like the best way to knit these communities back together instead of allowing them to fall apart.

Urban farming is an idea that’s gaining a lot of ground lately, especially in Northern California. Do you see a role for suburban farming as well?
I certainly think it’s feasible, more in some places than others. Merced, for example, was and is agricultural, so they could bring some of it back. You hear all those stories about the crisis of American farmers and farmland, so I think that that stuff should absolutely be put back. It seems to me to be sort of a great solution to employment issues as well. A lot of people would be ready for that kind of work.

But that goes to the larger idea of self-sufficiency and sustainability. If you are suburban or exurban, what are ways you can transform your neighborhood into something more walkable and self-maintaining? What services can you make more localized? I think schools and health clinics could be more localized—franchised clinics, almost like storefronts. You could just go there to pick up little things you need. Local and regional governments should be finding ways to incentivize all that kind of stuff. It’s not that there aren’t obstacles in terms of zoning, but let’s try a transitional solution—it’s not a lifetime commitment, we don’t have to do an environmental feasibility study. Let’s just try it. A colleague plays a sort of parlor game: What could we do if all impediments were lifted for six months? We’ve got to do some thinking under that paradigm and see what’s possible.

One of the great ironies seems that in order to really rehab vacant suburbs, you would need at least some people to commit to moving there, perhaps urban dwellers who are already used to making creative use of limited space. You’ve noted on your blog that there’s still a strong urban/suburban divide in this country. Do you think city dwellers would do it? Or is it a chicken-egg situation, where the urban dwellers would go to the suburbs if they were more like cities, but the only way they’re going to become more like cities is if urban dwellers migrate and transform them?

I’d hate to think it would require people from cities to move into the suburbs to do these things. I have no doubt there are suburban dwellers with innovative, transformative ideas; we don’t need to export urbanites to do it for them. I grew up in Marin County, which is a really nice suburb; I could walk to school, walk to a café. So I have little to quibble with about the design of a place like that. What I do have an issue with is something like in Phoenix where you have four man-made lakes and 30,000 houses and you have to drive an hour to get to anything. People heading for the suburbs move there thinking they’re getting certain things, and they may or may not be aware of what they’re missing.

We have to be able to illustrate the benefits of things like walkable communities, things people thought of as being important to urban neighborhoods, but left out of suburban developments. I don’t think people who live in suburbs are against those things necessarily. There’s just an extreme disconnect between perceived wants and desires and actual ones. There’s no reason to design anything that isn’t self-sustaining, walkable. I think if the developers would build them that people would start using them.

Is there a model for a rehabbed suburb?
That’s a complex question—I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer. It would depend so much on, say, the proximity of that place to places of employment or a university or something. What would be the economic driver to get people to that part of town? Or is that particular community one that should be bulldozed over and made into agriculture? So much is dependent on transit systems—if you can’t get anywhere, it shouldn’t be allowed to be built. But that just hasn’t been happening in development out here. I would hope there could be little test-case communities, and that once you show something works, that could help influence further development.

It’s all tied into this notion about the American dream and what that means. Can we design multi-family homes and denser communities and still have that be an acceptable goal for American mobility? Even the most liberal people I know in San Francisco go on and on about how much they hate density. Yet there’s nothing inherently problematic about density if done right. There are ingrained cultural things about what the suburbs symbolize and what the American dream really is. How do you begin to unwind all that stuff?

Do you see any change underway?
I see sprinklings of it, but no full-scale change. Most people don’t have five minutes to think about this. When gas prices started climbing up, people started buying out of exurban communities, trying to move in closer. They realized it was too much of a tradeoff to live so far away, so they were willing to buy a condo in the city or move to something closer, something smaller. Boomers are also buying out, selling their large single-family homes and moving into smaller places for cost reasons, or quality of life, or because they’re not able to retire when they thought. Will that move end up translating into smaller homes or denser communities? It may because of economic necessity, and I hope so. But I think that it needs to be driven continuously by the economic push, much like you see with environmental issues across the board. I have no illusions that people are all of a sudden going to be more virtuous. But that’s okay because what I have seen a lot are examples of individuals really making unique and often old-fashioned efforts at community-building within old neighborhoods—babysitter-sharing, food-sharing. I think more and more of those sorts of things are happening, and that’s the kind of thing where a deeply hard-hit community that’s not totally empty but has people left—those people could start to find their way to those solutions.

I’m wondering if you could talk a little more about the economics of trying to change land use. It’s hard to see how big corporations would be motivated to rehab houses/lots into denser or multi-use spaces.

Agreed. I can’t say I have the answer, but we can’t continue on this track. We seem poised for a second housing crash right now. How to stop it? Can we convert these homes to rentals? To housing for workers so they can live close to their employers? University housing? Senior facilities? Can we initiate temporary tax incentives toward restoring this land to parkland or to agricultural use? There is no one simple answer. Of course any transformation is expensive. But equally, if not more expensive, is keeping a lot of empty, unmaintained homes and simply doing nothing.

Will leadership on this issue come from the top or the bottom? Does government have a role?
I think it’s far more likely that change will come from individuals and small groups. No solution is going to work nationwide. Smaller, context-specific interventions seem to have the best chance right now. No one has the money to do a sort of New Deal type transformation of everything; the states are just all too strapped. So I don’t see a lot of top-down initiatives like that happening. Not that there aren’t any, but ones that are succeeding start at the other end. Those ground-up efforts are going to be the most successful and will, I believe, lead, rather than follow, national, federal, or local ones. Community initiatives are great, but it takes money to tear down developments, convert McMansions into multifamily units, create a transit network, etc. Without capital to change them, are the suburbs due to rot? Those things do require tons of money and tons of concentrated thought and planning. But I think you can also create a kind of micro-economy. I would love to think that remaining neighbors in hard-hit communities could be resourceful and say, “Right now we’re all driving to Wal-Mart in separate cars. Instead, let’s start a food-buying program, let’s have a clothing swap. Let’s start with small things and start saving people money that way.” I keep discovering new sites, initiatives, programs that aim to create and foster community: things like WeCommune.org, Shareable.net, the Star Community Index (ICLEIUSA.org), that head things in the right direction. Obviously, the impact, if things revert to the old ways, is devastating. More waste, more environmental disintegration, and honestly, a real lack of hope for any real change.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
Depends on the day. I sincerely hope people won’t go back to the way things were. Unfortunately, history suggests they will. Remember the ‘80s and all that excess? Clearly no lessons were learned there.

I go to housing conferences sometimes, and I’m like, “Oh my God! People aren’t paying attention!” I went to a shopping mall conference, and I just couldn’t believe it. Everybody there really thought that everything would come back to exactly how it was, and they just kind of needed to wait it out. No one was really rethinking their 400,000 square feet of retail palace. It doesn’t all have to change completely, but I don’t think that’s a viable model. It is unnerving when people insist on doing things the way they’ve been doing them despite clear evidence that change is necessary. I think that happens a lot with the housing industry also. They think, “We’re good at what we do, we can continue to do it, this is just a cycle.” So that’s when I feel quite negative.

Then again, I think if you can turn an old Wal-Mart into a church, not all is lost.

Thompson is among about thirty recent graduates of RichmondBUILD and Solar Richmond’s job training program, through which he learned about everything from metal stud framing, flooring, and construction math to energy efficiency and solar panel installation. The Richmond resident is confident he’s done well on his interview, but the rest of his group still sits anxiously inside, hoping to be hired for a solar installation on a large apartment complex just down the street.

“This is a good opportunity for us,” Thompson says, visibly upbeat. He graduated in mid-August; if he’s hired it will be his first paying solar job. At age 46, Thompson has been without steady full-time work for a couple years since his wife suffered a stroke. He heard about the job training program from a friend and jumped at the chance to update his skills, recognizing that construction will always be needed and solar tech is a growing field. “They’re going to let me know by the end of the week,” he says.

The United States has—officially—been in recession for more than a year, and at over twelve percent, California has one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates. The Bay Area has been hit hard by the retraction: San Francisco has a ten percent unemployment rate, and it is even higher in Oakland and Richmond, with both hovering between seventeen and eighteen percent of residents out of work.

Building a green collar workforce has been seen by many as a remedy to simultaneously address two deficits: dire environmental challenges and the ailing economy. While there is no official definition of what constitutes a “green job,” Dr. Raquel Rivera Pinderhughes, a professor of urban studies at San Francisco State and the author of Alternative Urban Futures: Planning for Sustainable Development in Cities throughout the World, says that they are usually blue-collar jobs that directly improve environmental quality. These include solar and wind tech jobs, bike repair, waste stream diversion, water efficiency retrofitting, sustainable food production, nontoxic painting and household cleaning, and jobs in mass transit. (Pinderhughes currently serves as the Ecology Center’s board president).

A multitude of green job training programs have sprung up in the Bay Area to accommodate people like Thompson who are underemployed and seeking new skills, and many of them co-exist in this one Richmond complex. RichmondBUILD Green Jobs Training Academy is a public/private partnership sponsored by the city that provides fourteen weeks of construction skills and renewable energy training. Established in the spring of 2007, it was designed to provide green-collar career opportunities and reduce violence in the city. Any Richmond resident with a high school diploma or GED, who can pass a math exam and drug test, can participate in the free program.

One of its partners, Solar Richmond, is a nonprofit program that manages a five-week solar installation curriculum. After training, Solar Richmond provides students with one-on-one case management and coordinates on-the-job-training or internships. Students come from a variety of ages and ethnic backgrounds, and many face significant life challenges in Richmond, where unemployment and violent crime is high. Currently, there is a waiting list of some 300 potential students.

Executive director Michele McGeoy says she launched Solar Richmond in 2006 because she saw that Richmond residents desperately needed green job training. “Solar is one great antidote to pollution, and jobs are one great antidote to violence,” she says.

Solar Richmond participants get hands-on training by building small-scale solar-equipped houses from the bottom up right inside the group’s warehouse. On the same day that Thompson was wrapping up his job interview, students in the next class to graduate had just finished the foundation and walls and were now focused on the roof of their own model home. A table saw whined, and the warehouse was abuzz with students sawing, measuring, and hammering. After this practice run, the group will install a solar system for low-income homeowners, who wouldn’t ordinarily have the means to purchase one.

Putting such a complex project together is a source of great pride for graduates; an indicator that they’re ready for real-world construction jobs. “We did it all,” recalls Thompson of his class’ own home model project. “We built a three-bedroom module from the ground up. We did the walls and roof, windows, HVAC. We learned energy efficiency, solar panels, safety, the works.” Now, he says, as he waits out on the sidewalk after his job interview, “I’m ready. Put me out there.”

In a bad economy, training doesn’t necessarily guarantee anyone a green job. People like Thompson are increasingly competing with college graduates or those who have been laid off and are transitioning into a new field but already have years of work experience. They may also already have skills in higher math, computers, research or writing, or already have a robust environmental literacy—skills that employers value. “Our guys are having different conversations with potential employers than college graduates are,” McGeoy says.

But, as Solar Richmond training and project manager Angela Greene points out, graduates of programs like Solar Richmond and RichmondBUILD have skills that many university students don’t. “Do these grads have basic carpentry and electricity skills?” she asks. “Do they know how to system-size? Do they know to install inverters in the shade? Employers see the value in what we have to offer. We’re not competing with college grads, they’re competing with us.”

Last January, RichmondBUILD conducted a workshop with solar and construction firms to gather feedback on what they want from prospective employees. According to Greene, the biggest response was that employers want people with both “hard skills”—things like knowing how to measure and install panel racks on a roof—and “soft skills” like computer literacy.

Yet whether or not green jobs program graduates can actually get work—much less full-time work—varies widely. RichmondBUILD boasts a ninety percent placement rate with an average wage of over $18 an hour, mostly in construction and clean-up jobs, but this includes both temporary and permanent positions. Solar Richmond has only placed 32 of their 160 graduates in solar-related jobs, and many are temporary jobs without benefits. “Counted this way, our placement rate is twenty percent,” says Zoey Burrows, development and communications manager at Solar Richmond. She points out that even though overall demand for solar technology has gone up, “We still have to get our graduates on those installation jobs in a field that is increasingly popular and competitive.”

Oakland is another city with ambitious environmental goals and an innovative green jobs training program, and its program faces many of the same job placement issues. “Overall, the economy is in the tank, but the green economy overall tends to be last to freeze over and the first to pull out,” says Emily Kirsch, Bay Area Green Jobs Organizer at the Ella Baker Center in Oakland.

The Ella Baker Center is one of the main organizations—along with Laney College, the Cypress Mandela Construction Training Program, and Growth Sector—behind the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, a much-hailed program that provides “green pathways out of poverty” for young adults. The program launched in the fall of 2008, and the inaugural class of forty students graduated this June. “When we started the OGJC it was before the economy crashed, and we found that those employers who had been committed to hiring weren’t able to do so, as they had been laying off people,” Kirsch says. So far, the program has placed 25 of its 40 graduates in solar and construction jobs.

Peter Crabtree, dean of instruction for vocational technology at Laney College, a Job Corps partner, points out that new graduates are facing a tough job market. “We started the program before the crash and targeted students heavily towards the solar industry,” he says. “But then this last year, it almost dried up, and we found that solar companies were enormously picky about who they hired. There might be one opening and fifty applications. We found our own grads were competing with journeyman carpenters, laid-off engineers, whoever.”

“It’s been very, very slow and it hasn’t really picked up yet. There are lots of dislocated workers out there competing for the same jobs,” agrees Caz Pereira, director of Growth Sector, the Job Corps partner that coordinates work placement. He says the key is to diversify training, and to be realistic about work availability. “First we have to ask, ‘How many jobs?’ then, ‘When will they be available?’” he says.

Yet green jobs proponents like Pinderhughes expect that some markets will continue to grow despite the recession and thanks to an infusion of federal and state funds, including energy efficiency and transportation dollars. “We’re going to see three major green economy sectors grow, with cities playing a major role,” she says, “First, energy efficiency, or what I call whole home performance. Second, and complementary to this, is water efficiency retrofits. And third, recycling and waste management.”

In addition to these three, she adds solar installation and mass transit. Local transit agencies struggle in good years, but are especially suffering this year, with dwindling funds from the state, and many announcing service rollbacks and lay-offs. (See story on page 21.) But construction of the new Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco, which broke ground for a temporary terminal in 2008 and will continue construction through 2019, is expected to provide many work opportunities. The project will connect regional bus lines, including AC Transit, with BART and Caltrain, and will eventually be the northern terminus of the California high-speed rail system—all transit options that provide alternatives to cars and could help reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Michael Cohen, director of San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, “The construction of the transit center will generate more than 125,000 new jobs in San Francisco and will help add to the Bay Area’s base of permanent employment. It is the kind of project that can tap federal stimulus funds, create jobs, and provide Bay Area residents with transit options unrivaled anywhere else in the country.”

To date, much green jobs training has focused on solar and other forms of renewable energy as growth fields. Indeed, a June report from the Pew Charitable Trust found that clean energy outpaced general job growth nationwide over the last decade, at 9.1 percent compared to 3.7 percent. (In California it was much closer at 7.7 percent compared to 6.7 percent.)

But Bay Area demand for solar energy has recently had some ups and downs. “A year ago it was looking pretty abysmal,” says document coordinator Kara Taddei of Sebastopol-based Solar Works. “People just weren’t interested. But it’s definitely increased in the last six months.” This year, says Kent Halliburton, vice president of sales at Real Goods Solar in San Rafael, sales are up approximately 30 percent.

Solar equipment suppliers say that a recent uptick in consumer interest is largely due to the dropping cost of solar panels and to government incentives like federal tax credits, state incentives, utility rebates, and innovative municipal programs like Berkeley’s solar financing program, in which homeowners pay back the upfront price of installing solar panels with their property taxes over twenty years. Sonoma County also has a similar financing method, called the Energy Independence Program, and San Francisco will soon announce the nation’s largest solar and renewable energy financing program, the Clean Energy Loan Program. In addition to solar installations, small-scale wind projects and energy efficiency upgrades will be eligible for financing.

All this means more job opportunities in the green energy market, but as Jan Halasz, design and finance consultant at Cal Solar Works in Fremont, cautions, “Incentives and tax benefits are the backbone of the solar business. Without those the market would collapse.” And of course the jobs would go with it.

Some of the local smaller “hidden” green businesses—ones like bike repair, materials reuse, and small farms that are unlikely to qualify for federal stimulus money—still aren’t sure if the recession has helped or hurt them, and report that they’re essentially holding steady. “When the word broke about a year ago of the Wall Street crisis, nothing much changed here,” says Dan Thomas, workerowner of the Box Dog Bikes cooperative in San Francisco. He says that for the first few years of the recessionary era, his business enjoyed “a steep upward trend,” but this year has been a mixed bag: the store hired a couple more employees over the summer, although sales leveled off.

Micah Sanders, co-owner of the Bent Spoke, a bike shop in North Oakland, concurred. “In 2007 we had around twenty percent growth. Gas was high, and more people seemed to be biking,” he says. “This year is flat in terms of sales. Repairs and jobs-wise, the same thing. Hopefully things are turning around. We’re starting to see people loosening their wallets.”

Full Belly Farm, a 200-acre certified organic farm in the Capay Valley that services restaurants, wholesalers, farmers markets, and runs a community supported agriculture (CSA) program, reports a similar slowdown. “We’ve stayed flat from last year to this year,” says partner Judith Redmond, despite the farm’s sales figures having grown every previous year since it opened in 1985. While she’s not sure if the downtrend is entirely due to the recession, Redmond notes that sales at farmers markets and via its CSA program dropped off this year.

Flat sales mean that these small green businesses can’t expand to take on new staffers. For example, “We had hoped to add [employees], but had to put a hold on that,” says operations manager Mary Lou Van Deventer of the Urban Ore Ecopark in Berkeley, which houses three acres of used doors, bathtubs, lumber, metal and furniture for sale. Overall, she says, the business hasn’t grown since last year. “At the beginning of the year [business] was a little better than expected. Since June, retail sales have slowed down,” she says. “I think the recession finally caught up.”

Despite the sales slowdown for some local green businesses, and an increasingly competitive job market, government funds continue to pour in for more green jobs education, meaning that there will soon be more green jobs grads looking for work. In October, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the recipients of the Clean Energy Workforce Training Program grants, nearly $27 million in stimulus funds for educating Californians in green construction and clean tech jobs. It is being Continued from page 18 Winter 2009 21 hailed as the nation’s largest green workforce program to date, and will train an estimated 5,600 people.

Several of the grant recipients are in the Bay Area. The cities of Richmond and San Francisco will receive the most money, at $1.5 million and $1.3 million respectively. The Peralta Community College District (which includes Oakland’s Laney College), the Contra Costa Community College District, and Sonoma County will each receive about $1 million.

These programs will train students in skills such as home energy auditing, solar installation and photovoltaic panel repair, water treatment, home weatherization, and repairing electric cars. Many of these programs do not require a two- or four-year degree but can be completed in a semester or two, and are targeted at people who will be entering the green jobs workforce in the near future. The philosophy behind stimulus funds is to “get them out quick, make them count, so people get trained, and the jobs are there,” says Crabtree.

At Contra Costa Community College, the money will go primarily to teaching students about hybrid and electric car systems, solar technology, and green building construction. The stimulus money will expand course offerings and help pay for equipment and technology for the students to use.

RichmondBUILD and Richmond Solar will receive some of that grant money to support their current training, and Laney College and its partner, the Cypress Mandela Training Center, will use it to expand and diversify their workforce training programs. The second cohort of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps is training right now, with over forty students in classes. With the new funds, 120 more will begin the six-month program in January.

For Terence Thompson, this kind of green jobs training seems to be paying off—he recently found out that he aced his job interview. Along with about ten graduates from the Solar Richmond program, he was hired for a temporary $15/hour photovoltaic panel installation project on a Richmond apartment building. In early November he started with the ground crew prepping solar panels and installing converter boxes, but the job only lasts until December. “If we do a good job, show them that we’re good workers, they could hire some of us on more permanently,” Thompson says.

In the meantime, he is keeping busy. He says he has his resume online and is looking on Craigslist for jobs for when this project is over. Several companies, whose representatives he met during the program, told him to let them know when he finishes up at the apartment complex. Thompson is also dreaming big: “Some day maybe I’ll own my own solar business,” he says.

Only ten years later, this definition of green jobs seems unimaginably outdated. Now the term usually refers to jobs connected to renewable energy-related industries such as solar, wind, and wave energy. As Van Jones, who recently stepped down from his position as the White House’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, noted in his 2008 book, The Green Collar Economy, this definition encompasses electricians and plumbers who can install energy-saving devices like solar panels and water heaters, builders who can construct energy-efficient dwellings, as well as organic farmers and bio-fuel crop producers.

These kinds of jobs are being funded as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act championed by President Barack Obama. But several Bay Area ecologists feel that today’s definition of green collar jobs needs to be amended to re-embrace—and prioritize—the kind of land management jobs it signaled in the ‘90s. For example, says plant biologist Mark Heath, who works with Berkeley-based open land management and restoration company Shelterbelt Builders, “I would like to open the idea of green jobs to include invasive plant management.”

Heath, together with members of the California Invasive Plant Council, recently met with lawmakers in Sacramento to raise awareness about the impacts of non-native plant species such as yellow starthistle on California’s agricultural and wild lands. Invasive plants are a direct threat to the environment and the economy, displacing native plants and wildlife, increasing wildfire and flood danger, consuming valuable water, and destroying productive range and timberlands.

Heath says he was surprised to find that legislators seemed to think green jobs equaled solar panels and not much else. He would like the government to fund a program like the Conservation Corps in which young people would be paid to learn natural land management techniques and to become stewards of the natural world. He says that since biodiversity is continually under attack by human development, conservation necessitates more than just leaving the natural world alone. “Habitat restoration requires both the academic understanding of how natural systems function and a trade culture to work the land with tools, time, and labor,” Heath says. “To accomplish anything, we will have to foster a class of scientist-laborers who not only understand the land but can also respond to it. Engineers and scientists cannot do it alone.”

Heath’s colleague Daniel Gluesenkamp is a past president of the California Invasive Plant Council; he now works at Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Bouverie Preserve in Glen Ellen as the director of habitat protection and restoration. Glusenkamp says the ranch provides green collar jobs with its habitat restoration projects, offering entry-level experience to volunteers. He is pleased that some stimulus money is going to map invasive plants in California, “so we can figure out which species and infestations are highest priority, then develop clear plans for where we start and where we go from there” to eliminate the invaders.

“We need folks trained to do restoration if we’re to save the biodiversity we’ve inherited,” Glusenkamp says. “Habitat restoration is a new field; we are still refining the technology. A typical restoration worker has a college or grad school degree, [but] we need to involve people without biology degrees. We need people with backgrounds in forestry, landscaping, and customer service.” He says that the field of natural areas land management needs an “efficacy revolution” equivalent to the leaps and bounds made in human medicine in the 1960s. He compares natural areas management to human obstetrics: “Until recently, and in spite of an array of advanced tools available in hospitals, mortality of mothers and babies was lower when birth occurred at home. Obstetrics was improved by an efficacy revolution in which practitioners began measuring outcome, adopting best practices, and improving training. Now we need a restoration revolution. This would produce ‘land doctors’ well versed in what practices have good or bad outcomes for local ecosystems.”

In developing such a specialty, Gluesenkamp says, “We need to look to Native American land management, which tended to combine good understanding of the natural systems with long-term stable management regimes.” He stresses that to preserve biodiversity, “We need to quit introducing and spreading invasive plants and animals, and we need to quit pumping carbon into the atmosphere.”

Gluesenkamp points to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area as an organization that has done a good job of pulling together people of varying backgrounds to work on restoring native plants at San Francisco’s Lands End. In addition to the heavy equipment operators essential for habitat restoration, that job site required project information coordinators who helped explain the scope of work to concerned residents on the periphery. Gluesenkamp says these types of jobs are a good fit for people with customer service experience.

Several years after writing Green Collar Jobs, Durning founded the Sightline Institute, an environmental think tank based in Seattle. Durning’s colleague, Sightline research associate Roger Valdez, worked with him to write a report issued this October called “Green Collar Jobs: Realizing the Promise.” Valdez says that while the report focuses on energy efficiency and renewable energy, the need for habitat restoration and invasive species management has not gone away. “It’s not an either/or situation,” he says. “The latest manifestation of the work includes what Alan wrote about initially, but the focus has expanded. At its root is a different way of thinking about the economy: Instead of turning natural resources into capital, we want to turn savings from renewable energy and conservation into capital.”

“Eventually renewable power, alternative fuels, sustainable farming and forestry, clean transportation and ecosystem transportation can all play important roles in the green jobs transformation,” the report states. “Yet buildings, which account for nearly forty percent of US energy consumption, are where the green jobs potential is most accessible.” The authors note that retrofitting buildings will save homeowners billions of dollars while offering employment to out-of-work craftsmen in the building trades.

The authors see great promise in green jobs overall. They cite research from economist Robert Polin of the University of Massachusetts that show the increased “bang for buck” of investing in green jobs. Among Polin’s findings: Spending $1 million yields only 1.5 “high-credentialed” fossil fuel-related jobs (such as for architects and managers) as opposed to 3.9 similar clean energy jobs; 1.6 “mid-credentialed” fossil fuel-related jobs (such as for crew chiefs and technicians) vs. 4.8 equivalent clean energy jobs; 2.2 “low-credentialed” fossil fuel-related jobs (such as laborer or clerk) vs. 8 clean energy jobs; and .7 “low-credentialed jobs in fields with good potential for earnings growth” such as construction, manufacturing, utilities in oil vs. 4.8 such jobs in clean energy.

Add ‘em up and you’ve got 6 “conventional” jobs versus 21.5 green jobs for the same million bucks. With doubledigit unemployment, not to mention a grateful planet, the choice seems obvious.

Fewer buses mean more car rides, greater greenhouse gas emissions, and worsened air quality. For those who stick with public transit, through necessity or conviction, it will likely mean a slower, less convenient ride. Yet so far in this recessionary era, much government transit investment has emphasized personal—not public—transportation. There were the automaker bailouts and the $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program, and there is typically an eighty percent highway/twenty percent public transit split in the federal transportation bills that Congress authorizes every six years. Caught in a Catch-22, public transportation operators are often forced to offer fewer alternatives and worse service to their ridership.

AC Transit is a microcosm of the nation’s under-funded mass transit problem: in 1955, back in the heyday of muscle cars and chrome, the publicly owned Alameda-Contra Costa Transit bus district was born. By 1960 AC Transit offered 250 innovative “transit liners” and had created an intercity express bus network. Yet public funding has shorted transit for so long that today many agencies are now on the ropes—AC Transit currently faces a $57 million deficit, fares have gone up, and retiring employees are not being replaced.

Throughout the fall, the agency grappled with the possibility of a fifteen percent service cut that, starting in January 2010, would close some lines and merge or reroute others. The most hotly contested proposed cut is to line 67, which carries riders from the downtown Berkeley BART station to Tilden Park. Other potential cuts include line 13 between Lakeshore and Crocker Highlands, the 15 line between Oakland’s 12th Street BART station and downtown Berkeley, and the 51, the agency’s busiest line, between the Bridgestone Shopping Center in Alameda and Berkeley’s Amtrak station.

Loath to reduce its service, the agency has searched for alternatives. In September it asked the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) if it might divert $80 million—previously slated for a bus rapid transit system between downtown Berkeley, Oakland, and San Leandro—to maintaining regular operations. In October, the agency requested that the MTC postpone the implementation of service cuts. As of press time, no decision had been reached regarding either request.

But even riders unaffected by specific line closures face higher fares. Fare prices went up this July, from $1.75 to $2 dollars a ride. Transbay fares increased by 50 cents. Since 25-cent transfers are only good once, riders who transfer a couple times will pay over $4 per one-way trip.

To transit watchers like Carli Paine, transportation program director of TransForm—a policy organization that advocates for public transit and more walkable communities—the possibility of service cutbacks seems inevitable. “It was a situation that was really waiting to happen,” she says, “because we don’t have long-term sustainable, stable funding for public transit operations.”

Indeed, public transit agencies are at the mercy of a complicated and often changing funding system. “The starting point,” says Nathan Landau, transportation planner for AC Transit, “is that no transit system in North America covers its operating costs through fares.” AC Transit receives its funding from multiple sources: about 18 percent from the fare box; 38 percent from county, state, and federal sales tax revenue including (since 1971) California’s spillover gas tax revenues; 25 percent via local property taxes including bridge-toll money; 17 percent state and federal grants including Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality money; and about 1 percent from those ubiquitous ads on the buses.

During a poor economy like today’s, the agency suffers steep declines in its share of county sales tax revenue, statewide sales taxes, California general fund dollars, and property taxes. But that doesn’t stop expenses from adding up. “Just like everybody else, we have to pay our lights and gas,” says AC Transit spokesman Clarence Johnson. “We have to pay salaries. We have to do all the things everybody else does, so for us to operate in this climate means we’ll be struggling just like everybody else. We’ve had layoffs. We’ve had fare increases. And now we’re talking about service cuts.”

When public transit agencies do receive government funds, money is often earmarked for capital expenses such as tracks, stations, and vehicles. The funding is often not transferable to day-to-day operations. “Most transit funding out there in the world is capital funding,” Paine says. “It puts transit operators in a really hard position, because you can buy a new bus, but you can’t pay for somebody to run it or to drive it. Or you can’t pay for the fuel to run it. It’s a little backwards! There’s this huge paucity of money for actually operating our existing systems.”

Worse, over the past decade the state has actively rerouted money from public transit. Since 2000, the state has diverted $100 million from AC Transit’s portion of the gas tax spillover fund to California’s general fund, says Johnson, who estimates that $60 million was diverted in the past three years. In 2008 alone, at the height of the economic crisis, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger diverted more than $26 million in state funds from AC Transit to the general fund.

In 2007, the California Transit Association sued the state, claiming that it had illegally diverted state transit funds to the general fund, violating voter-supported measures that had slated those funds for transit, including 1990’s Proposition 116, which mandated that spillover monies must be used to fund transit. This September, the California Supreme Court upheld an earlier appellate court decision that ruled in favor of the transit association. The court could force the state to return money it diverted to AC Transit.

It’s unclear how much money might be returned to agencies like AC Transit, or what impact this will have on the agency’s immediate woes. “We’re still waiting to find out what the court’s decision means for transit agencies,” says Paine. “I know that there are lawyers trying to figure this out as we speak.” While excited that the Supreme Court upheld the appellate court’s decision, which she says sends a clear message to the state about respecting the will of voters, Paine doesn’t expect that those funds will be redirected to transit in the coming year.

Not knowing when and whether the money will be returned makes planning difficult, AC Transit’s Johnson says. “The decision has been made, but we haven’t gotten any money yet,” he says. Getting back the approximately $60 million that was diverted over the last three years, “at a $20-million clip over a three-year period would be a tremendous boon for us,” he says. “It could really stave off some of these service reductions that are now in the works.” If that happened, through creative planning, Johnson predicts that AC Transit may be able to rescue the nearly 1,000 hours of  bus service per day that it’s slated to cut.

The possibility of service reductions couldn’t come at a worse time for riders. “In an economic crisis when people are struggling with affordability in their own households, being able to rely on public transportation as a low-cost alternative to owning a vehicle is a really great way to save money,” Paine says. “It’s exactly the wrong time to un-fund public transit.” AC Transit doesn’t relish the idea of cutting back services, either. “It’s one thing if you have a recession and you come out of it, you recover. But a lot of us are worried that the level of service will be permanently lowered,” says Landau.

AC Transit held a series of public workshops throughout the East Bay asking for community input on its proposed service cuts. “We’ve always had a very open process,” Johnson says. “We’ve realized that this time there were a lot of people that were going to be impacted, at a time, quite frankly, when they could least afford to be impacted.”

All of this budget cutting may also exact an environmental cost. Public transit is a sure way to reduce the carbon output of moving people between home and work, and keeping cars off the road improves air quality—according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the average American household produces 12.6 tons of carbon dioxide per year by driving. Even if many riders take the bus for financial reasons or because they don’t have an alternative, and not out of pure concern for their carbon footprint, says Johnson, “They’re having an impact on our environment. I really think bus riders need to be hailed for that because they are contributing in a major way to trying to stop this great depletion of our ozone.”

For some, cutbacks in public transit funding suggest a conflict about how the state hopes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “There seems to be a big disconnect, at least at the state level, where they’re doing a lot of the climate action work,” says Landau. “They want to create a greener climate, deal with greenhouse gases. I think they’re sincere. But at the same time they’re cutting transit agencies to smithereens. That’s been a huge frustration for all of us.”

In the meantime, AC Transit has launched several initiatives to help the state meet its greenhouse gas emission targets. Since 2000, the agency has been demonstrating that its hydrogen fuel cell buses are cleaner and twice as efficient as fossil fuel-burning vehicles, emitting only water vapor from their tailpipes.

And, as part of the Economic Recovery Act, in late September AC Transit was awarded a competitive grant of $6.4 million to install solar panels in its primary bus maintenance yard to generate green hydrogen for its zeroemission buses. The operation is sustainable and produces zero pollution. Johnson says the grant will reduce the agency’s power bills. “We put in a much smaller solar system at another one of our facilities and are estimated to save about $5 million over the course of the next fifteen years,” he says. “Every dime we save on one end, we can put back into service on the other.”

Some transit advocates feel that the way that governments have chosen to spend transportation money is an indicator of their economic and environmental priorities. “Whenever you spend money as a public agency you’re not just making a spending decision, you’re making a policy decision and a value decision,” says Paine. “There’s a growing network across the country of folks who feel like we need to have reform in how our transportation dollars are spent. Our highway networks are built out. We need to maintain those, but we really need to invest in the networks of other modes—biking and walking, and especially public transportation, local and interregional.”

TransForm, along with a broad coalition of other agencies, is working towards a more reliable source of funding, seeking reform in this year’s Federal Transportation Authorization, the national transportation bill that provides money to highway and bridge maintenance and public transit. The proposed bill assigns a smaller percentage of money to highways and more to public transit (about 23 percent as opposed to the historical figure of slightly under twenty percent). The bill has been delayed as Congress fights about the need for an overall plan rather than a series of piecemeal projects, and over how to fund it.

Some believe that investing in public transit will not only result in environmental benefits such as improved local air quality, but also will also boost the economy, by providing jobs and by helping people get to work. To an unemployed person without a reliable form of transportation, the world of possible workplaces can become very small, and of course the already employed need inexpensive, reliable ways to commute. Employers also recognize the importance of a robust public transportation system. Being near a transit stop helps East Bay employers—who cite proximity in their job listings—attract and retain employees. Says Erin Steva, the transportation associate for the public interest research group CALPIRG, “Studies show transit investments create nearly twenty percent more jobs than new highways, for the same amount of spending.” According to the California Transit Association, about 31,000 jobs are created for every $1 billion turned towards new public transit projects.

It’s a novel idea, but boosting—rather than shrinking—the public transit budget during a once-in-a-lifetime crisis might help the economy recover while contributing to environmental responsibility. As Landau puts it: “I think transit jobs are green jobs.”

This front yard, producing pounds of food each week, is not, after all, just like the others next door. Where a lawn used to be now sprouts food: artichokes blooming like dahlias, red-green tomatoes hiding like treasures among acrid-smelling leaves, and tiny lettuces unfurling in the sun.

Sylvaiette and Den Hill, the home’s owners, planted their front yard garden in early 2009 as an eco-friendly alternative to a water- and chemical-guzzling lawn. The garden now uses a drip irrigation system, and the Hills harvest almost all their vegetables from it, only buying eggs and some fruit at the farmers’ market. “Before, our lawn served no purpose,” explains Sylvaiette Hill, who has shoulder-length graying hair and an easy laugh. “We save on money and water, and we give away the extra food we can’t eat.”

As the recession drags on, more homeowners of every income level are replacing expensive and water-intensive patches of grass with miniature farms that become at home produce aisles. In 2009, the number of Americans growing at least some of their own food was expected to jump 19 percent from the previous year to 43 million households, according to the National Gardening Association. And in today’s economy where sales seem to go only one direction—down—sales of gardening supplies are up. Seed sales at Burpee Seed Company, one of the nation’s largest and oldest home gardening providers, have risen thirty percent this year. Even First Lady Michelle Obama set aside some of the White House’s South Lawn to grow food. Like the Victory gardeners of World War II, families are using growing food to demonstrate solidarity against common crises—the specters of peak oil, tainted food scares and, most of all, the malingering economy.

Some families, of course, have long relied on gardening for help managing on a tight budget. Abeni Ramsey, an Oakland single mother of two daughters, had always wanted to serve her family healthy dishes made from quality ingredients. Yet while commuting to school at UC Davis to earn her bachelor’s degree in agriculture, she couldn’t find enough money to put nourishing food on the table. She filled her pantry with donations from a crisis food bank for a time, but the choices were so nutritionally barren that she applied for state assistance. The monthly $350 in food stamps only bought so many organic fruits and vegetables, and she supplemented with $150 of her own money to buy whatever was on sale—usually two-for-one cereals and breads at Safeway. She had to fill her girls’ stomachs but hated serving them prepackaged junk. “I asked myself, ‘What can I do to make sure my kids get fed?’” she says.

Three years ago, Ramsey applied to the nonprofit City Slicker Farms’ Backyard Gardening Program, which installs gardens in West Oakland homes and gives low income individuals the knowledge and resources to grow their own food. In a single Saturday, City Slicker Farms employees ripped out the dead grass behind Ramsey’s home and replaced it with raised beds, a compost system, and her favorite crops. Since then, Ramsey has added more beds, installed a rain catchment system to save water for irrigating, and begun raising goats and chickens. This summer she began working for City Slicker Farms as the community market farm coordinator, managing the organization’s organic produce stall.

Gardening at home is a lot of work, but Ramsey says it pays off. “Winter gardening isn’t as glorious as summer gardening,” she says. “It’s a pain to feed the chickens and muck out the coop in the rain, and I grow plants that have a longer maturity time, like turnips, onions and potatoes. But it makes economic sense to grow my own.”

Ramsey and her girls, ages thirteen and six, now devour meals made mostly of vegetables picked from their yard. They eat canned pickles, tomatoes, and green beans Ramsey puts up. Both of the girls help in the garden, and the only time they get sugary cereal is when they visit their grandparents. “Our diet has improved significantly, and I haven’t been to the grocery store in two weeks,” Ramsey says. Instead of stocking up on shelf-stable packaged goods and produce that might go bad in a few days, she simply steps outside to pick kale, blueberries, or leeks. “You can’t do that on $350 a month in food stamps,” she says.

Barbara Finnin, City Slicker Farms’ executive director, points out that although California produces roughly thirteen percent of the country’s farm commodities, many urban communities here have limited access to healthy food. As long as the neighborhood bodega is the only nearby source of groceries, obesity, diabetes and other health issues so prevalent in poor areas will continue, she maintains. “Fritos, cereal, and maybe a mealy apple aren’t exactly life-affirming or enriching foods,” Finnin says. “People in low-income communities don’t have access to the organic food they want to eat. No one I know says, ‘Please give me pesticides,’ but they don’t have the choice.”

City Slicker Farms now installs a new garden every week, and has a waiting list about ten people deep, but Finnin says requests for garden installations have not skyrocketed during the recession. “In West Oakland, people have been dealing with an economic crisis for years,” she says. “It’s nothing new.”

What is new, though, is an increasing cultural awareness that the perfectly groomed front lawn—long a status symbol for American homeowners—may not be the most productive use of that space, nor all that good for the environment. Sylvaiette Hill, for example, decided to get rid of the grass in her front yard after watching water roll off the lawn and into a storm drain night after night. Dedicating so many resources to an unused patch of grass, especially in drought-weary California, seemed wasteful. “We wanted to do something different,” she explains.

Hill grew up with an expansive garden in her family’s backyard. Although she treasures the memory of stepping outside to bite into a sun-warmed tomato, the other parts of growing food—especially hauling buckets of water—pushed her and her husband to farm out the labor. Last March she hired Garden Fare, a San Francisco-based landscaping and gardening company that specializes in edible gardens, to convert her lawn and do weekly upkeep. The eye-catching sunburst layout of the beds gardener Leslie Bennett installed produces a startling amount of food: at their peak, three tomato plants yielded a whopping twenty pounds of tomatoes a week. “It was tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner!” Hill says with a laugh.

All those tomatoes would have cost the environment plenty had Hill bought them from the grocery store. Growing organically at home eliminates the need for chemical-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as for energy-intensive hothouse growing methods. The tomato you pick outside the front door makes a significantly shorter trek than the 1,500-mile trip the average veggie takes to market—and there’s no need for fossil fuelburning transportation.

Growing food instead of a lawn has less quantifiable benefits, too. In the fall of 2008, Zachary Norris replaced his front lawn with an edible garden for the usual reasons: “Watering my lawn was a waste of money and bad for the environment, and I wanted more access to fresh fruits and vegetables,” he says of his decision to grow food in the lot sandwiched between a walkway and his driveway.

He had no idea that his garden would also grow him friends. Norris says that before he began gardening, he didn’t really talk to his neighbors, even though he has lived in the same Oakland neighborhood for most of his life. But once his front yard began to sprout greens and edible flowers, passersby stopped to admire his work or offer advice. (Admittedly, he needed it: Norris didn’t have much gardening experience, so he ate the immature shoots of red onions until realizing he was sabotaging his onion crop, and he struggled to subdue an enormous dinosaur kale that threatened to overtake the garden.) He found himself engaged in conversations with neighbors as he picked ingredients for dinner, and soon enough, strangers turned into friends. “There are these intangible benefits of offering people food and people stopping by to say hello,” Norris says.

Once he got the hang of raising food, Norris found himself with a new problem: The garden yielded much more produce than he and his wife, Saru Jayaraman, could eat. Loath to see such nutritious fare become landfill fodder, he now brings the extra strawberries, chard, and squash to his mother across the street, his neighbors, and his coworkers. Instead of trashing tomatoes that refused to ripen, he passed them to a neighbor who made them into relish. And instead of borrowing food—from his mother or sister, or from a neighbor with a catering business who sometimes gave him leftovers—Norris has a chance to be the generous one. “Now I have more to give back,” he says. “I can offer things in return.”

Norris’ refusal to let such abundance go to waste is the spirit that Amy Franceschini, co-creator of the San Francisco Garden Registry, wants to harness. She and her partners created a Web site, GardenRegistry.org, where San Francisco gardeners post alerts of their surpluses for others to pick up. Franceschini sees the interest in local and urban agriculture as the epitome of relying on others. “It’s more than a fad; it’s a concern about where our food comes from, and everyone has to be involved in this food crisis,” she says.

Devin Slavin has taken that concept of communal sustainability to a most entertaining extreme. Along with a friend, two years ago the 27-year-old permaculture designer started the Grow Food Party Crew, and since then he and a veritable army of volunteers have converted about 25 lawns into gardens in Santa Cruz, Ventura, Ojai, and other nearby cities. Slavin and an average of thirty volunteers gather at an individual’s home and spend the day ripping out sod, filling in dirt, and tucking starts into the newly tilled soil—for free.

If a full day of manual labor doesn’t sound appealing, keep in mind that Slavin very consciously calls his project a party crew. Participants bring a guitar or set of bongos for an impromptu concert, a potluck-style spread is served at lunch and children come to help (or simply play in the dirt). “When we first started, we were like ‘Whoa, that was easy and one of the funnest things we’ve ever done,’” Slavin remembers. “We asked friends to pitch in, and all of a sudden we have gardens all over the place.”

News of his group has spread by word of mouth and YouTube videos, and communities as far away as Germany and New Zealand have started their own party crews. Slavin offers his services to everyone, not only low-income or underserved families. “A lot of people face the challenge of opening up their lives to the community and asking for help,” Slavin observes. “But once we get past that, we create an opportunity for the community to make a contribution. People really want to pitch in—that’s another kind of nourishment.”

Slavin thrives on encouraging neighbors to help each other and introducing people who otherwise would never have met. “People who have never gardened come in and experience something they unfortunately don’t get in many places, a feeling of belonging to a village, working together peacefully and having fun,” he says.

Although growing your own food usually pays off in the long run—all the gardeners interviewed for this story spend less on groceries these days because of their harvests—the start-up costs can be daunting. Soil amendments, planter boxes, starts, and fertilizer add up, and of course, you still have to water.

Yet thrifty urban farmers have found penny-saving shortcuts everywhere. Composting yard waste and table scraps yields nutrient-rich fertilizer in a few months while diverting garbage from the dump. Sprouting seeds yourself, especially ones you save from your plants, can minimize the need to shop at pricey nurseries. Installing rain catchment systems can stop the need of a hose for weeks, and putting in a graywater system can delay it for months. Heather Flores, author of Food not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community, says that by reusing graywater, swapping seeds, and sharing tools, she’s brought her gardening tab close to zero. According to City Slicker Farms’ annual report, 92 percent of its participants say they save money by gardening.

Of course, growing your own food still requires an investment of time. But even so, many people overestimate the commitment it takes, says Flores. “People should expect to put the same amount of energy into a garden as they do with their current lawn maintenance,” she estimates. Most of the gardeners interviewed for this story spend fifteen to thirty minutes most days working in their plots and more during intensive periods, such as planting time.

Many gardeners don’t look at the hours spent with their crops as a chore but rather as a restorative activity. “It’s so satisfying,” Ramsey says of her morning work in the garden. “It’s nice to have a reason to get up in the morning besides going to work. It’s my meditation time: I get connected to the world in a more substantial way.”

That bond often extends beyond the confines of a yard to encompass a larger ecology. On a clear fall day, Leslie Bennett, the Garden Fare gardener who designed and tends the Hills’ patch, is doing upkeep and gathering the week’s harvest. She plucks mature lettuces, pinches off yellowed tomato leaves, and surveys the front yard oasis. “Who cares about a lawn?” she asks. “But if your yard is special and it grows your food, you’ll develop a strong feeling for the garden, the land, and, by extension, the environment. It’s so close that you realize you can’t pollute the ground if you eat from it.”

That connection is clear in the Hills’ garden. Sharpiescrawled labels on wooden spoons and spatulas peek out among crawling vines and delicate-looking shoots, identifying each crop. Bennett pauses from her harvesting, wipes her dirty hands on her jeans and points to the weather-worn markers. “They’re the perfect metaphor for the cycle that links us all from till to table.”

Tear up the lawn. Grass, much like invasive English Ivy, is a hardy colonizer, so you’ll have to physically remove it if you want to plant this winter. First, rip out as much sod as you can. Next, dig down a foot and a half to remove the root system, shaking out as much soil as possible. A rototiller may be faster than hand labor, but the machine will leave behind pieces of roots that will regrow grass.

For a less time-intensive process, and if you can wait until spring to plant, cover the grass with non-waxed cardboard and then add a six inch-deep layer of mulch, such as wood chips. After about three months, the grass beneath the cardboard will have died, nutrients from the cover will have trickled down, and you can plant directly into the mulch. (If you buy the mulch from a tree care company, make sure the chips aren’t contaminated with diseases that attack local trees, such as eucalyptus and elm, so your soil doesn’t become infected, too.)

Amend the dirt. Much of the soil in Northern California is clay-based, so you’ll need to add nutrients for a healthy growing medium. Soil enhancers such as manures, compost, and fish emulsions will give the ground the nutrients it needs to yield a bountiful crop. Many municipalities and nonprofits offer free or discounted compost, too.

Plan your garden. You’ll want a mix of trees and perennials, such as drought-resistant citrus or pomegranates, annuals (your produce), and pollinator-attracting native plants, such as Mexican Marigolds. Read seed labels or talk with a nursery employee to learn when and how to plant each variety. Think about the layout—for instance, you may want herbs close to the door, since you’ll use them often for cooking—and the design of the paths to make tending the area easy.

Plant your garden. Although we tend to think of gardening as a springtime activity, in much of coastal Northern California, winter is an ideal time to start. The soil is less active so your plants will have an easier time settling in. The season is also perfect for planting winter crops such as beans and peas, as they capture nitrogen—an element essential for produce yet scarce in nature—and make it available for the rest of the year’s abundance.

Get more information. DIY can only get you so far; if you need help, seek it out from fellow gardeners, Web sites, or books. Thayer recommends An Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison and Sunset magazine’s Western Garden Book.

Thayer reminds gardeners that growing your own food is often a process of trial and error. Don’t be discouraged by setbacks or daunted by the idea of perfection, he says. And while planning is essential for a successful garden, nothing will grow before you begin. So start digging!

The California Coastal Commission, with its mandate of upholding the 1976 Coastal Act, is the last line of defense against unwarranted coastal development, pollution, and the blockage of public access to the shoreline. The agency, formed in 1972 by Proposition 20—the Coastal Initiative—was given the final word on development permit applications up to 1,000 feet inland in an effort to protect coastal wetlands, waterways, scenic vistas, and the beaches themselves from the ever-increasing development pressures. The bulk of the commission staff’s work involves sending officers out to project sites to evaluate the potential impacts of proposed developments. Additionally, when violations of the Coastal Act are reported, enforcement personnel make site visits to investigate and recommend action.

But in the years since its inception, the agency has suffered numerous budget cuts, and its staff has dwindled from 200 in 1980 to fewer than 130 today. During the recent economic crisis, the same problems facing Main Street are taking their toll upon state agencies like the Coastal Commission as well. “State revenue is reliant upon income tax, which is deeply affected by the ups and downs of the economy,” says Bob Merrill, the Commission’s North Coast district manager.

In years past, inflation has caused the Coastal Commission’s static budget to diminish in terms of real dollar value, but the impact of the 2008 economic meltdown has been even more severe, creating such a time and money crunch that hard-pressed staffers can’t always head off environmental problems before they start.

Not enough people, not enough hours

Bob Merrill couldn’t work longer hours if he wanted to—with state-mandated furloughs in effect this year, he has roughly 14 percent less time on the job.

Merrill notes that the furloughs created a de facto staff reduction, leaving less time for staffers to complete a growing amount of work. The North Coast in particular, with its vast open space and sparse population, never had that many representatives on the Coastal Commission staff — most are assigned to the busier Southern California districts. The furloughs have made it even tougher for them to stay on top of permit applications and reports of coastal land use violations.

“We still have an enforcement program, and we’re still enforcing, but clearly with less staff resources, it takes a longer time to respond to reports of violations,” Merrill says. “We’re not as responsive as we need to be.”

As a result, Merrill says, some violations cannot be dealt with right away, which may lead to ground and water contamination, development upon sensitive habitat, erosion, and loss of coastal access. In other cases, the permit approval process has stretched from weeks to months, frustrating good faith applicants who are trying to develop according to California law. “Most applicants wish the process would go faster,” says Merrill. For example the city of Eureka applied for a zoning conversion to turn an old restaurant into office space, and because the building is located next to a slough, the city had to apply for a Coastal Commission permit.

However, says Merrill, this September “They said they were frustrated by the waiting and withdrew their permit application.” Most days, Merrill and his staff are in the office, fielding calls from permit applicants and local government officials, reviewing applications and local coastal plans, and attending interagency meetings. But the bread and butter of the job is going out on site visits, during which commission staffers evaluate developments’ effects on natural resources such as habitat, views, or coastal access. “That’s one of the enjoyable parts of the job, quite frankly, is to get out on this amazing coastline,” Merrill says. But this, too, has been a victim of cost-cutting.

The North Coast office is in Eureka, but Merrill says visits to more remote locations in Del Norte and Mendocino counties have been severely limited by budget cuts. No money means no gasoline to get places; it’s that simple. “Budget shortfalls make it difficult to travel to those places,” he says. Worse, very few issues that need to be inspected can be dealt with all at once, meaning expensive return trips for staff members.

The recession has also undermined the commission’s enforcement power. There are four people in Merrill’s office who process permit applications for coastal development, but only one enforcement officer, Nancy Cave. Tasked with investigating reports of Coastal Act violations, Cave spends a lot of her time in the field, performing site visits and making recommendations about what actions should be taken. Although occasionally assisted by unpaid interns, Cave must cover all 300 miles of the North Coast district by herself, while supervising two other enforcement officers covering another 450-mile stretch from Sonoma County down to San Luis Obispo County.

Worse, she isn’t even based in Eureka with the rest of the district staff, but a five-hour drive away at the commission’s San Francisco headquarters. “We’re always busy and always on the road,” she says. “I’m a supervisor who should have an officer in the Eureka office, but I haven’t had one for nine years.”

When a violation of the Coastal Act is called in, it must be visually confirmed for the official record. However, Cave is often compelled to carry out her investigations by correspondence; over the years, she has developed a rapport with city and county officials who can be her eyes and ears in a pinch. It’s not ideal, but under the circumstances, Merrill says it’s the best they can do.

Having begun her career with the Coastal Commission staff in 1977, Cave is no stranger to adversity. “When I started in enforcement in 1985, there was no enforcement program, so I was the only staff member on the whole coast,” she says — that’s roughly 1,100 miles. She says that the recent round of budget cuts and furloughs have made handling her current caseload tricky—especially when she has to travel to the far northern end of the state, which can be an eight hour drive—but the fourteen percent pay cut staffers have endured as a result of the state’s financial woes has been especially painful. “It’s tough, but it hasn’t stopped people from trying to do their jobs,” she says.

A bad example

The results of under-enforcement can be seen in places like Pacific Shores, the skeletal remains of a never-built development located just north of Crescent City, in Merrill’s struggling North Coast District. Consisting of a subdivision road grid laid out in the 1960s—before either the Coastal Initiative or the Coastal Act were passed, and during a time of significant growth in California—it has become a perennial problem for Merrill, Cave, and the rest of the district’s overextended staff. Back then, land speculators hoped to expand into places that sounded good on paper, but in reality, were largely uninhabitable or lacked access to services. Today, the Coastal Commission has to deal with the environmental fallout of what happens when unbuildable lots are sold to unsuspecting buyers.

Although problems like these are generally handled by county planning and building departments, it just so happens that Pacific Shores is right next to the ocean, and therefore within the Coastal Commission’s jurisdiction. Pacific Shores—a forlorn locale just far enough away from municipal resources to keep it away from consistent monitoring—never got the water and sewer infrastructure required for landowners to actually build houses there. It had a water district for a few years, but even after collecting fees, pipes were never laid. It exists as a swampy area next to a huge lagoon; officials from Del Norte County say that most of the lots are flooded half of the year, making them physically uninhabitable.

Today, the area serves as an impromptu dumping ground, strewn with abandoned cars, appliances, and other trash—Merrill says that this trash often chokes the adjacent lagoon. A dozen or so people live on their unimproved lots in cars, trailers, and even tents. Unexplained brush fires are common, as is crime—a meth lab was found there a few years ago, and the empty streets are regularly used for illegal drag racing. “I still see people dumping used oil and car batteries out in the weeds,” says Dave Mason, a code enforcement officer for the Del Norte County Planning Department. “I’m not an environmental specialist by any stretch of the imagination, but dumping that kind of stuff out there can’t be good.”

Mason says the county has limited resources, and can only afford to send a cleanup crew—with the dump trucks required to haul everything away—every three to five years to clean up the trash. The California Department of Fish & Game has offered some help by working with local activist groups to buy up properties so that the area can eventually be turned into a wildlife refuge. Lots are still being sold on the Internet, though, bringing in often hostile owners who are not eager to leave their cheaply acquired land for someplace more suitable for building. And because Pacific Shores is located several hours away from the North Coast District’s Eureka headquarters, Merrill says that neither he nor any of his staff can get up there often enough to pay much more attention to the area than the county does.

So with government officials rarely available to enforce environmental law, Pacific Shores largely does without it.

What’s next?

The Coastal Commission doesn’t just watch over housing developments; in the North Coast district, development often takes the form of road construction and other public infrastructure projects. Merrill points out that even projects receiving federal stimulus funding require Coastal Commission review if they’re in his jurisdiction. “We’re finding that because so many projects [proposed in our district] are public infrastructure projects funded by grant and stimulus money, it’s difficult with all the furloughs and budget cuts to dedicate available staff to all of these projects,” he says. Yet federal stimulus money carries with it certain deadlines, making the lagging Coastal Commission permit application review process a threat to federal funding. “Project applicants, especially for stimulus-funded projects, have deadlines they have to meet,” says Merrill.

A few stimulus-funded projects awaiting Coastal Commission review include a shoreline revetment project in Crescent City, Humboldt State University’s dock expansion on Humboldt Bay, and improvements needed on the Klamath River boat ramp. All of those projects have to be reviewed by the Coastal Commission staff to gauge their potential environmental effects.

ABX3 33, a state energy department reorganization bill working its way through the state assembly, would establish a new energy agency, giving it sole authority to issue site permits for energy projects and exemption from Coastal Commission review. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger touts the move as a money-saver, but even if it speeds up the construction process, some critics view it as yet another potential roadblock for the beleaguered Coastal Commission.

Meanwhile, commission staffers worry that furloughs and budget cuts will continue to make doing their jobs an uphill battle. “The news doesn’t sound terribly encouraging that it will change soon,” says Merrill of his staffing shortfall, although he looks with hope to July 1 of next year, when the new budget is scheduled to come out.

And most of all, commission staffers worry that with less attention being paid to human activity in remote places, the fate of the natural environment—water quality, wildlife habitat, and coastal access—will suffer. Leaving violations unresolved creates a lawless atmosphere in places like Pacific Shores where nobody is watching most of the time, and lets environmental problems fester. Says Cave, “You’re sending out a message that it’s okay to break the law.”