Most California sea lions are not tagged, so there is no way to confirm that these newly arrived animals are the same ones that beat a hasty retreat from San Francisco Bay. But the sea lions’ rapid invasion of these Oregon waters has led marine scientists to suggest that the California animals joined other similarly motivated pinnipeds searching for colder waters and a better food supply.

Sea lions appeared to be on the move throughout 2009: Many marinas located on the Northern California coast also reported more sea lion sightings that year, although none approached the numbers that were hauling out in the Bay Area. “Their numbers definitely increased in 2009,” says Tim Morley, Santa Cruz Marina harbormaster. He points out that increased numbers can boost competition among the sea lions, and cause problems for humans, too. “Competition in the open water outside the harbor is pretty tough for sea lions,” he says. “The big males that get injured pull themselves up on the dock to recuperate. They are unpredictable and dangerous.”

The sea lions’ departure from San Francisco Bay leaves both bad and good news in its wake: Bad tidings for sea lion fans but a welcome reversal of fortune for beleaguered fishermen and boat owners who have long felt frustrated in their attempts to ward off marauding sea lions without running afoul of the law. At Pier 39, a popular tourist destination on San Francisco’s waterfront, the timing couldn’t have been worse: Thanksgiving is the official start of the Christmas shopping season, and the pier’s merchants were priming for the holiday traffic that the boisterous sea lions attract. “The sea lions are the number one draw at the pier,” says Pier 39 marina’s harbormistress, Sheila Chandor.

Chandor is in her 25th year of managing the pier and has been around long enough to remember when the sea lions first appeared, shortly after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. “There was a male sea lion hanging around the dock—‘hauling out’ is the term we use. We nicknamed him ‘Flea Collar’ as he had a piece of wire around his neck,” Chandor recalls. “Two months after his arrival the sea lion population had grown to about five hundred, right after the height of the herring season here in the bay.”

Over the last twenty years, the pier’s sea lion population has ebbed and flowed, says Chandor, and managing the interests of both the pier’s official and non-official tenants has been tricky. The official residents—the merchants and the marina boat owners—have very different feelings about the pinniped crashers. Foot traffic to nearby shops and restaurants increased as the word got out that the sea lions were hauling out at the pier, and the merchants, happy to see an uptick in customers, started feeling protective about their new neighbors.

However, these warm feelings were not always shared by boat owners, who sometimes faced cantankerous male sea lions hauled out on the docks, blocking entrances to their slips. Owners sometimes needed a helping hand to remove the sea lions from their property—no small feat since these animals can grow up to eight feet long and weigh up to 882 pounds. It didn’t help public relations, says Chandor, that sea lions have smelly breath.

Pier management tried to deal with the influx. “We had to kind of think on our feet about this issue,” Chandor explains. “Over the years we rearranged where we berthed boats in order to minimize boat owners’ encounters with nosy (and noisy) sea lions.”

But when the pier’s sea lion population tripled in 2009, pier management had to revisit this containment strategy, Chandor explains. “We had six new floats, expressly dedicated to the lions, installed to accommodate their growing presence. We also added a ‘sea lion ambassador’ to our staff, to water down their floats and to use water hoses to keep the lions off of all other docks but K dock so that we can maintain property control.”

This kind of property control has left Hedley Prince, Fisherman’s Wharf harbormaster, frustrated. For Prince, the sea lions’ November disappearance is good news. Prince says that the sea lions have been a major headache for the fishermen who berth their commercial fishing vessels at the wharf, less than two miles away from Pier 39 on the same stretch of waterfront. The docks are not designed to hold the sea lions’ weight, he explains, their poop can create health issues, and the unpredictable lions may bite when they feel threatened.

“The most aggressive of the bunch, the male lions, tend to hang out here,” says Prince. He says that he has clearly labeled the entrances to the docks with warning messages about the temperamental nature of the lions, and that the entrances are controlled by locks, but Prince still is concerned about stray tourists who, excited to see a sea lion, may find a way to circumvent the locks and get hurt by the wild mammals.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act, or MMPA, limits the ways that frustrated fishermen and boat owners can chase away sea lions. Enacted in 1972, the law was meant to ensure that the populations of all marine mammal species are maintained at sustainable levels. It allows the culling—or killing—of sea lions in only very few circumstances. It also provides strict guidelines for how and when marina operators can legally deter sea lions from hauling out nearby—essentially when the sea lions damage private property, including fishing gear and catch.

Using high pressure water hoses to move the sea lions is the most common allowed procedure, although setting up barriers, such as netting and swim step protectors, and using visual repellants (like flashing lights or strobes) and noise makers (like firecrackers, horns, and bells) are also permissible techniques.

Many operators say that these legal methods are ineffective. “The Marine Mammal Protection Act severely limits how we can manage their presence. The lions don’t like to be sprayed with water, so that the best we can do, in order to comply with the act, is to spray them with hoses,” says Prince.

But the act has also been hailed for protecting marine animals and their habitat. Chandor says implementing the MMPA has had a beneficial effect on bay waters, and thus on the sea lion population. “The water quality has to be pretty good for the lions to stay around,” she says.

Amendments to the act are unlikely, says National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration marine biologist Joe Cordaro, who monitors the status of marine mammal populations, working closely with operations that rescue stranded mammals. “There would be a tremendous outcry from the public if anyone suggested tweaking the act,” he says, “and no one in Congress would have the political will to do so.”

However, despite these strict environmental regulations, the Bay Area does pose two potential dangers that might discourage sea lions from living here: El Niño and harmful algal blooms. Cordaro says that El Niño, the periodic weather pattern in which normal trade winds subside, causing sea surface temperatures to rise, has been brewing in tropical parts of the world in 2009, yet has not made its presence felt here. Should it warm up California waters, the sea lions would need to dive deeper for colder water or make the trek northward to colder climes. “One– and two-year-old sea lions can’t dive that deep or swim that far,” he says. “With larger sea lion populations we could see an influx of starving sea lions that our present rescue operations could not support. They would be faced with making some very hard triage decisions about how many mammals they could save.”

Algal blooms present another danger, he says. Algae are a vital component of marine and freshwater ecosystems, providing the base for many marine food chains. But harmful algal blooms, called HABs, grow quickly and at very high densities, outcompeting, poisoning, or asphyxiating other organisms. Disastrous consequences can occur when fish eat a type of algal bloom called a toxic diatom bloom, says Cordaro. California sea lions can eat these tainted fish, and then die from brain lesions. Some toxic algal blooms have been sighted near the Sausalito-based Marine Mammal Center, and its fall/winter 2009 newsletter reported that half of the center’s rescued lions were being treated for some level of domoic acid poisoning.

Jim Oswald, the Marine Mammal Center’s communications manager, says that 2009 was a significant year for the health of the bay’s pinnipeds. “During May and June we saw an increase in malnourished pups stranding on the central coast,” he says. “This was a direct consequence of the subsiding trade winds that created a lack of upswelling.” Yet he is hesitant to make a direct link between the sea lions’ mass exodus from the bay and their recent Oregon presence. Sea lions are opportunistic, social creatures that don’t have dedicated turf, he explains, so it’s not unusual for them to migrate along the Pacific coast.

If they return, their former San Francisco neighbors wonder what will happen, especially if their numbers should continue to surge. Conventional wisdom says that sea lions will continue to haul out in San Francisco as long as the conditions are good, and Cordaro agrees that a plentiful supply of food in the bay coupled with the lack of sea lions’ main predators, great white sharks and orca whales, will continue to attract them. But, he points out, marinas like Fisherman’s Wharf are not designed to hold these hefty mammals, and property damage could become a bigger problem in the future.

For the time being, Pier 39 visitors will have to be content with spotting just an occasional sea lion, and Chandor and Prince will have some breathing room to examine their containment strategies. But when—and if—the sea lions return is anyone’s guess, since the big mammals aren’t sharing their travel plans. At least not in a tongue we understand.

On one of these levee-protected islands, wetlands are reemerging. On a tract of land set amongst winding dirt roads, a group of scientists affiliated with the US Geological Survey (USGS) have been growing wetlands just as neighboring farmers do alfalfa and olives. These scientists say creating wetlands has the potential to mitigate climate change, bolster the safety of the state’s water supply, and create new economic potential for the region.

Since the mid-1990s, a fifteen-acre tract of Twitchell Island in the western Delta region has hosted their research. The Twitchell Island Wetlands Pilot Project was originally conceived to investigate the possibility of reversing land subsidence, the steady loss of land elevation due to compaction and soil erosion that threatens the stability of the Delta’s levees. This has created serious flooding potential if the levees fail, positioning the Delta as the next New Orleans.

The pilot project was designed to study how wetland growth might combat subsidence trends. As wetland plants die and decompose, their root mats and other decayed materials form layers over which new plants grow, increasing land surface over time. Elevation gains of more than ten inches were recorded in sections of the Twitchell Island wetlands from 1997 to 2005.

But scientists behind the pilot project soon realized that wetlands also offer another environmental gain: carbon sequestration. Wetland vegetation like cattails and tules use photosynthesis to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing it in their plant tissue. Wetlands can sequester as many as 25 metric tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per acre. Forests and marshlands only sequester six and nine tons per acre, respectively.

Three of these scientists—research chemists Roger Fujii and Brian Bergamaschi of the USGS and Dr. Stuart Siegel of the private consulting firm Wetlands and Water Resources, Inc.—are now proposing an investigation of the potential of “carbon-capture farming” in the Delta, which would entail shifting sections of farmland from low-value crops such as corn and alfalfa to carbon-sequestering wetland vegetation. So far, the concept is mostly untested—state budget cuts halted a large-scale experiment planned for 2009—but the scientists believe it has enormous potential. Carbon-capture farming, Bergamaschi says, is a “solution that restores land surface in the Delta, protects levees, and provides an income to farmers, sustaining our farming communities in the Delta. It’s better than a win-win situation.”

Fujii came up with the concept of carbon-capture farming in the early ‘90s after realizing that wetlands sequester carbon dioxide at impressive rates. It would work much like ordinary farming, except that profits would be generated by selling sequestered carbon credits rather than food crops. In order to grow wetlands, farmers would install water control structures and flood their fields. As wetlands mature, they would sequester carbon at faster rates, “meaning they would capture carbon dioxide out of the air and fix it into biomass, which is then pushed into their root system,” Bergmaschi explains. A farmer would make money by selling the credits, similar to emission-reduction credits, on the market to industries or companies that find reducing greenhouse gas emissions too expensive or impractical.

Managed wetlands would be very similar in plant distribution and habitat function to their natural counterparts, except that carbon-capture farms will be constantly flooded. “In natural wetland systems, there tends to be a succession of vegetation once the soil grows to knee-high waters,” Bergamaschi says. “That wouldn’t occur in [carbon-capture farms] because we are going to keep flooding them.” Keeping land flooded, Bergamaschi believes, has the potential to increase land elevation at faster rates.

Growing wetlands for profit is a novel concept, and its newness poses complications. “There are no other wetland projects that we are aware of that are in any sort of carbon market,” Bergamaschi says, and there’s also no system yet for verifying how much carbon a farm might sequester. As Bergamaschi points out, “There are no registries out there, no markets that are willing to accept wetlands, there’s no way to price it because there’s no one to gauge what the risk is with wetlands.”

If the market forces work, however, Bergamaschi and his colleagues believe that farming wetlands would not only benefit farmers and absorb greenhouse gases, but would also help shore up the Delta levee system, protecting California’s water supply. When the Delta marshlands were first diked and drained in the late 1880s, the flow of rich mineral sediment onto the Delta plains during the rainy season stopped. Sediment still flows through canals, however, which means that land elevations of the diked plains have dropped while elevations of adjacent river channels have risen. Soil loss from farming exacerbates these trends. As soil is exposed to the atmosphere for cultivation, oxygen promotes soil microbial activity. Those microbes then oxidize the organic matter in peat soils, causing soils to erode away. Today, nearly half of the Delta’s 740,000 acres are at least fifteen feet below sea level.

This has led to instability in the levee system. To compensate for the rising elevations of river channels, levees have also been raised. This expands their bases onto adjacent marsh, sand, and peat beds, materials that are inherently weak and unstable. The elevation differences between river and drainage ditches result in water seepage through and under levees. Compaction of the Delta’s peat soils, which form the foundations for many levees, has led to cracking and slumping. Because much of the region sits below sea level, were these levees to fail, saltwater from the bay would most likely be drawn into the Delta, turning the statewide water hub into an unusable saline lake.

According to a 2007 report by the Public Policy Institute of California, approximately 1,100 miles of Delta levees are fragile. “The cumulative likelihood of islands flooding over time… [is] very high and increasing. When you factor in sea level rise that increases the potential risks,” warns Dr. Ellen Hanak, the institute’s senior research fellow. Between 1967 and 1992, fifteen major islands were flooded due to levee failure.

Levee failure threatens not only the state’s agriculture but its drinking water. According to Hanak, Delta water supplies “about a third of the Bay Area’s urban use, about a third of the San Joaquin Valley’s agricultural use, and about a third of urban Southern California’s water use.” Altogether, over 23 million Californians rely on the Delta levee system for water.

To Siegel, Bergamaschi, and Fujii, carbon-capture farming is a long-term solution to this problem, too. They believe its widespread adoption would rebuild the Delta’s unique peat soils and lessen pressure on the levees. “There would be tremendous benefits from doing this,” Siegel said. “We’d have better levee protection, local climate moderation effects, and huge reduction in waste water input into Delta waterways.”

But not everyone is as convinced that carbon-capture farming is the solution to the Delta’s subsidence woes. Hanak calls for more effective management of the existing water infrastructure and the construction of a peripheral canal. And Bruce Blodgett, executive director of the Delta Farmers Association, says that wetlands “would be a pretty disastrous turn” for agriculture. “I can see where people would say ‘This is a real feel-good project,’” he says. “It’s actually not if you’re looking from a food production capacity standpoint, the ability of our country to feed itself, our state to feed itself.”

According to Blodgett, turning over agricultural land to wetland production would be a serious blow to local and state economies. Irrigated agriculture generates $27 billion annually for California. Delta land, used to grow everything from wheat to blueberries, is a significant contributor to that revenue. Food production also supports
associated industries like manufacturing, trucking, and packaging. The only commodity produced by farming wetlands would be carbon credits, which don’t require transportation, processing, or packaging, and would leave those industries high and dry.

Worse, Blodgett adds, growing wetland plants like cattails would lead to higher demand for water in an already drought-stricken state. According to USGS research, managed wetlands use about ten percent more water than common Delta crops like corn. “We’re not in a situation where we can start adding a lot more water-intensive crops,” Blodgett says. If wetland production starts up, he says, “you’re going to have a lot higher water usage, and you’re going to have no economic productivity for related industries. In a county like this where we have record unemployment… it’s an absolute disaster.”

As Bergamaschi sees it, the future well-being of the Delta depends on selecting the best use for Delta lands. “We’re proposing to apply wetland farming in an area that’s under threat” of levee failure, he says. “We’re not proposing that wetland farming replace agriculture in the Central Valley.” There must be a balance, he says, between food production
and using active agricultural land to store carbon.

There is romance and mystery in fog, flowing down the shrouded city streets, shadowing Dashiell Hammett’s quick-talking detectives, churning into the “gray primordial vastness” that bedeviled the sailing ships of Jack London. To borrow a line from noir, it would be a shame if anything happened to the fog.

That’s because fog is not just a moody background; it’s a vital control on Northern California weather. Without it we’d have no redwood trees and no salmon, and we’d have uncomfortable people living in what we could call Nevada-by-the-sea. It would be hot and, with climate change, getting hotter. If you’ve been to Las Vegas in July, you know what that would do to your enjoyment of life, not
to mention your air conditioning bill.

But it’s only in the last few years that scientists have started to get a handle on the conditions that make fog happen here, and how fog might have changed—and be changing—as the climate does. Fog, even as a scientific entity, is elusive and wily and ethereal, defying our attempts at easy prediction.

Fog is a low cloud. Northern California summer fog—also known as a marine layer—is a type known as “marine advection fog,” different from the nine or ten other types that form in different ways and feature different types of clouds. Marine fog forms when wind pushes a warm, moist air mass over a cold surface, in this case, the ocean. As the air cools, it loses its ability to hold as much water, so
droplets condense, form a cloud and hang around in the sky. That’s a relatively simple equation, and works anywhere in the world, including your bathroom when you take a hot shower and pass warm moist air over a cold mirror.

Summertime fog is probably the most vital regulator of the climate in Northern California, and changes in the fog could spell big changes for the species—humans included—that depend on it. But before anyone can offer any kind of confident prediction about the environmental future of Northern California, they need to understand fog, which means understanding the factors that create that warm air and that cold surface, and move all the parts around in the right way.

And there are a lot of moving parts. To name just a few, the formation of summer fog is influenced by the difference in temperatures between the Central Valley and the coast, by large-scale pressure patterns over the entire Pacific Ocean and western United States, by the difference in pressure between, say, Nevada and Seattle, by sea surface temperatures, and by the difference in sea surface temperatures between different parts of the Pacific. Like a Facebook romance, it’s complicated.

Just understanding all that stuff in order to come up with a good description of how and why marine fog forms in Northern California is difficult enough. But now all the factors that conspire to create the fog are changing with global warming. Sea surface temperatures, for example, are heating up, although they also change every year on their own, thanks to regular events like this year’s El Niño or longer-term gyroscopic swings like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Air temperatures are heating up, too, but more so in some places than in others, and it’s not a steady uphill climb everywhere. Coastal maximum summer temperatures, for example, have increased on average over the last hundred years, but decreased during the last thirty, while the inland daily temperature average increased only slightly—meaning that in some places the average temperature rose slightly, while in others it decreased. And since fog is affected by the difference in temperatures between places, but also affects the temperature… yikes.

With so many factors in play, it’s hard to know if the state is in for more fog or for less. One recently published scientific paper argues that we used to have fog more often: Fog was 33 percent more frequent in the first quarter of the 20th century than during the last half, for reasons that appear to
be unrelated to global warming. Another study suggests that warming may actually result in more fog for the coast.

So what will happen to fog? Now that is a good mystery.

Dave Reynolds, the climatologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s Northern California
forecasting office, lives on the boundary of the Mark Twain witticism “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” Reynolds models and monitors the big-picture weather and climate patterns of the entire globe, then tries, along with his colleagues, to predict the Bay Area’s weather.

Our weather, fog included, is determined by the globalclimate—stuff like whether a jet of air blowing off the Himalayas (yes, those Himalayas) makes it all the way to California or gets stopped just short by a high-pressure ridge over the coast. In the summer, the forecasters are looking at worldwide phenomena in the service of one big task: “Forecasting the depth of the marine layer”—the fog—“is the number-one challenge from May 15 to October 15,” Reynolds says. “That drives how warm it’s going to be inland, how cool it’s going to be on the coast, how far the clouds will drive in.”

Reynolds needs to be accurate about the depth of the fog, because the rest of his forecast depends on that, and because a lot of people—not just San Franciscans complaining about a 75-degree heat wave—depend on his forecast. Firefighters need to know whether they can do controlled burns in the mountains. Boaters need to know the marine navigation conditions. Air traffic controllers need to know whether they can open all the runways at SFO. Water resource managers need to know what demand will be like and how hot it will be. Energy grid monitors need to know how many air conditioners will be running. Hospitals need to know if the heat or air quality will be a health issue.

Now, for the forecaster’s challenge: In Northern California in the summer, warm, moist air masses are usually blowing across the Pacific from the tropics, borne of, and propelled by, sea surface temperature variations in the western equatorial Pacific. Meanwhile, a general high-pressure area
over the Northern Pacific and a low-pressure area caused by high inland air temperatures causes wind to blow roughly south along the coast of the western United States, churning up the ocean and creating an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water called the California Current. On a typical summer
day, when the warm air meets the cold water—poof!—marine advection fog appears over the coast. When there’s such a temperature difference between inland and coast, the ocean cooled air will try to expand into areas where it’s warmer. In the summer, the inland areas get hot, and so the cold, foggy
air marches inland, conquering local heat areas as it goes.

It doesn’t take much of a change in the big picture to affect the fog. Say the high pressure area moves a bit, or the sea surface temperatures change—and remember, these are sea surface temperatures out near, like, Tahiti, and pressure areas covering thousands of square miles off the coast of Seattle—and the fog could go away for a week. You can, perhaps, understand why Reynolds has a tough job.

Reynolds’ workstation sits in the middle of a NORADesque command center, with banks of monitors displaying maps of various resolutions, each grid covered in splotches of color to represent different aspects of the weather. Reynolds sits surrounded by displays of the factors that cause fog: sea surface temperatures, inland temperatures, pressures, pressure gradients. Computers show the current state of all these factors and then forecast how they’ll change on an hourly scale over the next day, week, or month.

While the models are generally pretty accurate at predicting the next 24 hours, both computer weather and climate prediction models are not good at forecasting clouds more than a day or two in advance. There is a reason for this, and it is that long-term clouds, from a mathematical and
computational perspective, suck. Try modeling the physics of a bunch of water droplets condensing in air around an almost infinitely variable local topography with its own microclimates and slight temperature gradations and pressure gradations and elevation changes, all of it depending on subtle
differences in far-flung pressure and sea surface temperatures and…blast, you’ve just burned down your computer.

Even worse, Northern California’s coastal climate is particularly tricky to predict. We live right on the border between different types of climate areas, the wetter northwest and the drier southwest. The farther you get from here, the more confident climate predictions become.

Since computers struggle to predict weather, say, a full month ahead, Reynolds is left trying to predict a warm or cool summer based on a reading of all the other variables. He prefers looking at sea surface temperatures. “The colder the waters are over the ocean, the higher the probability
you’re going to get marine stratus,” Reynolds says. “It’s our view [that] the colder the ocean temperatures, the higher the probability of a cold summer.”

For climate change researchers, who are looking at much longer trends, there’s little hope of deterministically modeling individual cloud behavior. Generally, for a climate scientist to describe something as an actual change, rather than just a decadal shift, a thirty-year observation period
is required. But running a thirty-year simulation of how climate change may affect fog is just too uncertain, time-consuming, and hard on currently available computers.

(Undaunted, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory are working on the requirements for a one-of-a-kind computer that will try to model long-term global cloud behavior. It will be called the “Green Flash” and use special software being built at an atmospheric science research lab in Colorado, with contributions from Lawrence Berkeley engineers. They hope to have it up and running in a few more years.)

In the meantime, land managers often need scientists to take a stab at predicting the future of fog, anyway. For example, the Farallon Islands National Marine Sanctuary has been working on a climate change scenario for the islands, and last year the organization asked Reynolds to provide a
spring-and-summer cloud forecast. He wasn’t comfortable doing it but, when asked to say something, went with the occasionally advanced theory that, if inland areas heat up faster than the coastal areas over the next few decades—and recently, they have—fog should increase. (The pressure gradient caused by higher inland temperatures would increase both the winds that stir up the California Current to create fog, and the breeze that then blows fog in from the ocean.)

“The physics of it says that stratus should increase,” Reynolds says. “All things staying the same.” And then, at the idea of all things staying the same, he pauses for a minute to laugh.

Figuring out what will happen to the fog in the next century is not merely speculative research for the benefit of postcard photographers. Fog—both the clouds and their cooling effect—enables life of all kinds in California. It makes it a pleasant place to live, serving as natural air conditioning, which is important in an age of energy dependence and global warming. Fog sustains redwood trees, and everything that lives in them, because redwoods are somewhat inefficient plants that lose more water than other plants on sunny days; redwoods need cloud cover so as not to become desiccated.

While redwoods exemplify fog dependence—coast redwoods live only in the narrow coastal fog belt of Western North America—a great many other species need the fog. Salamanders, frogs and other amphibians, for example, are particularly sensitive to both temperature and humidity. Some salamanders suffer heat stress and die at temperatures in the mid-70s. The fog provides vital temperature control, allowing coastal amphibian species to survive (although some species hack it in the hotter Central Valley by hiding out during the day). Other plant species, like huckleberries, prefer shade and cool temperatures to avoid losing too much water.

The Central Coast’s endangered Coho salmon also desperately need the redwoods and the fog. The fish can’t reproduce in streams warmer than about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, a boundary to which many streams come perilously close in the warm summer spawning months. Without the cooling effects of fog and redwood shade, the salmon would face one more problem on a list that’s already near unmanageable: reduced spawning habitat, lowered summertime water flow, reduced food availability, and decreased genetic variability. A recent estimate put the total number of Central Coast Coho at 500 fish, and scientists warn that the subspecies is near extinction. “Redwoods and Coho are inextricable with each other,” says Charlotte Ambrose, a salmon recovery coordinator with the National Marine Fisheries Service. “If we can manage our redwood region for a diversity of ages in the redwood stand, we are likely to be managing for Coho salmon.”

As one way to help, Norman Miller, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, has proposed an investigation with the fisheries service to use a climate model to simulate where future stream temperatures might stay low enough to harbor spawning salmon. The project would look at fine-scale water temperature as a function of the presence of fog, while also taking into account tree shading and dew. “The question becomes, how do we quantify regions that don’t get above a temperature like that?” Miller says. “Because stream temperature is a key to salmon recovery.”

The end goal would be to identify good spawning streams in advance, and preemptively work to protect them. “We really don’t have good models in place right now to help us identify where those areas are where we can protect them now, or work with whoever the landowner is now to preserve those areas,” Ambrose says.

There’s also a human factor to fog. We rely on its cooling effects for agriculture—the wine grape-growing conditions of Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties, for example, are shaped by the fog to such an extent that even minor changes could be career-ending for some vintners. Summertime
clouds are also a major transportation issue for boats and airplanes, and have been throughout history. In the era before the Bay Bridge, when you still had to go from Oakland to San Francisco by boat, fog was a menace to navigation, a dark, ominous, terrifying shipwreck-waiting-to-happen. The
San Francisco Bay was once the most shipwreck-prone place on Earth. Fog, in other words, is a weather condition that matters. Just ask the pilot of the Cosco Busan.

Several recent research papers take some steps toward a better understanding of Northern California fog. One is the dissertation of UC Berkeley geography graduate student James Johnstone, now a postdoc at the University of Washington. In a 250-page paper that is considerably more thrilling
than its title, “Climate Variability in Northern California and Its Global Connections,” as well as in a paper published this February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Johnstone set out to define the global patterns that control fog in the summer and rain in the winter in an attempt to see what might happen to redwood trees.

One of the curious things about Northern California fog is that the observational record for it is extremely poor. The National Weather Service started tracking fog measurements at the San Francisco airport in the mid-1990s, but that’s not yet the kind of time scale a climate researcher needs. Miller and others use summertime relative humidity data measured by several offshore buoys along the coast—if the humidity is 100 percent, they assume there’s fog.

Johnstone used regional airport data. Airports take hourly measurements of the height of the cloud ceiling, which is a nice way of identifying foggy days. Johnstone used observations from the Arcata and Monterey airports, which had records going back to 1951. The observational record shows a weak, insignificant decrease in fog between 1951 and 2008, with considerable year-to-year shifts. (In the peak year, 1951, there was more than twice as much fog as in 1997, the minimum year for fog.) But Johnstone wanted to extend his records to cover the entire century, and so he went looking for a way to identify fog by proxy.

He matched up the observed fog records with the big-picture stuff over the same time period, to see how well temperature, pressure, and sea surface temperature worked as predictors of fog. They all did, to some degree. Movement in the North Pacific Pressure High and changes in global sea surface temperatures both appeared related to the presence of fog in Northern California. But temperature variability—the difference between inland and coastal daily maximum temperatures across the western United States—stood out. “It correlates amazingly well with fog,” Johnstone says. “This just blew my mind that they correlate so strongly.”

Temperature records go back much further than the cloud ceiling observations, to the beginning of the 20th century. If the inland-coast temperature differential is reliable enough an indicator of fog, which Johnstone thinks it is, it allows an estimation of what fog has done over the entire century.

This time, there was a stronger trend: Johnstone’s analysis showed that fog in the early 1900s was about 33 percent more frequent than in recent decades since 1951. While 1951 was extraordinarily foggy, by extending the study backward, Johnstone inferred that years like that were much more typical between 1901 and 1925. He credits the long-term reduction in fog to coastal circulation and temperature changes, including the roughly thirty-year cycling of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Johnstone cautions that making any predictions now would be premature. His study shows such considerable year-to-year variability in fog—even decade-to-decade variability—that he concludes crediting anything to global warming is probably still unsupportable. “The future is anybody’s guess,” he says.

One of the few well-known predictions about fog comes from Bereket Lebassi, a graduate student at Santa Clara University, along with a number of local researchers including Norman Miller and San Jose State professor Robert Bornstein, in a paper published last year in the Journal of Climate.

Although Johnstone’s work shows an overall decrease in the difference between inland and coastal temperatures, due in part to uncertain trends in the inland summer temperature maximums since 1901, those inland temperatures have rebounded since about 1970, warming relatively faster than the coast, which has actually seen its daily temperature maximums decrease, according to the Lebassi paper. The authors argue that this is fog cause-and-effect: The increased temperature differential causes more fog, which in turn further cools the coast, which further increases the temperature differential.

“As global warming is warming the interior, that would mean—in theory, and our observations back this up—there would be increased onshore sea breeze activity, bringing in cooling air, and bringing in fog, which would block the sunshine, and therefore the temperatures along the coast would be cooling,” Bornstein says. “And that’s what we found.”

This is a fairly remarkable-sounding idea: The effect of global warming could be to cool coastal California. Bornstein, like Reynolds, says that in theory, in the future the cooling trend could continue, since current global warming predictions call for temperatures to increase more quickly inland than on the coast. If coastal maximum temperatures continue to cool, as they did during the study period, that would be good news for hospitals worried about human heat stress and vintners worried about the extinction of wine grapes in the Napa Valley. Bornstein has started to look at energy consumption, and how more fog in the future might help coastal California keep its energy use down.

Still, the data wasn’t complete enough to nail down any conclusions. (And, Johnstone points out, the increase in fog over the last thirty years amounts to a small uptick in a century-long decline.) “I’m not willing to say anything,” says Berkeley Lab’s Miller. “The real questions behind that are, what changes will we see in the mechanisms that are conducive to fog formation, the controls? You can ask the same question about hurricanes—what are the big controls?”

These controls are moving targets—sea surface temperature gradients, inland temperature gradients, pressure gradients, changes in the upwelling. Sea surface temperatures, for example, are warming everywhere, but asymmetrically. Even the tropical jet stream appears to be changing, shifting slightly to the north, which could alter weather over the entire mid-latitudes. None of it is changing uniformly with respect to fog, meaning that in some sense, researchers have to pick their poison. Will stronger winds lead to a stronger upwelling and therefore colder water—and so more fog? Or will globally warming ocean temperatures cancel that effect out and weaken the upwelling, leading to less fog?

Park Williams, a postdoc in UC Santa Barbara’s geography department who worked on his own fog study for his dissertation, is the first to admit that, after years of studying fog data, the future is still unclear. It’s more important than ever, though, he says, particularly when you look at predictions for temperature changes in California and realize that those are completely dependent on fog. (In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, for example, coastal California is a tiny, cooling dot in a sea of red warming areas.)

“Cloud cover along the coast reasonably dictates summer temperatures,” Williams says. “Until we have a more accurate picture of how summer cloud cover may respond, we have no idea what our temperature outlook is for a global warming picture.”

But for now, the fate of fog defies easy—or complete —explanation. It’s the kind of thing that keeps scientists going: a real, complex puzzle that could take years or decades to fully untangle, with tremendous implications for human health, navigation, agriculture, native species, and energy use.

In The Sea Wolf, Jack London compared fog to “the gray shadow of infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth.” London wrote that line in 1904, a few decades before the first researcher proposed—and was ridiculed for suggesting—that greenhouse gases might change the climate. We know more now about almost everything, including about fog and what causes it. But we do not understand everything, and so fog remains a gray shadow of infinite mystery.

The cell is not only cleaning the winery’s effluent, it is creating a new alternative fuel. Bacteria inside digest organic waste from water used to rinse barrels and wash grapes. While cleaning the runoff, the cell produces hydrogen, a gas that emits water vapor when it’s burned, rather than air-dirtying carbon dioxide. Although still in the research stage, this project hints at a future in which sustainable energy can be farmed from the agricultural byproducts of Northern California’s wineries, breweries, and distilleries.

It takes an astounding amount of energy to produce a glass of pinot grigio or a bottle of ale, and the process also creates a deep and fast-flowing waste stream. It can take up to seventeen gallons of water to make a single gallon of wine, which is formidable considering that California—perennially in drought—annually produces 580 million gallons of vino. And even mid-size breweries can generate tens of thousands of tons of solid waste each year. Turning effluent and solid waste into a fuel source, though, could help producers solve the problems of limited power and seemingly unlimited byproducts. No wonder, then, that the state’s alcoholic beverage industry is hoping to turn its trash into energy-rich treasure.

“Have you seen The Matrix?” asks Bruce Logan, director of the Environmental Engineering Institute at Penn State. Designer of the microbial electrolysis cell, Logan is working with Napa Wine to put his thinking into action. “In the movie, they hooked up humans in this goo to make energy,” he says. “That’s science fiction, but what we’re doing is not. We’re using microbes to break down glucose, alcohol, and other traces in the wastewater to make an electrical current and hydrogen.”

Electromicrobiology, the use of bacteria to generate electricity, may offer an alternative to expensive, scarce, and climate-damaging petroleum and coal. This plan for turning waste into renewable energy appealed to Andrew Hoxsey, the managing partner of Napa Wine and a fourth-generation winegrower who refuses to be yoked by operating conventions, such as spraying pesticides. Under his direction, the company’s 635 acres of vines were certified organic in the 1980s, long before “sustainable” was a buzzword. “My grandparents didn’t use many chemicals, basically just some Roundup, and learning to live without those few chemicals was pretty easy. We don’t know how else to do it,” Hoxsey says. “We’re focused on doing things with less impact environmentally.”

Hoxsey also keeps tabs on the hydrogen industry (“I’m adamant that hydrogen should be looked at more closely as a power source,” he explains), so when he learned of Logan’s studies in Pennsylvania, he offered his winery as a site for a pilot project. Researchers from Penn State installed the device last September; today, despite the overcast skies, Hoxsey stands in a lot behind the winery’s tasting room, unshivering before the box. Wearing a cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, he gestures towards the fuel cell. “Microbes—we call them ‘bugs’—are present in the soil, in wine barrels and in water treatment ponds,” he says. “You can’t see them and the concept of them is way out there, but they’re there. We’re using these bugs to produce electricity.”

He outlines the process: The bacteria, living on bottle brush-like fibers inside the box, eat the sugary leftovers of grapes and exhale clean water. Meanwhile, a small amount of energy pumped in unites protons and electrons to form hydrogen. On a good day, the box produces the equivalent of five gallons of diesel—not much in the grand scheme of winery operations, but Hoxsey is unfazed. For now, the project uses just a fraction of the winery’s effluent because scientists are working out glitches in the cell’s design. (The vast majority of the winery’s wastewater is currently diverted
to ponds, where other kinds of bacteria clean it before it irrigates the vineyards.) “We’re learning a lot,” Hoxsey says. “Eventually we’ll store the hydrogen in a battery or cell, but for now we’re testing the feasibility. You could run a car with the hydrogen it makes or generate energy to power our winery. Hydrogen gives more alternatives than electricity.”

Although Logan estimates it will be another three to five years before the technology is used on a larger scale, a project like this is a tantalizing taste of what the alcoholic beverage industry could do to harvest its own energy. The idea of eco-friendly wine-making is certainly growing: Membership in the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, which Hoxsey chaired in 2008 and 2009, has nearly tripled in the last five years, to 1,237 vineyards and 329 wineries statewide. While Hoxsey’s hydrogen cell may be unique, throughout the state other beverage companies are brewing up similarly innovative solutions.

The view from atop Chico, California’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Company roof is breathtaking. Blue skies and sun—the first clear day the region has seen in weeks—shine on a dizzying quilt of 10,000 rectangular solar panels. The brewery’s 200,000 square feet of blue silicon plates make it one of the country’s largest private solar arrays, but a row of large silos off to the left offers another glimpse of the company’s attempts to operate off the grid.

Each of those silos contains almost 25,000 gallons of beer. To craft that beer, brewers boil the grains, filter out the solids, cool the product, then add yeast to the liquid. That slurry sits in fermenters—the silos—for ten to fourteen days. Yeast, a single-celled organism, eats sugars from the malt and hops. As it digests its food, the yeast exhales carbon dioxide and produces alcohol. But instead of releasing the greenhouse gas into the air, Sierra Nevada diverts it to a storage tank, where it is cleaned and pressurized. It later plays a vital role in the brewery’s operations, adding carbonation
to some of the brews and pushing beer from one boiler to another via a labyrinthine series of tubes and pipes. “Our philosophy is a closed-loop approach,” says Cheri Chastain, Sierra Nevada’s sustainability coordinator. “We take the byproducts of brewing and use them for something we need.”

This both saves money and reduces greenhouse gasses, she says. “Carbon dioxide is usually a big purchase for carbonation and dispensing,” Chastain explains. “With the recovery system in place, we’re not releasing carbon dioxide and we’re supplying a hundred percent of what we need. It’s a free fuel source and we have it on-site, so we might as well use it.”

Sierra Nevada employs mindful production elsewhere. Chastain walks nearly the entire loop of the twelve-acre facility, which exudes the sticky-sour smell of yeast and hops familiar to anyone who has visited a fraternity after a keg party. Chastain points out the silos that store spent barley until it’s fed to steers destined to end up as hamburgers in the brewery’s restaurant; she describes the ultra-efficiencies of the boilers, lighting, and bottling line. After all, she says, “You can create all the green energy you want, but if you’re not using it efficiently, it defeats the purpose.”

Squinting against the sun, she gestures toward a set of metal containers shaped like upside-down pyramids. The three giraffe-height vessels hold 300,000 gallons of wastewater that’s been used to rinse fermenters and bottles, along with billions of bacteria that are busy chomping sugars
and cleaning the detritus-laden water. These microbes generate methane as they eat, and instead of being released into the air, the gas—more than twenty times more corrosive to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide—is pumped back to the plant to power boilers. Although methane isn’t innocuous (it releases carbon dioxide when used), it offsets the brewery’s need to buy natural gas, a finite source of energy that expels its own atmosphere-altering compounds. And while Sierra Nevada does buy some natural gas, it generates 84 percent of its own energy through its combination of solar arrays, gas reclamation and fuel cells—up from 65 percent in 2008.

The brewery also takes a cue from iconoclasts who power their cars on deep fryer oil. Sierra Nevada recently purchased a biodiesel processor designed by Chico State University graduates, and the machine converts its restaurant’s dirty vegetable oil into about a hundred gallons of biodiesel a month. That clean-burning fuel powers trucks delivering beer around town. Sierra Nevada is also investigating other alternative fuel sources, including distilled ethanol from spent grains. “We hope that not just the brewing industry, but all industries, follow suit and work to make their operations more efficient,” Chastain says. “We believe that all manufacturing should be done in the most sustainable manner possible.”

Six hours’ drive south of Chico, Sun-Maid embraces an “ecosystem” approach to operations, turning its waste into products that help the environment and the company’s bottom line, says Vaughn Kiligan, Sun-Maid’s director of corporate sustainability. Although better known for its raisins, Sun-Maid also produces alcohol from sub-par grapes that is later turned into brandy and sherry. At the company’s distillery in Orange Cove, just southeast of Fresno, grape juice is transformed into toast-worthy spirits via a method largely powered by biofuel.

To make alcohol, heat is applied to fermented fruit juice in a still. As the liquid evaporates, it produces concentrated alcohol and leaves behind a mush of sugars and grape solids. For the last twenty years, Sun-Maid, run as a cooperative of grower-owners, has taken those “slops” and run them through a methane digester, a state-of-the-art device when it was installed in the 1980s. Just as in Sierra Nevada’s water treatment, microbes eat the leftovers and exude methane. That gas is harnessed and burned to heat the still that will produce alcohol and more waste for the digester. The repurposed byproducts provide sixty percent of the energy needed to power the still, slashing the company’s natural gas consumption.

“We’re not opposed to saving money, and we wanted to deal with the waste in a way that gives maximum returns to the co-op members,” Charles Feaver, vice president of the distillery at Sun-Maid, says of the company’s decision to install the methane digester years ago. “We’re also concerned with sustainability, and it’s a win-win on both accounts. Farmers are not interested in wasting water, contaminating land, or anything else other than the health of the land and making a profit. After all, growers and farmers were the first environmentalists.”

Microbe-powered boilers, repurposed waste products and recovered greenhouse gases all seem like logical ideas in an era of dwindling resources. Yet creating alternative energy within a company can be capital-intensive. For example, Sierra Nevada’s Chastain estimates it will take another nine years for the brewery’s solar array to pay for itself. The hydrogen cell at Napa Wine is so experimental it probably won’t even have a price tag for years, but like methane digesters, solar arrays, and other industrial-sized energy conversion technologies, it likely won’t come cheap. As a result, it is often fiscally impossible for small producers to hop on the waste-to-energy bandwagon.

Ryan Donnelly, co-founder of Miracle One Wine, a Napa County producer of chardonnays and pinot noirs, wanted to craft impressive wines “at the least cost to the environment,” he says. Yet being part of a small start-up meant that he couldn’t try the energy-saving projects that Napa Wine Company, Sun-Maid, and Sierra Nevada champion. “We’re just getting started and don’t have the capital to do our own solar power or wastewater treatment,” he says. Remaining committed to eco-friendly practices, though, Donnelly and Miracle One moved in with Sonoma Wine Company, a co-op style warehouse for small producers. “We chose to make our wine at their facility because of their sustainability efforts,” Donnelly explains. “One of the interesting things they do for us is save our wine waste for Green Energy Network to produce ethanol.”

Ethanol, the once-lauded alternative to gasoline, has been criticized as a fuel source, because some farmers now prefer to grow corn for fuel production, rather than the edible crops needed to sustain their communities. Green Energy Network’s solution circumvents these criticisms by distilling unsalable wine—an already-existing product—into ethanol. “Wineries in our area have to dispose of some wines for one reason or another. They don’t dump it—that’s wasteful and it causes environmental problems,” explains Damon Knutson, co-founder of Green Energy Network. As he walks around the yard outside his Sebastopol home, sheep bleat noisily in the background, occasionally interrupting his train of thought. “The waste has to be dealt with, and what we do is take their wine and distill it to 190-proof alcohol to blend with gasoline,” he says. Knutson and his brother Durrell run the business mostly as a hobby, he concedes; it remains secondary to his career in construction.

If their operation looks somewhat makeshift, that’s because it is: The Knutson brothers have cobbled together their experience in construction, solar technology, plumbing and alternative energy promotion to create a self-powered distillery. Their homemade still is twelve feet high; wrapped in silver insulation and looking like a prop from a campy space-age movie, it stands alongside dark gray tanks holding wine outside a friend’s furniture store. Trucks from Sonoma Wine Company periodically crunch over the gravel lot to drop off pallets of reds and whites that can’t be sold, either because they’re too old or mislabeled. Damon Knutson distills all the alcohol from the wine, pours the finished product back into the original bottles and sells the biofuel to members of the Green Energy Network, who add it to their tanks with regular gasoline. At $3.80 a gallon, it may seem cheaper to simply fill up at a nearby Chevron, especially because adding ethanol can reduce a car’s efficiency. “But you’re still increasing your mileage per gallon of gas, and our product is essentially carbon-neutral because it’s made by converting a waste product in a low-energy process,” Knutson explains.

The Green Energy Network is small—Knutson can’t keep up with the wine that arrives from the co-op members at Sonoma Wine Company and has had to start storing it—but he plans to more than double his current output of a hundred gallons of ethanol a week. Yet the point he wants to prove is clear: By pooling resources—or rather their waste—minor wineries such as Miracle One can outsource the waste-to-energy procedure. The partnership benefits the wineries (which would otherwise have to pay to dispose of their waste), the innovator (Green Energy Network turns a free material into a salable product) and consumers (individuals reduce the impact of driving a car with a local substitute for gas). The symbiosis between Green Energy Network and Sonoma Wine Company demonstrates that even the little guys can get in on the alternative fuel game.

The oversupply is intentional: while the yard belongs to Hahn, she does no gardening herself. Instead, she hires two professional urban farmers to plant, weed, harvest, and deliver the bounty to her family’s doorstep—and to her neighbors’ doorsteps—once a week. “I don’t even go down there,” the attorney and community activist said one morning last fall. “I’m busy!”

To Hahn, this arrangement makes perfect sense. Instead of hiring a gardener to tend her roses, she hires a farmer to tend her vegetables, thus putting her land to productive use. “If I turn my backyard into edible food plants, that means five or six other families don’t have to,” she says, as the chickens, which produce four to five dozen eggs each week, cluck in apparent agreement. “I spread the benefits to more than just my family.”

But feeding six families costs money, and Hahn has shouldered the set-up costs alone, installing garden beds and drip irrigation, buying seeds, and paying the farmers to coax the land to produce. To recoup those costs, Hahn wants to charge her neighbors a small fee for their weekly food baskets. This exchange, she says, would be similar to a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, in which people pay a subscription fee to a farm in return for regular deliveries of seasonal food. Since she lives in Berkeley, a city that just last year made building a local food system part of its long-term Climate Action Plan, Hahn figured she would have no problem getting a license from the city to run her small farm.

She was wrong. In fact, the process of getting a license turned out to be so convoluted, and so expensive, that for now she’s given up trying to do it. At a time when it seems everyone wants to bring the farm back to the city, and urban food projects are all the rage, Hahn’s story is a study in just how great a challenge this can be. Her adversary is not an anti-vegetable city official or a NIMBY neighbor—all that’s stopping Hahn is a few bland paragraphs in the zoning code.

Hahn’s backyard farm project started when she moved into her house in late 2006. At that time, she recalls, there was nothing at all in the yard—the previous occupants had laid down a layer of sod, which died soon after Hahn moved in, leaving the yard, she says, “ugly and useless.” Not much of a gardener herself, Hahn didn’t think about what to do with the space until more than a year later, when a flier in the neighborhood caught her eye: A woman named Willow proposed to set up a backyard garden in exchange for room and board. While she thought the flier “lovely,” Hahn was initially skeptical. “Seriously … Willow?” she recalls, rolling her eyes in a just-another-Berkeley-hippie sort of way.

But one phone call changed her mind. Willow Rosenthal was the founder of West Oakland’s food security project City Slicker Farms and about as far from a dreamy hippie as raspberries are from ramen. When she looked at Hahn’s yard, she saw potential. A veteran urban farmer, Rosenthal plans intensive gardens—so intensive, she says, that she only reluctantly concedes space for a picnic table. Hahn’s forty-by-sixty-foot backyard area, Rosenthal thought, could easily feed five or six families. The two hatched the idea to create a neighborhood-scale CSA, with Hahn lending land that would otherwise go unused to two farmers—in this case, Rosenthal and her assistant Laurel Sharp—who would manage its daily operation.

The problem is that Berkeley’s zoning code says nothing about a neighborhood CSA, and its absence is significant. Technically, such an operation would be considered a business, since money changes hands. But Hahn’s North Berkeley neighborhood is strictly residential. Its zoning code allows people to run small, low– or moderate-impact in-home businesses but mandates that all activity take place indoors. It also forbids “customer visits,” “handling or transport of goods or products” on-site, and “offensive or objectionable noise, vibration, odors, heat, dirt, or electrical disturbance perceptible by the average person.” An outdoor operation that uses a pickup truck and a compost pile, and would require customers to pick up vegetables, is not allowable under the code.

Hahn and Rosenthal discovered all this when they called the city’s health and planning departments to see what would be required to get a business license. While all the city officials they talked to said they supported the project in theory, they said that legally, there was no way to make it work. One official, says Hahn, described the farm as a “high-impact home occupation.” If Hahn and Rosenthal wanted to go ahead with the project, they were told, they would need a special exemption, which would require a public hearing, six to eight months of waiting, and close to $4,000 in fees. After months of haggling, they pulled their application last summer and decided to regroup the following season. “We didn’t think it was going to be so complicated,” says Hahn.

Berkeley city planning director Debbie Sanderson agrees that while a backyard CSA sounds like a good idea, as the laws are currently written it is unquestionably illegal. While the city could change its code, either under the direction of the city council or in response to a citizen petition, the process
is lengthy and complex. The most recent change, which created a provision allowing in-home teaching, took nearly a year to implement, Sanderson says. Still, she says, the code is a living document: “Life in the world is always changing, so the code has to change too.” Indeed, the question of how to integrate agriculture into urban landscapes has started to pop up in American Planning Association journal articles in recent months—one article analyzed the cities of Portland and Vancouver—but it hasn’t come up in Berkeley until now.

Decades ago, when Berkeley’s zoning codes were written, people wanted cities to be urban. Ornamental landscapes demonstrated leisure and wealth, a lifestyle different from working on the land. Far from encouraging backyard farms, city planners dismissed them as relics of the past. It’s only recently that people began transitioning to backyard farms. (Or, as Hahn prefers to call them, “edible gardens”—“When you say ‘farm,’ people think of tractors and Porta-Potties,” she says.)

Decades ago, when Berkeley’s zoning codes were written, people wanted cities to be urban. Ornamental landscapes demonstrated leisure and wealth, a lifestyle different from working on the land. Far from encouraging backyard farms, city planners dismissed them as relics of the past. It’s only recently that people began transitioning to backyard farms. (Or, as Hahn prefers to call them, “edible gardens”—“When you say ‘farm,’ people think of tractors and Porta-Potties,” she says.)

“The bottom line is that the code didn’t contemplate this,” says Hahn. “It anticipates piano lessons, college counseling, therapy.” In other words, quiet in-home businesses. This makes sense to her. “I don’t want, say, a car repair shop in the yard,” she says. “But edibles grow as quietly as flowers.”

Hahn is not the first would-be backyard farmer to encounter this set of problems. In an era of E. coli outbreaks, high food prices, and a torrent of food industry exposés, the push for locally-produced food has taken off in cities nationwide. But in many cases it has run straight into a regulatory wall. Most zoning codes, like Berkeley’s, are written to maintain separation between commercial and residential areas, and almost none address food production. Add the challenges of potentially contaminated soil, limited water, and neighbors unhappy about the smell of compost, and any project more ambitious than a hobby garden can seem daunting. Still, the small scale of what Hahn is proposing makes it possible to resolve these issues. None of her neighbors has ever complained about the farm, she says, and if anyone did have problem, it would be easy for that person to come talk to her because they’re neighbors. (That said, Hahn notes that changing the code would make it harder for one disgruntled person to sabotage an otherwise popular project.)

Farmers across the country have found individual workarounds. In Flint, Michigan, a collaborative of urban gardeners is working with the city to rewrite outdated codes with an eye towards local food production. In Detroit, which has a large percentage of vacant land within city limits, high– and low-tech urban agriculture is one solution to the search for a new industry. Entrepreneurs and do-it-yourself homeowners are flocking to the city, and a number of proposals to rezone certain neighborhoods and authorize farm projects are currently before the city government. (The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network says 900 farms already exist within city limits; meanwhile, an entrepreneur and money manager named John Hantz is offering to put up $30 million to convert large plots of city land to a conventional farm.) In Buffalo, New York, a couple last year reached an agreement with the city to lease 27 acres of vacant land for farming, provided they sell the food locally, and with the understanding that the city may still develop the space in the future. And in Sacramento, the city government amended its codes in 2007 to allow front-yard vegetable gardens, which it had previously forbidden as unsightly.

With the possible exception of Detroit, these are piecemeal solutions to what many people believe is a much bigger problem. Cities might be able to produce enough food to feed their residents, but to do it they need to rethink the way they use space, and that includes changing zoning laws to allow for small-scale businesses like Hahn’s. Berkeley has written goals for local food production into its long-term Climate Action Plan, including commitments to “encourage… buildings to incorporate rooftop gardens that can be used for food production,” “encourage residents to grow food in home and community gardens,” and “support local efforts to provide training to residents in farming and gardening techniques.” Right now, though, they’re just goals.

For now, Hahn and Rosenthal are giving their produce away to neighbors, but as the farm heads into its first full season, they’re again looking at ways to change the law. Though the concerns someone might have about a farm—“yucky smells and loud noises,” says Rosenthal—seem not to apply to Hahn’s farm, both she and Rosenthal say that zoning changes must take neighbor’s comfort levels into account. Still, they say, those changes can be consistent with levels of nuisance and noise that people already take for granted. “People are allowed to have dogs, and dogs are noisy,” says Rosenthal. “Construction workers and landscape workers can start making noise at 7 am.”

“I think it will take time for people to change their way of thinking about this,” says Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguín, who has spoken with Hahn about drafting legislation that would change the city’s code to encourage small-scale farms like the one she proposes. “We’re trying to achieve more sustainability,” he says, “but it takes a while for our law to change to catch up.”

Why go to all this trouble in the first place? Hahn lives in a foodie Mecca, replete with farmers’ markets and local produce at every grocery store. But for Hahn, even local food isn’t local enough. For example, she points out, “local” food often comes from the Central Valley. “If I can grow it in my own backyard, why would I get it from Salinas?” she asks. She wants to do everything she can, she says, to reduce her “food-miles”—the distance food travels from farm to plate—to zero.

The idea of food that’s “more local than local” has a certain appeal for some, though they can’t always put their fingers on exactly what that appeal is. “When I get the veggies, they have just been picked,” says Austene Hall, who lives down the hill from Hahn and has been getting vegetables from her for a number of months. After a pause, she adds, “I really like having it right next door. Willow and I chat over the wall; I hear all about what they’re planting and why.”

Hall also likes that she can eat vegetables that may as well have been grown in her own backyard, without actually having to grow them. Though she’s vegetarian and describes herself as an avid gardener, she prefers flowers to food and has no interest in trying to meet her own vegetable needs. To Hahn, that’s the reason the model she’s proposing is so crucial. Growing food requires time, resources, and skills that most urban dwellers don’t have and aren’t willing to acquire. “If you want to reduce the total amount of food trucked and shipped, you need a model where a paid professional
is doing it,” she says.

Rosenthal agrees. “We don’t think everyone should sew their own clothes. Why should everyone grow their own food? It doesn’t make sense,” she says. “There’s a huge number of people interested in using their yards to produce food for their families, but because of life circumstances they will never put time into actually growing it. They are in an economic bracket where they want to hire someone to do that for them, just as they would hire a landscaper to maintain their nonedible landscape. If we ignore these people, we ignore a vast productive capacity within the community.”

Despite the challenges, says Rosenthal, people’s growing interest in the origins and sustainability of their food means that the time is right for cities to take on these issues. “People are starting to ask, ‘How do we want to use our collective resources?’” she says. “I have complete faith that these things will change.”

In 1999, Berkeley launched a pilot project that took food waste from the city’s restaurants and grocery stores and sent it to a composting operation. By 2007, all Berkeley residents were given the opportunity to compost their moldy produce, bones, and greasy napkins by tossing them in the green rollaway carts the city provides for yard debris collection. The food waste composting program
proved wildly popular from the start; the city received thousands more requests for five-gallon kitchen green bins than it had anticipated. By 2009, the city was diverting over 12,000 tons of food and yard debris from residences and nearly 6,000 tons of commercial food scraps per year to Grover
Environmental Products, a composting facility located in Vernalis, near Modesto.

Berkeley’s gardeners have been especially pleased with the program, as the food and green waste is transformed into rich—and free—compost for schools, community gardens, and residents. Once a month for most of the year, a huge heap is given away at the marina, where residents fill their trunks
and truck beds with boxes and bags of WonderGrow, Grover’s black gold.

Yet as popular as the program is, the large-scale composting of city food and yard waste faces growing challenges, some related to the materials that city dwellers toss in their bins, others to the evolving competition for food scraps. Good ideas—like enriching the soil of organic farms with compost made from urban food waste—are not necessarily meshing with other good ideas, like using
compostable plant-based plastics rather than disposable petroleum-based plastics. Pesticides approved for use on lawns are persisting all the way through the industrial composting process and contaminating the end product, making it unsuitable for organic agriculture. And the development of alternative composting technologies—namely biogas digesters—is provoking a debate over what food and yard waste should be used for.

Broken wheel
Americans like take-out food, and environmentally conscious consumers and businesses increasingly offer “compostable bioplastic” containers—clamshells, cups, and utensils made from renewable raw plant materials like potato or cornstarch. But some of these products offer more hope than reality. For a bioplastic product to be considered “compostable” by the American Society for Testing & Materials, it has to meet three criteria: It must break down into carbon dioxide, water, and biomass at the same rate as paper; it must disintegrate into small pieces that are indistinguishable from surrounding compost; and it must not produce toxic residue that would prevent the compost from supporting plant life.

While compostable bioplastics will break down in a backyard compost pile, it takes a very long time—longer than makes sense for most backyard composters. Most purveyors of compostable bioplastics recommend that their products go to commercial composting facilities, where the piles reach higher sustained temperatures.

In October 2009, a contingent of Ecology Center staffers toured the Grover composting yard, where Berkeley’s municipal food and yard waste is carefully cooked and turned in long piles called windrows. The staffers were curious about the fate of the SpudWare sporks and Natureworks cups that are optimistically tossed into green carts throughout the city. At Grover, they observed employees picking all plastic items—both petroleum– and plant-based—out of the dumped materials. Any smaller plastics that made it through the initial screening were removed later, as the material was sent through a trommel and a sorting station.

Here’s the reason: even if bioplastic items are suited to break down in a commercial facility, they look nearly identical to the petroleum-based plastic they are meant to replace, which makes it difficult for workers at the plant to distinguish between the two. Because of the quantity of waste they are sorting, and the difficulty of identifying the types of plastics that arrive at the facility, laborers remove all plastics, including most compostable bioplastics, which are then hauled off to the landfill along with the other contaminants. (The exceptions to the identification problem are Biobags, the green trash bags made of non-GMO plant starches that many people use to line kitchen compost bins. No petroleum-based trash bag is bright green, so BioBags are easy to spot.)

However, the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) has not approved bioplastics to be used in organic compost, so even the readily identifiable BioBags are not used in WonderGrow, Grover’s compost that is approved for organic farming. “The wheel is broken,” says manager Adam Grover. “A lot of the people who buy organic food are the same ones pushing bioplastics, but organic farmers can’t buy compost made of bioplastics.”

Pesky pesticides
Grover Environmental Products provides both a waste hauling service for cities and a high-quality soil product for farmers and landscapers. This double-focus comes naturally; the company’s composting facility grew out of a landscaping business that Adam Grover’s father started in 1970. Over time, the family business branched out to include a tree service, a nursery, and the composting operation. Because the Grovers have been involved in a panoply of horticultural activities, they know the value of great compost. “We use the waste stream to get to that finished product,” says Adam Grover, “but we go to great lengths to consistently make a quality finished product.”

According to Brian Mathews, food scrap program manager for the Alameda County Waste Management Authority (StopWaste.org), Grover’s focus on the quality of the end product is unparalleled. “Grover is considered by the industry to be one of the top producers of organic compost. He’s not associated with any garbage company; he’s totally independent and makes a high quality product that is excellent for agriculture. He cares about his product he’s making. He’s concerned about the feedstock. He is making a product that he can sell to repeat customers who are growing vegetables and everything else,” says Mathews. That is high praise indeed, considering that Mathews is a former competitor; before joining StopWaste.org, Mathews ran the Gilton Resource Recovery Composting Facility, which had the City of Berkeley’s composting contract until it was awarded to Grover.

Unfortunately, even the most diligent composting operations can’t entirely control what substances make it into their scrap heap. Farmers constitute a significant part of Grover’s client base, which is why it was such a blow when the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) announced last fall that Grover’s WonderGrow compost was prohibited for use in organic farming because the department found it contained bifenthrin residues. Bifenthrin is a pyrethroid insecticide used in products like Talstar, Capture, Brigade, and Ortho Home Defense Max to kill ants, spiders, roaches, termites, and bees. Bifenthrin is also found in Scotts LawnPro Step 3, a popular lawn fertilizer that kills all the bugs in your grass.

Bifenthrin persists in soil for quite some time, so when your neighbor treats his turf with Scotts LawnPro Step 3, then cuts his grass and dumps it into his green curbside cart, the compost made with that municipal yard waste will most likely contain residual bifenthrin. “Every composter who
uses yard waste in America has this problem,” Grover sighs. “It’s a huge problem.” The CDFA also banned Clean City Compost made by Feather River Organics and Nortech Gold Compost made by Nortech Waste LLC, two other brands of compost that use yard waste.

It could not have happened at a worse time. The CDFA alerted organic growers to the bifenthrin problem right before fall, when most farmers apply compost to their fields. Grover had just delivered fifteen truckloads of compost to Yolo County’s Full Belly Farm, which sells organic produce at Bay Area farmers’ markets and through a popular CSA. “We ended up hauling those fifteen truckloads back off Full Belly Farm,” Grover recalls. “The farmers were very disappointed.”

Paul Muller, one of the Full Belly partners, explains that after that incident they were reticent to buy compost from other operations, fearful that other products would be contaminated, too. “We did buy some other compost and frankly, it wasn’t the same quality,” Muller says. “We have had to rethink our strategy. We have relied on compost a lot for fertility.” As an alternative, Full Belly planted cover
crops like vetch that can be tilled back into the soil. In Muller’s opinion, “There are a lot of persistent pollutants out there that should be taken out of home garden use because it ends up in the compost.”

But for composters, city yard waste provides an otherwise ideal product that they can turn into cheap compost. “Organic farms aren’t exactly rich,” Grover explains. “That’s the beauty of using green waste from cities—it makes compost affordable to small-scale organic farmers.”

The bifenthrin contamination was discovered under unusual circumstances that illustrate some holes in the regulatory framework for organic compost. In this case, the pesticide was discovered when a wheatgrass farmer in Placerville had his product tested by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. “The wheatgrass farmer figured out that wheatgrass grew really well in straight compost. The wheatgrass was shipped to the grocery store in a tray full of soil,” says Grover. Because it was sold in that manner, he says, the testers threw both the wheatgrass and some of the attached soil in a blender for testing in the lab. “When they tested just the wheatgrass, it was free of bifenthrin,” says
Grover. “But when it was mixed with the compost, it was not.” This is significant because most wheatgrass customers only eat the plant itself, which is typically sheared from the growing tray. In the case of bifenthrin, the pyrethroid can attach itself to soil but does not get taken up into the plant.

Clear rules govern the testing of organic produce: the EPA sets acceptable levels of synthetic pesticides, and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation conducts random testing of organic produce to make sure the guidelines are being followed. Yet according to Renee Mann, review program manager of the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI), “There is no clear authority that
tells us how to test compost.” OMRI is the Oregon-based nonprofit that determines which agricultural inputs are allowed for use in organic production and processing. The National Organic Program of the USDA sets the standards for what is allowable, and OMRI carefully reviews products against those standards for inclusion on its list of approved products, on which organic growers rely.

The National Organic Program has neither set acceptable levels for bifenthrin in compost nor has it determined how and when to test for bifenthrin. The only composts that were prohibited by the CDFA last fall were the ones associated with the testing of the Placerville wheatgrass, even though many other composts that use yard waste as a feedstock could be contaminated with bifenthrin as well.

The National Organic Program has neither set acceptable levels for bifenthrin in compost nor has it determined how and when to test for bifenthrin. The only composts that were prohibited by the CDFA last fall were the ones associated with the testing of the Placerville wheatgrass, even though many other composts that use yard waste as a feedstock could be contaminated with bifenthrin as well.

Composters who use yard waste in their mixes are eager to get their composts out of regulatory limbo. The CDFA continues to prohibit WonderGrow for organic growing, while at the same time, WonderGrow continues to be listed in OMRI’s directory of approved products. The NOP, which has the last word, remains silent. According to Adam Grover, “at the EcoFarm Conference in January, Miles McEvoy of the National Organic Program promised to see if he could institute a timeout period during which more testing could be done on finished crops rather than on the compost and inputs.” Recently, OMRI posted a notice on its Web site: “Most yard waste composts will remain on the OMRI Products List until a full investigation is completed for each compost. This is based upon OMRI’s due process, which allows our clients to be informed of an investigation, provide further information to defend their product listing, and contest OMRI’s final decision.”

The NOP is aware of the problem, says Mann, but it may be many months before guidelines are issued regarding bifenthrin in compost. “It’s a pretty big issue,” says Mann. “The levels that they ultimately set may lead to us delisting some or all of the yard waste compost on our list.”

Power politics
Composting is an up-and-coming industry, likely to follow on the heels of recycling as an environmentally and economically preferable municipal waste option. Just as corporate waste haulers expanded into the recycling business, they are now expanding to composting operations. This January, Texas-based garbage giant Waste Management, Inc. announced that it will “expand organics recycling facilities across the US and Canada” by investing in Harvest Power, the largest food and yard waste composting facility in North America.

Waste Management intends to pursue both aerobic and anaerobic digestion technologies, two very different methods that use municipal food waste for different ends: fertilizer or fuel. Grover practices aerobic composting, which means that bacteria, in the presence of oxygen, rapidly consume the plant matter. The waste products of the process are carbon dioxide, heat, water, and humus, the soil amendment that growers covet. Carbon dioxide builds up in the bottom of the windrows as the piles heat up. If there is too much of it, the piles will start to decompose anaerobically and generate methane, a greenhouse gas that the EPA deems 21 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. To avoid that, Grover carefully checks the carbon dioxide levels within the compost piles and turns them with a giant rolling machine to re-inject oxygen into the long brown heaps of organic matter.

On the other hand, the methane produced by anaerobic digestion can be diverted to a combined heat and power unit and transformed into electricity. The East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) is using food waste from the City of San Francisco for that very purpose. San Francisco’s waste management utility, Recology, sells nearly 25 percent of its commercial food scraps to EBMUD for biogas (methane) generation. The food scraps are combined with sewage, wastewater, and bacteria in EBMUD’s two-million-gallon bio-digesters. The heat and methane produced from the anaerobic digestion is transformed into electricity that meets ninety percent of the power plant’s operational energy needs. Some days, EBMUD even sells back surplus electricity to PG&E.

After the noxious stew has served its methane generation purpose, EBMUD spins the excess water out of the waste material. Solid wastes are carted off to be used as alternative daily cover—the mulch that is spread over the garbage at the landfill to reduce blowing litter, animal attraction, and noxious odors. At this point, the biosolids from EBMUD’s digester cannot be used as an agricultural soil amendment because of prohibitions regarding the use of sewage sludge.

Not all anaerobic digesters are the same. The technology is changing at a fast clip, mostly driven by European companies. Some digesters, like EBMUD’s, add food scraps to sewage to up the methane production. Others use animal manure and other agricultural wastes as the methane-producing feedstock. Still other digesters, which use less water, can employ food and yard waste to produce methane. This last version can both produce energy from methane yet emerge with an end product that can be used as a soil amendment.

In the last fifteen years, the development of anaerobic digesters in Europe has exploded, spurred by the European Union Landfill Directive of 1999 that required member states to stabilize organic material prior to land-filling. If the US were to follow suit, in the pursuit of minimizing methane from landfills and maximizing energy production from renewable resources, anaerobic digesters could indeed be the next big thing. Waste Management is betting on it.

In fact, as more anaerobic facilities are developed, debates are breaking out over which processing method constitutes the “best and highest use” of municipal food scraps. Adam Grover is not concerned that the biogas generators will claim too much of the spoils; he thinks there will be plenty to go around. In fact, he says, it is possible for aerobic compost operations to have too much food waste, since the process relies on a careful ratio. “You can hardly compost food waste by itself—it’s too rich. You need to mix it with green waste, so we might get more food waste than what we can compost soundly. You might get too high of nitrogen count and have odor problems. But,” he concedes, “I don’t know how it’s all going to pan out. [Anaerobic digestion] could be competitive in time, but the technology is not there yet. Maybe in ten years.”

At present, Tania Levy, associate management analyst from the City of Berkeley’s Solid Waste Management also sees no competition between the two methods. “They’re not competition, they augment one another!” she says. “We don’t have enough permitted composting facilities to handle all the organic materials, so adding more facilities of either kind is a good thing.”

Meanwhile, the amount of waste material being diverted from the landfill and trucked to the compost yard continues to rise. Since the Berkeley residential food scrap program debuted three years ago, Levy says that the amount of residential food scraps and yard waste captured has increased 39 percent, while the amount of commercial food scraps has increased 24 percent. Composting is a burgeoning industry, and challenges are an unavoidable aspect of that growth. But the vexations of persistent pesticides and indistinguishable bioplastics may be small bumps on the way to urban food and yard waste becoming a valuable commodity.

[At Columbia], I studied environmental science and got fascinated by this microcosm of materials flow, the piles and piles of garbage along upper Broadway. My dorm was on 110th Street and the campus was on 116th Street and I would walk those six blocks every day and see shoulder-high piles of garbage. It was just amazing to see so many bags. I started digging through these bags because I was so curious about what was in them. I couldn’t believe how much stuff there was, but also how much paper there was. I don’t know what the statistics were then, but now forty percent of garbage
in this country is paper. I said, “That’s what these logs were being cut down for? That’s why those trees are being cleared and those forests felled?”

I signed up to take a tour of Fresh Kills landfill, this gigantic landfill in Staten Island. In every direction as far as I could see was just stuff. You know, appliances and clothes and shoes and pizza boxes and food. I was stunned at both the level of waste and that nobody was talking about this, as if I had stumbled on some secret mass grave. I kept thinking, “How is this happening? How did we build an economy based on such a massive level of destruction?” I vowed to figure it out. I became totally obsessed with garbage.

I was very lucky to be able to get a job at Greenpeace working on garbage. It was the late ‘80s to early ‘90s, and there was massive community opposition to landfills and incinerators in this country. There were about 400 incinerators proposed in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in the US and three-quarters of them were stopped because of community opposition. There was a real pressure about “What are we going to do with our waste?” Greenpeace had the idea—which like many people in Berkeley I thought was a good idea—to make it increasingly difficult and expensive, increasingly strictly regulated, increasingly politically unpopular to build incinerators and dump your stuff in dumps, the idea being that the harder it gets to throw it away, the more motivation there is to reduce the waste upstream.

But we didn’t foresee that some real sleazy schmucks would just load their garbage onto ships and take it around the world and dump it on other countries. I was amazingly fortunate to be at Greenpeace right when they started this campaign, and I spent almost a decade traveling around the world tracking our garbage. I tracked US garbage ships to Haiti, [I went to] South Africa, all over Asia, just all over the place.

How did seeing where our trash ends up change your perspective?
It’s left me with this kind of social neurosis. I can’t help it, whenever I look at anything I just think of its lifecycle. I’ve been to literally hundreds of factories where stuff is made and dumps where stuff is dumped, all over the world except Antarctica. When I look at anything I think about where it came from.

A lot of people say that I’m anti-stuff, and some people that lack a critical thinking muscle email me to say, “If you’re so against stuff, where did you get that shirt you’re wearing?” I’m not against stuff. It’s actually the opposite—I’m pro-stuff. I’m into having knowledge and appreciation and reverence for our stuff. [She holds out her Blackberry.] These metals were mined somewhere. Some habitat was destroyed to get these metals. These chemicals that are inside it, the flame retardants, there’s probably a PVC coating on it—all these chemicals were produced at some factory that made some kid sick somewhere. There’s energy use, it was shipped around the world. So much is embodied in this that what I want to do is appreciate it and take care of it and to keep it as long as possible.

I’m not against consumption; I’m against consumerism, which is the particular kind of consumption where we try to meet our emotional needs and show our status through our stuff. If you’re cold, get a sweater, no problem, I’m not against that. But if you think you’re better than the person with an older sweater next to you, or if you have eight sweaters while someone is cold next to you, or if your sweater was made at the expense of workers using toxics, pesticides, and heavy metal dyes, those are a problem.

How did you branch out into public speaking?
I did a lot of talks being on staff at Greenpeace, working more and more with people around the world on environmental health and justice issues. But I finally realized I needed to come back to the US because the US was the driver of so much of this. I tracked the export of our hazardous
waste overseas. I tracked the export of our hazardous technologies overseas, things like incinerators that we don’t want here anymore but US companies are exporting overseas. I tracked the export of hazardous products like cigarettes or banned pesticides that we don’t want but we export. But I realized that the most dangerous thing that we were exporting is this toxic-based consumer-driven economic model. I realized I’ve got to come home and try to get us to slow down our consumption because we’re modeling this around the world. We’re telling people everywhere that they can live like this … when already we’re using one and a half planet’s worth of resources a year. If everybody lived like we do in the US we’d be using five!

You joined Berkeley’s Rockwood Institute leadership training program to learn about publicizing your message.
We had this exercise where you had to stand up in front of the group and you have five minutes to explain your purpose. I am such a materials geek and technical wonk that I stood up there and said, “My purpose is to bring about a paradigm shift in our relationship to materials.” I said, “We use too much materials, and we use too toxic materials.” I gave this whole talk—I’d been doing this for twenty years and I was very confident. At the end Eli [Pariser] from MoveOn, obviously a smart guy, raised his hand and said, “I have no idea what you just said!”

I was like, “What is not to understand—too much materials, too toxic materials?” And Eli said, “What is a material?” I asked, “What do you mean, ‘What is a material?’ It’s everything, it’s what you’re holding, it’s what you’re sitting on.”

And he looked and said, “I’m sitting on a chair.” That was the most important moment. I said, “Is that what you guys see when you look at that—your brain says ‘chair?’” And they were like, “Yeah, what does yours say?”

I said, “Mine says: ‘Wood, it looks like teak. I wonder if it came from Malaysia or Indonesia? I wonder which people got kicked out of the forest to make that? I wonder if it’s a clear-cut now or a palm oil plantation? It looks like PVC—I wonder if it’s got flame retardant?’”

They were just like, “Oh my God.” They said, “You are lost.” They wrote me off. They said, “You will never be able to talk about this to people who are not already talking about it.” They said that my talk was so full of jargon.

Van Jones [founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights] told me never to say the phrase “paradigm shift” in relation to materials in public ever again. He said that I was starting the conversation twenty years into it. He said, “You just spent twenty years looking at factories and dumps around the world—we didn’t. So you’re starting out there and we’re like, ‘chairs.’” That was so useful.

What happened next?
On the last session of this Rockwood training, almost as a joke, I got this big piece of paper and I drew this cartoon, “The Story of Stuff.” And they LOVED it. I was like, “You’re kidding, I just drew stick figures!”

Activists often take the wrong tack on communication. I did this in the first communication exercise I had in talking to this group—I realized in hindsight that my goal was to show them how much I knew, to share my most advanced thinking, to do as much of a brain dump as I could manage to establish myself as a credible source of information. I realized it was much more [about] showing off in a way, not so that they would think I was cool, but so they would think I was a valuable source of information on this so that they would want to come to me. … [But] as organizers it’s not our goals to tell every single thing we know to everybody. It’s to make a connection so that we can go on that journey together. They told me to take my center of gravity out of my head and put it into my heart and connect to people as humans.

How did you turn your cartoon into a film?
I was getting invited to do this talk all the time. I did it so many times I thought, “I’m going to barf if I have to give this talk again.” Every time after I would give the talk someone would raise their hand and say, “Do you have a film of this talk?” So I just collected all their names. I didn’t have any good film, and I’m busy and I just didn’t believe anybody would watch it. Films are expensive—it’s hard to make a film. Finally [a] funder gave me a seed grant and assigned her communications director to work with me. We took a film of me doing the talk live, and then we took it around to some different production houses and asked how they might make a film of it. I just loved Free Range Studios. I thought they were really creative. By then I had this pile of people who said they’d help so I wrote back to all of them and said, “Remember that talk that you saw a few years ago that you liked? We’re making a movie, you want to help?” Thank goodness so many people pitched in.

What did you think would happen when you released the movie online in 2007?
I just expected, phew, I don’t ever have to do that goddamn talk any more. I remember Free Range said, “Annie, you might need some help with this after you launch it.” And I was like, “Help with what? It’s a twenty-minute cartoon, you put it on the Web, what is there to do? I’ll just have to update the Web site once in a while.” I was so naïve. We had thought that success would be 50,0000 people watching it, and we got that in like four hours. We were getting emails from people literally all over the world. Now it’s been viewed online about 8 million times by people in 223 countries and territories.

Why do you think that happened?
I think a huge part of it was the moment. We’re trashing the planet, we’re trashing each other and we’re not even having fun—those three things are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

You got some flack from people who thought not buying stuff is unpatriotic.
Isn’t that so funny? I feel like the best way we can honor and pay tribute to our country is by pointing out where things are going wrong. It’s like, if you’re in a ship and it’s sinking and you point out that it’s sinking, is that anti-ship?

Was making the film free online part of its success?
When I was making it, I had another friend who works for an environmental group who was also making a film and he was making his available for $19.95 if you buy the DVD online. I told him, “Make it free, the new price point is free. The goal is getting the message out.” We had some arguments. He said, “No, people value stuff more if they pay for it.”

This movie, the viral success of it has just shocked everybody. Even before we made it, Free Range Studios, which knows so much about this, said twenty-minute things don’t go viral. They said, “Your primary distribution strategy will be DVDs.”

We do distribution by DVDs because a lot of places don’t have access to high-speed Internet. Some people have written to us and given us a hard time about the materials in the DVDs, but from my international travels I know that there’s such a digital divide. I didn’t want to limit this conversation to people who have high-speed Internet. We’ve sold a lot of DVDs to Native American communities, to public schools that don’t have Internet access, to Russia, China, India, places all over the world.

Why do a book too?
It’s one way to make it available beyond the high-speed Internet crowd. Also, I couldn’t fit all this in the movie. I had to leave a lot out. The number one complaint that The Story of Stuff movie gets is “You left something out.” I get that all the time. And I’m like, “Guys, cut me some slack, it’s a twenty-minute cartoon! I’m taking on the entire global materials economy!” I tried to talk really fast but there’s only so much you can say in twenty minutes.

There are four things that the book has beyond the movie. One is more detail. A lot of people wrote and wanted more detail: Is extraction always bad, could mining be reformed, are all chemicals bad, are all corporations bad?

Second thing is there are more explanations and alternatives and solutions. … People often ask, “What are the ten things I can do to save the planet?” and I’m like, “There aren’t ten things to do.” But I do recommend individual actions, and Appendix 1 is examples of the kinds of policies and reforms and laws that people could work for. So the third thing is more examples of ways to get involved.

The fourth is more personal stories. I was kind of hesitant to include this because it felt so narcissistic to talk about my own travels, but the publisher convinced me that it allows people to relate to me as a person. Not everybody is interested in the technical makeup of organochlorines and medical waste management techniques.

One of the book’s big recommendations is that we should value time over stuff.
Right now the people of the United States work longer hours than probably any other industrialized country. Juliet Schorr, who wrote The Overworked American, said that we’re working more hours now than in feudal society. In between feudal society and now, it got better for a while during the Industrial Revolution. In the Industrial Revolution there were gains in productivity and we chose a different path than Europe—we chose to trade those gains in productivity for more stuff. So we continued to work long hours but we have huge houses, huge cars, huge refrigerators, multiple televisions—I mean we have more and bigger stuff than anybody in any other country. Europe took a different path. They chose to trade those gains in productivity for more leisure. So if you spend time in Europe, their apartments are smaller, their fridges are smaller, their cars are smaller and fewer, they invested in public transportation instead of in a car ownership society. They have less stuff. It’s a less commodified society and there’s more leisure.

Are they happier?
All the data shows that they’re happier. The Happy Planet Index by the New Economics Foundation looks at happiness over resource use, which means: How efficient is that country at converting resources into well-being? They consider happiness [to be] life satisfaction times life expectancy. The United States [ranks] 114th out of 143. All of Asia, all of Latin America, all of Europe except Luxembourg, most of the former Soviet Union—almost everybody was above us [in 2009] except for one Middle Eastern country like the United Arab Emirates because they have such intensive resource use, and Africa. Costa Rica was number 1 in 2009, which is interesting because they’ve also abandoned their defensive military and diverted all those resources into social well-being. They have a higher life expectancy than us, a higher life satisfaction than us, and they are using a quarter of the resources.

You also recommend more sharing.
There is no reason not to do it: less resource use [and] you save money. If you save money you don’t have to work as much so you can have more leisure time. Another thing is you have to talk to people to share. When you look at the data of how we are working longer hours than at any time in recent history, where is all that time coming from? Where there’s less time spent is in community engagement and civil society.

There is this terrifying downward spiral where we are so exhausted and stressed and socially isolated, we’re spending less time investing into community, so community is less able to provide the resources it used to provide: entertainment, free childcare, someone to bring you food when you are at home sick, someone to bring in your mail when you are traveling, a ride to the airport, help moving. Those things get commodified, which means we have to work more to pay for them all.

Are you turning StoryofStuff.org into a channel for other films? In December you released The Story of Cap & Trade, and you’re also planning to do films on electronics and bottled water.
We were getting about 10,000 views a day and I thought, “If this many people are looking, we might as well give them some new information.” We decided we would work with partner groups that were working on issues directly related to systems of production and consumption. Our criteria is that [they be] more solutions-oriented. … Another criteria is that the organization we’re partnering with would do the follow-up work. We’re not going to start campaigns on cap and trade and bottled water and electronics and cosmetics. There are very good organizations on those issues. We wanted to encourage our viewers to contact them.

Another criteria is that the new films [be] emblematic of a key point of The Story of Stuff. The bottled water one is about manufactured demand. How was it that they got us all to spend $2 for a glass of water when you can get it for a cent at the faucet? The electronics one is about planned obsolescence.

How do you want people to use these films?
We use a Creative Commons license specifically because we want people to do whatever they want with these films. Anybody is allowed to download it for free. On the Web site for The Story of Stuff we have downloadable posters to announce a screening, downloadable invitations for house parties, and a little kit about how to have a house party. We want people to show these films and start a discussion with their classmates, their community.

The goal of making The Story of Stuff was to turn the volume up on public discourse around how we make, use and throw away stuff. I don’t have a particular thing I want [people] to do. If they’re turned on by gardening, they should start community gardens. If they’re turned on by transportation, they could fight for bike lanes. If they’re sick of working like dogs, they could fight for a mandatory vacation law.

Why did you do The Story of Cap & Trade? It’s about an abstract idea, not about a kind of stuff.
The cap and trade one was different because it was an emergency. Because of my work internationally I knew a lot of environmental activists in other countries and a lot of them are in the countries that are bearing the brunt of climate change. They felt excluded from the policy discussions and they were deeply concerned that this cap and trade approach was not going to work … [and] asked me if I would please work with members of Climate Justice Now! to make a film that would encourage critical discussions about cap and trade.

I called so many environmental groups around here and asked them, “What do you think about cap and trade?” Everybody I talked to said it doesn’t meet what the science says we need, it probably won’t work, but it’s the best we’re going to get. … I had this existential crisis because a lot of the groups that I knew said, “Don’t make that film, because it’s going to jeopardize our chance to get this bill, and even though it won’t work it’s the best we’re going to get.” And I said, “Well, it’s definitely the best we’re going to get if that’s all we ask for.”

What are your objections—you like the “cap,” but not the “trade” part?
“Cap” means you put a limit on how much carbon you’re producing. Duh, of course we need to do that. We’re producing too much carbon; we have to put a cap immediately. But then the devil’s in the details.

One of the devils is that the current bill in the US Congress is called “cap and give-away,” you cap how much carbon there is and then you make permits for companies to release that carbon. The companies get these permits for free. The other approach is that you charge the companies for the permits and you can use the money for all kinds of things to help transition to a clean energy economy, to help low-income residents deal with the higher cost of energy during this transition. We should charge them for [permits]—that should be a cost of doing business.

The second thing I’m concerned about is the offsets, which sort of ruins the whole point of cap and trade. With offsets if one reduces their emissions below how many permits they have, they can sell their permits to someone else. There are a number of problems with that. One is that it means there is more pollution still. If you’ve reduced [emissions], someone else has increased it, so it’s the same. Another thing is there tend to be pollution hotspots in those situations, which brings up a real environmental justice issue. In some communities people have the political clout to demand that their companies clean up, and in other communities they don’t. … [By] allowing companies to do these offsets I fear that you’ll see a migration of dirty industries to these communities that are perceived not to have the political clout to stop it.

The other thing is that there are just total scams with this. Under these offset programs a company can do something like say, “Oh, I was going to increase [emissions] 500 percent but because I care so much about the planet I’m going to only increase 100 percent.” So they can say that they are voluntarily reducing it 400 percent and then get paid to have offsets for that.

Another devil in the detail with this is that it’s a distraction. This creates a huge financial market for trading these offsets. It’s about creating a new bubble because the dot.com bubble burst, the housing bubble burst. The people whose jobs are creating and investing in bubbles are looking for a new bubble, and the carbon market is a really ripe one.

What’s a better solution?
What we really need is a complete overhaul of how we do business today. One is cutting fossil fuel subsidies. We said in the film that right now the US government subsidizes fossil fuels 2.5 times more than renewables. A lot of people told us that that is conservative … by some calculations the US subsidizes fossil fuels five times more than renewables.

We need to get subsidies [to move] away from an individual car ownership society, invest in public transportation, redesign cities so that people can live closer to their work and closer to stores and things so they don’t have to commute as much, build up our communities and increase sharing so that not everybody has to buy everything, because anything you buy adds more carbon to the planet. Invest in clean energies. Stop burning coal, no new coal plants. It’s hard to give a quick summary because it really means redesigning our entire economy.

For The Story of Stuff most of the criticism came from the right—for The Story of Cap & Trade some of it came from the left, people who say you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
These were the “This is the best we’re going to get” people. There are some times in which you have to make compromises in politics. That is part of the game. But you can only make so many compromises before your solution is not a solution any more. I don’t trust commodities traders to save the planet. They’ve never made saving the planet their priority; I don’t believe they’re going to do it now.

Who should be at the helm?
I think it should be democratically elected government.

What are you going to do next?
We have a number of ideas for upcoming films. I want to do the story of credit cards. We want to focus on issues that are not getting a lot of attention and that we can take the risk, because we have nothing to lose.

Nobody would be more surprised by this feat of survival and service than Rob Martin and George Kohl,
cofounders of a short-lived ‘70s St. Louis experiment called Environmental Response. After their own organization broke apart on the shoals of burnout and identity crisis, the two men conducted a survey of these new-fangled local service organizations meant to help heal the earth. During
the months surrounding the first Earth Day in 1970, eighteen environmental centers emerged, and Martin and Kohl examined eight of these, including Berkeley’s, founded in May 1969. The survey they issued in April 1973 is called “The Goddamned Report,” and it’s interesting reading nearly forty years later, not least because some of the challenges they identify remain true today.

The idea behind ecology centers (during the ‘70s and ‘80s, 44 centers would be founded across the nation) was to offer information and education rather than partisan politics. The centers would provide meeting space and networking to specific-issue action groups and to the public at large, serving as a community resource and library combined. A switchboard would answer informational
calls, like-minded people could meet each other in a comfortable environment, and activists could research answers to burning questions that would provoke cries for environmental reform. As Martin and Kohl wrote, “the Ecology Center concept was clearly a product of movement-oriented thinking,” with committed, passionate people kindling concern for the environment in communities that welcomed the center’s presence, responding with money and volunteers.

Yet exhausted staffers, lack of direction and concrete goals, and disappointment over lack of support characterized many centers in the early years. Only three years after the first Earth Day, “The Goddamned Report” pronounced the ecology movement dead, the concept of coordinating organizations obsolete, and criticized an attempt at a multi-service approach. Of their own experience in St. Louis, Martin and Kohl wrote: “A few remained, continued the fight (for that is what it was) but the two of us left. Gradually. At first it was our spirit that turned on us, and then our minds. We stepped back, as if out of a furious athletic contest, and climbed into the bleachers from where we began to see, so plainly, the errors we had been making all this time.” The authors advocated dropping the name “ecology center,” closing down the centers, and regrouping to adopt a couple of carefully chosen goals to fight entrenched industry and government interests. This, they said, would be the second phase of environmentalism.

Like Time magazine’s “God Is Dead” cover, the movement’s obit proved premature. Sometimes you just have to wait for others to catch up. What Martin and Kohl labeled unattainable is what Berkeley’s Ecology Center has accomplished over its decades of service: “Notions of broad-spectrum organizing, “ wrote Martin and Kohl of the center concept, “of involvement on all levels of community power structure; of financial support from a committed citizenry; of a wide variety of
activities and services; of trouble-shooting and educating and organizing and researching and publishing all done simultaneously. They are dreams now, not realities.”

Debates about the efficacy of spectrum-based vs. issue-specific focuses persist, as do questions of how to assign priorities and fund vital programs. Yet today the Ecology Center continues to fulfill its original mission of providing the public with reliable information, hands-on training, and models for sustainable living. Programs include Berkeley’s residential curbside recycling, the Berkeley farmers’ markets, the Farm Fresh Choice food justice program, the EcoHouse demonstration home and garden, the Ecology Center store, a library and information center, classes and climate change action groups, and this magazine. The Ecology Center also sponsors nine other nonprofits, such as the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives and the Indigenous Permaculture Project, and puts on an annual summit to showcase Berkeley sustainability programs and initiatives.

Which goes to show that it takes dreamers as well as pragmatists to change the world.

“I’d been selling at the market for a number of years,” he says, selling raisins, grapes, and organic dates. A people person, Lumpkin helped other vendors and volunteered for organizational duties. In the mid-’80s, the vendor-operated market ran out of steam and went on a couple-year hiatus. During that time, Lumpkin and Biz Marcus, who picked up leftover produce from farmers for the nonprofit agency Daily Bread, worked to restart the market. When the Ecology Center took over market administration in July 1987 and started the market back up again, Lumpkin joined the farmers’ market committee (now called the community advisory board) and soon stepped into the co-manager spot.

During that time, the Ecology Center, which had been run as a collective requiring consensus for decisionmaking, also went through a transformation. Each program had a manager, as it does now, but there was no overall administration. “There was an office manager,” explains Lumpkin, “but that person was more about communicating between people. Everyone had his or her own program, and no one took care of organization-wide business. People made sacrifices of time and energy to
keep the collective functioning. We talked it around and around and a lot of us, including myself, didn’t want to go that direction. I really liked the collective model; I don’t like to have bosses, but on the other hand, we needed someone to take care of stuff. Things were falling through the cracks.” After talking it around and around over a period of weeks, Lumpkin says it became obvious that the collective had to give way to a top-down management process, and recycling manager Kathy Hutton
became the first executive director of the Ecology Center.

Even with a management structure, running a center divided into separate programs can be challenging: how is it determined what work gets done and how that work is supported? “It’s hard to prioritize in that kind of model,” Lumpkin says. “I was thinking back to one change that cut two ways. When we had [information manager and board member] Karen Pickett, we had someone very
involved in forest and wilderness issues. She brought that expertise to the information department, connected us to Headwaters and Earth First!. Since she left, we’re not so connected to those things anymore. But Karen’s program, Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters, became our first fiscally sponsored project, and now we umbrella all these other organizations. We’re able to help make them happen without having to staff them.”

Lumpkin feels that the Ecology Center’s strength today lies in its broad-based, nonpartisan focus. “We’re not in such a tight niche,” he says. “We do our specific hands-on programs, and those things set us apart. Mainstream environmental organizations aren’t there to answer people’s questions on a variety of issues, and we are. And we’re also there to demonstrate with programs, especially recycling and the farmers’ market, an environmental model.”

The center has enough flexibility to try new ideas. As the special events coordinator, Lumpkin schedules and oversees events connected with the market, such as the holiday crafts fair and the string band contest. “What you see now are the things that worked, like the fiddle contest,” he says. “I tried to start a bunch of different things that didn’t continue because they didn’t get enough attendance. I had a vision of an ecological culture that I wanted to have an influence on, and I wanted
us to help grow that. The Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival is rooted in an environmental set of values, and it remains the closest to my vision. I wanted to celebrate the seasons, do equinox and solstice events, but I could never make them work. I had to go with what worked rather than
be driven by my personal vision.” Last year’s festival, held at the end of September, was the fourteenth annual meet.

The farmers’ market still invigorates Lumpkin. “It’s one of the sweetest places on earth you can spend your time,” he says. “When I’m up at the market, many people I know not by name but by face smile at me just because I’ve been associated with the market for so long. Between selling and managing and doing the special events, it’s been over 25 years. I don’t have that anywhere else. It’s just a feel-good thing.”

1989: “One thing about the Center… it was then and it still is. There aren’t many community-based organizations that have stayed in existence. Why? Because there’s still a need for it. It has not gotten diverted from its basic purpose. It has not blown apart like other groups. The Ecology Center plods on. Nothing shocking… nothing extreme. It didn’t take a good guy/bad guy approach. It showed how things should be done and expected people to catch on.” —Peter Heylin
First board president Peter Heylin worked one day a month at the center; board members in the early years took turns staffing Saturdays. Heylin cofounded bottle-recycling facility Encore! in 1975, which Wine Business Monthly deemed an effort “ahead of its time”; recycling wine bottles became more difficult after the introduction of pressure-sensitive labels. In summer 2009, a Napa-based venture with high-tech equipment capable of removing the labels kicked into gear.”

1999: “A lot of people got their start being turned on to other people, resources and ideas at the Ecology Center, and then went on to do other things. It would have been different had the Ecology Center not been there for people. One of the reasons it’s hard to track is because the way that the Ecology Center functions is to not really ‘own’ much of anything, in terms of campaigns and issues, but to try and be a resource and a springboard. I think that a lot of the people that worked on Styrofoam or plastics issues, or started community recycling centers, or brought projects into the schools, or started community garden groups, or creek restoration groups, wouldn’t necessarily credit the Ecology Center. There was this general sharing of ideas without ownership. It was a different way of spreading the word. The point was to get it out there and spread it as widely and as far as possible, and I think, given what we see today, that was very successful.” —Karen Pickett, Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters

2010: “One thing that I value most about the structure of the Ecology Center is its flexibility. We’re able to offer so many services to so many people. We provide essential services such as waste reduction, sustainable food production, community food security, and nutrition. We can offer highly affordable classes on sustainable activities such as urban gardening, gray water systems, soil fertility, energy savings, carbon footprint reduction, and so many others. Our programs promote youth empowerment, community organizing, and environmental justice. We are able to model and teach sustainable practices while we actively participate in policy and planning discussions. It’s exciting to be involved on so many levels at once, and I feel our ability to reach out and help people is only growing.” —Raquel Pinderhughes, president, Ecology Center board of directors

YEARS OF SERVICE
May 1969:
Berkeley Ecology Center founded by a photographer, a commercial pilot, two schoolteachers, and a
water expert, Ray Balter, who was also a printer and hoped the center could sustain itself through commercial printing. The Ecology Center opened at Allston Way and Oxford, with a bookstore, library,
meeting rooms, offices, and a print shop.

Earth Day, 1970:
The Ecology Center receives its 501c3 status, the first such organization in the nation to apply for and receive nonprofit status.

1970:
The Ecology Center receives a federal grant for one year to run a recycling center at Sacramento
Street and University Avenue in Berkeley.

January 18, 1971:
Two Standard Oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate Bridge, and hundreds of volunteers rush to save oil-soaked birds and wildlife. The Ecology Center is a focal point for coordinating the volunteer effort.

Early 1971:
The Ecology Center reorganizes as a membership organization with a staff of three, a nine-member
board of directors, and two honorary directors. “By paying the staff next to nothing for ninety hours
a week we managed to get out of debt,” said thenboard chair Peter Heylin.

1972:
Conscientious objectors arrange alternative service at the Ecology Center; besides staffing the center, many of the early recycling volunteers were COs. A speakers’ bureau is established.

1972–73:
A second recycling center opens at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Dwight Way. A third site opens at Channing and San Pablo Avenue. In June 1973, the Ecology Center inaugurates curbside pickup of newspapers. In October, the Ecology Center sponsors the first National Recycling Convention
in San Francisco.

1973:
Issues of the day include opposition to a proposed southern crossing of the bay and a proposed mall on the Berkeley Marina. The Ecology Center champions waterfront preservation, protection of
Sunol Regional Wilderness from development, and helps campaign for Proposition 20, which creates the California Coastal Commission.

1975:
The Ecology Center inaugurates ENCORE! (Environmental Container Reuse) to recycle wine bottles. That facility is first housed in West Berkeley, then Emeryville, finally at 2nd and Gilman Street.

1978:
The center moves to a small storefront at College Avenue and Derby Street, causing a cutback in meetings.

1979:
California Waste Management Board advances $90,000 to establish multi-material curbside recycling, adding cans and bottles to pickups.

1979–80:
Campaigns include opposition to Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, initiating urban farming days at the student farm on Oxford Street, compost distribution, plant pest identification classes, rabbit raising demonstrations.

1983–84:
Urban Ore, Community Conservation Center, and the Ecology Center form the Berkeley Recycling
Group to negotiate contracts with the City of Berkeley. The city awards recycling contract to Engineered Waste Control (EWC). After a battle, Berkeley voters choose Measure G, keeping
recycling in the hands of the Berkeley Recycling group. Measure G also mandates fifty percent recycling over a five-year plan. In 1984, Berkeley recycles 25 percent of its solid waste (1,490 out of 7,800 tons a month).

1984:
The Ecology Center loses its lease and moves to cramped quarters in the University Avenue Co-op. The new home leads to a rejuvenated center thanks to the synergy with the co-op and its members.

July 1987:
Farmers’ Market organizers seek sponsorship of the Ecology Center for a new Farmers’ Market.

1988:
Farmers’ Market expands to year-round schedule and is running at capacitywith thirty farmers. Most farmers leave a box of produce for the Daily Bread Project, distributing food to the needy. Ecology Center Recycling Manager Kathy Evans receives the top recycling award in the state, Recycler
of the Year.

1989:
The Ecology Center helps pass Berkeley’s Stop Styrofoam Campaign, leading to a local ban and inspiring communities around the country. Recycling curbside collection goes from monthly to weekly. In November, the Ecology Center moves to its current home at 2530 San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley.

1992:
The Ecology Center newsletter becomes Terrain magazine.

1999:
A Berkeley health report shows diet-related disease in low-income neighborhoods, which historically have less access to healthy foods. The Berkeley Food Policy Council, of which the Ecology Center is a
member, proposes Farm Fresh Choice, a program to bring fresh produce into lower-income neighborhoods. Farm Fresh Choice becomes an Ecology Center program in 1999.

2005:
Coauthoring Berkeley’s Zero Waste policy with city staffers, the Ecology Center helps start the Bay Area Zero Waste working group and the California Product Stewardship Council.

2006:
The Ecology Center adopts the Berkeley Eco-House. Founded in 1999, the EcoHouse serves as a
demonstration house and garden where community members can learn about accessible and affordable ways to adapt existing spaces. Classes and tours are held regularly on-site.

2006:
The Ecology Center hosts the first annual Sustainability Summit, held in the fall, to showcase efforts of the city of Berkeley, nonprofits, and individuals to improve sustainable practices. Subsequent events are sell-out affairs.

2008:
Climate Change Action groups begin meeting at the center in August. Participants learn how to minimize their carbon footprint and how to lead groups of their own at work or in their neighborhoods.

2010:
The Ecology Center signs a ten-year recycling contract with the City of Berkeley.