California’s Native American tribes have been asserting themselves in the state’s endless water debates, speaking out against massive new water projects and for salmon and improved river flows. These voices are getting a newly respectful hearing, but how much influence do they really have? I explore the question in a new piece for Maven’s Notebook, [...]
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The bays, rivers, and marshes from the Golden Gate to Sacramento–one waterscape with many names and many problems–continue to draw me in. This year I revisited Suisun Marsh, the great freshwater wetland and waterfowl refuge that is the middle link in this aqueous chain. Digesting a just-issued report from the San Francisco Estuary Institute, I [...]
Now it gets serious about sea level rise. An architect in the coastal village of Bolinas offers a plan to rebuild the town’s core on higher, safer ground. Around San Francisco Bay, cities and counties face a new state mandate to brace for encroaching tides. In the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, sometimes called “doomed” because [...]
Work continues on my Marin County Environmental History and overlapping projects. On November 8, the History’s website went live. On the 11th, I helped Gerry Warburg launch Saving Point Reyes, his inside history of the 1969 campaign to rescue the half-finished National Seashore from the budget chopping block (and much more). On November 15, I [...]
Sometimes the news is good. This soggy winter and spring I tramped the margins of southern San Francisco Bay to witness an unfolding environmental triumph: the conversion of 15,000 acres of former salt ponds into tidal marshes and other habitats vital to birds and an entire ecosystem. The regenerated shoreline fringe will also help buffer [...]
It’s out: the latest state plan for moving Sacramento River water south to California’s biggest cities and farms. Also just out and almost as long in the making: my history of such ideas and efforts, which now go back a century. I hope my work for the California Water Library will help readers of all [...]
A project two years in the making gets off the ground this month: a comprehensive environmental history of Marin County, California, a landscape and habitat of national value, the scene of thorny debates past and present, and my home turf. I’ve been writing pieces of this story since 1970; now I want to tell the [...]
In Sausalito, 6 PM, I’m joining an IN PERSON panel, with Marin City activist Terrie Harris Green, Dalia Adofo of Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates, and Sausalito Mayor Janelle Kellman, to explore the overdue melding of social justice and environmental concerns. I’ll be the old white guy. It’s at 750 Bridgeway (old B of A) [...]
The Knee Deep Times is a lively new newspaper—free and online—about people facing off against sea level rise and other menaces of climate change. The excellent Ariel R. Okamoto, also of Estuary News, edits. In the fall I joined Ariel in reporting on sessions of the 2021 Climate Adaptation Forum, a grand caucus of experts [...]
Oil spills, large and small, blot the history of San Francisco Bay, but for old-timers there is just one Great Oil Spill: the disaster of January 18, 1971. Two small Standard Oil tankers locked hulls in the foggy Golden Gate, releasing over a million gallons of heavy fuel mixture to foul shores from Ocean Beach to [...]