Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
on this planet live and work, but it should give us courage and perspective
to remember the first environmental activists, who didn't realize that what
they were trying to do was impossible.”
Since then, many initiatives have succeeded in tackling the “impossi-
ble”—saving birds, redwoods, wetlands, and creeks from urban pressures,
and creating a body of federal and state legislation to protect the quality of
the environment. As a result, by the late 1980s, the bay was much cleaner
and healthier than it was after World War II. It was also surrounded by
communities with a special commitment to its welfare.
Moving the bay's best interests to the front burner of the regional agenda
took decades. It wasn't so long ago that city fathers saw a fortune in real
estate glimmering under the bay's blue surface. In the 1960s, every city
lucky enough to have shorelines had a plan to grow its borders by filling
the bay. Dumping sand and rock in the shallows would enable the con-
struction of new houses and commercial buildings, thereby increasing
both municipal acreage and tax revenue. The natural topography made
landfill relatively easy to accomplish—most of the bay was, and still is, less
than 12 feet deep and easy to “reclaim.” Developers drew maps of the bay
showing more streets and subdivisions than underwater topography.
“The Bay was seen chiefly as a thing to get rid of, and the solemn super-
structure of western property titles rose upon a quicksand of epic fraud
and theft from the public domain,” UC Berkeley historian Gray Brechin
observed in a speech about early views of the bay.
The grand schemes for new in-bay subdivisions were a far cry from the
reality of the shoreline in the 1960s. At that time, the edge of the bay was a
forbidding zone of barbed wire, railroads, industry, firing ranges, ship-
yards, and salt ponds. Decades of trash and sewage dumping had turned
the gravel beaches and sandbars into reeking wastelands. Living by the
water was not for the rich but for the poor.
“The pattern of development was for communities to be walled of
from the bay. So cities that once had a landing or a small port didn't, when
I was growing up in the '60s, even think of themselves as bayside cities
anymore. You couldn't get to the shore of the bay as a member of the pub-
lic,” says David Lewis of Save the Bay, an organization founded to protect
the region's watery heart.
Though unable to reach the water's edge, local residents could see and
smell the rot in their midst. Mounds of garbage grew taller by the day
along the shorelines of communities such as Berkeley, Albany, Hayward,
