Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Mountain View, and Palo Alto, and choked baylands in San Francisco's
Candlestick Cove and San Jose's Alviso. At that time, 20 major landfills
pushed into the bay “like deltas from rivers of consumption and waste,”
writes John Hart in his book
Portrait of an Estuary
.
These and other landfills took a noticeable toll on the remaining open
water. At the time of the Gold Rush, experts estimate, the open water area
of the bay was around 787 square miles. By 1960, so many extensions had
been added to islands, shores, and seawalls that only 548 square miles of
bay remained.
But up in the hills, someone was watching the bay's disappearance. In
1961, three women accustomed to beautiful bay views from their front
windows began noticing the changes to the shoreline. “We could all see it
being filled in,” says Sylvia McLaughlin, wife of a mining magnate and Uni-
versity of California regent. “Then I saw the headlines in the
Berkeley Ga-
zette
, how the city was going to double its size in the name of 'progress.'
And every time I went downtown, I'd see these huge trucks rumbling down
to the bay, filled with dirt and refuse from university building projects.”
Others could see the travesty on the shores, too. The
Chronicle
's Gil- i l -
liam remembers fires burning out in the bay at night. Where Berkeley's
Eastshore Freeway is today, he recalls dikes crisscrossing the shallows,
trucks dumping garbage inside the dikes, and the burning of the garbage.
By that time, most of the bay bottom had been sold of to railroad and real
estate companies for development. Everyone saw this as progress, not pil-
lage. “The word
environment
, as we now use it in relation to total ecology,
was not even in anyone's vocabulary yet,” Gilliam says.
Concerned, Sylvia McLaughlin met with her friend Kay Kerr, at Berke-
ley's Town and Gown Club, and soon afterward with another friend, Es-
ther Gulick. They discussed, with some horror, their hometown's plans to
pave several thousand acres of the bay—an area that might have stretched
streets out to the end of Berkeley's long wharf (three miles). They vowed to
try to halt the filling.
The three women had a lot going for them. Not only were they fired up
about the plight of their bay but they had the means and connections to do
something about it. In addition to the business and university ties of
McLaughlin's husband, Kerr was the wife of the president of the University
of California, and Gulick was married to a professor.
As a first step, they invited the leaders of 13 conservation groups to
Esther's living room. “Kay gave a pitch about the bay being filled in and
they all agreed something must be done, but said they were too busy sav-
ing birds and redwoods and wilderness,” recalls McLaughlin. “So they all
wished us luck and filed out the door, and we sat down and started our
own organization, Save the Bay.”
Aided by the gift of mailing lists from the Sierra Club, the Audubon
