Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
protecting the habitats and quality of the bay, where they so enjoyed hunt-
ing and fishing. Many other initiatives followed—making the region one
of the most environmentally mobilized in the world (see p. 319, “Learning
More, Helping Out: A Few Places to Start”).
“I remember one dinner party at our house, when the president of
Ideal Cement, a friend of my husband's, winked and said, 'Well, Sylvia,
you're just too naïve to understand,' ” says McLaughlin, guessing he was
trying to put her in her place concerning a huge bay fill project. “Years
later, I met his partner in the project, David Rockefeller, at a party. He held
out his hand, looked me in the eye, and said, 'Well, you won.' ”
The environment, scientists often remind us, is a closed system. Things
don't go away; they just change forms or shift from place to place. Yet for
centuries, humans have trusted creeks, rivers, currents, and tides to carry
their sewage, refuse, and waste away. Out of sight, perhaps, but not out of
mind for long.
Waste is not borne away quickly in the bay. Though the tides sweep
beaches and mudflats smooth twice a day, only a small fraction of the bay's
water exits the Golden Gate. In the decades preceding the 1970s, this re-
circulation made the bay particularly rife. Raw sewage traveled directly
from toilets into the bay via more than 80 points of discharge. Industries
and refineries also discharged untreated wastewater. Farms upstream wa-
tered their crops and let the excess—laced with fertilizers, pesticides, and
minerals—run off into rivers feeding the bay. Meanwhile, every refueling
or repair of a vessel spilled a little oil.
Back then, fish bloated and turned belly up in the bay every few weeks,
particularly in the South Bay, where waste from Santa Clara Valley fruit
canneries often overwhelmed local sloughs. At this end of the estuary,
tides and freshwater inflows weren't strong enough to flush and clean the
shallows. Nutrients from sewage and cannery effluent triggered algae
blooms. When these blooms died, the decomposition process stole so
much oxygen from the water that none was left for the fish (a phenome-
non scientists call anoxia).
“The shore stank and the bay reeked of sulfides, peeling the paint of
the houses in Milpitas,” says Sam Luoma of the U.S. Geological Survey, a
hydrologist who arrived in the Bay Area in the early 1970s to research
contamination, and went on to lead several large estuary restoration ini-
tiatives. “That's why they called Milpitas the armpit of the bay, because it
smelled like one from July through September.” Similar anoxic conditions
