Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
TABLE 1.
San Francisco Bay through History
1700
TODAY
Bay surface area
~800
~580 square miles
Bay Area human population
10,000
8 million
Tidal marsh
190,000
45,000 acres
Freshwater flows through Bay
~30
~20 million acre-feet/year
Salmon returning to spawn
>2 million
<150,000 (only 1/5 wild origin)
Spring shorebird count
millions
hundreds of thousands
Sources:
Data from Bay Conservation and Development Commission; Margolin 1978;
Habitat
Goals
; Department of Water Resources; California Department of Fish and Game.
water for longer than anyone, anywhere, on the West Coast,” says the U.S.
Geological Survey's Jan Thompson. Though Thompson has spent most of
the last two decades studying an alien clam decimating the bay food web,
she remains optimistic. “What better system to prove that you can turn
something around than one that has been so manipulated, and one we can
still manipulate?”
Californians are as changeable as the bay itself. Many come to the Golden
State expressly to escape their former lives or to experience something
new. People arrive ready to fight for a dream, whether gold or freedom or
tolerance or redwood trees. And one of the dreams they've fought hardest
for is a healthy bay.
By the 1950s, the bay was more stinky and ugly than healthy. For years,
locals had been dumping their garbage at shoreline landfills, draining
their sewage into creeks and tidelands, and banishing their industries, re-
fineries, and canneries to the waterfront. Fish kills, oil spills, and bay
fills—the dumping of dirt into the shallows to create new real estate—were
considered a normal part of doing business. The shore was not a place to
go for recreation and exercise, as it is for many Bay Area residents today,
but a place to avoid.
In 1961, Berkeley's plan to fill several thousand acres of the bay lit a fire
under three of its residents. Kay Kerr, Esther Gulick, and Sylvia McLaugh-
lin could see the muddying of the waters and the changes to the shore
from their living room windows up in the hills. Investigating the matter,
the women heard city council members discussing the removal of all of
the coves to achieve tidy waterfronts, and saw an Army Corps of Engi-
