One cannot undermine the power of nature to restore itself. The morning after it rains in Berkeley, everything outside looks so fresh. The wood shingles and turquoise tile of Cloyne Court and Soda Hall are clean and vibrant. The sidewalks are damp. Streets glisten. From Northside, I amble downhill over puddles and gutters toward the Berkeley Marina. In Downtown, I catch the 51B, which takes me over train tracks and Interstate 80, then drops me off at the waterfront. The smell of wet earth is heavy in the outdoor air.
It’s been seven years since former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency” when 58,000 gallons of Cosco-Busan oil spilled into the San Francisco Bay. Now, things are more or less OK at the marina. The birds and their mudflats are no longer tarred. The shellfish are, arguably, safe to eat again. The extension of the Bay Trail, partially funded by Cosco-Busan oil-spill reparations, is open to bikers and pedestrians. Soon, the do-it-yourself trash cleanup stations, which are fully funded by reparations, will be installed along the shoreline.
Although the Cosco-Busan oil spill was, according to Shorebird Park naturalist coordinator Patty Donald, “horrible and massive,” the truth is the marina itself was founded on enormous loads of trash. Trains ran along the beaches of the East Bay until Berkeley began pouring landfill into the bay. While activism has diverted landfill away from the bay, we still haven’t stopped what Donald calls “an ongoing onslaught.” She’s referring to the shoreline pollution caused not by oil spills but by rain.
“When it rains,” Donald says, “everything comes off the streets.”
On the shoreline, any day of the year you’ll find cigarette butts, food wrappers and bead-sized plastic pellets — along with leaves, pine cones and the exoskeletons of little crabs. What you won’t find with the naked eye, however, are the pesticides, molecules of plastic, car emissions or industrial chemicals that have been spilled “accidentally.” Although California has passed some environmental reform, we still have not challenged pollution that comes from our consumer culture and overuse of automobiles.
Oftentimes, wildlife has to cope with such man-made pollution. At the marina, I saw an airborne crow hurl an oyster at the asphalt in order to crack its shell. Later, during low tide on the mudflats, I saw a murder of crows feeding on the shellfish inside a big rig tire pitted in the sand. Although birds are resourceful, trash poses a danger to them. The Laysan albatross, for example, will eat lethal man-made waste instead of food. Researchers find their carcasses in the sand; rib cages stuffed with plastic goods and feathers. Birds and fish will digest plastic pellets, which — according to the Algalita Research Foundation — may contain up to 1 million times the amount of pesticides as their ambient water. Meanwhile, sandpipers and snowy egrets forage near the mouth of Strawberry Creek, which, like our other creeks, has been turned into tunnels and gutters.
In spite of our dilapidated system of environmental governance, California has passed some powerful legislation. Proposition 84 is funding the development of metrics, machines and a public database for small-scale trash interception. Cities statewide are required to develop Climate Action Plans, which specifically lay out how they will resist and adapt to climate change. Yet this is only the beginning of what we need to do to help restore the environment.
The same body of internationally inspired empirical research on the shortcomings of American health care and economic systems ought to also be levied against regressive urban development. In Tokyo, every tree has a “doctor.” In France, according to planner Lucie Laurian, the right to live in a “balanced environment” with due respect for health is a constitutional right on par with the human rights of 1789 and the welfare rights of 1946. In Copenhagen, planners are collaborating to make their city carbon-neutral by 2025. With similar focus and energy, we as a state need to pioneer environmental development and restoration.
We need to rework water rights and chemically intensive farming. We need to rethink the use of plastics in general (not just for lattes and grocery bags). We need to reroute the way hundreds of thousands of us travel to the same places in the same region, daily and separately.
Modernization has altered our natural landscape in Berkeley. Instead of flowing from a corridor of willows, Strawberry Creek flows from a sewer into the mudflats, where birds feed during low tide. Strawberry Creek, and all our other creeks, should run in daylight as far as possible from the hills to the bay. For now, it doesn’t. It won’t. As long as we let each city live up to its own weak set of environmental standards, the birds will have to keep out of the rain.
Contact Josh Escobar at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @urbananimale.