‘Popular Uprising’ Helped Save Bay

When Sylvia McLaughlin heard of the city of Berkeley’s plan in 1960 to double its size by filling in 2,000 acres of the San Francisco Bay with trash and developing on it, she was outraged.

The year before, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had published a report commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that determined 60 percent of the bay to be shallow enough to fill and develop.

If these plans had been fully realized, the bay would have shrunk down to little more than a shipping channel. That possibility led McLaughlin, Kay Kerr and Esther Gulick to found Save the Bay, one of the nation’s first environmental groups.

Almost overnight, tens of thousands of people from across the country joined the group, said Will Travis, the executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

“That ended up being the first incident in the United States of a popular uprising to save a natural resource,” Travis said.

Save the Bay continues their conservation mission today. Last month, they held a forum that featured a panel of experts who discussed current threats to the bay’s cleanliness. The panel named urban runoff and inappropriate disposal of toxic wastes as among the major causes of the current pollution.

“We’re going to be drowning in our own waste if we don’t give ourselves the tools to clean it up,” said State Assemblymember Loni Hancock.

Plastic waste especially endangers the lives of marine animals in the bay and in the open ocean, where the trash is often swept, said David Lewis, Save the Bay’s current executive director.

Members of the panel agreed that people must generate less trash if they are serious about cleaning up the bay.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Save the Bay’s work was a major catalyst for the environmental movement that swept across the United States and that continues today, Travis said. Before the movement started, the public did not view the bay as an important resource.

“The bay was treated as ordinary real estate. Everybody was dumping (garbage) in the bay,” Travis said. “It used to be that you could not drive across the Bay Bridge with your windows open because it stank so much.”

After a city had dumped enough of its trash into the water, they could begin to develop on top of it and create real estate to tax, Travis said.

“People thought they were filling the bay for progress,” McLaughlin said.

Travis said that people feared not developing the bay would “bring the economy to its knees.”

Despite fears of economic hardship, members of Save the Bay succeeded in convincing the Berkeley City Council in 1963 to scrap their expansion plan.

But the members of Save the Bay feared that the bay’s health could not be preserved unless action was taken on a state level.

This led to what McLaughlin called one of Save the Bay’s biggest victories, the passage of the McAteer-Petris Act in 1965. The act, one of the first pieces of environmental legislation in the United States, laid out a plan for the bay’s preservation and created the first agency aimed at regulating and protecting coastal waters.

At the time, “there was no Environmental Protection Agency, nothing,” McLaughlin said.

The group’s success showed people around the country that environmental change was possible, Travis said.

“I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that had the three women not done what they did, America would look remarkably different,” he said. “That proved that you could do this—that American democracy could work.”

McLaughlin said one of the primary causes of positive change has been the shift in the public’s attitude towards the environment from the early days of Save the Bay until now.

“(We’ve seen) gradual change—Maybe we helped start the change,” she said.

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