California Coast & Ocean

I live four miles from Oakland Airport, built on wetlands where hunters used to shoot canvasbacks and sprig. The larger populations of those birds have since been diminished by agribusiness farms in the Great Plains states and by things like jet runways here and elsewhere.

I also live half a mile from Oakland's Highland General Hospital. Before the Iraq War, the Army sent its surgeons to Highland for practical training, for there was a ready supply of gunshot victims, young and old, some of them cut down with the sort of semi-automatic weapons the NRA defends so fervently.

My two-year-old recognizes, and frequently goes to sleep to, the distant sound of ambulances arriving at the hospital. He will grow up in a household that keeps firearms and that maintains a spirited dislike of the NRA, its cynical rhetoric, and much of what it stands for. On the other hand, one day I will offer him the chance, if he wishes, to join me at dawn in the marsh and await the flight of mallards overhead. And though Black Point may be gone, I believe there will be similar opportunities a bit more distant. If the extra driving gets me down, I'll try to stay focused on the extra ducks, geese, and countless other species benefiting from substantially increased wetlands, and try to instill in my son the notion that he deserves a world of improving, not declining, natural resources--a goal that will require his full and unsentimental attention.

This article is greatly abridged. For the full text, see the print edition of Coast & Ocean.

Michael Bowen, project manager with the Coastal Conservancy, has worked extensively to remove barriers to fish passage in streams.