In Conclusion

After completing a long journey, it’s useful to look back at its beginning. What was the vision when we set out? What is it now? What have we learned en route about ourselves in relation to our planetary home?

There was a time when San Francisco Bay was being filled with debris and trash, and stinking dumps burned on its shores. It was done legally, to make more real estate. That’s hard to believe now, hard to imagine, but I saw it with my own eyes recently in “Saving the Bay,” a four-part documentary by Ron Blatman broadcast by KQED and KTEH this fall (for more information see www.savingthebay.org).

When this bay abuse was happening, in the 1950s and ‘60s, conventional wisdom held that the wheels of progress inevitably destroy natural places we love, so there was no point in objecting.

Three Berkeley women, however, refused to go along. They called a meeting, made phone calls, and soon had thousands of allies. The movement to Save the Bay led to legislation that was radical for its time. It created the nation’s first coastal management program, inspired the Save Our Coast movement, and became a model for the 1976 Coastal Act. I hope this documentary gets a wide audience, for it contains lessons for many of today’s struggles to define and safeguard our common good.

To take effective action, citizens must be well-informed. The mission of Coast & Ocean has been to help Californians know their coast better, enjoy it, and participate in shaping its future. The magazine was launched more than 24 years ago with a more modest purpose: to report on changing urban waterfronts (the original name was California WaterfrontAge), and one of the first issues was dedicated to San Francisco Bay. We changed the name to Coast & Ocean as our coverage expanded to the entire California coast, into the watersheds, and to coastal waters.

This year we reached out still farther, for the borders delineating coastal issues have kept dissolving. We built the Spring/Summer (Vol. 25, No. 1) issue around a map of the Pacific. Now, in our final issue, we look inland toward the mountain crests, wander California’s largest watershed, and return to where we started, San Francisco Bay.

It’s easy to get discouraged now, when short-sighted funding cuts have stopped so much good work. But if we lift our gaze to see beyond this moment, we need not lose heart.

In many streams, barriers to fish passage have been removed, allowing salmon to return. (See the watershed map for spots where you might glimpse some.) Citizens are working to restore anadromous fish to currently inhospitable places.

In July I accompanied ecologist Derek Hitchcock to the Goldfields, a vast gravel patch left behind by the Gold Rush on the Lower Yuba River. The river is confined there between towering gravel “training walls” that reminded me of the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River, built to rush stormwater to the sea.

Hitchcock talked about a project to restore juvenile salmon habitat in the Goldfields, expected to be “shovel-ready” soon. I was skeptical until I remembered that when I first heard the poet Lewis MacAdams describe the founding of the Friends of the Los Angeles River back in 1986, I assumed he was talking about an art event; the LA River had been reduced to a stormwater channel. Yet now you can walk and bicycle along that river, rest on benches in small tree-shaded parks, even watch birds and study native plants.

A vision is essential to begin a journey through unexplored terrain and guide it. San Francisco Bay is a natural wonder under restoration because three women living in the Berkeley Hills refused to accept the outrage they saw from their livingroom windows. Conventional wisdom is often blind. Some ideas seem radical only because they are eminently sensible.

In July I flew across the Pacific for the first time, to visit with friends in Japan. En route, watching a little plane move across the gray map on the screen in front of me, I imagined the people on the islands below, the turtles and sharks and ships traversing the waters, the lost shipping containers sinking. The map we had published was imprinted in my brain. I no longer thought of our coast as a sliver on the western edge of North America; we are Pacific people, connected by this ocean to life within and around it, and only by recognizing that can we--perhaps--prevent a common catastrophe.

On my last day in Japan at the Osaka Kaiyukan aquarium, the sense of shared kinship across the water was sealed: the aquarium, one of the world’s largest, is organized around the “Ring of Fire, Ring of Life” that is the Pacific Rim. The elevator took me up eight levels to otters beside a mountain waterfall. I walked down a ramp that spiraled around the giant ocean tank where two awesome whale sharks swam slowly among manta rays and other creatures. Tanks on the ramp’s outer side contained Pacific Rim animals, including sea otters from Monterey Bay. Watching them, I had a happy sense of belonging to a planetary home more inclusive than the one I had left in California.

Adios, dear readers. Thanks to those of you who wrote beautiful letters about Coast & Ocean, to my wonderful colleagues and network of allies, and to the Coastal Conservancy, which courageously enabled us to publish this magazine for almost 25 years without intruding on my editorial independence. It was a rare privilege.