The recent California Adaptation Forum in Sacramento included more sessions and voices on climate justice and equity issues than in year’s past, but the public was missing.

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13
Nov

The recent California Adaptation Forum in Sacramento included more sessions and voices on climate justice and equity issues than in year’s past, but the public was missing.

 “When you have two hundred of the best climate adaptation professionals in the room together, that’s an opportunity…” said Phoenix Armenta from the Resilient Communities Initiative. Armenta and Lucas Zucker from the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy were members of a special equity-tribal advisory committee convened before the conference to help with program development, diversify attendance, and elevate the conversation on equitable climate adaptation. “There’s always tension about whether to weave [equity] into every single session or give it its own separate track,” said Zucker. “You get your planner types… who can go through the entire conference never being exposed to any of the equity content.” In 2018, the committee ultimately decided to integrate equity across the conference tracks and...
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26
Sep

San Joaquin Communities Access Cleaner Water Due to New Legislation

The only water easily available to many low-income inhabitants of the San Joaquin Valley’s smaller, non-incorporated settlements is well water tainted with arsenic and nitrates from surrounding activities. But two state bills ensure that these communities – and everyone else in California – not only have the right to safe, clean, and affordable drinking water, but also get access to public water infrastructure and services as needed. Assembly Bill 2501, approved this fall, “makes sure the state’s consolidation authority can order a city or special district to extend clean drinking water services to people in domestic dwellings,” says Phoebe Seaton of the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability. Advocacy on the part of affected communities, with help from organizations like...
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26
Sep

Constellation of Climate Events Lifts State Spirits

“We are seeing events we have never seen before,” said California Natural Resources Secretary John Laird to the over 750 attendees of the California Adaptation Forum on August 28th. Inside the cavernous ballroom of the Sheraton Grand in downtown Sacramento, Laird ticked off to the audience the evidence that climate change is present in California: wildfires burning faster and hotter, rainfall five hundred percent above normal, and longer lasting Central Valley heatwaves. “[Climate change] is happening, we’re experiencing it, and we’re in the middle of it right now,” concluded Laird. “What we’ve seen is frightening, but we can’t allow ourselves to be paralyzed.”
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26
Sep

The State’s Biggest Landlord Reconsiders Its Neighbors

When Mari Rose Taruc approached California environmental justice (EJ) leaders about advising the California State Lands Commission on its EJ policy, they didn’t know what she was talking about. “They were like, what does the State Lands Commission do?” recalls Taruc with a chuckle. A two-way discovery has since taken place between the agency and the resulting EJ group. The discovery is significant because State Lands wields bureaucratic power often out of reach of small EJ groups. As Taruc quips, it is “the state’s biggest landlord.”
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13
Aug

A new online portal from the Delta Stewardship Council offers everyone from scientists to tourists an accessible window into the Delta’s identity and importance.

“Although I had studied freshwater and marine ecology, I really was not familiar with the Delta before I started working there,” says 2017 Sea Grant Fellow Heidi Williams, who developed the Beginner’s Guide to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. “I was looking for a way to dive in and learn about the Delta and realized that there wasn’t an easily accessible place to turn for the basics.” As a science communications fellow, Williams suggested to the Council that she create one herself, and spent the next year immersed in Delta-related articles and other materials. “I realized that this needed to be more up-to-date than a lot of that material because a lot of science and politics have changed and progressed in...
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18
Jun

PERSPECTIVE: Reflecting on the Rush to Resilience

After listening to the final Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge presentations for all the design teams, attending the closing roundtables and speeches, and reading the June 2018 special issue of ESTUARY News focused on resilience planning, the Bay’s top environmental history writer John Hart reflects on take-homes. "Hart very quickly and clearly cuts to the core questions that emerged from the challenge,” says RbD director Amanda Brown Stevens.
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15
Jun

The Quiet Go-To Guy: Carl Morrison

When Carl Morrison died in a crash of his small plane near Petaluma this past April, the press noted the loss of a family man, Civil Air Patrol commander, Marine Corps Veteran, and pious Mormon. The shock also reverberated through the world of Bay Area flood control and water agencies, for whom Morrison was indispensable. As his Bay Area business expanded, Morrison eased his commute by training as a pilot and acquiring a small plane. People marveled at how many places he seemed to be. “There must have been more than one of him,” says Napa County’s Rick Thomasser. A man of formal habits, Morrison never dressed down for field-work. His peers might smile at that, but they cherished his...
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15
Jun

North Richmond: Building Equity in the Urban Fabric and Forest

The neighborhoods in North Richmond grew up with Richmond’s famed shipyards during World War II, along with railroads and a burgeoning fossil fuel industry. When you stand there today, you can literally see and hear this legacy of industrialization, which is also evident in the community’s high rates of poverty and asthma. Here the idea of resilient design means something completely different than it might mean in other parts of the Bay Area. It was these environmental justice concerns that attracted the San Francisco design firm Mithun to North Richmond for the Resilient by Design challenge. Collaborating with a community advisory board, they called themselves the Home Team and looked to address the on-the-ground, day-to-day needs of North Richmond neighborhoods....
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15
Jun

South Bay: Swaps and Sponges Create Absorbing Vision

East Palo Alto is a microcosm of Silicon Valley’s most pressing social and environmental issues. Home to low-income communities, the city faces rising rents and the displacement of longtime residents. As one of the lowest-lying communities in the Bay Area, it is also ground-zero for sea level rise in the South Bay. Although located at the northern end of Resilient by Design’s Field Operations Team’s 20-mile shoreline jurisdiction, much of their public engagement effort was focused on East Palo Alto. “This scale of work needs an enormous amount of public support,” says Field Ops’ Richard Kennedy of their ambitious plan to use a network of marshland, salt ponds, and tidal wetlands to “sponge” the effects of sea level rise from...
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15
Jun

San Leandro Bay: Three Cities Confront Common Estuary

There’s no easy way to describe what makes the San Leandro Bay region of the East Bay so unique. Ask a design specialist, like Claire Bonham-Carter of Resilient By Design’s All Bay Collective, and she’ll point to “massive infrastructure--the Oakland airport, the BART station, two major roadways…” On the other hand, community activist Colin Miller of the Oakland Climate Action Coalition says “It’s the people that really makes it special.” Miller and the other All Bay Collective community advocates pushed the team hard from the start to consider equity and social justice in all aspects of the project. The final result, a concept called “the Estuary Commons,” proposes to build tidal cities—pre-assembled housing units floating on excavated lagoons—but a huge...
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15
Jun

Making Youth Perspectives Count Beyond Educational Exercise

“Our work is 50 percent working with young people and 50 percent working with adults to understand how they need to work with young people,” says Deborah McKoy, Executive Director of Y-Plan, an educational arm of the UC Berkeley Center for Cities + Schools. Y-Plan has partnered with Resilient by Design to create a parallel challenge eliciting youth perspectives on complex issues surrounding sea level rise. At UC Berkeley’s Alumni House, students from twelve Bay Area schools gave presentations to a panel of government representatives like Daniel Hamilton, Oakland’s Sustainability Manager. He feels that kids can actually be easier to work with than adults: “Local government tends to operate in silos, but big issues like climate are silo-busting. Kids do...
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15
Jun

Marin City: A Peek into that Beautiful Future?

“What does it look like in resiliency planning when community voices take the lead?” That’s the question posed by Pandora Thomas of Permaculture + Social Equity Team. P+SET has partnered with Marin City as a part of the Resilient by Design challenge and the brand of resilience espoused by the community is non-negotiably local. To build local capacity in this predominantly African-American locality, P+SET held a community course that covered permaculture design and advocacy literacy. For many communities, acceptance of outside power coming in gets complicated when self-determination is threatened or displacement looming. As Thomas explains the effort, “no longer is there this idea of only experts coming in to save us. Now it’s the homegrown expertise partnering with other...
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15
Jun

San Rafael: Elevating a Canal, City, Community

For the Latino and Vietnamese residents of the Canal District in San Rafael, sea level rise is a tangible threat—not by the end of the century, but right now. “If the Bay Area doesn’t respond in these places, where it’s abundantly obvious, how are they going to respond to the rest?” asks Marcel Wilson of Bionic Team, tasked with creating a more flood-proof San Rafael as part of the Resilient by Design challenge. After a year of work, Bionic Team envisions a city with elevated structures, floating homes, and canals in place of streets. They also see a revitalized shoreline and improved public access. “Finding a new paradigm is the challenge for San Rafael,” Wilson suggested. “We think the paradigm...
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13
Jun

Two-Way Bay: Estuary Leaders Reflect on Resilience

This 8-minute film interviews eight directors of water quality, restoration, and environmental programs around the San Francisco Estuary about their experience of the 2017-2018 Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge.
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20
Mar

Photo Essay: Sailing, A Dying Sport or Character Builder?

Around the Bay, people who love to sail are sharing the sport with young people. Tucked into marinas and coves, and working out of portable classrooms and small offices, yacht club volunteers and nonprofit staff are working hard to get youth out on the bay in sailboats. They don’t expect to make sailors out of the kids but they do believe that getting a kid on the water, even for a few hours, has value. They know that being on a boat pushed through the water by wind teaches science and math; builds camaraderie, confidence, and teamwork; inspires environmental stewardship; and encourages the habit of saying “yes” to life. “I enjoy sailing because it’s a sport that challenges you mentally...
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19
Mar

North Richmond Transitions

Today’s North Richmond shoreline looks much different from its historic blend of baylands, mudflats, and wet meadows. A lot of the land has been filled, or else fragmented by transit and industry. The region’s three creeks — the Rheem, the San Pablo, and the Wildcat  are mostly behind levees for flood control (the San Pablo and Wildcat Creek levees were raised in late 2017). The shoreline, and the 500 meters inland where the optimal marsh-upland transition zone could exist is bounded on one end by Chevron’s Richmond Refinery and by an Amazon distribution center and other new, massive warehouses at the other end. The middle of this zone is cut, not by long tidal plains or gentle sloping uplands, but...
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13
Dec

Searching for a Few Good Weevils

“They’re pretty charismatic,” says Julie Hopper of the tiny herbivorous weevil N. bruchi. Native to Argentina, these weevils were first brought to North America to combat the spread of the invasive weed water hyacinth.
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13
Dec

Resprout Photo Essay

Spending time in the burned zones is an almost overwhelming assault on the senses; this is a familiar world inverted. The colors, textures, shapes, and smells are all unfamiliar. That which should be green is black. That which should be inside is out. That which should be standing has fallen. Nothing, it seems, can be taken for granted.
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13
Nov

A former Japanese-American-owned nursery/brownfield in Richmond is being transformed into a green infill development that includes affordable senior housing, a four-acre greenbelt with a daylighted creek, an urban forest, and easy connections to transit via the Richmond Central Greenway.

Tucked into a corner of the city next to the I-80 freeway and BART tracks, the “Miraflores” site was the heart of the Japanese-American nursery industry in the East Bay. From the early 1900s to 2006, three Japanese-American families operated a rose and carnation nursery there, one of about a dozen such nurseries in the Richmond-El Cerrito area, according to Bay Area historian Donna Graves. During World War II, the families were sent out of state to camps but returned to operate their nurseries after the war; the redevelopment will preserve some homes, water towers, and greenhouses to honor the families. In 2006, the Richmond Redevelopment Agency purchased the property and began cleaning up contaminants on the site, which included...
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13
Nov

For the first time, the San Francisco Estuary has been mapped out for non-motorized watercraft.

From the Palo Alto Sailing Station to the Petaluma Creek Marina, the San Francisco Bay Area Water Trail program has established five maps that unify a network of “trailheads,” allowing boaters to access the entire Estuary. “The goal of the project is to improve and enhance access for non-motorized craft,” says Ben Botkin, Water Trail Planner. The back of each map provides information on the specific ecosystems of each region, serving to inform and inspire boaters to explore the varied waterscapes. “There are so many amazing places to see,” says Botkin, “And we want to educate people on how to do it safely.” The maps are available for download at the new Water Trail website, which also provides up-to-date water condition...
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