Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The SF Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the Story of the Estuary in just nine major topics and a few browsing categories, so many unique stories from our archives have been missed. Like tales about the region’s various research vessels that collect data on conditions in the water or trawl for fish of management concern. Or the stories bringing to lif ..read more

Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient water rights and newer mandates governs who gets what water and how much. An equally complex infrastructure – including gates, pumps, screens, and barriers – is deployed to deliver the fresh water to farms, cities, and industries, sometimes far from headwater sources. The state’s infamous war ove ..read more

Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the SF Estuary, by requiring treatment before discharge, some contaminants remain thorny problems.  Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San Joaquin Valley, linger in the sediments, nearly impossible to clean up.  Emerging contaminants from contemporary lifestyles such as herbicides, flame retardants, and fire-fighting foams are being linked to human health proble ..read more

When rain runs off into the Estuary from streets, parking lots, and other hard surfaces, it can carry a toxic soup of contaminants—oil, grease, and myriad other chemicals that may start off as pollutants in the air but end up on the ground where they can they then be washed into water bodies in storms. For the past three decades, Bay Area scientists have tracked and analyzed these contaminants—to determine exactly what they are and how they affect water quality while water quality agencies have developed increasingly stringent regulations—such as TMDLs, or Total Maximum Daily Loads and other ..read more

By the time Estuary debuted in 1993, the Central Valley’s once abundant runs of Chinook salmon had been severely depleted by dams, diversions, pollutants and predation by non-native fish. Sacramento River winter-run fish were federally listed as endangered in January 1994; the Central Valley spring run was listed as threatened in 1999 and the fall run is identified as a species of concern. Protecting and rebuilding these populations has been a lodestar for many, if not most, of the efforts to restore the Bay and Delta, beginning with 1992’s Central Valley Project Improvement Act. Over the dec ..read more

Early efforts to restore the SF Estuary, before the federal Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act changed management priorities in the 1970s, focused on preserving marshes for waterfowl hunting, protecting river reaches for fishing, and growing trout and salmon in hatcheries. By that time, the estuarine ecosystem had been so severely altered by draining, diking, damming, farming, urbanization, species invasions and water supply projects that there was little left to restore. Restoration to some pristine former state was soon deemed an impossibility. Nevertheless, new mandates forced plan ..read more

San Francisco Bay has been called the most invaded Estuary in the world. From Chinese mitten crabs to zebra mussels from Europe to Atlantic cordgrass from the East Coast, the Estuary has been colonized by myriad animals and plants from other parts of the country and world. Many animals arrived in ships’ ballast water or aquarium water dumped by unknowing home hobbyists while plants like Atlantic cordgrass were introduced intentionally by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in restoration projects, from which the plants then hybridized with Pacific cordgrass, creating a menacing invader. But erad ..read more

In 1996 I began a five-year stint as Estuary News’s first assistant editor; I’ve been writing for the magazine on and off ever since. Many of the stories I’ve written have focused on the laws, lawsuits, policies, and regulations that have affected the Bay and Delta over three decades, and it has certainly been fun to navigate these ever-choppy political waters in stories like last June’s Flow Deal: Peace Treaty or Trojan Horse. But the stories I think I’ve enjoyed reporting the most were the profiles of people who work to protect and improve the Estuary’s environment and communities, such ..read more

My favorite writing for Estuary News has enabled me to witness firsthand people’s heroic efforts to enable humans, plants, and wildlife to thrive alongside one another again in the San Francisco Bay-Delta. I rose in the dark to traipse through Mowry Marsh behind biologists conducting the first region-wide survey of endangered salt marsh harvest mice. I peered into bubbling tanks at the UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Laboratory to admire Delta smelt whose futures are murky if efforts to revive their habitat aren’t successful. I’ve quashed pervasive seasickness to accompany scientist ..read more

Writing for Estuary News has been a pleasure and a privilege. Each article has deepened my relationship with the San Francisco Bay Area. Although I was born and raised here, my relationship with this landscape is constantly evolving. My reporting is rooted in gaining a fresh perspective on the place each story is set in. When I put my “reporter hat” on, I interact with place in a way that is very different from in my off-duty life: both more detailed and more intimate. And the moments in time in the landscapes I move through become a vivid part of my life experience. One dramatic example o ..read more