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Down by the Bay: San Francisco's History Between the Tides
San Francisco Bay is the largest and most productive estuary on the Pacific Coast of North America. It is also home to the oldest and densest urban settlements in the American West. Focusing on human inhabitation of the Bay since Ohlone times, Down by the Bay reveals the ongoing role of nature in shaping that history. From birds to oyster pirates, from gold miners to farmers, from salt ponds to ports, this is the first history of the San Francisco Bay and Delta as both a human and natural landscape. It offers invaluable context for current discussions over the best management and use of the Bay in the face of sea level rise.
294 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 29, 2020
Great environmental history and political ecology of the San Francisco Bay Area, that helpfully explains how what had been a fantastically ecologically rich liminal space between sea and land gradually became enclosed and fixed into a hard boundary through the processes of law and cement. The book begins by explain what an unusual estuarine space the SF Bay is — created by the tectonic force of the San Andreas fault going offshore, and a unique break from the Central Valley. Of course, this whole area only was created with at the start of the Holocene — before then, the Golden Gate would have been a canyon. In fact the San Pablo Bay only formed 7500 years ago and the Delta only became a cracking wetland some 4500 years ago. (See https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/i....)
The chapter on the draining of the Sacramento Delta, and the legal theft of this fast public property by a few hundred San Francisco businessmen, is shocking. The combination of hydraulic mining in the Sierras, which flushed a cubic kilometer of silt down into the Delta and Bay, and the effort to dredge and polderize the Delta so it could be turned into farmland, eradicated this ancient space in a decade, turning it into channelized islands, subsiding amid an ever higher river. The next chapter then explains how what had been a fantastically rich fishery was essentially destroyed by enclosure and industrial pollution, before closing with restoration efforts that have unfolded over the last 60 years, a process Booker treats not uncritically, understanding that simply reflooding wetlands may release toxins that are buried there.
Booker also usefully resuscitates various abandoned or lost dreams of what the Bay could be — not only the social orders of the pre-contact indians, who for millennia harvested the native oysters and waterfowl, but also the differing dreams of the settlers for how they might maintain their “droit de terroire” in the face of privatization.
The chapter on the draining of the Sacramento Delta, and the legal theft of this fast public property by a few hundred San Francisco businessmen, is shocking. The combination of hydraulic mining in the Sierras, which flushed a cubic kilometer of silt down into the Delta and Bay, and the effort to dredge and polderize the Delta so it could be turned into farmland, eradicated this ancient space in a decade, turning it into channelized islands, subsiding amid an ever higher river. The next chapter then explains how what had been a fantastically rich fishery was essentially destroyed by enclosure and industrial pollution, before closing with restoration efforts that have unfolded over the last 60 years, a process Booker treats not uncritically, understanding that simply reflooding wetlands may release toxins that are buried there.
Booker also usefully resuscitates various abandoned or lost dreams of what the Bay could be — not only the social orders of the pre-contact indians, who for millennia harvested the native oysters and waterfowl, but also the differing dreams of the settlers for how they might maintain their “droit de terroire” in the face of privatization.
March 4, 2016
Very informative but less engaging than I prefer. After reading Summer Brennan's Oyster Wars I'm curious who's right and wrong about the San Francisco Bay's oyster history.
June 5, 2020
Engaging account of the human manipulation of the San Francisco Bay, although the prose tends to be a bit patchy and repetitive.
January 23, 2023
Interesting history of the interactions between humans and the natural region stretching from the San Francisco Bay to the Central Valley.
May 22, 2023
Fairly academic environmental history of the intertidal Bay, not far removed from its origins as the author's doctoral work at Stanford, so I'm not sure I'd recommend it for everyone, but good stuff for history nerds. I found the emphasis on property law to be a bit tedious. Speculation on water lots physically shaped San Francisco, but it doesn't seem like it directly influenced biodiversity or ecology in the Bay. People were probably going to farm oysters, mine gold, develop heavy industry, and generally fill and develop on and around the Bay shore whether or not people partitioned and sold underwater property. The links between salt and the chemical industry were unknown to me. Also the word for unseparated salt slurry is "bittern"?! Apparently etymologically unrelated to the bird.
Notes
p. 17 The Bay has drained during ice ages and re-appeared in between multiple times, and today's Bay is the largest and longest-lasting version we know of.
p. 19 He mentions that salt marshes are among the most productive natural systems on the planet, which I sort of knew, but it got me wondering how they compare to kelp forests... and I haven't found a good direct comparison. This article is kind of close (in Australia) but seems to focus on sequestration over production and may not incorporate production per unit area.
p. 25 He notes that cattle and annual grasses destroyed deep-rooted native perennial grasslands, thereby increasing runoff. Any evidence to support that (the runoff part)? Cursory search turns up many studies on grazing and hydrology generally, but mostly via abiotic effects like soil compaction, not specifically on grass species composition and subsurface plants.
p. 50 William Tecumseh Sherman on his pre-war career as a banker in the corrupt speculation boom of 1850s San Francisco: "I can handle a hundred thousand men in battle, and take the City of the Sun, but am afraid to manage a lot in the swamp of San Francisco."
p. 51 He says San Francisco was built out over the Bay so quickly that piers became sidewalks and people actually fell through the sidewalk and drowned. What did these sidewalks look like?
p. 55 If you've learned a bit about the ecological history of San Francisco (or dug a few inches into the ground in Golden Gate Park) you know that much of San Francisco, particularly the western parts of the city, were once a vast series of sand dunes. These dunes were the home of the Xerces Blue, described to science soon after the arrival of Anglo-Americans, and driven to extinction over the following 90 years by same. What was new to me was that part of the destruction of the dunes was in the service of filling in the Bay, and that California's first railroad was built for this purpose, carting sand from the dunes to the shore for fill, an ecological lose-lose.
Somewhere in this part of the book Booker also describes a rather insane positive feedback loop in which buildings built on fill would collapse in earthquakes when the fill and underlying mud liquified, creating rubble that would then be used to make more fill on more mud. Less of a feedback loop, but sediments from Sierra mining were used to create the levies that transformed the Delta from a world-class wetland to highly productive but highly vulnerable farmland.
p. 105 Anonymous farmer in the 1930s: "We are not husbandmen. We are not farmers. We are producing a product to sell." Is this why large-scale farm operators in California refer to themselves as "growers" and not "farmers"?
p. 114 Hunters killed and died to defend hunting rights in parklands. Now I'm curious about the source he cites: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/97805202...
p. 129 Jack London's wanted to marry his childhood sweetheart, Lucy Cauldwell, a member of a prominent and well-to-do Black family in Oakland. Apparently they rejected him for being kind of a waster. I don't care much about Jack London, but this makes me want to read up on this history and who the Cauldwells were. Actually this dropped me down a Wikipedia hole and now I think I do care about Jack London.
p. 145 SFO was an oyster field, something I was thinking about as I landed there while reading this book.
Notes
p. 17 The Bay has drained during ice ages and re-appeared in between multiple times, and today's Bay is the largest and longest-lasting version we know of.
p. 19 He mentions that salt marshes are among the most productive natural systems on the planet, which I sort of knew, but it got me wondering how they compare to kelp forests... and I haven't found a good direct comparison. This article is kind of close (in Australia) but seems to focus on sequestration over production and may not incorporate production per unit area.
p. 25 He notes that cattle and annual grasses destroyed deep-rooted native perennial grasslands, thereby increasing runoff. Any evidence to support that (the runoff part)? Cursory search turns up many studies on grazing and hydrology generally, but mostly via abiotic effects like soil compaction, not specifically on grass species composition and subsurface plants.
p. 50 William Tecumseh Sherman on his pre-war career as a banker in the corrupt speculation boom of 1850s San Francisco: "I can handle a hundred thousand men in battle, and take the City of the Sun, but am afraid to manage a lot in the swamp of San Francisco."
p. 51 He says San Francisco was built out over the Bay so quickly that piers became sidewalks and people actually fell through the sidewalk and drowned. What did these sidewalks look like?
p. 55 If you've learned a bit about the ecological history of San Francisco (or dug a few inches into the ground in Golden Gate Park) you know that much of San Francisco, particularly the western parts of the city, were once a vast series of sand dunes. These dunes were the home of the Xerces Blue, described to science soon after the arrival of Anglo-Americans, and driven to extinction over the following 90 years by same. What was new to me was that part of the destruction of the dunes was in the service of filling in the Bay, and that California's first railroad was built for this purpose, carting sand from the dunes to the shore for fill, an ecological lose-lose.
Somewhere in this part of the book Booker also describes a rather insane positive feedback loop in which buildings built on fill would collapse in earthquakes when the fill and underlying mud liquified, creating rubble that would then be used to make more fill on more mud. Less of a feedback loop, but sediments from Sierra mining were used to create the levies that transformed the Delta from a world-class wetland to highly productive but highly vulnerable farmland.
p. 105 Anonymous farmer in the 1930s: "We are not husbandmen. We are not farmers. We are producing a product to sell." Is this why large-scale farm operators in California refer to themselves as "growers" and not "farmers"?
p. 114 Hunters killed and died to defend hunting rights in parklands. Now I'm curious about the source he cites: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/97805202...
p. 129 Jack London's wanted to marry his childhood sweetheart, Lucy Cauldwell, a member of a prominent and well-to-do Black family in Oakland. Apparently they rejected him for being kind of a waster. I don't care much about Jack London, but this makes me want to read up on this history and who the Cauldwells were. Actually this dropped me down a Wikipedia hole and now I think I do care about Jack London.
p. 145 SFO was an oyster field, something I was thinking about as I landed there while reading this book.
Want to read
March 31, 2014I really liked the first two chapters, but then I couldn't really get into the rest. I do hope to get back to this book someday.
August 7, 2015
Really enjoyed this book. Good combination of ecology and history of the San Francisco Bay.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews