California is generally known as an environmental leader, but the state has also faced tremendous environmental degradation and destruction. I chronicled my “top 10” worst environmental decisions in the state’s history last year.
But what about the good things state policy makers have done? Here is my list of the most significant environmental wins in California since the state’s founding. To qualify, as with the last Top 10 list, the action had to preserve a uniquely beautiful environmental feature (landscapes and plants). You’ll see that many of these decisions sought to reverse the destruction highlighted in my original negative list.
10. San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway Removal
The Embarcadero freeway was a double-decked freeway eyesore circling downtown San Francisco. Following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, it became structurally compromised. While some wanted it re-built, city leaders ultimately decided to tear it down, opening up a beautiful, walking/biking/transit-friendly promenade and revitalizing the Ferry Building through improved access. It’s a success story about what can be accomplished when we undo the car-oriented infrastructure mistakes of the past.
9. Avoiding New Power Plants With Energy Efficiency
Since the 1970s, California has instituted a series of energy efficiency mandates on new buildings and appliances that have collectively helped the state avoid building dozens of new power plants, while at the same time saving consumers a lot of money. Imagine our coastline and disadvantaged communities with all those polluting power plants that ultimately were not needed. It also means that today we need to develop less land for new solar and wind installations, thanks to the foresight of the state’s energy efficiency visionaries.
8. Protecting the California Coastline
Concerned about development and privatization along the state’s sensitive coastal lands, California voters in 1972 approved Proposition 20, which led to the legislature adopting the Coastal Act. The Act and its commission ensures that the public always has a right to access the state beaches, as well as placing environmental protections on any new proposed development. As a result, the state has ensured environmental protection across 1.5 million acres of land and 1,100 miles of California coastline from Oregon to Mexico, including nine off-shore islands.
7. Establishing Point Reyes National Seashore
Point Reyes is a natural wonderland just 40 miles north of San Francisco, with beautiful, historic coastal areas, along with graceful cypress forests and valleys in the interior. It was under threat of housing development when local leaders convinced the National Park Service in 1962 to establish the Point Reyes National Seashore as a 53,000 acre recreational area, which in 1976 grew an additional 25,370 acres with the Phillip Burton Wilderness Area there. As a result, the area is protected from further development and maintained as accessible open space for residents of the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
6. Protecting the California Desert
The Mojave Desert is a striking, stunning landscape in the high altitude plain outside of urban Los Angeles, stretching to the Colorado River. Mountain peaks punctuate forests of Joshua trees, sand dunes, and wide vistas brimming with flowers in the spring. When under threat of development, including mining and off-roading, state and local leaders convinced Congress in 1994 to protect this land with Sen. Feinstein’s California Desert Protection Act, which created two national parks (Joshua Tree and Death Valley) and the Mojave Preserve, protecting more than 9.6 million acres.
5. Preserving the Santa Monica Mountains
The Santa Monica mountains form a backbone through much of the heart of urban Los Angeles, from the Hollywood hills through Malibu and out to the Pacific Ocean, briefly resurfacing as some of the largest Channel Islands. They offer beautiful hiking, historic and sacred Native sites, commanding views, and spring wildflowers and waterfalls. Threatened by development given their prime location and views for the wealthy who can afford to live there, state leaders formed the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to protect them as a natural respite for Angelenos for generations to come.
4. Saving the San Francisco Bay
The San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary on the West Coast of the United States. Historically it was teeming with birdlife, fish, and shellfish, along with densely populated Native villages. Industrialists filled in much of the Bay and its coastal wetlands, including for real estate and other development. In the 1960s, local activists formed Save the Bay, leading to successful efforts to preserve the remaining wetlands from further development.
3. Rescuing the Last Old Growth Redwoods
California’s coastal redwood trees are the tallest on Earth, reaching as high as 330 feet and living for over a thousand years. These treasures are only found from the Oregon border south to Big Sur, though loggers felled over 95% of them within a century to meet the region’s insatiable demand for lumber. Along with the Save the Redwoods League and some local landowners, state and local leaders managed to preserve groves throughout the state, culminating more recently in a deal to preserve the Headwaters Forest in 1999.
2. Ending Sierra Nevada Hydraulic Gold Mining
Gold mining brought much economic activity and immigration to California, but it led to war and genocide of the Native people, as well as significant, long-lasting pollution in our agricultural lands and waterways. Mercury from the mines still plague our waterways. But in 1884, federal judge Lorenzo Sawyer put a stop to hydraulic mining in the name of protecting agricultural land from the sediment runoff, in the case Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company. As a result, the Sierra Nevada mountains no longer face destructive hydraulic mining and our waterways are cleaner.
1. Establishing Yosemite National Park
Yosemite National Park is arguably the crown jewel of America’s park system. It features stunning glacial-carved Valleys, including Hetch Hetchy and the namesake Yosemite Valley, with incredible geologic features such as Half Dome, El Capitan and Yosemite Falls, the tallest waterfall in North America, along with priceless Sequoia tree groves. President Lincoln signed legislation in 1864 to protect much of the Valley and the main Sequoia grove, setting the precedent for the founding of the first national park at Yellowstone in 1872. Then Scottish immigrant and Martinez resident John Muir convinced Teddy Roosevelt during a 1903 camping trip to expand national park protection for Yosemite, allowing visitors from all over the world to enjoy more of the wonders of this world-class treasure.
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While it’s easy to lament all that was lost in California’s environmental history, these 10 wins remind us that wherever there has been destruction and injustice, reformers and visionaries have also been present to fight back. (And of course there were more victories that didn’t make this list, such as saving Mono Lake and fighting off the draining and highway-strewning planned for Lake Tahoe.) These successes did not happen on their own, and in fact in many instances happened in the face of significant opposition from entrenched interests. We owe a debt to those activists and leaders who helped preserve much of California’s environmental heritage for future generations.
California has a paradoxical history with its environment. On one hand, the state boasts incredible natural beauty, along with a government that is an internationally recognized leader for strong environmental policies. But the state’s residents have also caused severe environmental destruction, particularly in the late nineteenth century — some of which helped spur the mobilization that led to these environmental successes.
Looking at California’s history, what were some of the most striking examples of environmental destruction? To qualify for this “Top 10” list, the destruction had to be irreparable (at least in anyone’s lifetime) and of a uniquely beautiful environmental feature (landscapes and plants). Of note, animals are not included, nor is an assessment of the economic trade-offs or alternatives.
10. Quarrying Morro Rock
Morro Rock is California’s Gibraltar, a striking coastal feature just north of San Luis Obispo on Morro Bay. It’s a remnant, exposed rocky volcano, visible from miles away. The local Chumash tribe consider it a sacred site (named Lisamu) and have special access to the top for religious ceremonies. But half of the side of the rock was quarried from 1889 to 1969 to form the bay breakwater, leaving a massive scar.
9. Draining the Owens Valley and Mono Lake
The Owens Valley is a remarkable north-south valley created by fault separation along the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. Just past the northern end of the valley lies Mono Lake, an ancient salt-water body of water. In the early 1900s, Los Angeles city leaders surreptitiously purchased land and water rights to direct the Owens river, and eventually the streams supplying Mono Lake, into aqueducts to service Los Angeles real estate development. The result was a shrunken Mono Lake and desiccated Owens river valley and lakebed, creating toxic duststorms and economic and environmental blight in the region.
8. Channelizing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta
The Delta sits between California’s Central Valley and San Francisco Bay, draining most of the water from the interior of the state to the Pacific Ocean. It is one of the largest estuaries in western North America, once featuring a vibrant ecosystem with rich soil. Chinese laborers were employed to build levees between the 1850s and 1870s to dam and farm the land. Today, these levees are at constant risk of collapse, jeopardizing much of the state’s water transfer system from north to south, while much of the Delta ecosystem is in a state of freefall.
7. Clear-Cutting the Sierra and Lake Tahoe Pine Forests
The Sierra Nevada mountains used to be blanketed in old growth pine forests, which included trees the size and age of giant sequoias in some cases. But in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, much of the mountains, including the entire Lake Tahoe basin, was clear cut largely to build underground silver mines in neighboring Nevada. Today, the resulting second-growth forests of clumped juvenile firs and pines creates a fire-prone jumble that forest officials are struggling to manage properly. You can still see the original old-growth pines only in places like DL Bliss State Park along Lake Tahoe, ironically preserved by one of the industrialists who profited from the logging in the first place.
6. The Los Angeles Freeway Embrace
The City of Los Angeles is ringed by semi-arid mountains, distant snow-capped peaks and a long coastline featuring wetlands, coastal bluffs and sandy beaches. Yet in the middle of the twentieth century, city and state leaders enabled the paving of much of this landscape via the construction of multiple large freeways, starting with the Arroyo Seco Parkway in Pasadena, the first freeway in the country. This automobile network induced significant traffic congestion and sprawling development that to this day generates a substantial amount of air pollution, despite efforts to retrofit the city back to a Railtown.
5. Damming Hetch Hetchy Valley
Hetch Hetchy is a rare glacial-carved valley within Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada, featuring a meandering Tuolumne River and similar in scale and beauty to the more-famous Yosemite Valley to the south. San Francisco water engineers at the turn of the last century sought to dam this bathtub-shaped valley to bring mountain water to the groundwater-challenged San Francisco peninsula. Over the objections of John Muir and the Sierra Club, the federal government and San Francisco officials approved the dam, flooding and permanently marring this geologic wonder.
4. Logging Giant Sequoias
Giant sequoia trees can live up to three thousand years and grow to become the largest living things on Earth. California’s western Sierra Nevada mountains host the last remaining 77 groves on Earth. In the late 1800s, Californians chopped down about one-third of them. Worse, most of the wood from the trees would shatter on impact with the ground, so these residents could only use the wood for building fences or manufacturing shingles.
3. Wetlands Destruction
California once boasted over 4 million acres of wetlands, out of 163 million in the state, from coastal lagoons to Central Valley floodplains. These lands featured abundant bird and aquatic life, among other features. But 90 percent of them were destroyed by river damming and channelization. Today, what remains hosts 55% of the state’s endangered species, with much of those lands now irreparably lost to farms, cities and sprawl.
2. Clear-Cutting Old-Growth Coastal Redwoods
Coastal redwood trees grow to be the tallest living things on Earth and can live up to two thousand years. They are located along California’s coast up to the Oregon border. But starting in the mid-nineteenth century through the 1980s, loggers cleared 95% of the original old growth forests. Once cut, new trees may quickly grow up in a ring around the old stump but resemble toothpicks compared to the originals. To view what was lost, you can visit Muir Woods 12 miles from San Francisco, Big Basin Redwoods State Park near Santa Cruz, or Redwood National Park near the Oregon border.
1.Hydraulic gold mining
In the mid-1800s, mining companies discovered that they could harvest gold from the Sierra Nevada foothills more easily if they blasted the rock with high-pressure water. In a few short years, these companies denuded and deformed much of the Sierra foothills, sending debris into the Central Valley and mercury pollution into the San Francisco Bay, where it still sits today. A federal judge stopped this type of mining in the 1884 decision Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company, in order to protect agricultural land in the Central Valley. But much damage was permanently done to the foothills, agricultural areas of the Central Valley and San Francisco Bay water quality.
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There are potentially many other examples of harmful environmental decision making to choose from, which you can suggest in the comments. The one upside of many of these tragedies is that they resulted in a public backlash that inspired long-lasting environmental reform and organizations, with compounding successes to this day. Much of the destruction described here could have been far more significant without this citizen (and often business) mobilization. But still, what is lost is forevermore, a cautionary tale that should give us pause before we sacrifice any more of California’s environmental heritage.
