IS THE WATER in San Francisco Bay safe for swimming? Are the fish safe to eat? Are the animals who live in the water getting sick? What are the new innovations for keeping the Bay and its tributaries healthy? How can art help environmentalists think more creatively? These are some of the questions addressed at the State of the San Francisco Estuary Conference, which was held this week at Oakland’s Scottish Rite Center.
The event was organized by the San Francisco Estuary Partnership, a regional collaborative of government agencies, nonprofits and community groups that work to protect and restore the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary. It is one of 28 estuary partnerships across the country established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and funded by Congress.
According to SFEP Director Caitlin Sweeney, the partnership program has been funded through the year and has broad bipartisan support.
Each year’s conference opens with a progress report. Sweeney delivered a summary in front of a projected color-coded scorecard.
The report evaluates the health of the estuary in 24 indicators grouped into five categories — clean water, quality of habitat, resiliency of ecological processes, flourishing wildlife and public health.
“Here’s the 2025 scorecard,” Sweeney said. “As you can see, red and yellow predominate, meaning that most of these indicators are in fair or poor condition.”
Jay Davis, program director with the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a data-collecting scientific organization that monitors the Bay, began with a reminder of progress.
“Prior to the Clean Water Act of 1972 and other environmental regulations of the 1970s, the Bay and its shoreline were a dumping ground for minimally treated sewage, industrial wastewater, polluted runoff and solid waste,” said Davis. “With the passage of environmental laws, water quality showed a stunning improvement within 15 years, but the rate of overall progress has slowed in the past 30 years.”
“Is the Bay safe for swimming? The condition is good and holding steady,” he said, meaning that the water is clean enough for recreational use.
“Are fish safe to eat? The overall assessment is fair, but things have been steady and not changing,” Davis said, blaming the historic presence of mercury and industrial toxins as the main reasons that estuary fish are not entirely safe for human consumption.
Striped bass are popular for consumption and the main indicator species for mercury, he said, adding their health rating has hovered between fair and poor for the last 50 years.
Is the estuary safe for aquatic life, like birds and salmon?
“Water quality is fair and shows no change,” he said.
Concentrations of nutrients like fertilizer are higher in the Delta regions and put other parts of the estuaries at risk for harmful algal blooms, he said. But a proactive, massive initiative is underway to spend billions of dollars to upgrade our regional wastewater treatment plants to reduce nutrient inputs.
Not all algal blooms are toxic, but bad outbreaks of blue-green algae in warm waters can generate cyanotoxins, which can make people and animals ill when inhaled or touched.
Changes in the amount of cool fresh water that flows into the Bay from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are one of the strongest indicators of overall health.
“Based on the amount of fresh water that actually flows into the bay each year, the estuary has been for decades experiencing chronic man-made drought conditions,” said independent consultant Christina Swanson.
“The [water quality] index declined from generally good conditions to fair conditions during the 1940s and early 1950s, reflecting the construction and operations of dams and ramped up water diversions from the Bay’s rivers and the Delta,” she said.
Swanson said 2006 was the last year with good conditions, and since then conditions have been poor in more than three quarters of all years.
The political perspective was delivered by David Lewis, executive director of Save The Bay, the area’s largest regional estuary advocacy organization. Lewis was presented with the SFEP Jean Auer Award for his significant contribution to the cause.
“We all know the challenges today are daunting,” Lewis said in his acceptance speech. “Ocean warming and acidification threatens the whole marine food web. With sea level rise, our wetlands will flood our communities within decades. And our 50-year-old environmental laws, like the California Environmental Quality Act, Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, are insufficient for what is facing us. They don’t help us speed up protection of environment and public safety from climate threats, floods and extreme storms, fires and droughts and rightly should be modernized.”
After the ceremony, Lewis said in an interview that the Trump administration has acted vindictively by targeting San Francisco Bay and California for cuts.
“The good news is that Californians passed a $10 billion climate bond last year in November, and one billion of that is for coastal resilience,” he said. “We were wise to pass measure AA in 2016 which has provided steady funding from people who live here.”
Measure AA generates about $25 million a year specifically for tidal marsh restoration, he said. A tidal marsh is an area that floods and drains with the daily tides and is crucial for protecting shorelines, cleaning water and providing essential habitats for dabbling ducks and baby salmon.
For a closer look at the conditions of the local waters and how they can be improved, visit the State of the Bay report at ourestuary.org.
Creative thinking
At the 2024 conference last year, it seemed to be raining money. President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure bill had allotted $132 million for expanding and accelerating comprehensive plans created through the National Estuary Program, with underserved communities being the first to benefit. Any local community wanting to clean up their neighborhood creeks or restore native habitats could apply for a variety of state and county grants.
This year, the focus was on creative thinking.
Performance artist Diandra Marizet Esparza, delivered a keynote by reading interpretive prose from her journal and meditating on storytelling as a form of healing.
“When our sense of belonging is ruptured by politics, by migration, by storms and destruction, our stories can guide us back to a sense of hope,” she said.
An art exhibition in the main hall featured the Bay Clay Oyster Reef project by Daniel McCormick and Mary O’Brian. Their rock-like sculptures are made from heavy Bay silt. They are placed along the shoreline to promote the colonization of oyster beds that were wiped out by layers of silt released by mining practices in the Gold Rush era.
One of the most popular panels was all about Bokashi balls, a do-it-yourself organic chemical solution for improving water quality. Bokashi are golf ball-sized nuggets shaped by hand from a mixture of clay, wheat bran, wood ash and molasses. The final ingredient is beneficial microbials, pro-biotic bacteria commonly found in everyday items like yogurt that have digestive health benefits.
When the balls are dropped into dark waters, beneficial bacteria grow and out-competes the harmful bacteria found in pollutants and algae.
Cuauhtemoc Villa, who runs a youth engagement program in Portland, Oregon, said the use of effective microorganisms in organic farming was tested by chemical engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“They are microbes like you’ll find in lactic acid bacteria, that we know from pickling,” he said. “If you think of pickles, it keeps things from going pathogenic. It’s a clean freak.”
The panel was organized by Charlie Toledo, executive director of the Suscol Intertribal Council, who attributes the Bokashi balls with cleaning the Napa River. Toledo reminded the audience that modern restoration practices can be done at the community level, just like pre-European forms of land management.
“[California] was not a wilderness,” said Toledo. “It was a managed agricultural preserve. One of our elders had said a long time ago, every square inch of California was touched by human hands.”
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