This episode was adapted from a podcast called Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism.
It features recordings from the UC Berkeley Oral history center — which are awesome because it means we get to hear firsthand from historic change makers. But technology has come a long way since these were recorded, so you may need to listen a little closer than usual.
Stick around at the end of the episode for more details about the Voices for the Environment exhibition.
I’m Olivia Allen-Price and this is Bay Curious.
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Olivia Allen-Price: In the early 1960s, California was already the most populated state in the nation, and the Bay Area was becoming a crowded place. Developers needed land, and they were looking to fill in the Bay to create more of it. But as The California Report Magazine’s Sasha Khokha tells us, some local residents were not keen on this plan.
Sasha Khokha: The Army Corps map published in the newspaper sent shockwaves around the region. And it alarmed three Berkeley residents: Catherine “Kay” Kerr, Esther Gulick and Sylvia McLaughlin. They recalled that moment when they were interviewed together for an oral history project in 1985.
Catherine Kerr: When the Army Corps map appeared in the Oakland Tribune showing that the Bay would end up being a river by 2020 because of all the fill, it was clear to me that this was certainly a possible train of events, and it needed to be stopped.
Sylvia McLaughlin: And I was totally appalled, reading in the [Berkeley] Gazette, of the city manager’s dream to fill over 2,000 acres in front of Berkeley. And this was one of the things that galvanized us into action.
Catherine Kerr: About two weeks later, Esther came over. We were sitting in the living room, and it was a beautiful day, and the Bay was very blue. I said to Esther, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the bay. Did you see the map in the Tribune?” She said, “Yes. Wasn’t it awful?” I said, “Well, do you think you would have time to do something about it?”
Sasha Khokha: The three Berkeley women started having regular meetings in the spring of 1961. They fit squarely within a well-established Bay Area tradition of environmental activists. They were white. They were highly educated and they were well-connected in local and state political circles. You might recognize Catherine Kerr, as the wife of former UC President Clark Kerr.
They read city council plans, consulted with academics on the Berkeley campus, and then called a meeting of the leading environmental organizations in the Bay Area.
Catherine Kerr: The three of us had decided that we were not conservationists and this was a really terrible problem. We were going to tell them about the problem, and then we expected they would carry the ball.
Esther Gulick: We weren’t going to form an organization at all.
Catherine Kerr: We didn’t have any of the expertise. We explained about the Army Corps map. there were maybe eighty square miles of fill already proposed by various cities around the Bay. And so we said, “This is the problem.”
Sasha Khokha: One by one the environmental leaders in the room agreed that saving the Bay was important. But they also said it was not something their groups could take on. Kay Kerr remembered Dave Brower from the Sierra Club saying:
Catherine Kerr: “Well, it’s just exceedingly important, but the Sierra Club is interested in wilderness and in trails.” Then the next guy, Newton Drury, said, “Well, this is very important, but we’re saving the redwoods, and we can’t save the Bay.” And then it went around the room to the point where there was dead silence. So we said, “Well, the Bay is going to go down the drain.”
Sasha Khokha: But Kerr said there was one way the Sierra Club offered to help:
Catherine Kerr: Dave Brower said, “Now there’s only one thing to do: start a new organization, and we’ll give you all our mailing lists.” And they all wished us a great deal of luck when they went out the door.
Sylvia McLaughlin: They said, “Someone should really do something about this.”
Esther Gulick: It turned out that we were the somebodies.
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Sasha Khokha: And that’s how these three Berkeley women found themselves starting the Save San Francisco Bay Association. And those other environmental groups they did follow through in one important way. They shared their mailing lists. Out of the first 700 mailers the three women sent out, they got about 600 pledges of support. Within a month, Save San Francisco Bay had secured a solid membership base.
Esther Gulick: They just couldn’t believe it, you know. They, like us, thought the Bay belonged to us, the Bay belonged to everybody.
Sasha Khokha: One of the group’s first tasks was to push back against Berkeley’s plan to double the size of the city by filling in more than 2,000 acres of shoreline.
The activists showed up in droves to Berkeley City Council meetings to object to the plan. And they flooded the mailboxes of elected officials.
Catherine Kerr: I would say that was one of our very first lessons, that if you were going to save the Bay, you had to have the support, and you had to educate the politicians. And the second thing was that you couldn’t educate them or get their support without facts. So we spent a great deal of time on collecting facts and then educating everybody that would listen.
Sylvia McLaughlin: Our members were very responsive. We would suggest that they attend critical city council meetings and they would. Sometimes the following city council meeting would be wall to wall with chamber of commerce people. It went back and forth like that.
Sasha Khokha: In the end, members of the Save San Francisco Bay Association won. In 1963, the Berkeley city council rescinded its plan to fill in the Bay. It was a big victory for environmentalists and it would change Berkeley and the larger Bay forever.
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Sasha Khokha: But there was a problem. The victory in Berkeley only went so far. Other cities around the bay had dozens of other fill plans in the works. The three Berkeley activists knew something had to be done in Sacramento if they were really going to save the whole bay. Kay Kerr used her political connections to get a meeting with state Senator Eugene McAteer.
McAteer was born in San Francisco and was a powerhouse in Bay Area politics. He was a builder, and he had a track record of supporting development and infrastructure projects, like freeways, universities and dams.
But he could tell that the issue of whether or not to fill in the Bay was a significant one. He’d seen the legislature stall over this debate before. So, he proposed a different tact: a study commission focused on regulating development of the bay.
Joseph Bodovitz: I think what people tend to forget now is how unusual it was to have anybody of McAteer’s stature interested in an environmental issue in the sixties.
Sasha Khokha: This is Joseph Bodovitz. He was a regional planner, tapped to lead a study about what it would look like to regulate bay development. And he said it took the clout of a business-focused, pro-development leader like McAteer to force the legislature to take up the issue.
Joseph Bodovitz: I don’t know what would be a good example, like Ronald Reagan really being serious about protecting redwoods or something.
Sasha Khokha: The study group ultimately created what became known as the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, or BCDC.
These were uncharted waters. There was no precedent for regional environmental regulation back in 1965. In fact, BCDC was the first regulatory agency of its kind in the nation. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wouldn’t be established for another 5 years.
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A guy named Melvin B. Lane became BCDC’s first chairman. He approached regulating bay development using a handful of basic policy concepts.
Melvin Lane: One of them was that, you don’t put something in the Bay that can just as well go on land. The next one was, you don’t put something next to the Bay that can just as well go inland. And that covered an awful lot of things. A house doesn’t have to be in the Bay, a yacht harbor does. [laughs]
Sasha Khokha: Mel Lane was a Republican and a successful businessman. And he could speak with authority to developers and real estate interests. At the same time, he was an environmentalist and publisher of Sunset Magazine, which had long celebrated the beauty of California and the West, and the importance of preserving natural lands.
Mel Lane: Things that the general public can enjoy will get preference over things that just a limited group can enjoy. The things that a limited group of people can enjoy will get a preference over the something that only is for a single person, or a single owner. There are a lot of industries that need to be in the Bay, but if you fill it up with houses and warehouses, you don’t leave room for those things that really have to be there.
Sasha Khokha: Lane thought BCDC should take a different perspective from how a city council or developer might approach the Bay.
Mel Lane: If somebody owns a piece of shoreline and some mud flats, and they go to the city council and they say, “Now I just want to fill in a little bit out here to help my building, but I’m going to put a little path around here, and there’s a picnic table. And I’ve got this architect that’s going to put ivy on my building, and I’m going to create fifty jobs, and I’m going to pay you twenty thousand a year in taxes, and on and on. And, I’ve only taken .0007 percent of the bay.” A city council can’t turn that down. But if you looked at all of the privately-owned shallow parts of San Francisco Bay and said, “Now if this happens to even a large part of it, was that a good idea?” We’d say, “No.” If you looked at that one slice, you’d say, “Yes.” So as planners, we should be looking at the total, but a developer looks at only his thing.
Sasha Khokha: Operating a commission that actually rejected permits for multi-million-dollar developments wasn’t easy. Almost immediately, BCDC found itself squaring off against all kinds of Bay Area business interests.
Mel Lane: At the time BCDC was created there were some firms who were fighting it extremely hard.
Sasha Khokha: Leslie Salt Company was the largest landowner on the San Francisco Bay, operating 26,000 acres of salt ponds at the southern tip of the Bay. In the mid-1960s, the company was looking to turn large portions of their property into commercial and residential real estate.
Mel Lane: They had decided a couple of years before BCDC came into being, that they were going to start making money on their real estate, because they were never going to do it in the salt business. So, we did fight and scratch with them.
Sasha Khokha: BCDC rejected Leslie Salt’s proposal. The commission also battled other corporate giants, including two big ones: U.S. Steel, and Castle & Cooke, better known by its two subsidiaries, C&H Sugar and Dole. U.S. Steel wanted to build an office complex in the San Francisco harbor next to the Ferry Building that would have included a 550-foot skyscraper, more than twice the size of the Ferry Building’s clock tower.
Mel Lane: Well, they wanted to put some big office buildings out in the Bay. And we did fight them on that, and everybody else took credit for it.
Sasha Khokha: Castle & Cooke’s project was even more ambitious. They wanted to build a 42-acre plaza out into the Bay that would house a hotel and a bunch of restaurants and shops. The footprint of the plaza would have been 30% larger than Alcatraz Island.
BCDC rejected both proposals.
Sasha Khokha: Another proposal called for filling in the east side of the peninsula — all the way from San Bruno to the San Mateo Bridge — with dirt from San Bruno Mountain. It would have created 27 square miles of infill land.
Mel Lane: They would cut down the mountain, push it in the Bay. Pushing land into the Bay — developers just love that. God, they think that is so wonderful. Anyway, we finally wore them down, but they were tough and very able.
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Sasha Khokha: In 1969, the California Legislature made BCDC a permanent commission.
Becoming an official state agency marked two milestones in the evolution of Bay Area environmentalism. First, it gave environmental considerations a permanent place in state government. Second, the agency tried to strike a balance between economic development and environmental conservation. Here’s what Joe Bodovitz, the planner, said about that:
Joseph Bodovitz: People sort of had to confront the legitimate interests of both conservation and development. The idea, again, that Mel felt very strongly about is that reasonable, fair-minded people, confronted with facts in a reasonably unemotional way, are going to come out largely agreeing to the same kinds of things. They may disagree on a particular permit or a particular issue, but no fair-minded person can say marshlands aren’t important. Similarly, no fair-minded person can say ports aren’t important to the Bay Area economy.
Sasha Khokha: Mel Lane said BCDC’s greatest innovation was as a government mediator. It created and enforced rules across the Bay; and it occupied a middle ground between activists and developers.
Mel Lane: Environmentalists should be extremists. They represent an extreme, and the people who are going to make a buck represent the other one, and the decision-maker should sweat it out in the middle.
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Sasha Khokha: The work of Kay Kerr, Esther Gulick, Sylvia McLaughlin and BCDC certainly saved San Francisco Bay from development. But it also became the model for other state regulatory agencies, like the California Coastal Commission.
What began with the activism of three women in Berkeley, flourished into an environmental agency whose impact would be felt for decades to come.
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Olivia Allen-Price: That was Sasha Khokha, host of KQED’s The California Report Magazine.
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This episode was adapted from a podcast called Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism. It was originally produced by Todd Holmes and Roger Eardley-Pryor, with help from Sasha Khokha. It featured historic interviews from the Oral History Center archives at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
Interviews include Esther Gulick, Catherine “Kay” Kerr, Sylvia McLaughlin, Joseph Bodovitz and Melvin B. Lane.
To learn more about the Bay’s history of environmental activism — including how pollution has affected communities of color in the Bay — check out the free exhibit at UC Berkeley in The Bancroft Library Gallery. It runs through November 2024. We’ve got all the details in the show notes.
Bay Curious is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale, and myself, Olivia Allen-Price. Special thanks to Dan Brekke for his voice work in the show intro this week. As always, thanks to the KQED family for making this show possible, especially Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, César Saldaña, Maha Sanad and Holly Kernan.
I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Have a wonderful week.
