By

Ariel Rubissow-Okamoto
About the author

Ariel Rubissow Okamoto is both today’s editor-in-chief and the founding editor of ESTUARY magazine (1992-2001). She enjoys writing in-depth, silo-crossing stories about water, restoration, and science. She’s a co-author of a Natural History of San Francisco Bay (UC Press 2011), frequent contributor of climate change stories to Bay Nature magazine, and occasional essayist for publications like the San Francisco Chronicle (see her Portfolio here). In other lives, she has been a vintner, soccer mom, and waitress. She lives in San Francisco close to the Bay with her architect husband Paul Okamoto.

Articles by Ariel Rubissow-Okamoto

13
Dec

Nudging Natural Magic

“Miraculous” isn’t a term that comes easily to the lips of scientists and engineers. But the word cropped up more than once in interviews concerning the results of the horizontal levee experiment on the San Lorenzo shore – including off the charts levels of removal of nitrogen and pharmaceuticals from wastewater passed through the system.
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Bridges - public shore
01
Dec

Public Sediment Favors Mud

“We’re finally seeing a change in paradigm,” says Brett Milligan regarding how sediment is treated in the Bay Area. What was once considered waste is now considered a resource, and a group called “Public Sediment,” part of the Bay Area Resilient by Design Challenge, are proposing mud rooms, mud berms, mud pathways, and top-to-bottom mud management to better build up Bay Area shorelines and keep them above rising water.
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13
Nov

A wedge of gravel, mud, and grasses irrigated by treated wastewater outperforms all expectations as a prototype for climate change adaptation.

Experts monitoring 16 months of plant growth on a humpbacked levee experiment on the San Leandro shore, a project led by the Oro Loma Sanitary District, found early weed colonization followed by rapid dominance of target native perennial vegetation. “Native vegetation outcompeted weeds,” says Peter Baye, who designed the planting palette for this multi-benefit infrastructure project. The results were apparent during an October 2017 tour for international design teams looking at homegrown innovations in sea level rise adaptation as part of the Resilient By Design Bay Area Challenge (see photo). With so much of the Bay shoreline in need of protection from increased flooding, as well as habitat for wetland species at risk and new wastewater infrastructure, progress on this experimental levee is being...
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13
Nov

The digital light is finally filtering into the dark recesses of ESTUARY News magazine’s archives.

For readers who may have tried to search our magazine web site for a favorite article or information on a specific topic, we have good news: ESTUARY’s featured online articles are now searchable back to the start of 2014. Take a look — browse by key words and tags, scan enlarged magazine covers in the archives, or just deploy the simple Q function. It’s a trove of good references, histories, voices, and stories of efforts to protect and restore our waterways over the years.
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22
Sep

Beacon not Burden

What some might call a regulatory burden on industry, commerce, and American greatness, others might call the road to success. Jay Davis, a serious guy, doesn’t crack a smile when he describes the Bay Area’s Regional Monitoring Program as “a beacon of environmental protection.” It may sound a little over the top, for a PhD who ran the program for more than a decade, but all you have to do is fact check. Ask some of the oil refineries, power plants, cities, engineers, ports, scientists, and regulators who’ve participated in this 25-year old collaborative monitoring program to confirm this result and they all say the same thing. It takes time but saves money. It helps those being regulated deal with...
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15
Aug

The Second Signal: Guadalupe River Flood Monitoring

It was past midnight when Lester McKee pulled the plug. He’d been watching the weather for days on screen, looking for the perfect storm of conditions he needed to send his team out to sample the Guadalupe River in Santa Clara County. He knew there’d been enough rain already to saturate the soil and surpass annual averages. Zooming in on real-time sensors aimed at Santa Clara Valley Water District reservoirs, he could see they were full enough to spill downstream. On NOAA’s weather site, he found that ten inches of rain were projected to fall on the ridgeline of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the state’s water resources department was estimating peak flows of 9,000 cubic feet per second in...
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15
Aug

Sport Fish Still Not Squeaky Clean

Toxic flame retardants quickly declined in Bay-caught fish, once banned, but legacy mercury persists, according to the most recent year of sampling. As the region’s collaborative monitoring program for Bay contaminants — the RMP — arrives at its 25th birthday, its long-term commitment to consistent data collection for the purposes of targeted environmental management is showing its mettle. The RMP has been catching and testing a wide array of species of popular sport fish, ranging from giant sturgeon to tiny sardines, since 1997. This June the program debuts the latest results. There’s good news, bad news, and no news. PBDEs, those sticky flame retardants linked to cancer, and sprayed on fabrics and couches, have continued their steady decline over the...
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11
Aug

A new Bay Area screening tool helps me wrap my brain around a TMI project.

The day I began editing a monolithic overview of Santa Clara County’s Coyote Watershed I received a gift from my handler. He’d just thrown me for a loop by suggesting we describe not just Coyote Creek’s vast extent and myriad One Water management issues, but also its six sub-watersheds. I asked him to summarize the differences. Rather than composing a detailed memo, or searching water district literature for the materials, he logged into Bay Area Greenprint. Within hours I had six super-organized mini-reports offering maps and metrics on each creekshed. At a glance, I could see acreages, land uses, habitat extent, presence of endangered species, food production, groundwater recharge, wetland and river quality, trails, flood risk, and even climate change...
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20
Jun

LA Drainage Goes Native

Community Conservation Solutions is piloting a new analytical tool that not only taps an untapped local water supply — the 969 miles of metropolitan storm drains in Los Angeles — but also has the metrics to earn carbon credits for doing so. “It’s very practical, you just stick your straw in the local water source rather than pumping it into the city from hundreds of miles away,” says the NGO’s director Esther Feldman. The tool helps land and water managers prioritize projects on public lands near stormdrains that use this local water to irrigate and vegetate the urban ecosystem, and to recharge groundwater.
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26
Mar

Back to the Bones of the Delta

Anyone who’s been around debates about the Delta’s highest and best
 uses for decades has seen a long train of plans touting this or that kind of restoration to save salmon, smelt, mice, birds and other endangereds. What’s different about the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s recently released Delta Renewed guide is that it finally puts all that’s been learned together in 
one place in a mere 100 pages.
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15
Dec

The Dirt on Flea Control

It’s hard to go to the big box pet store and not stumble over the flea control displays. Most pet owners have dabbed or squirted Frontline or Advantage between their cat’s shoulder bones or onto the back of their dog’s neck, but who would guess this same chemical would make its way off our pet’s fur, down the drain, through wastewater treatment, and into the Bay? Apparently all the petting and shedding and subsequent washing of hands, doggies, and floors is moving flea-killing chemicals into our household wastewater, and the treatment plants aren’t getting it out again. “Sewage treatment plants were not designed to treat and remove all the industrial chemicals we are now using in our homes,” says Kelly...
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20
Jun

Deliquescent Summit on Ocean Climate

Walking in the door of the fourth Ocean Climate Summit this May and finding Amy Hutzel, long-time chair of the committee in charge of implementing a conservation plan for the San Francisco Estuary, I asked her what she was doing out of her watershed? “Dipping my toe in the Pacific, “ she said. “For a while now, we’ve been working to build partnerships inland and offshore. It’s all one estuary.”
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09
Mar

Mainstreaming Resilience

Whatever the “perturbation” coming our way – a flood, a drought, a weed or Donald Trump – our recovery, in the aftermath, depends on something ecologists call resilience. It’s a term everyone is pasting onto their management initiatives these days. But what exactly does it mean?
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05
Jun

Beyond the Blubber

When John Kucklick talks about interrogation techniques, his subjects aren’t tight-lipped terrorists, they’re bits of blubber. Harbor seal fat is a well-known repository of legacy contaminants from the Bay like PCBs, flame retardants and DDT, but the Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay (RMP) wanted to know what they might be missing. In 2010, they asked Kucklick, a scientist with access to a national database of 330,000 chemicals and some pretty cutting edge software, to check their blubber for unknowns.
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26
Mar

Rethinking our Grandest Plan for the Estuary

Changing estuarine conditions and new pressures from ongoing urbanization and development, as well as from climate change, inspired estuary planners to undertake a revision to the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) in 2014. The CCMP, first published in 1993 and most recently updated in 2007, was the first master plan for improving the health of the estuary encompassing San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento- San Joaquin River Delta. The intent of the current update — a project still led and managed by the San Francisco Estuary Partnership (SFEP) — is to streamline the current plan, which contains more than 200 actions, and refocus on contemporary concerns.
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16
Dec

Beyond the Bag Ban

The other day I found myself turning out the closets for one last plastic bag. But a year into San Francisco’s bag ban, there just aren’t that many plastic shopping bags around our house anymore. All told, 60 percent of municipalities in the four most urbanized Bay Area counties have banned them. It’s all part of a substantial endeavor by regional regulators and 76 local municipalities to stop litter, PCBs and mercury from getting into our creeks and Bay via stormwater runoff.
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27
Sep

Alameda Work Trickles On

Along Alameda Creek, which drains a 640-square-mile watershed, humans have built dams, buried creeks, and reshaped channels. “The watershed is huge and complex, and all these changes, compounded over time, have left us with a long and arduous path to getting it to function more naturally again,” says Carol Mahoney, a planner for Zone 7 Water Agency.
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23
Sep

Defter Delta Restoration

An issue paper endorsed by the Delta Stewardship Council this August seeks to spark progress throughout the myriad stages of habitat restoration. As public and private interests gear up to help endangered fish and migrating birds by restoring habitats in six priority zones of the Delta and Suisun Marsh, this paper lays out tools and concepts for getting the most out of these investments and learning from our mistakes. The paper details steps for achieving effective restoration, reviews barriers such as conflicts with existing land uses and the complexity of permitting processes, and recommends strategies for addressing these challenges.
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19
Jun

Shifts in Selenium Spikes

USGS scientists headed up river this June to see whether two Asian clams had also headed upstream with the drought. When there’s less fresh water flowing out to sea, salty ocean water intrudes inland, and changes the distribution of these pesky invertebrates. Potamocorbula like it saltier than Corbicula, and usually hang out in the Suisun Bay region. But scientists suspect drought conditions may have changed all that, and with it, how and when the contaminant selenium gets cycled through the estuarine food web via the clams.
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19
Jun

Hamilton Done, But More To Do

Breaching the outboard levee near Marin County’s Hamilton community this May is cause for both a whoop of celebration and a sigh of relief. Celebration because it was an ambitious wetland restoration project with a complicated design and multiple partners that wasn’t easy to pull off, yet in just a few months it’s become a beautiful landscape filled with blue water, green shoots, yellow flowers, quacking ducks, and happy neighbors. Relief because at times the costs and challenges of moving so much mud to the site, in order to the raise the elevation of subsided wetlands, seemed overwhelming to those in charge. But they did it. And now they need to do it again; only this time they hope it...
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