By

Isaac Pearlman
About the author

Isaac Pearlman covers sea level rise, flooding, and other topics for ESTUARY. A Bay Area native, Isaac's writing is informed by his master's degree in environmental science, as well as many adventures from living and working in South America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. His stories and essays have been featured in Earth Island Journal, the Progressive Populist, and Ecosystems among other outlets. https://isaacpearlman.wordpress.com

Articles by Isaac Pearlman

Measuring sediment accretion and Hamilton wetlands restoration site in Marin County. Photo: ESA
21
Mar

From Sticks to Satellites: Restoration 1960-2023

The 1960s and ‘70s were a time of rapid change for the San Francisco Bay shoreline. It had long been treated as a waste disposal site or area to fill for development, but public outcry for protection reached a crescendo in 1969 with the birth of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). The passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972 meant that destruction of wetland habitat—already 90% vanished from the Bay—had to be mitigated, or re-created elsewhere. For the first time there was public support and a legal obligation to restore wetlands, but scientists had to figure out how. On June 3, 1976, an intrepid group of restorationists in the small Marin County town of...
Read More
23
Mar

Delta Study Predicts Stronger Floods and Less Water Supply

Though most don’t realize it, practically all Californians are linked to the Bay-Delta region via its triple function as a source of drinking water for some 27 million Californians, a critical water provider for the Golden State’s hefty agricultural industry, and a rich and unique ecosystem. But for those who live in the legal Delta zone – some 630,000 people – the braided weave of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and their maze of associated wetlands and levees provides a place of home, community, and recreation. And, as a recent study by the Delta Stewardship Council shows, climate change is tugging on the watery thread holding it all together. “Two-thirds of Californians get their water from here, which is...
Read More
22
Sep

Retrofitted Houseboat IDs Fish in the Shallows

On a hazy Delta morning at Isleton’s B & W Resort, more than a dozen trucks are already neatly arrayed in the double-long parking spaces with empty trailers facing the boat launch: evidence of fishers and boaters getting an early start on their Labor Day weekend. Randy Mager, sporting a flannel shirt and worn baseball cap, radiates earnest enthusiasm, which for a 20-year state government veteran is as refreshing and rare as a Delta smelt. “I am more excited about this than I have been about pretty much anything else in my career,” says Mager, a senior environmental scientist with California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR). Randy Mager. Photo: Isaac Pearlman The subject of his palpable excitement lays in the...
Read More
18
Jun

Big Projects, Wet Feet: Mega Developments Hedge on Sea-Level Rise

On September 3, 2019, Golden State Warriors CEO Rick Welts stood proudly in front of the newly inaugurated $1.4 billion Chase Center basketball arena. “A brand new journey starts today,” he promised the assembled luminaries and fans. Having built on Mission Bay’s watery footprint, the Warriors defended their new arena against sea-level rise, saying in an official statement it will stay dry in 2100 “even with the anticipated 36 inches of sea-level rise.” Just three weeks later, a massive $1 billion dollar housing and commercial development less than a mile upshore from the Chase Center received permission to break ground. Dubbed “Mission Rock,” the project is also designed for sea-level rise: 66 inches by 2100. In other words, almost twice...
Read More
18
Jun

San Francisco Prepares for Water From All Directions

“Even a city with as many resources as San Francisco has can’t do this [alone],” says the director of the Port of San Francisco’s Waterfront Resilience Program Lindy Lowe, speaking of the climate change threats looming over the City by the Bay. “It’s too big.” The perils San Francisco faces include three-to-ten feet of sea-level rise this century, a sharp increase in extreme heat days, and more severe floods and drought. As city officials grapple with today’s severe housing and inequality crises, they are also confronting the need to preserve aging infrastructure...
Read More
08
Aug

Sea level rise combined with future coastal storms will be costlier and more destructive to California than earthquakes or wildfires.

A new study by United States Geological Survey researchers examines how future coastal storms and waves will affect California’s shoreline via erosion and flooding in conjunction with sea-level rise. And it puts numbers on the cost and people affected by California’s future storms and waves: about $150 billion in property and 600,000 people by 2100. “Bay Area communities account for two-thirds of the projected impacts across the state over the next century,” explains lead author Patrick Barnard. “Many communities, such as Foster City, are vulnerable to extreme storms today, and that vulnerability will increase dramatically over the next few decades, even with just several inches of sea-level rise.” If nothing is done to prepare the coast, sea level rise pushing...
Read More
13
May

Therese McMillan inherits huge challenges as the new Executive Director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

The Bay Area region is beleaguered by traffic, a crippling housing shortage, and growing inequality. MTC plays a role in all these areas. “We have a master coordinator role in being able to knit the region together through land use and transportation planning, and major dollar investments,” says McMillan of the MTC, which distributes billions of public transportation dollars collected annually by local, state and federal governments, although she notes that the agency doesn’t “have land use authority, or our own transit system—that is vested in the cities and counties, and separate transit agencies.” While land use and transportation are squarely within MTC’s purview, for others issues—housing affordability and growing economic inequities—MTC must partner with myriad other agencies across nine...
Read More
06
May

Dave Halsing is in a race against sea level rise to restore the South Bay salt ponds.

 “The existential challenge is doing marsh restoration fast enough to get it into place and established before sea level rise really starts to kick in,” says Halsing, the new Executive Project Director for the massive, 15,000-acre South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. The thoughtful and reflective restoration manager is seizing the reins from previous director John Bourgeois to lead the 50-year, $1 billion effort that is the largest wetland restoration project on the West Coast. “I had to take a shot at what was truly a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Halsing says of his new position. “Connecting with so many different agencies, communities, and stakeholder groups is a fascinating and rewarding opportunity. It touches on so many aspects of the natural...
Read More
13
Feb

In 2019 Los Angeles property owners will see a new addition to their tax bill: a tax on impervious surface area to fund stormwater projects.

Measure W, approved by voters last November, will tax residents 2.5 cents per square foot of impermeable surface on their parcels. The initiative will raise an estimated $300 million per year to fund rain gardens, new parks, and watershed restoration in order to capture and clean the precious rainwater sliding off the county’s concrete and asphalt surfaces. Though the county currently captures and stores enough rain to meet the consumption needs of one million residents, the Measure W tax revenue could help more than double that number. According to the Los Angeles Times editorial board, which supported the measure, it will also help the county’s 88 cities and 200 water agencies to meet water quality standards that they have routinely violated in...
Read More
13
Dec

Calculating the Cost of Adaptation

What makes a bond green? When the debt is issued specifically to bankroll projects with tangible environmental benefits. So when the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission faced a hefty price tag for major infrastructure overhauls, they chose to go green. “The goal is to get to $1 trillion in annual green bond issuances by 2020,” says Mike Brown, the SFPUC environmental manager who oversees the $1.4 billion in green bonds that the commission has issued since 2015. To Brown, the global rise of green bonds presents an opportunity. “I want to get to the point where every dollar of debt issued is green.”
Read More
26
Sep

Constellation of Climate Events Lifts State Spirits

“We are seeing events we have never seen before,” said California Natural Resources Secretary John Laird to the over 750 attendees of the California Adaptation Forum on August 28th. Inside the cavernous ballroom of the Sheraton Grand in downtown Sacramento, Laird ticked off to the audience the evidence that climate change is present in California: wildfires burning faster and hotter, rainfall five hundred percent above normal, and longer lasting Central Valley heatwaves. “[Climate change] is happening, we’re experiencing it, and we’re in the middle of it right now,” concluded Laird. “What we’ve seen is frightening, but we can’t allow ourselves to be paralyzed.”
Read More
13
Aug

California’s groundwater faces widespread chromium contamination risk resulting from natural, rather than industrial sources.

Chromium’s toxic form, known as hexavalent chromium, is used in steel manufacturing, leather tanning, and wood treatment; its lethal effects were popularized in the 2000 movie Erin Brockovich. But today transformation of the benign form of chromium naturally found in soils poses the larger risk, according to a recent Stanford University study. Dr. Debra Hausladen and her colleagues used a statewide groundwater database to trace the origin of 90,000 chromium samples, and discovered toxic chromium from natural sources is affecting a much higher population and area in California than exposure from industrial sources. Due to the high occurrence of toxic hexavalent chromium in regions such as Central Valley, the researchers suspect groundwater pumping and other human activities play a role...
Read More
15
Jun

North Bay: Common Ground on a Grand Bayway?

Traffic-choked, flood-prone Highway 37, traversing the northern Bay Area, has been locked for years in a debate between restoration groups and transportation agencies seeking what they thought might be opposing goals: resilient landscapes and a roadway meeting the North Bay’s transportation needs. As part of the Resilient by Design Challenge, the Common Ground team was assigned to bridge the divide over the highway’s future. “Getting committed to a long-term process is like driving cross-country in a car with different people,” says Tom Leader of Common Ground. “You’d be throwing away a lot of value by having a single-minded agenda.” Called the “Grand Bayway,” the team’s vision describes a raised road through an ecological Central Park, with revitalized ghost towns like...
Read More
15
Jun

San Leandro Bay: Three Cities Confront Common Estuary

There’s no easy way to describe what makes the San Leandro Bay region of the East Bay so unique. Ask a design specialist, like Claire Bonham-Carter of Resilient By Design’s All Bay Collective, and she’ll point to “massive infrastructure--the Oakland airport, the BART station, two major roadways…” On the other hand, community activist Colin Miller of the Oakland Climate Action Coalition says “It’s the people that really makes it special.” Miller and the other All Bay Collective community advocates pushed the team hard from the start to consider equity and social justice in all aspects of the project. The final result, a concept called “the Estuary Commons,” proposes to build tidal cities—pre-assembled housing units floating on excavated lagoons—but a huge...
Read More
22
Sep

High Road for the Wettest Highway?

As Bay Area cities and counties grapple with the formidable challenge of preparing for a higher San Francisco Bay, there is perhaps no better example of the obstacles and opportunities than the effort underway to adapt Highway 37. The 21-mile North Bay corridor running from Vallejo to Novato has long been a source of tranquility and frustration. The highway offers sweeping views of tidal baylands dotted with roosting waterfowl and shorebirds plumbing mudflats for food, along with mile-upon-mile of open space. And commuters often have ample time to enjoy the scenery: Highway 37 is one of the most congested in the region. Congestion isn’t the only problem facing the highway. This past winter a combination of storms and high tides...
Read More