By

John Hart
About the author

John Hart is an environmental journalist and author of sixteen books and several hundred other published works. He is also the winner of the James D. Phelan Award, the Commonwealth Club Medal in Californiana, and the David R. Brower Award for Service in the Field of Conservation. For ESTUARY, he writes on groundwater, infrastructure, and California water politics and history.

Articles by John Hart

24
May

John Hart

I’m thinking of the bookends of my Estuary News article shelf. The first story I wrote, “Filling Up on Empty,” asked just how much water might practically be stored in Central Valley aquifers. Could groundwater be our insurance against super-droughts ever more likely to come?  I relished the deep dive into hydrology, but had to surface with bad news: vital though aquifer recharge is, the potential isn’t big enough to support our current water use habits through a really Big Dry. On the positive side, it was nice to finish the run this spring with “Taking the Measure of Success at the South Bay Salt Ponds,” a story about accelerating progress in converting former ponds to marsh and other dandy...
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21
Mar

Taking the Measure of Success at the South Bay Salt Ponds

It is two decades now since some 23 square miles of South Bay salt evaporation ponds became public property. Eighty-eight old impoundments were to be remade into habitat for birds and other creatures—and into a superior flood-control buffer for communities beside the rising Bay. Progress since then has been slow, and fast. Slow, because relatively small swathes of territory have been visibly, obviously changed. Slow, because a whole set of basic questions had to be answered before the work could pick up speed. And fast, because those questions have now been answered, by and large, and the news is pretty good. As sea-level rise makes the project ever more urgent, the way seems open to a rapid transformation in the...
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12
Oct

Key Facility’s Fuzzy Future

There are 14 marine laboratories in California. Just one of them is on San Francisco Bay: the Estuary and Ocean Science Center (EOS), on the rugged eastern shore of the Tiburon Peninsula in Marin County. EOS has trained generations of leading figures in estuary science and management. It possesses a site and facilities that no possible alternative could match. The research community swears by it. And in two years it might close. In the 1970s, after decades as a U.S. Navy property, the 53-acre parcel was considered for inclusion in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Instead, in 1977, it passed—for one dollar—to San Francisco State University (SFSU). But the bargain has devolved into a burden, and today a budget...
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30
Aug

The Tunnel Plan: Thoughts a Month Later

It’s now five weeks since Governor Newsom’s Delta tunnel plan was unveiled in a Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Time enough for the main ideas to sink in; time enough for familiar players to strike their familiar positions; and time enough for some of us to burrow deep into its tables, figures, and appendices. To recap briefly: water taken from new intakes near Hood on the Sacramento River would enter a tunnel and flow 45 miles underground before being lifted again to charge up the California Aqueduct at Bethany Reservoir. The tunnel capacity would be 6,000 cubic feet per second, which, if operated full time, could provide 4.3 million acre-feet a year for export to San Joaquin Valley farms and to...
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16
Dec

The New Face of the Met

On October 17, 1972, the Edmonston Pumping Plant south of Bakersfield began lifting water drawn from the Delta up and over the Tehachapi Mountains toward southern California cities. That moment created a statewide water network stretching from the Trinity Alps to the Mexican border. It also made the Southland’s great umbrella water agency, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, an intimate partner and massive player in northern California water affairs. Since that day, many in the north have seen “the Met” as a kind of colonial power, both far away and threateningly present. It pays a large share of the cost of the State Water Project. It owns lands in the Delta. It underwrites research. It often seems to...
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17
Jun

Cooking Food in a Sacramento Shipping Channel?

The learned doctors attending the bedside of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta agree on one thing: the patient is not doing well. What ails it, many students of the case suggest, is dehydration: the perennial artificial drought induced by withdrawals of water for human use. Recently, though, attention has turned to a comorbidity: malnutrition. Delta waters simply don’t generate enough basic food, in the form of phytoplankton, to sustain the food chains extending to salmon, sturgeon, and smelt.
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22
Mar

Bay Oil Spills: Never Again, and Again

Oil spills in San Francisco Bay are frequent news, but for those old enough to remember there is only one Great Oil Spill, the disaster of January 18, 1971. In a predawn darkness thickened by heavy fog, two small Chevron tankers were maneuvering through the strait. At San Francisco’s Pier 45, Coast Guard technicians were just then testing a novel radar system. They watched helplessly as two blips threatened to fuse into one. Frantic calls to the captains failed to get through.[1] The inbound Arizona Standard rammed its bow 40 feet into the outbound Oregon Standard, releasing more than a million gallons of heavy “Bunker C” fuel mixture — likely the worst spill in Bay history.[2] The San Francisco Bay...
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08
Dec

Science-in-Short ~ Sea Level Rise Podcast

In this podcast, Julie Beagle, a former lead scientist at the SF Estuary Institute now the Army Corps, tells what she calls "wicked scary" sea level rise stories. Beagle also describes several kinds of “nature-based” treatments that can delay and soften the onslaught and also addresses the problem of scale.
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22
Sep

A Fragile Fleet

Watching Bay-Delta science unfold, we take for granted the little armada that keeps it all going. Nobody has a firm count, but it appears there are about 100 vessels supporting research in the Estuary. They range from a few large craft that can work outside the Golden Gate to little “trailerable” skiffs and Adirondack rowboats that ply Delta shallows. Like many of the systems that quietly sustain our society, this one is showing signs of strain.
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18
Jun

Highway 37: The Road to Restoration

From head-on collisions in the 1980s to crippling congestion now, Highway 37 is a familiar headache for highway engineers. Fearing that engineers might not take full account of the vast marsh restorations underway in the area, the Sonoma Land Trust, the Coastal Conservancy, and others joined in a State Route 37-Baylands Group. In 2017, the group laid down markers: Whatever is done with the east-west highway must also improve the passage of tides and stormwaters north and south, not further impede those flows.
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19
Mar

Remembering Bruce Wolfe

Bruce H. Wolfe, for 15 years the Executive Officer of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, suffered a fatal heart attack on February 25 while out on a run at Hilton Head, South Carolina. Doing what he loved, one inevitably notes; but family, friends, and long-time colleagues in the water world would have preferred to have him around much longer. Wolfe was an aficionado of the sport of orienteering, a kind of racing with map and compass that requires both speed and accurate navigation. Maintaining precision under time pressure: that could be a pretty good metaphor also for the professional life of this gifted man. Raised in Piedmont, Wolfe attended Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, where he ran,...
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05
Dec

Big Picture Review of Regional Science and Governance

Offshore, kelp forests were dwindling. Outside, hillsides were burning. Inside the Scottish Rite Center in Oakland, scientists and policy people were sharing the latest findings concerning the vital shallows in between: the San Francisco Estuary. The patient pursuit of knowledge, essential to smart action in a changing world, had chalked up a fruitful two years. Of the action itself, there was rather less sign. Felicia Marcus might speak to that better than anyone. As chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, she had coaxed along a nine-year process, mandated by law, to raise minimum flows in the major rivers that sustain the Estuary. The Board took the first of several wrenchingly hard decisions 12 months ago. Result: the process...
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SOE Conference Banner Egret
05
Dec

View From the Precipice

By John Hart Scientific studies of the Bay and Delta tend to look intensely at small bits of the system. A countervailing theme at this State of the Estuary conference was the need to see wider, to “zoom out” — and most of all to help the public see the broad view, too.
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13
Dec

Estuary Partners Choose their Battles Coast to Coast

A boatload of estuary experts from around the country gathered on an early October day to tour the prettiest part of San Francisco Bay. They paid rather less attention to Alcatraz and the Golden Gate than to each other. In town for the National Estuary Program’s annual Tech Transfer Conference, they had come to compare notes and strategies from the 28 varied bays, bights, bayous, and river mouths that benefit from one of the nation’s most durable, and efficient, environmental laws. In 1987 amendments to the Clean Water Act, Congress proclaimed selected tidewater regions to be “estuaries of national significance” and offered money to help local coalitions take on environmental problems there. Through all the political gyrations since, a thin...
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13
Dec

River Flows on the Brink

It was a rare decisive moment in California water. On December 12, the State Water Resources Control Board resolved, at the close of a marathon meeting, to require more water to be left in the Tuolumne, Merced, Stanislaus, and lower San Joaquin Rivers.
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18
Jun

PERSPECTIVE: Reflecting on the Rush to Resilience

After listening to the final Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge presentations for all the design teams, attending the closing roundtables and speeches, and reading the June 2018 special issue of ESTUARY News focused on resilience planning, the Bay’s top environmental history writer John Hart reflects on take-homes. "Hart very quickly and clearly cuts to the core questions that emerged from the challenge,” says RbD director Amanda Brown Stevens.
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15
Jun

The Quiet Go-To Guy: Carl Morrison

When Carl Morrison died in a crash of his small plane near Petaluma this past April, the press noted the loss of a family man, Civil Air Patrol commander, Marine Corps Veteran, and pious Mormon. The shock also reverberated through the world of Bay Area flood control and water agencies, for whom Morrison was indispensable. As his Bay Area business expanded, Morrison eased his commute by training as a pilot and acquiring a small plane. People marveled at how many places he seemed to be. “There must have been more than one of him,” says Napa County’s Rick Thomasser. A man of formal habits, Morrison never dressed down for field-work. His peers might smile at that, but they cherished his...
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05
Oct

Indecision Point

The Delta Stewardship Council was created in 2009 but given no say over a pending dual tunnels plan. The state was pushing a grand program called the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan. However, the BDCP was abandoned in 2015 in favor of two new, independent programs: EcoRestore and California WaterFix (popularly known as the twin tunnels). Rather than adopt a new policy on conveyance, the council has simply framed its discussion of the tunnels as another recommendation.
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05
Jun

Filling Up on Empty

“We are sucking our aquifers dry,” the headline reads. Could this be a good thing? The bad effects of declining groundwater levels are known: land subsidence, the cost of pumping from deeper wells, the drying up of surface springs and streams. But there is a potential gain as well. Using up one resource, the water stored under the ground, we are creating another: storage space far greater than any conceivable new dam could provide. “Historical overdraft,” writes engineer Jay Lund, “may be an effective means of underground reservoir construction.” If so, we have been building like mad.
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