The Clash Over The Runways (page 2 of 3)

It could if you view delay through the lens of the economy. Which is where Willie Brown is looking. An unabashed champion of the runways, the mayor "really believes this is most important issue facing the Bay Area," insists Kandace Bender, formerly Brown’s press secretary for five years, whom the mayor recently dispatched to SFO to act as communications director for the runway project. "He knows the economy will suffer if the airport is not kept viable."

Due to chronic SFO delays, Brown and the regional business community foresee conventioneers bypassing San Francisco for Las Vegas, tourists going to Bourbon Street instead of Pier 39, and Bay Area employees whiling away company time in airport bars reading John Grisham. Then there’s the dark vision of local construction firms not getting multimillion-dollar contracts to build the runways.

Supporting numbers are provided by the Bay Area Economic Forum, a business-oriented research group. Its calculations reveal that SFO-generated jobs, construction contracts, and tourism brought $24.5 billion in business revenues to the region in 1999. On the downside, SFO delays that year cost passengers $120 million in lost productivity. Without new runways at SFO—and at San Jose and Oakland airports, for that matter, which also have expansion proposals in the wings—the Economic Forum projects that 92,000 jobs and $7.5 billion in business revenues will vanish into the fog by 2020.

At the same time, no one ever wrote a poem about economic projections. Which is not true of the bay. Its 450 square miles define the contour of our land, give birth to a certain tranquility in our daily lives. If the bay has a laureate, it is Malcolm Margolin, publisher of a new magazine called Bay Nature and books about California’s natural history, and author of The Ohlone Way, detailing the area’s past Native Americans. With his long hair and wild beard, Margolin resembles Walt Whitman in looks as much as temperament.

Thanks to pioneering Bay Area conservationists in the ’60s, he says, "we began heading toward a new way of seeing the bay. We saw that its value was not economic but spiritual. A perception arose that we can bring back some of its earliest beauties: tremendous marshes and flights of ducks and geese that darken the sky. But this runway project is like putting a big billboard in the middle of the bay that says, ‘Screw you, environment.’ It says these other values are negligible compared to the greatness of a new airport expansion."

The runway project highlights this clash of values like never before. While local environmental groups such as Save the Bay have been waging a political battle with the airport for two years, obscured in their war of words has been the bay itself. I daresay that for all its visual beauty, few of us are familiar with the ecology of one of the world’s great estuaries, nature’s fertile meeting ground of salt water and streams. The bay, its tides controlled by the seasons of the moon, is home to more than 2,000 species of plants and animals, an interconnected web of life in which shocks reverberate along every strand. Should we build the runways? The answer may be as simple as stepping outside.

Stuart Siegel has a big brown cardboard map of the bay, circa 1863, propped up on the side of his parked truck. We are standing on a bank of the Petaluma River, ringed by tall grasses, where the river flows through a sandy marsh into a northern mouth of the bay. It’s a bright, crisp morning, and I am getting a crash course in tidal wetlands, bordered by biologically rich mixing zones, where freshwater blends with the bay. As Siegel sees it, the airport expansion highlights the march of progress that first trampled the wetlands and upended the bay’s ecology.

Running his finger around the historical map, Siegel points out the tidal wetlands that circle the bay’s shores. Then we look up and survey what surrounds us now: the Port Sonoma boat marina, tall steel trestles supporting Highway 37, giant power-line towers, and a rash of split-level houses. Still, he says, of the river behind us winding its way through the grasslands, "this is one of the last bastions of undeveloped parts of the bay."

Siegel is a professional wetlands scientist who for 17 years has consulted with government planners and environmental groups. He loves this channel because it’s the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation in physical geography at UC Berkeley. But, characteristic of one who spends his time in the field and not in the classroom, he is far from wonkish. The name of his email server is Swamp Thing.

Siegel calls estuaries biological wonderlands. "You get a tremendous amount of biological productivity where freshwater and seawater meet," he says. "It’s where all the plants grow. The fish are all there. It’s an epicenter of productivity."

Wetlands and mixing zones, he says, embody the core of bay life. "They provide all the food for fish, birds, and mammals like otters, muskrats, and harbor seals. If you take the bottom away, the top collapses. That’s what’s happened in the Bay Area. Since the late 1800s, 90 percent of the wetlands have been lost to urban development, agriculture, and salt ponds. We’ve lost all this tremendous diversity and life." Long gone are the bears, elk, and antelope, most of the oak trees and redwoods, the native salmon and oysters.

Due to landfill, the bay is one-third smaller than it was in 1850, says Siegel. What did San Francisco’s city fathers do with all the debris from the 1906 earthquake and fire? They dumped it into a cove to form the Marina District. And it’s not only dirt dynamited from nearby mountains and sand dredged from the bottom of the bay that now constitute our ersatz shoals. It’s junkyard scraps of iron and wood and, as everyone who has set foot at Candlestick Point and the Shoreline Amphitheatre knows, garbage.

In fact, caulking the wetlands is a cruel irony, as their plants and organisms naturally sift toxins from the water. "Tidal wetlands are the kidneys of the estuary," says Siegel. "They filter all the filth out of the system. So when you remove the wetlands, contaminated waters spread into the open waters and impact the entire food web."

While the new runways won’t directly trounce tidal wetlands—there are few left—they will nonetheless have a baywide effect. Siegel explains that by eating up wetlands over the years with development, we have reduced the total volume of water in the bay and stymied tidal flows that help flush it clean. It’s an impact that will be exacerbated, he says, by further shrinking and altering the shape of the bay.

In Siegel’s view, the runways represent a cultural leap backward, to a time before environmentalists put the brakes on filling the bay. "And here we are facing two new square miles of fill," he says.

It’s understandable that before the environmental movement took off in the ’60s, the bay, like the rest of the American wilderness, was viewed not as an ecosystem with its own integrity, but as real estate. Siegel grins as he tells me about John Reber, whose plans for the bay in the ’40s make Citizen Kane look shy.

An actor who produced touring theatricals, Reber was obsessed with city engineering and public works. After years of study, he cooked up a plan that would solve all of San Francisco’s transportation, water, and energy problems. What the city needed to do, he said, was construct two gigantic dams in the bay, one that stretched from San Rafael to Richmond and one from San Francisco to Oakland. That way, river water that flowed into northern and southern points of the bay could be trapped into two giant lakes. The freshwater could then be pumped out to quench a growing, thirsty area. What’s more, the tops of the dams could support 32 highway lanes and four railroad lines.

Sure, the dams would kill all the tidal wetlands ringing the bay, but Reber promised to get the garden-club ladies to plant flowers there. The huge schools of Chinook salmon that channeled through the waters to spawn in rivers upstream also would be wiped out. But Reber promised to stock the lakes with trout for local anglers. Sounds good to us, said a coalition of Bay Area engineers, the Real Estate Association of San Francisco, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

When asked why he wanted to build the dams, leaving San Francisco’s skyline to shine over little more than a lagoon, Reber replied: "The whole bay is too big."

Siegel cracks up at Reber’s big dream, but then he reminds me that it didn’t happen too long ago, that plenty of developers besides the airport still have their eyes on the bay. They include the Port Sonoma Marina — where we’re standing now — which is currently being studied as a ferry-terminal site and which not long ago was envisioned by Sonoma builders as a transit village, complete with homes and businesses, the perfect gateway to the Wine Country.

But the tide, so to speak, is turning. Siegel has also brought me to this spot because it hosts one of the most successful restoration projects in the Bay Area.

As we walk atop a levee along the river, Siegel says wetlands restoration is pretty simple. In many cases, as in the 45-acre area of tidal marsh to our left, restoration means breaching a levee, allowing tidal waters to return to the site and work their alchemy. "We just re-create the physical template and nature does the fine-tuning," he says.

Compared with the barren oat hay field on the right side of the levee, which is acres and acres of dirt mounds, the channel marsh is positively vibrating. Tall cordgrass and bulrush line the edges of tiny sandy islands that have formed here. Ducks and shorebirds scamper across the islands, pecking food out of the shallow water. Divots in the sand signal where bat rays hover in the marsh to feed.

"This was a plowed field only six years ago," says Siegel. "Now look at the vegetation, the birds. It’s phenomenal. When you get right down to it, it’s amazing that we can do this."

Restoring the wetlands is a rising cultural force throughout the Bay Area. Currently, more than 80 restoration projects—representing tens of thousands of acres—are under way. "We’re seeing a huge shift in people’s consciousness of the bay," says John Steere, director of the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture, a coalition of agencies involved in wetlands restoration. "Nobody else in the country has shown this kind of stewardship of a natural resource."

Areas ripe for restoration stretch from abandoned air force bases to clogged creeks. But a huge batch of sites has stirred up controversy—and that’s the bay’s 32,000 acres of diked salt ponds, which constitute about 15 percent of its total surface area and which are owned by Cargill Inc., located in the South Bay’s Newark. SFO is promising to spend tens of millions of dollars to buy a large percentage of the salt ponds and convert them to wetlands. "We think it’s more than a fair trade-off for building the runways," says Lyn Calerdine, SFO’s very likable environmental manager.

Which is easier said than done, responds Siegel. "It’s incredibly difficult to re-create wetlands out of salt ponds," he says. It’s not merely a matter of breaching the dikes and letting nature run its course. Obstacles abound: roads, sewage pipes, railroad trestles, natural-gas pipelines, and electrical cables. It will take years to sort out, says Siegel, and in the process could cause more environmental damage than good.

To see why, I’m standing on a muddy levee between two of Cargill’s salt ponds in the South Bay. The sun has just risen over the Fremont hills, and the blue sky is carpeted with white gulls. It is not a flock of birds. It is not a swarm. It is a cloud of gulls, their wings as loud as a thousand violins, hovering right over my head. I’m thinking: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was a kiddie show.

"Pretty amazing, isn’t it?" says young waterland biologist Cheryl Millett, smiling. Surreal is more like it. The gulls roost all at once, forming a long white fence along a levee. As I gaze beyond them into the distance, my eyes pass over the congeries of turquoise salt ponds, a marshy slough, a mowed green lawn in front of a Radisson hotel, and two blimp hangars at Moffett Field. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wookies walked out of them.

Here, at the southern end of the bay, the salt ponds are home to 150 species of birds and a favorite rest stop for 90 percent of the shorebirds migrating down the Pacific Coast. Because civilization has claimed 80 percent of the wetlands, the salt ponds, by default, have emerged as being among the bay’s most fertile habitats. As everybody knows, the best thing about flying into San Francisco is looking down on the salt ponds and marveling at their metallic maroon and green colors, which arise from billions of microorganisms and invertebrates swirling in the soupy water.

Millett traverses the levees between the psychedelic ponds practically every day, counting thousands of ducks and shorebirds and observing their behavior. She works for the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, a nonprofit research outfit based in nearby Alviso, surely the only rustic town left standing in the Bay Area. Despite the brittle-cold morning, Millett, Anna Clarke (a biology student and the observatory’s office manager), and field biologist Sue Macias are wonderfully enthusiastic about being out here, helping me understand this one-of-a-kind ecosystem and the threats to the birds that flourish here.

It’s the microscopic brine shrimp, as many as 40 billion in a single pond, and the small fish that feed on them that make this a bird’s paradise. Along with other tiny, creepy invertebrates and an insect with the great name water boatman, the shrimp devour the algae and bacteria that abound in the water. Just now, ducks bob along the surface of the ponds, pecking at shrimp and fish, while in the shallow middle of one pond, two beautiful black-necked stilts with long red legs walk across the glistening water, as if performing some kind of avian miracle.

The women delight in pointing out uncommon species to me. After all, these are not your garden-variety ducks out here.

"Look," says Millett. "There’s a little gang of red-breasted mergansers."

"Those will score you major points with your birder friends," says Clarke.

"They’re fish-eating ducks," says Millett. "They’re cool to watch. They go underwater and pop back up. See their wild feathers?" The birds have Candy Apple–green heads and black feathers shooting up like Mohawks. "Ducks with attitude," she says, laughing.

There are way too many birds to count individually. So the women identify the species, count them in clumps of about 50, add up the clumps, and note them on clipboards. (This morning’s count: 37 species, 13,596 birds.) As they work, they tell me how worried they are about the airport’s planned runways.

Perhaps the main reason the birds congregate in the salt ponds is that so many of their traditional homes are now residential districts and business parks. Millett tells me the salt ponds, although in part artificially created, replicate an ecosystem similar to the one that existed before urban expansion.

"The runways could have an enormous impact," she says, "displacing the birds that use that area as habitat. And there are thousands of ducks, like surf scoters and scaups, where they plan to put the runways."

"But won’t the birds just find someplace else to go?" I ask.

"It’s possible," she says. "But only if there’s enough food and other habitat requirements to support them. How many more times can they go someplace else?"

"At some point," says Clarke, "the birds that live in the bay and the migratory birds that stop here are going to be landing on the roof of Lucky’s and looking for plankton. We’re already seeing a diminishment in the number of birds."

Nine species of Bay birds are listed as threatened or endangered. For instance, since 1980, sleek, red-headed canvasback ducks have decreased from 50,000 to less than 25,000. The pudgy California clapper rail, which once punctuated the wetlands in the tens of thousands, plunged to a mere 250 in 1992, although baywide restoration projects have helped it rebound to about 700.

As we walk along the levee back to the observatory office, the women grow philosophic. Perhaps some of the salt ponds should be restored to their natural habitats, they say. But given all the uncertainties, the current rush to do so seems blinded by politics, as the ponds constitute one of the birds’ last remaining homes.

"People always talk about delays at the airport," says Clarke. "Well, I would gladly stand in line for however long it took if it meant that we could save and maintain this wonderful habitat."

The runways’ impact on the birds, on all the bay’s wildlife, is being studied—although no one is doing so solely out of the kindness of his or her heart. Compelled by city, state, and federal laws, the airport is funding an official environmental-impact report, being prepared by international engineering firm URS Corporation. The company has subcontracted studies in 19 environmental fields—including water quality, seismology, and hydrology (the study of the bay’s tides and currents)—and has called on the services of many fine Bay Area scientists. All of whom have been advised not to talk to the likes of me until the study is completed at the end of this year.

But other experts schooled in the ways of the bay, who have studied the airport’s plans, can and do speak authoritatively about their impact. And none more than Steven Moore, an engineer for the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, whose appointed board members must agree that the runways will not further foul the bay’s water. In fact, BCDC won’t authorize a permit until the water board certifies a plan. Moore is analyzing the airport’s plan and will ultimately issue a detailed report to the water-board members. And from the tenor of his opinions today, it doesn’t seem likely he’s going to pen a glowing review.

Seated in his office, high above the new city center in Oakland, the serious Moore goes further than Siegel in describing how the runways will hamper the bay’s natural circulation process. The configuration most likely to be recommended by the airport features two new runways shaped like long piers jutting north, as if running parallel with Highway 101, and one stretching east. The northbound runways, Moore says, will clog the circulation of the bay and of the silt in the shoreline, creating a biological dead zone.

"When you create these artificial straight lines in nature, you create funky circulation patterns for water," he says. "You throw off the natural balance of the ocean, which comes in and replenishes the oxygen and dilutes the toxins. With poor circulation, the microbes and algae go bananas. They consume oxygen, the sulfides go up, it kills the fish, and you get the smell of rotten eggs."

"So, to play the rube," I say, "why should I care?"

"Because it’s gonna stink. That’s why you should care. South San Francisco is going to smell like a cesspool. This is gonna hit home—especially to the folks who work in their fancy office buildings in Oyster Point. They’re not going to be happy."

But the dead zone is only a nuisance compared with the real problem, he says. And that’s the massive amount of sand—which resides beneath the muddy layers of the bay—that the airport plans to dredge up near Alameda. "You’re gonna be dredging up the ghosts of the past," he says. Buried in the bay is "a whole industrial revolution’s worth of chemicals, like mercury, which is a major pollutant, dating all the way back to the gold rush. And that area near the Alameda Naval Air Station has really high PCB levels, which is a carcinogen. If it causes cancer in big animals like us, you can imagine the effect it has on little animals."

Like the BCDC and the other public agencies, the water board will study the URS environmental report before taking its final vote. It also will consult with its own investigative engineer. For now, Moore’s advice is: "Don’t go there. Let’s not dig up the skeletons."

Perhaps the animals most haunted by the skeletons would be the bay’s 500 or so native harbor seals. As the top of the food chain there, they end up consuming the most toxins and minerals. Their reddish coats may well result from the ferrous deposits in the water. Also, their favorite land site for giving birth, Mowry Slough, is located in the South Bay. In fact, most of the seals’ 11 haul-out sites in the bay, where they come out of the water to rest, are located in the South Bay. So when they go hunting for herring, they would have to swim around quite an obstacle in the form of the new runways.

Seated in his office at San Francisco State University, the easygoing Hal Markowitz, the region’s leading seal expert, says the animals can be sensitive to the least disturbance. Even when nursing, the mothers, if startled, may abandon their pups, leaving them to die. Markowitz says the skittish seals can be rattled by anything from someone paddling by in a kayak to jets flying overhead. One harbor seal study has shown that low-flying planes may have caused the deaths of 200 pups on Alaska’s Tugidak Island.

Markowitz says that while the seals love all the herring, the bay is not the most hospitable habitat for them. Unlike with the harbor seals that populate the coastal waters of California, the bay’s seal population is not growing in healthy numbers, due to contaminants in the water, the constant dredging of ship channels, and encroachment on the seals’ haul-out sites.

Markowitz is particularly concerned about the construction of the runways, which will entail years of loud riveting that will echo through the water and disturb the seals. He also worries that the excess silting Moore describes may clog up some of the haul-out sites.

Even so, Markowitz says, he doesn’t want to sound pessimistic about the runway proposal. But, well, "you’re talking about animals that are already living in a polluted environment and are confronted by a lot of difficulties. I’m not saying there are never going to be seals in the bay again if we put this thing in the airport. I’m just saying it’s going to have a really substantial effect, and if we look at it on an individual basis, it’s going to destroy the lives of a lot of animals."

On the bright side, if there is one just now, I have to admit that one of the best things about exploring the bay is discovering all the people and places dedicated to its preservation. I journey to marine biology labs and talk with scientists studying the native salmon that once populated the bay, chat with folks about butterflies at the National Wildlife Refuge Environmental Center, and wander around the primeval mudflats of weird little parks like Bayfront, just south of the airport.

But by far, my most surprising discovery is that the bay is the only commercial fishery in the nation that’s inside the confines of an urban area. The prize is herring, whose roe are extracted and exported to Japan as a sushi delicacy called kazunoko. The herring sweep into the bay on ocean tides to spawn on rock and grass shoals from Sausalito to San Mateo. Because the flood tide generally purls through the Golden Gate most strongly in the night, small fishing boats congregate in the Sausalito cove on weekday nights during the fishing season, November to March.

Watching the herring fishermen from atop a Sausalito bluff is one of the most spectacular sights in the Bay Area. The boats display tiny red and green lights at the top of their masts, which flicker across the night water like Christmas trees. When the fishermen reel in their nets, they shine a white floodlight on them, and the thousands of herring, flapping in the weave of the nets, glitter like huge silver chains.

However, being on board a herring boat in the middle of a cold January night is a different story. "It’s a war zone out here!" says Ernie Koepf, son of a fisherman, who has been catching herring in the bay for 25 years and has no doubt been making people laugh for just as long with his wry, sarcastic humor. I count 50 herring boats, called bowpickers, in the cove tonight, practically clanging into one another as the fishermen plant their detachable nets in the water, each with an identifiable marker. "Fishing’s supposed to be relaxing," says the raggedly handsome Koepf, who listens to classical music on the boat. "But this is a derby!"

This is also Koepf’s big night. Around 11 p.m., he spots one of his nets and attaches it to a line on a hydraulic reel. He flips a switch to start the reel, and he and boatmate Rich Kent begin guiding the net, stuffed with squirming herring, into the boat. As the net spools onto the big reel at the back of the bow, it passes over what looks like a washing machine agitator turned on its side (the shaker), which flips the fish out of the net and onto the deck. The shaker makes a repetitive clanking sound—all of the boats in the cove are clanking like an automobile assembly line—and the deck of Koepf’s boat soon fills up like a bathtub with herring. He sloshes through the fish and opens a hatch to let them fall into the hull.

"There’s something about this bay," a perspiring Koepf says to me during a brief calm. "The boats, the fish, the city at night. The lifelong fishermen and refugees from other jobs. It never ceases to amaze me. I love it out here." By morning, Koepf and Kent, exhausted, have caught a humongous 15 tons of fish. I, personally, never want to see another herring again.

With a total annual take of up to $10 million, herring fishing in the bay is a relatively small industry, though not necessarily for individuals: In his best year, Koepf grossed more than $200,000. To me, though, the herring are a reminder that the bay—the body of water itself—is not just a playground for sailboats, but a living, breathing ecosystem.

When I call Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, to ask what he thinks about the runway plan, he’s so excited I called that he arranges a meeting of some of the area’s leading marine biologists and fishermen. We get together in his office, on the top floor of the old coast guard station, a white wooden building with maroon shingles and green windowsills at the west end of Crissy Field. With dark walls, black admiral chairs, and shelves filled with dusty logbooks kept by fishing commissioners dating back to 1870, the office is straight out of Jack London. "This job doesn’t pay much," Grader says. "But I got one hell of an office."

Among those gathered are Paul Siri, the authoritative associate director of the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory; Pietro Parravano, whose ruddy face and white beard tell you he could be nothing but a lifelong fisherman; and Bill Kier, a consulting fisheries scientist who began studying the bay 40 years ago with the state fish and game department. In fact, Kier helped draft some of California’s key environmental laws, ardently backed the McAteer-Petris Act, which led to the creation of the BCDC, and his cranky view of SFO reveals that he has weathered enough political storms for one lifetime.

They all agree that the new runways will upset the bay’s ecosystem—particularly as a fishery. To strike a balance with the environment, the state fish and game department laws allow commercial fishermen to catch only 10 to 15 percent of the herring that swam into the bay in the previous year. This season, they were permitted to catch a total of 2,700 tons; four years ago, the quota was as high as 10,000 tons.

The decline may be due to natural cycles in the estuary, but biologists worry that it’s also the result of spawning habitats’ being decimated. They say loss of water circulation near the airport and toxic sediments stirred up by dredging could further rob the herring, and many other fish species near the airport, of breeding habitats and kill both fish eggs and hatchlings. A decline in the fish population is bad news for both kinds of mammals on the water: fishermen and seals.

"A hundred years ago, everything was in sync—the ocean and the delta watersheds," says Parravano, who has consulted with marine biologists for years, as he often represents fishermen at public water hearings. "Now, because of water diversions for Central Valley agriculture and cities, we have a much more controlled environment. It creates a complete breakdown in the life cycles of the fish and other organisms. And it’s getting worse."

"What is it we really want to do with this bay?" asks Grader. "Instead of talking about constantly dredging and building new runways, why aren’t we talking about bringing back some of the things that were here historically, like crabs and oysters? There doesn’t seem to be an overall vision of what we want the bay to be."

But a holistic vision of the bay, they agree, has been perpetually rebuffed by politics. Kier tells us about the state water hearings, lasting from 1986 to 1988, designed to protect the bay’s water quality. Scientists who recommended increasing freshwater flows into the bay to sustain its ecosystem, he says, were ignored in favor of the political heavyweights who wanted to keep diverting water to urban and agricultural areas.

"They brought out 44,000 pages of exhibits and 14,000 pages of testimony," says Kier. "Probably $50 million was spent to evaluate the bay’s species. God, it was beautiful. For one science-grounded moment, we had great clarity. And then water politics did what water politics does in California: It buried the science."

What’s more, Siri believes, the URS study, while certain to contain valuable information, can’t help but be incomplete. "The science will create a useful picture of the way the bay operates now," he says. "But we don’t have enough information to predict what’s going to happen in the future. This is the difficulty that society faces in mucking up aquatic systems. They are so complicated that creating a model of what’s going to happen when we do an intervention like these runways is almost impossible. The airfield developers think they can mitigate some of this damage, but I don’t think they can."

Kier, though, has had it with scientific tomes that he says lawmakers don’t take the time to read anyway. "It doesn’t matter a damn," he says. "You can smell a campaign a mile away. The only reason we’re having this meeting is because downtown chauvinism is running high. SFO doesn’t want to lose the market to San Jose and Oakland."

And he’s not finished: "I look at how this runway project is proceeding and how the environmental documentation is being approached—the fix is way deep in. Who in the hell else would have come up with a mandate from Christ-knows-where to do the biggest bayfill in the history of the bay but Willie Brown?"

Brown is indeed the runway plan’s lightning rod of controversy. Ever since 1968, when he was a San Francisco assemblyman and reportedly told a group of Berkeley conservationists that he didn’t care if the bay was filled in as long as blacks did a fair share of the filling, he has not been a big hit with environmentalists. On the promotional trail for the runways, he has given them little reason to change their minds. People who oppose the runways would "like to roll the period back to when [SFO] was just a little field with one little shed," Brown told Channel 7 news last December. "They are firmly of the opinion that there should never be any disturbing or rearranging of what they say is natural in nature. There is nothing natural about that bay."

I tell Kandace Bender, SFO’s communications director, that Save the Bay executive director David Lewis is getting a lot of publicity mileage out of Brown’s remark. "I know he is," she says, smiling. "And I say to the mayor, ‘You’ve got to quit saying that.’ And he goes, ‘Well, there is nothing natural about the bay. It’s all man-made.’"

Bender says that what the mayor really means is that the perimeter of the bay is man-made. Lyn Calerdine, SFO’s environmental manager, who has an ingratiating, self-deprecating manner and is sitting with us in a conference room at the airport’s developmental bureau, chimes in. "It’s true. The shoreline around the airport is all artificial."

It’s safe to say, however, that filling in the bay just because it is already filled in may not be the strongest defense of the new runways. But one thing’s for sure: Since 1927, when it really was a little field with one little shed, SFO has always solved its problems by ordering more landfill and building new runways.

The runway troubles all began in 1929, when Charles Lindbergh, attempting to take off from the airport in a 32-passenger plane, swerved off the taxiway to avoid an oncoming plane, got stuck in the mud, and had to be towed back to the terminal. How humiliating! And what terrible publicity for San Francisco. Since then, the airport has answered every complaint about its aging infrastructure by marching to city-council meetings and asking for more money for expansion.

And it’s still marching to city meetings—but not to ask for money. According to its latest financial statement, SFO is flush with $530 million in total equity and has no problem acquiring bonds to build things. Now, the contentious matters are strictly environmental.

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