Sedimentation and the Muddy History of the Berkeley Marina

by NAOMI MINT-LEVINTHAL

Every Sunday morning, I ride down to the Berkeley Marina, lock my bike, and open up the clubhouse for the day. Setting down my stuff, I go to check the forecasted tides and jot them down on the whiteboard. I set dock time around whatever comes first: sunset or low tide. This is my second year working at the Marina, and I have long learned that every action on the water is dependent on the highs and lows of the tides.

Right now the tide is high, so I roll my boat out of the yard to drop in the water. Climbing down the ladder, I hop into the boat, start the engine and peel off into the middle of the East Bay. I cut the engine once I’m a little way past the abandoned restaurant that overlooks the southwest end of the Marina. While waves lap up against the side of the boat, I stare out at San Francisco, observing the cars, bridges, boats, and buildings. Here I am alone, yet surrounded by everything all at once.

I have a conundrum, one that I often face while sitting in this boat in the Bay. It is one found in the nexus between humans and nature – one that I have slowly realized is at the heart of the Marina’s existence as a whole. The question is: what is natural, and what do we do with nature that has been irrevocably altered from what it once was?

The South Sailing Basin is known for its world-class winds, sailing, windsurfing, kayaking, and open water swimming. Recreational water sports are central to the Berkeley Marina’s economy, and through this lens, many people simply understand the space as a means of entertainment and enjoyment. Yet the Marina is much more than a break from the urban bustle, in terms of both its ecological significance and historical importance. One component of the Marina that illustrates this is its mud.

Tides are sort of like a curtain, opening up for the show. There is something behind the curtain that we can only observe when the tide drops. In one way, it is mud; in another, it is sediment. In many ways, it is history. The deposition of rock, organic matter, soil, and other materials that are transported by water, wind, ice, or gravity is a process known as sedimentation.

The muddy floor of the Berkeley Marina was created through sedimentation. When I paddleboard at low tide, drifting across the water, inches above mud, I can drop one foot off of my board, and then another, feeling the slick squelch as my feet sink in. With each step, I feel the ecological history layered within the sediment just below me.

“Imagine how much better it would be if we just dredged the Marina” is a sentiment that has often been expressed by club members while sitting on the bench outside the clubhouse. With dredging, we could stay out longer – plus classes and recreational activities could continue without interruption! While some are enthused, this idea of massive “improvement” has always left me with a wary feeling.

In response, I have spent hours reading local news articles about dredging, with papers arguing for and against the act. Still, the idea of dredging the Marina holds a sense of moral ambiguity in my mind. This ambiguity falls someplace between the lines of natural and unnatural.

The issue is that though disruption and damage will occur from dredging, the Marina is a product of such damage from human life already. The sludge that would be dug out is not simply the result of an established ecosystem but is instead the aggregate of our human past flowing and collecting in the basin, creating the space as it exists today.

The Marina is unnatural in the inherent sense that every natural aspect of it has been changed by humans already. Two examples — Strawberry Creek and the 19th-century gold rush — do a good job of depicting just how much human life has fundamentally altered and shaped the Marina.

Strawberry Creek led to the location and founding of UC Berkeley, and thereby the development of much that the

East Bay is today. This creek lets out directly into the South Sailing Basin of the Berkeley Marina. I regularly bike to this estuary area to watch the various geese, ducks, seagulls, killdeer and other birds gather at sunset. It’s both strange and beautiful that such natural acts of life exist so close to the concrete walls of the East Bay. In this meeting of the Creek and the Bay, emerging from a small square concrete tunnel under a bridge, the birds paint a picture of life, of an ecosystem existing in spite of all that has been built around it.

One day, Robert Charbonneau was a guest lecturer for a class of mine. Charbonneau completed his Masters in Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley in 1988, and through the implementation of his thesis, The Strawberry Creek Management Plan, he was responsible for the planning and coordination of the Strawberry Creek restoration.

Though now a world-class example of river restoration, Strawberry Creek was once used as an easy dumping ground for waste of all kinds, including campus sewage that flushed directly into the Creek. From the 1890s up until 1987 when the Strawberry Creek Management Plan was introduced, the Creek was ostensibly a raw sewage system, and everything dumped into the toxic creek flowed directly out into the Bay. It is quite shocking to discover that such dangerous dumping took place at the University in the very recent past.

During Charbonneau’s lecture, he described an incident where, when testing to see which toilets flowed into the Creek, an assistant accidentally added a bit too much green dye before flushing. The water flowed through the pipes and deposited into the Creek. From there it did not stop, traveling down the stream to make its way to the Marina – turning the entire South Sailing Basin green. This is one of the most vibrant physical examples of the connection that our actions have to the environment, highlighting that we were not just making the Creek a sewage drain, but the Marina a sewage dump for over 100 years. Though the Creek has been restored, the widespread, long-term ecological damage of such an event is sure to hold a lasting mark to this day, as this sewage has settled deep into the sediment of the Bay.

Beyond sewage, the slick and fine texture of the Marina floor is a result of another major event of the past: the 19th-century California gold rush. In Matthew Morse Booker’s book, Down By the Bay, he describes the complex urban and ecological history of the Bay Area. In the book, he explains that one of the largest defining factors of modern Bay Area ecology is the result of impacts from the gold rush.

To find gold in the Sierra Nevada, miners used hydraulic mining, dumping mountains worth of rock and soil into streams. This debris made its way down streams to the Sacramento River and eventually into the San Francisco Bay. While boulders and rocks filled riverbeds, fine sediments of sand and clayey mud known as “slickens” made their way to pave the Bay.

The impacts of such mining were devastating, with the influx of sediment causing an outright smothering of the ecosystem of plants and animals that lived in the Bay before the mining event. There was an estimated 8 inches of depth lost in the San Francisco Bay, creating a sterile abrasive surface that was almost impossible for most biota to live in.

Additionally, this mining-based devastation happened to coincide with one of the most extreme climate events in California’s history. Between November 1861 and January 1862, a record-breaking amount of rain fell in California. This extreme rainfall caused so much river water to flow into the Bay that the area essentially became freshwater for nearly two weeks. Given their intolerance to freshwater, in conjunction with the already destructive gold rush mud, most estuary species were wiped out almost immediately, enacting a full reset of the Bay Area biota in a two-week flash.

The Strawberry Creek and the gold rush are just a drop in the bucket of the complex ecological history of the Bay. Yet, they are ideal in the way that they portray our inherent connection to and impact on our environment. Their reflection in the sediment is the aggregation of the world we have created — one that, as humans, we never will truly quantify. Our actions lead to ecological impacts that we are often too far removed from to actually see. Yet these impacts are real and alter our world constantly.

Without a job at the Marina that places me at the forefront of this urban-ecological contention, I would never have asked why the bay mud underneath my feet feels such a way, or what happens when an urbanized creek flows into the Marina from a concrete opening in a wall. As we built the world we know today, we created the criteria through which the ecosystem of the South Sailing Basin is able to exist, while sheltering ourselves from that impactful reality.

The space for life in the Bay has almost always been undermined by human goals, and intentions to dredge are just a continuation of this. “To dredge or not to dredge” is one of many urban-ecological decisions that will shape our future world. As decision-makers, it is time to start asking questions about what exists in less visible parts of our environment — like the mud — to discover our impacts on those spaces. Through this practice, we can build forward in recognition of our influential membership within the dynamic ecosystem that surrounds us all.