A new generation of volunteers shepherds East Bay streams into the 21st century.

A faint path emerges out of the flora, first shooting straight uphill, then zigzagging into narrow switchbacks. It leads to two women bent toward the earth, silently and rhythmically pulling up fistfuls of thistles and forget-me-nots by the root. Beyond, the trail dissolves skyward into bright emerald-green grass patched with darker sword fern. Contrasting red flags mark newly planted natives taking root. Lucy, a white Labrador retriever puppy, and 10-year-old Annaliese Kauffman skillfully scale the steep canyon. They scamper from a rocky gully midway up the battered wall, bypassing broad-leafed cow parsnip whose white petals will drift over the hillside like snow in spring. Further along the same north-facing slope, hovering 50 feet above the ground and gurgling creek, a father and son tamp damp earth with the backs of their shovels, widening an existing deer path for human feet. It is a damp late-February workday in Oakland’s Beaconsfield Canyon, with weeding and trailblazing progressing methodically.

Two years ago, if anyone peered down on Beaconsfield Canyon (part of the 2,765-acre Sausal Creek watershed) from Annaliese’s backyard on the southern ridge, piles of debris and weeds completely hid the shimmer of water flowing between the rare black cottonwoods. Some neighbors didn’t even know the creek was there until Annaliese’s dad, Richard Kauffman, and a handful of helpers began pushing back the impenetrable tangle of Himalayan blackberry and Italian thistle. Since then, volunteers have logged about a thousand hours removing the most flammable non-native plants and planting hundreds of less fire-prone natives in the canyon.

These volunteers are doing for free what city of Oakland agencies could not do without them. The task is daunting because a whopping 15 percent of the Sausal Creek watershed is open space, and the work—improving wildlife habitat, and reducing erosion and fire danger—is not only specialized, but also ongoing.

Local ecologists say a healthy creek, even a small one, is a magnet for diverse wildlife and flora. Over the past decades, it has become increasingly clear that creeks help regenerate the fragments of open space remaining in the paved-over, built-up East Bay. The relatively recent five-acre Beaconsfield project, part of the latest wave of creek restoration efforts, builds upon a long local tradition of volunteers tending to neglected streams forced underground or overrun with debris and invasive plants.

Because of groups like Kauffman’s, East Bay residents have garnered a wide range of experiences restoring streams during the past 25-plus years. In 1982, volunteers turned their attention to Strawberry Creek, participating in an early experiment in daylighting (removing a culvert, or enclosed concrete pipe, to bring the creek above ground). Thanks to community residents, Berkeley’s Codornices Creek has, since 1996, flowed above ground, unimpeded along much of its route to the Bay. Work along Cerrito Creek west of San Pablo Avenue—wedged in a curious slot between the El Cerrito Plaza shopping center parking lot and multi-family housing—began in 2004 and continues today. In Oakland, strands of Sausal (“willow,” in Spanish) Creek in Dimond and Shepherd canyons have been restored, and volunteers continue to maintain them.

No sweat: KPIX news anchor, Wendy Tokuda (center), and her family take a break from their labor of love at Beaconsfield Canyon.

Today, the grassroots movement in creek care is burgeoning, with environmentally concerned citizens educating themselves in everything from controlling erosion to collecting native plant seeds to removing invasive species. In managing the public land next to their own backyards, these enterprising individuals are planting seeds of ecoliteracy in their communities. Their message about the resilience and vitality of creek environments is rippling out to neighbors, schoolchildren, city employees, and beyond. And an intertwined network of volunteer creek groups is providing not only people power, but also intensive leadership, oversight, and guidance to make sure our public green spaces remain inviting to creatures large and small—including humans.

——————————————

Because even the most organized creek volunteer group can benefit from city help, volunteer work usually goes hand in glove with that of government officials. Lesley Estes, who heads the city of Oakland’s Watershed and Storm Management Program, ensures that her office provides tools, equipment, and garbage pickup for volunteers. “In a time when resources are limited, dedicated volunteers are taking ownership of their environments,” Estes says. “They are a resource we could not do without.”

The Oakland Fire Department has also come to rely on citizen participation in its fire prevention programs. In the past, the department performed annual broad-brush clearing of dead tree limbs and weeds in early spring, but could not always distinguish poison hemlock, an undesirable, from native fern; occasionally, the wrong plants were mowed down. In one instance, says Karen Paulsell, an energetic Beaconsfield and Sausal Creek volunteer who participates in various watershed endeavors, rented goats indiscriminately munched up a hillside of freshly planted natives, leaving nothing but stumps and roots.

The Fire Department now relies heavily on the Beaconsfield group for advice about appropriate timing for weeding and pruning. Volunteers are teaching city employees to cut native plants after they reseed, and to attack non-natives early, before they go to seed and spread. Last year, the Fire Department hired a land management consultant knowledgeable about natives to clear the canyon of flammable brush; this year a botanist oversees crews. And recently, Beaconsfield group members began meeting regularly with Fire Department officials to coordinate a schedule for their combined efforts.

Assistant Fire Marshall Leroy Griffin, for one, is appreciative of the group’s advice and effort. “They have done a lot of work,” he says. “They have flagged the desirable plants and come in behind us to do general maintenance.” While the Fire Department uses power tools and does the heavy lifting, the volunteers perform labor-intensive weeding and other tasks. Another perk of paying attention to ecology: the city now leaves behind felled trees as benches and habitat, so its employees spend less time hauling off heavy timber. Despite the extra effort necessary to coordinate with volunteers, Griffin anticipates that the collegial relationship will save the city money in the long run. If he is right, the project will serve as a model for other communities.

But the course of creek restoration does not always flow so smoothly, particularly when the stream in question runs through private property, beneath roads, or adjacent to commercial interests. In the late ’90s, for example, Congregation Beth El submitted a proposal to the city of Berkeley to build a new synagogue on a historic two-acre site—through which, as it happens, Codornices Creek flows. Backed by several environmental groups, the Live Oak Codornices Creek Neighborhood Association opposed the project, in part because of fears that it would interfere with long-term plans to daylight a submerged portion of the creek on the property. Not until 2001 was the controversy settled, with Beth El modifying the location of the synagogue’s driveway in order to keep future access to the waterway intact.

Equally controversial is a current proposal to capture water from Strawberry Creek on the U.C. Berkeley campus and channel it into a series of basins—edged with creek plants—running down the middle of Center Street in downtown Berkeley. According to Matt Taecker, Berkeley’s principal planner, the idea of having an open waterway or other water feature downtown has been around since the early 1990s, and Center Street, with its high volume of foot traffic, is the obvious choice for a pedestrian plaza. In the coming months, the planning commission will start looking at the current proposal, which features an innovative design by DeYoung Museum landscape architect Walter Hood. The project’s ultimate fate, however, rests with the Berkeley City Council. Meanwhile, Taecker says, a petition asking that Center Street stay open to car traffic is circulating; to date, about 100 signatures have been collected, most from local merchants.

——————————————

In the shape of a carrot with its greens intact, the Sausal Creek watershed is roughly bounded by Skyline Boulevard to the east, Joaquin Miller Road and Lincoln Avenue to the south, and Shepherd Canyon Road and Montclair Village to the north. It follows the angle of Fruitvale Avenue, narrowing to a point as it goes. By the time it reaches the Oakland Estuary near the end of Alameda, it is a dotted line—signifying culvert—on the map.

Grassroots activists have been fretting about—and fighting for—the fate of Sausal Creek for years. In 1982, the Urban Creeks Council, a newly-formed nonprofit founded by Carole Schemmerling and Ann Riley, successfully resisted an Army Corps of Engineers proposal to straighten Sausal Creek, as well as Wildcat Creek in Richmond. Today, the Urban Creeks Council serves as a kind of senior statesman in the realm of creek advocacy, a source of information and guidance for many newer “friends of” groups within the nine Bay Area counties.

One such organization, Friends of Sausal Creek (FOSC), began organizing around Oakland watershed issues in 1996. Since becoming a nonprofit in 2001, it has grown into a 1,300-member powerhouse with a 100- to 150-person active volunteer base. Fifteen to 20 crew leaders and site stewards manage public land from Shepherd Canyon Park in the hills to Barry Place below Highway 580. Now a noted name in the local pantheon of creek advocacy, FOSC is the parent organization of the Beaconsfield offshoot.

FOSC is best known for the Dimond Canyon Restoration project of 2002, when, in conjunction with the city of Oakland and the California Coastal Conservancy, its volunteers removed a culvert, allowing the creek to meander once again through mile-long Dimond Canyon. The group went on to remove invasive plants, restore trails throughout the park, and plant natives beside the restored creek. In addition, they started a native plant demonstration garden. A hundred people a week now enjoy hiking the well-maintained Dimond Canyon trails.

Today, the flourishing FOSC is known for high-profile projects like an annual Creek to Bay Day workday in September, a native plant sale in October, and multiple Earth Day projects in April, all drawing crowds of willing helpers. The organization supplements those big pushes with a full calendar of seed hikes (during these rambles, volunteers collect seeds from native plants within the watershed), workdays, and lectures. Its 11-member board of directors, on which Kauffman sits, comprises a healthy mix of seasoned volunteers and new blood. They are looking at the big picture and steering the organization in the direction of long-term planning.

FOSC’s stream-saving counterpart to the north, Friends of Five Creeks, was founded in 1996, and the two share a similar mission. Friends of Five Creeks works to restore creeks in North Berkeley, Albany, Kensington, El Cerrito, and Richmond—among them Cerrito and Codornices. Sara Marcellino, who just wrapped up a four-year stint as FOSC’s executive director, says her organization stays in touch with Friends of San Leandro Creek, yet another sibling in the sprawling “friends of” family. Recently, FOSC has also established contact with Save the Bay, the local nature conservancy institution founded by Sylvia McLaughlin back in the Sixties.

——————————————

Native plant enthusiasts were delighted by the flora Kauffman and his Sausal Creek friends uncovered in Beaconsfield Canyon: delicate violet-hued trillium; black cottonwood whose roots drink from the creek; native blackberry; pink flowering currant, a favorite food of hummingbirds; red elderberry, shade-loving sword fern, and stream-loving horsetail. As work progressed, more native vegetation came to light. An astonishing 48 drought-tolerant, fire-resistant native species had survived alongside the stream beneath a dense mat of invasive plants and trash. With ongoing help from Beaconsfield’s land stewards, they now have the chance to flourish.

Kauffman, a former corporate communications consultant, says he has no history of activism, nor is he “a big joiner.” He fell into organizing the effort in 2006 after he failed to get the Oakland Fire Department to clear the dry brush from Beaconsfield.

Concerned about the potential fire hazard to his property and the 34 other homes ringing the canyon, he felt he needed to do something. His neighbor, KPIX news anchor Wendy Tokuda, suggested organizing monthly workdays.

At first, Kauffman recruited a handful of neighbors to help. Now that the group has become more established, the base is broader, with youth performing community service, and Piedmont volunteers occasionally dropping in. In March, 20 students from Acalanes High School in Lafayette materialized to help build trails, banish the Algerian Ivy from trees, and pull other weeds.

Kauffman, who had been living in his home for a decade before the canyon makeover, recalls what his backyard looked like before the restoration: “It was overgrown with blackberry and thistle, littered with construction debris and old tires, and covered with a carpet of vegetation so thick you couldn’t even walk. It was very forbidding.” Beaconsfield continued to suffer from neglect until Earth Day 2007 when, armed with saws and hatchets, six volunteers (including Kauffman and Tokuda) worked their way from the canyon floor around the creek and partially up the north ridge.

Since that first workday, the land stewards have resorted to using old-fashioned brains and brawn—and a few hand tools—to combat their wily green opponents. They’ve had to. Because the city of Oakland bans herbicide use on public land, the volunteers have wrestled with Cape Ivy’s insidious purple rhizomes, and hacked away at notoriously tenacious Himalayan blackberry whose runners, once cut, are rumored to multiply like heads of Medusa.

Over time, each volunteer developed a specialty. Mike “The Hatchet” stripped acacias of their bark to weaken the trees (a slow torture known as girdling). Once the Fire Department’s contractor cut them down, he sealed the stumps in black plastic bags. Gordon tangoed with ivy roots up to six feet long that threatened to strangle mature oak trees. Paulsell, using a GPS monitoring device, mapped the boundaries and coordinates of the park. All in all, they removed 100 cubic yards of debris over the course of 18 months.

According to Kauffman, “Now on workdays, instead of hauling away vegetation, we chop it up and leave it in place to create habitat for birds, skunks, and raccoons. When we pull these plants we pull them very gently and gingerly so we disturb the seed bank in the soil as little as possible, so that the next year we don’t get even more growth in the same spot.”

Ten volunteers showed up for Beaconsfield’s work party this past February. Tokuda, who offered instruction as she weeded alongside Helene Moore, a Joaquin Miller Elementary computer teacher participating for the first time, views the restoration as therapy. The local celebrity comes out to yank undesirables two to three times a week when she is not anchoring KPIX’s 5 p.m. news.

With the bottom of the canyon mostly clear, the volunteers minimize fire danger by planting natives in clusters. According to Paulsell, who has spent the last six years examining watershed problems, the goal is to create a patchwork of isolated trees, islands of shrubbery, and grassland to keep flames from spreading between patches. Between the islands, clipped grass holds the soil in place to prevent erosion.

The next hurdle, Kauffman says, is to coordinate the timing of the group’s efforts with the growing season to avoid dispersing unwanted seeds. Over time, volunteers learned the hard way to take out Italian thistle and other non-natives before they go to seed—or witness their return with a vengeance the following year. Restoration of the mix of streams, grassland, and oak woodland tucked into this crevice of the Oakland hills will continue indefinitely.

Other successful Bay Area creeks groups also have a standing schedule for workdays, like the weekly Tuesday morning “weed warrior” sessions hosted by Friends of Five Creeks. Long-time environmental activists Richard Register and Kirstin Miller, respectively president and executive director of the Berkeley nonprofit EcoCity Builders, lead work parties at lower Codornices Creek in Berkeley every Sunday at 11 a.m., rain or shine.

But creek restoration isn’t all idyllic (if sweaty) interacting with nature and checking tasks off the to-do list. The Beaconsfield project, for example, unmasked an unnamed tributary of Sausal Creek, and rare and beautiful native plants like trillium. But it exposed less attractive elements as well: a disintegrating storm drain filter and fragments of a culvert three feet across, designed to contain the flow in the gully. A developer, it turned out, had installed the eyesore as a preliminary to building a cul-de-sac of 20 private homes at the base of the canyon. In 1992, after the subdivision scheme was abandoned, the city of Oakland purchased the land, but failed to set funds aside to maintain it. Paulsell says the creek formerly flowed about where the dirt road is today.

So now what? The Friends of Sausal Creek imagine a future landscape that includes neither road nor culvert. In their vision, Beaconsfield is a nature preserve where the creek runs its natural course. It is a vision that the next generation may very well share. But the scope of the project is large, the current state bond crisis means even less funding for creeks groups, and it’s scarcely good news that a minor fault line underscores Beaconsfield Canyon. For any number of reasons, there are bound to be more unforeseen developments en route to Eden.

——————————————

Phil Stevens, executive director of the Urban Creeks Council, laments what he sees as a certain shortsightedness on the part of those who author government bonds. “The emphasis has always been on building things—on infrastructure,” he says. “There has never been any money for taking care of things.” He is vitally interested in the question: “How do you take care of creeks?”

In a much earlier era, such caretaking would scarcely have been necessary. But, says Stevens, “urbanization has altered the shape and flow of creeks everywhere, and the Bay Area is an extreme example of that.” For example, he explains, hard, nonporous surfaces like asphalt and storm drains dump water at a higher rate into creeks, creating torrential flows. The force of this water causes rapid erosion and unnaturally steep creek banks, which affect both flora and fauna. The Urban Creeks Council recently addressed one aspect of this problem by creating a series of step pools in Codornices Creek, adjacent to St. Mary’s School on Albina Avenue. Its mini-cascades allow rainbow trout and steelhead to navigate a steep slope that they would otherwise not be able to manage.

“What we see now and think of as normal is an artifact of development,” concurs FOSC’s Paulsell. Like Stevens, the Sausal Creek group is looking at long-range strategies to counteract the havoc wreaked by modern civilization. They are in the midst of creating a watershed plan that will provide a blueprint to decrease erosion in the steep upper watershed, and improve water quality throughout. Beaconsfield happens to be one of the top 12 worst erosion sites in the watershed, according to Paulsell, who accompanied engineers during their preliminary survey.

Recommendations based on the outcome of the project could translate into fewer shotgun culverts jutting out of cliffs and dumping hillside-eroding runoff. The upshot might be fewer landslides, not to mention creeks with cleaner, more oxygenated water, with rainbow trout laying their eggs in the gravel riffle. Marcellino says that Friends of Sausal Creek is awaiting the release of $30,000-$40,000 in state funds to complete the project.

Susan Schwartz, president of Friends of Five Creeks since 1998, is another activist with pragmatic concerns for the future. Overall, Schwartz says, the East Bay enjoys good water quality in its creeks—the problem is managing urban runoff that causes pollution and erosion. She is interested in new regulations by the Regional Water Quality Control Board that require runoff to be treated on-site. “Cities don’t like these rules,” she says. But she’s heartened to note that some municipalities, like Palo Alto, are beginning to provide homeowners with incentives for decreasing pollution.

——————————————

Part of the FOSC’s long-term vision—teaching local residents about the environment and how to care for it—is already well underway. From the bustling, upbeat atmosphere, you’d never guess that FOSC’s native plant nursery sits on the former dumping ground for debris from the 1991 Oakland and Berkeley hills firestorm. The city of Oakland provided this undeveloped land on Sanborn Drive in Joaquin Miller Park—a spacious site with an eye-popping view that takes in the entire watershed—for the nursery. Here, volunteers grow everything from osoberry to jewel flower from seeds collected directly from the local watershed. Their efforts are carefully planned and coordinated, with the nursery maintaining ice chests filled with envelopes of seeds labeled with the name of the plant, date of collection, and source. The grounds include a volunteer-built greenhouse and shade structure—and, often, a gaggle of amateur environmentalists who are eager to help.

On a recent visit to the native nursery, I meet Heidi Gibson, who lived in Oakland for a decade before moving to Moraga. Last year, she discovered the nursery through a community service project at her son’s school, and has been volunteering with her family ever since. As Gibson and I speak, kids from the Piedmont High Key Club are busting up asphalt to remove fennel, and digging a ditch for the new irrigation system. Ian, Gibson’s seventh-grade son, tells me about the recently completed shade structure while filling a wheelbarrow with decomposed granite for its floor. A group of high school students from Castro Valley smooths and levels the bumpy surface, one raking while dancing to the music from an iPod. Gibson’s daughter, Shannon, happily snips old Venetian blinds with scissors to make plant labels, as Gibson and her husband transplant twinberry and gooseberry starts from the greenhouse.

Participating in plant propagation is an ideal teaching tool, says Mark Rauzon, a geology teacher at Laney College and a longtime board member of FOSC. Plans are underway to formalize the informal learning that goes on at the nursery. Rauzon, who gives his students extra credit for volunteering on Earth Day, says that a private donor has provided $10,000 towards building a new education pavilion at the nursery to be completed later this year.

——————————————

Not all environmental education, however, is as ad hoc as a family outing to a native plant nursery—nor, according to teachers at Oakland’s Joaquin Miller Elementary school, should it be. That’s why, every now and then, you can see a group of Joaquin Miller students—Annaliese Kauffman among them—walking single file up winding Ascot Drive, wearing magnifying lenses on cords around their necks. They trace the course of the creek in reverse on their way to the canyon.

Annaliese and her peers will scrutinize ferns one visit, and analyze oak trees the next, recording their observations in sketches and words in compact nature journals. Older kids take water quality samples and study macro invertebrates, like the caddis fly, as indicators of ecosystem health. They carry samples back to the classroom to inspect aquatic worms and damselfly larvae under a microscope.

Struck by the need to get urban children up to speed in basic ecoliteracy, two members of the Joaquin Miller staff—computer instructor Moore and student teacher Beth Keer—developed this innovative program, which they’ve dubbed the Stream Team project. Using Beaconsfield as an outdoor classroom, teachers integrate in-class assignments with learning in the field.

Keer, a core volunteer who lives on the ridge near the Kauffmans, is studying to become a science teacher. When she leads field trips into the canyon, she uses the culvert as a lesson. “Where is the creek? Is it in that pipe that humans tried to put it in?” she asks the kids. “Where would it like to flow?”

Today, en route to Beaconsfield with a group of fourth-grade canyon veterans, Keer points to a tree and requests its name. Earlier in the term, the fifth-graders collected its robust seeds, and the fourth-graders germinated them in soil-filled paper cups, experimenting with the amount of sunlight and water used to do the job. “Buckeye!” a voice in the crowd of 31 kids cries out. Students will transplant the baby buckeye seedlings to the watershed later in spring.

Going native: In January 2008, Beaconsfield Canyon volunteers planted 300 native plants fostered at the Friends of Sausal Creek nursery. Courtesy RICHARD Kauffman.

Later this morning, Johanna, Annaliese’s fourth-grade classmate, sits perched upon the deer path switchback in dappled shade. Serene among the cow parsnip and sword fern, she props her sketchbook open in her lap. Delicately, she bends a frond tip up to observe the little gold dots on its underside—the spores she expected to find. She draws the fronds in her sketchbook in exquisite detail.

A small moment, perhaps. But it is precisely for the sake of such a small moment—a child of the 21st century finding herself at home in nature—that the Beaconsfield group and their many East Bay counterparts are making a monumental effort.

——————————————
Lauri Puchall writes about architecture and the environment and works for Turk Kauffman Architecture.