Baykeeper Update

Plastic beads, SF Bay, and the blues

Posted September 9, 2020

Maybe I’m singing the blues, but I’ll venture to guess we’re all experiencing a pretty unusual September, with pandemic shut downs still in effect and smoky air keeping us indoors. Typically, this is a month of fresh beginnings, the summer ending with the new school year and crisper nighttime temperatures. And at Baykeeper, it’s usually the exciting start of volunteer season, with events like Coastal Cleanup Day.

In a normal year, we'd hold a large organized cleanup and maybe partner with our friends at Sports Basement, United, Levi’s, or a local community group at a shoreline park. And for me, it often becomes a family affair. My kids and I make a day of it, cleaning up the shoreline, meeting people who love the Bay, and learning about how trash hurts the Bay’s wildlife. 

But not every Coastal Cleanup Day holds a happy memory. I still remember one of my first at Baykeeper, nearly twenty years ago. As the group spread out along the Oakland shoreline, a co-worker and I found a nice shady spot and began filling our buckets with plastic straws and empty water bottles. Then we found a small green bead, which glistened when we held it up to the light.

The bead was beautiful, but soon we were singing a different tune. The more we looked, the more we found. Tiny plastic beads were everywhere, with no end in sight. Other Baykeeper staff came to help us, but it seemed almost futile. Where had the beads come from? Were trash cleanups pointless? What could we do to stop trash like this from making its way to the Bay? 

We never did figure out the source of the beads, but that day our scientists and lawyers became determined to advocate for stronger laws that would stop trash from reaching the shoreline in the first place. Since then, we've led the charge to enforce trash laws against polluters and to stop trash at the source before it enters city storm drains and reaches local creeks and the Bay shore.

I’ve also made my peace with cleanups. Stopping trash where it starts is critical, but so is removing trash from the shoreline before it gets into the water. And by doing it together—with friends, family, and colleagues—we build a sense of shared responsibility for the Bay.

This year cleanups are actually more important than ever, since there's been a big uptick in pandemic-related trash along the shore, with items like used masks, wipes, and latex gloves. Sadly, Baykeeper won't be hosting any big community events this year, but we'll be supporting your solo or pod cleanups throughout September. Our hope is to get members like you to pledge to do your own cleanups, with the goal of 50 cleanups by the end of the month. You can sign up here.

Baykeeper staff also compiled a special Spotify playlist to get you in the mood to help the Bay! Below are some of our staff’s favorite water-inspired tunes.

Hope to see you dancing on the shoreline collecting trash…from a distance!

Signature
  Sejal Choksi-Chugh
  Executive Director
Sejal Choksi-Chugh

Ben Eichenberg, Staff Attorney

While you're out there picking up trash from along the Bay shoreline, what could be better than listening to Steven Tyler scream "I LOVE IT BECAUSE IT'S TRASH!" I really get into cleanups; I love to see the kind of stuff lying around, the things that people reject from their lives. Sure, it can be gross, but this song helps me get into the spirit: "anything dirty or dusty or dingy!" On the other side of the spectrum, Joni Mitchell is both rockin' and makes activist music at its best. Once the lyrics get into your head, you'll be singing them throughout the whole cleanup: "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone -- They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." 

 

Jon Rosenfield, Senior Scientist

I'm making the best of this time by taking guitar lessons again, for the first time since I was a teenager. Back then, Peter Gabriel's song Here Comes the Flood was a metaphor and a warning—now it seems more like the nightly news. Regardless, I find it strangely calming to play because it reminds me of the power of water to reveal hidden truths. But when I want to fill my mind with upbeat water vibes, there's nothing better than Cassandra Wilson singing Courtney Pine's I've Known Rivers, a joy-fueled musical arrangement of the Langston Hughes poem. 

 

Léa Pfeffer, Development Associate

The summer of 2014 was my last summer working on the water in Clearlake before going abroad to finish my studies. There is something unbelievably therapeutic about being on the water and seeing nothing but miles and miles of water all around you. We played Zedd's song Lost at Sea on repeat that summer. When I was away for school, I would listen to this song and it would always bring me back to that experience of driving boats, kids laughing, water splashing all around us, and the California sunshine. 

 

Mark Westlund, Communications Director

Long before San Francisco had the famous Automatic Human Jukebox performing on the streets of Fishermans' Wharf, there was one-man band Jesse Fuller. His 1955 classic San Francisco Bay Blues is one of the best songs ever written about the Bay—with all due respect to Otis Redding and Steve Cropper—which has been covered by all sorts of mostly unknown songsters including Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Richie Havens, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, and many such others. You can choose your favorite, but I still like Fuller's original. However, when I want to get in touch with the spirit of the waters, I slip into Homenaje a Yemaya, a prayer to the Yoruba goddess of the ocean and mother of all living things—here's an offering by the legendary Celia Cruz.   

 

Cole Burchiel, Field Investigator 

I'm lucky because my job running Baykeeper's boat patrols takes me out on the Bay in all types of weather, at all times of the day and night. I feel very strongly that the Bay possesses distinct personalities depending on the weather, so much so that any single place or neighborhood will feel like an entirely different world from one day to the next, and there are songs that evoke each place and time. With just navigating under the Bay Bridge in mind, I think about Quantic's Creation on sunny days, Arthur Russell's Answer Me when it's foggy, We Are the Sun at sunrise, Fastasma Vega at night—and on rainy days, my personal favorite, it's Mulatu Astatke's moody Ethopian jazz classic, Tezeta.  

 

Sejal Choksi-Chugh, Executive Director

Back in 1998, I left my home in Georgia and headed for the Frisco Bay. So Otis Redding’s classic, (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay, has always held a special place in my heart. That fondness grew even stronger when the beloved Waterkeeper Alliance band, The Notorious Outfalls, dedicated a raucous rendition to me when I became the first female San Francisco Baykeeper many years ago. And when I’m in a feistier mood, I love feeling inspired by my friend and talented local musician, activist, and UCSF physician, Rupa Marya. One of Rupa and The April Fishes' newer songs, Frontline, perfectly captures my mood when Baykeeper stands up to protect the Bay against a big corporate polluter: “You better recognize who we are. We are the ones who are rising with the water…standing strong everywhere on the frontline.” Pumps me up every time!

 Photo by Robb Most