WATERFRONT LINES: Watershed Weekend

Finally got to meet Pulitzer Prized poet Robert Hass, this past Saturday, at the Watershed Festival in downtown Berkeley's Civic Center Park. What an honor! Ari Simmons, fellow Berkeley geographer and environmental planner, had suggested I consulted with Hass on my Master's thesis, Stewardship Stories for Watershed Justice. I had also heard of him through my work in watershed stewardship, along with the Festival, but never had a chance to go.

The Watershed Festival, co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's English Department where Hass teaches, Poetry Flash, Ecology Center, and Ecocity Builders, is in its 14th (15th? Who's counting?) year celebrating environmental poetry, music and activism. The day started with a ritual: a walk up Strawberry Creek on the UC Berkeley campus. It was such a luxury to spend a Saturday morning listening to the gurgles of the creek, the strains of the poets, the chit-chats of the birds, and this year, the campus creek steward-in-charge.

Tim Pine from environmental health and safety showed us the latest in campus stormwater management, pervious pavers installed in a parking lot to allow rain to infiltrate and help remove all that crap - motor oil, brake pads, etc - that rain washes off.

Kirstin Miller, Ecocity Builders executive director, brought along one of the oldest storm drain stencils around. Richard Register had designed one for Derby Creek, a creek in Berkeley that's almost entirely been buried and hardened into storm drains.

Richard's one of a few souls out there who fought early on for creeks to be daylighted, or unearthed from their graves under cities. The urban creek restoration movement started right here in Berkeley, with one of the nation's first daylighting projects at Strawberry Creek Park in the west part of the city.

I got to meet Carole Schemmerling the next Sunday; she was commentator on a creek restoration expedition I co-led, highlighting 30 years of creek restoration in Berkeley, part of the College of Environmental Design's 50th anniversary. Schemmerling was there from way back when, and told us stories of fierce battles and unwitting victories along the way.

Big lesson from Momma Schemmerling: Direct action works! One of the biggest concerns neighbors may have about daylighting a creek is creating a corridor for crime and drug dealing. A landscape architect on the tour asked if daylighting the creek has increased or reduced such illicit activities. Carole recounted how one used to find a line forming on Saturday morning at the porter potty at Strawbery Creek Park, people waiting their turn to buy some drugs. That is, until two teenage girls came along, sick and tired of cleaning up the syringes, paper filters, cigarette packs, and all the crap left behind by drug users at the park. That fateful day, knowing the drug dealer was inside with a client, the two girls toppled over the porter potty, and ran the hell away!

We started at Strawberry Creek Park, daylit in 1985, then hopped on to Codornices Creek by the soccer fields at Gilman and 5th Streets, daylit in 2005, to another daylighting project a couple blocks upstream at University Village completed with just $25,000 and thousands of hours of volunteer labor, and finally at the Blackberry Creek restoration project, completed in 1995, an outdoor science and discovery lab for students and toddlers from the adjacent Thousand Oaks elementary and neighborhood.