Bruce Willey

Pining for the Bristlecone

This originally appeared as a cover story in GT Weekly, September, 2008. 

We’re moving methodically up the slope of Campito Mountain in the White Mountains of California above Owens Valley. It’s a walloping bluebird of a day and the air at 11,000  feet makes breathing somewhat labored. Adelia Barber, a 29-year-old graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, is checking on her seed germination experiment, which is laid out over the hillside amongst a stand of Great Basin bristlecone pines, trees that have braved storm, lightning strikes, climate fluctuations and everything else that nature has thrown at them for more than 4,000 years.

Barber kneels down low to inspect the two wire cages and an open plot that contain bristlecone seeds that make up the experiments scattered across the hillside—nearly 200 of them in all. The cages protect the seeds against predators like rabbits and mice; the open plots are the control group. Bristlecones are prolific seed producers, but on average manage only one or two offspring every 800 years in their lifetime. Barber wants to know why this is so.

“It’s unique because they live in an incredibly harsh environment, yet still put all those resources into seed production every single year,” she says, counting the ungerminated seeds and marking the results on her clipboard. “Evolutionary ecological theory would generally suggest that species that evolved to live long life spans would put more resources into growth and survival and fewer resources into reproduction. So having an organism that is one of the oldest living things on Earth that does the polar opposite, it’s not what you would expect. But at the same time, it makes perfect sense for these trees in this environment.”

But the bristlecone pine does a lot of things you wouldn’t expect. Aptly named the Pinus longaeva, the bristlecone pine seems to have found its brand of the fountain of youth in the nutrient-vapid soil and wind-strewn ridges of the White Mountains and the Great Basin Range of Nevada. No other non-clonal species—that is, genetically identical plant—lives as long as the bristlecone. Yet today, science isn’t that interested in the longest-lived, fastest, tallest, etc., after all. Among other things, what makes the bristlecone special is that it provides a living record of the Earth’s history in its rings.

Edmund Schulman, for which the Schulman Grove is named and the recently burned (by an act of vandalism) Schulman Visitor Center in the White Mountains, was the first to recognize that the tree’s lives might indeed reach back into prehistory. Boring into the trunk of one of the trees he later dubbed the Methuselah, he found from the rings that the tree was 4,789 years old. In the late 1950s, after publishing his fieldwork in a scientific journal, Life magazine and National Geographic ran stories of the discovery. When writing about the trees he has said: “The capacity of these trees to live so fantastically long may, when we come to understand it fully, perhaps serve as a guidepost on the road to understanding of longevity in general.” Sadly, Schulman did not live up to his tree’s reputation. He died at the age of 49 from an apparent heart attack.

Schulman would also never live to see the far-reaching effects of his research and discovery. Schulman and his successors in the field of dendrochronology (dating past events with tree rings) helped to correctly calibrate radiocarbon dating, which showed that previous carbon 14 dating was off by as much as 1,400 years.  This revelation came as a shock to the archaeological world, turning previous notions of European, Middle Eastern and the Nile Valley prehistory upside down.

With this, the bristlecone became even more famous, as arboreal celebrity goes, and in 1958 the Forest Service established the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. Fifty years later, there is a proposed wilderness designation of 235,000 acres in the works for the White Mountains, which would further protect the country’s highest desert and uniquely stunning ecosystem. The wilderness bill would also protect many bristlecone groves that are outside of the current boundaries of the Ancient Bristelcone Pine Forest.    

                                        Live Long and Prosper

Moving further up the slope, we’re joined by Tim Forsell, the chef and station manager of the Crooked Creek Research Station down the dusty road where Barber has lived for the past three summers. The University of California operates three research stations in the White Mountains, inviting scientists from a diverse of backgrounds and interests to use their facilities for research on everything from the biology of ground squirrels to the effects of high altitude on humans.

But from the get-go it’s obvious Forsell is not just a cook and the station manager. Forsell was a wilderness ranger for 20 years just to the north of Yosemite National Park. He lived alone in a small cabin for many of those years, an experience he tells people “ruined” him. Now he doesn’t use computers and rarely picks up a telephone.

As Barber counts her seeds, I ask Forsell if spending all this time up in the White Mountains has allowed him to form some sort of intimate knowledge of the bristlecone.

“Well, that’s kind of a personal question don’t you think?” he says, not missing a heartbeat. “But yes, I am definitely one of those tree people. I don’t hug too many trees, but certain aspens, the really smooth ones … well sometimes I can’t resist.”

His quick wit and soft-spoken nature aside, Forsell knows a lot about the bristlecone and often accompanies Barber out in the field. Barber has even taken to calling him “her muse,” bouncing ideas off the self-trained naturalist to see if they make any sense to him. He returns the compliment by saying that Barber “has a unique ability to be able to reach deeply into the past, far beyond the reaches of normal human understanding of the time scale.”

Forsell and I walk further up the slope to a grand old downed snag of gnarled bristlecone wood, sandblasted by wind and weathered by time. Because the wood is so resinous and dense, and because the environment up here is so dry, even a tree that has been dead for 3,000-4000 or more years can still be anchored into the hillside, defying even its own death. Difficult to fathom, but this very tree was probably very old when the Egyptians were first contemplating the shape of a pyramid.

“They are standing, they are firmly anchored, but they are slowly eroding from all sides,” Forsell says, rubbing his hand over the fluted wood the color of a deep summer tan. “You’ll see these spikes and they are the branches, but they’re worn down to these spindly little skeletons, the bones, the inner bones of the tree,” he adds. “And you realize this tree has been dead for too many years to understand properly. It’s been standing there dead and slowly getting dissolved by blowing sand. But the wood is full of integrity. It’s like stone. These dead trees seem more like statues. They are just so beautifully artistic.”

Forsell tells me he has heard these tree statues make music as the blowing wind passes through the thinner area of the wood. Veritable tones and whistles that produce some of the most interesting music he has heard.   

Suddenly—and it is sudden despite the fact that the only thing that happens with any speed around here is the strike of lighting from the summer thunderstorms that frequently thump the area—Barber yelps up to us: “Whoa! Whoa! Seeds! Tim, come see. I got two babies!”

We make our way down the slope to where a beaming Barber is kneeling in the rocks above her cages.    

“We’ve talked about that,” says Tim, referring to Barber’s sometime habit of stepping out of her scientific persona and into one of a mother tree. He bends down to take a closer look at the tiny seed that has sprung an even tinier root. “Isn’t that cool. Holy cow,” he says.

“Tim makes fun of me but I think they are so cute,” Barber muses. “Wow, what a beautiful day.”

There’s good reason for Barber’s maternal bent. Not only is this germination so incredibly important in the life cycle of the bristlecone, but this is the first time Barber has gotten one of these seeds to grow out in the wild in one of her experiments.    

After the sudden excitement has died down and we continue up the slope to check more seeds, Barber explains more about the life history of the bristlecone and why those two germinating seeds matter so much.

“They (bristlecones) have evolved a unique strategy to persist in this extreme environment,” she says. “And longevity, whether or not that just happened to be a by-product of the environment or whether it’s the result of many generations of natural selection, longevity seems to suit them here. It’s a very successful strategy because the seeds have such a minute chance of survival that the trees actually need to live for a very long time to reproduce successfully.

She adds that this population has survived over millennia only because few trees have lived long enough to buffer the population through hard times. “They essentially need 800 years of massive seed output to have the chance of producing one or two offspring in their lifetime. Some trees undoubtedly do better than others.”

Regarding the harsh environment, Barber tells me the bristlecone also seems to have something in common with Buddy Holly, Jimmy Hendrix and Kurt Cobain—if only in a very loose, metaphoric way. The trees that grow out in the poorest of soils, in the most exposed areas to the wind and the blowing blizzards of winter, tend to live the longest. Those that grow in more sheltered areas, in more nutrient-rich soils, grow fast and tall but die sooner. “Live fast, die young,” Barber says. “But what we don’t know is if there is a genetic component to this, or for that matter, why?”

                                            Earn Your Old Turns

Last April, before the research season had begun for Barber and Forsell, and before the road had officially opened into the White Mountains, I’d strapped on a pair of skis to explore the Schulman Grove in the snow. I was ashamed to admit it, but I’d never been up into the White Mountain before, having always mothed to the Range of Light—the High Sierra with its big, glacier carved peaks, lush forests and opulently carpeted meadows. From below, the Whites looked bare, and dare I say, slightly boring to this mind that prefers to wander up jumbles of rocks that complete a vision of what a mountain is supposed to look like.

But I live in Big Pine for much of the year, smack dab in the middle of Owens Valley, and pass the sign almost every day—Bristlecone National Forest. It was high time. The excuses were running thin.

The road was open to the Sierra Overlook, 20 or so miles up to 10,000 feet, where one can get one of the best views of the High Sierra anywhere. Here I was in the White Mountains finally and yet my views were directed back at the High Sierra. Must be hard, I mused, for a mountain range to always be in the shadow of another more famous range, not to mention a rain shadow at that.

Nevertheless, I turned my tips to the east and skied the two-and-a-half miles on the road into the grove. And there, around a bend, I saw my first bristlecone pine. I’d read about them before, and of course, had seen the pictures of the stark wood sticking out into a Kodak sunrise, but never in person. And I have to say I was slightly nonplussed. To my eyes the tree looked about like any other pine or fir I’d seen. It didn’t look grand or old. It didn’t inspire congenial thoughts about the millennia, either backwards or beyond. But then I skied further into the grove, and there it was. An old one, looking wise and far better for the wear. The bristlecones I’d seen earlier were simply being Buddy Hollies.

I took off the skis and wandered about in the corn snow. There was not a soul up there but the trees, a few birds and myself. So I sat in the snow, almost awestruck in the presence of such elderly trees. And without getting weirdly metaphysical about it, I felt strangely comforted by the fact that this planet is so strange and wonderful, that it contains such tenacious life, that it’s worth getting awe-struck emotional about it now and again. So I did.

In the afterglow of that experience, after I’d begun to feel the reality of sitting in the snow too long, I put on the skies and tramped up the hill about a thousand feet up into another grove. This, too, was an equally beautiful grove, but I managed to control my emotions and sense of wonder. Instead, I turned downhill, making telemark turns through the bristlecones, pulling in as tight as I could to their trunks where the shade held the fastest snow.

In an open area, I slid to a stop and realized I’d almost reached back to the road. Looking back up at my tracks, I thought of climbing again for another run. But the sun was getting low, and I reasoned I’d be back soon because there was something about these trees that had me hooked.    

                                             Age-Old Reasons

“You see people, me included, fall in love with these trees because it an amazing thing to really learn about an organism or particular individual that will surpass us by miles and years,” says Barber when I tell her how I came to know these trees for the first time in the snow. I leave out the transcendental misgivings, but it’s difficult to remain coolly unenthusiastic at high altitude amongst living life forms that even have needles (likely the oldest photosynthetic cells) that are as old as a middle-aged man.

Barber tells me that people will make pilgrimages to the groves with dying relatives. There have been people who were dying of AIDS, who found comfort walking amongst the trees. Another man, a volunteer who helps with her research, has made a wish that his ashes be scattered under a particular bristlecone, a common request as it turns out. “There’s something comforting about a few molecules of your body being absorbed around the base of one of these trees and going into the rings,” she says.

Forsell bids farewell, taking long strides down the rocky slope. He must prepare dinner down at the station. Barber and I head higher to the edge of where the bristlecone grows. It’s been hypothesized that bristlecones are beginning to move up in altitude in response to global climate change. This is difficult to prove within our short life spans relative to these trees. But Barber is finding younger rather than older trees at higher altitude.

“When I get asked about tree line change, I like to ask it back as a question: Look at this pattern. What do you think?” she says.  “It is an open question, and I don’t if it’s happening. As a scientist I’m not going to claim that tree line is moving up because we don’t have any data to say that bristlecones don’t just die more frequently at the upper tree line. But that certainly is possible.”

Still, Barber is careful not to get doom and gloom regarding the trees and climate change.  All the research that’s been done on the bristlecones suggests that they have survived incredible climate extremes, both from season to season and through countless years. But at the same time, the bristlecones provide a highly accurate record of the Earth’s climate. Like ice core rings, but without the need for refrigeration. “And a lot easier to read,” Barber adds.

Barber is most interested in the larger picture, that is, bristlecone population ecology and population change. By doing so, she joins somewhat of a biological movement that is seeking to understand the demography of natural populations—fish, whales, sea turtles, plants, fungi—and trying to understand them in terms of population numbers. It’s critical work in a century when many species of plants and animals are either adapting or going extinct due to climate change, human overpopulation, over-fishing and deforestation—to name a few. Specifically, Barber is studying what individual stages of the bristlecone’s life cycle are most important to these changes.   

Her project is also putting numbers on every aspect of the bristlecone life cycle, trying to determine what the important parts of the cycle are. “Will climate change affect young trees disproportionately, will it affect large trees disproportionately, and once you have a model built with these numbers you experiment with all sorts of alternate scenarios,” she says. “Because there’s one very cool thing about bristlecones that you don’t get with any other (plant or animal) species and that’s that we have a record of mortality here. So for sea turtles, for elephants, for all these other long-lived species that live about as long as we do, we don’t know how frequently they die or why they die over centuries of millennia. Not only do we have a record of mortality with bristlecones, but we have a record of mortality for over 5,000 years. So we can really ask, ‘How did climate affect these trees over the last 5,000 years? ’ ”

We wander further up above the sparse groves, the dark rock of the Campito quartzite loose under our feet. Nothing grows here aside from the day glow-colored lichen on the rocks and a few scrubby plants holding on for dear life. At the summit of Campito Mountain we sit down and take in the views of Owens Valley, North America’s deepest valley, and the High Sierra further west. The late afternoon smog of the Central Valley is faintly visible creeping over the crest, and suddenly the hum of civilization seems frighteningly close. Little wonder: if the bristlecone can record in its rings a volcano eruption half way around the world, what’s to stop it from making a record of our own climate blunders?

I tell Barber it’s hard for me to grasp the scale of time with regards to the bristlecone. How it seems like both a very long time and short time, much like the world seems big or small depending on how you look at it. How our survival, (and the bristlecone’s) so much depends on thinking in terms of larger and smaller pictures at the same time. And that if we continue the rapid pace of civilization below, we’ll all collectively “live fast and die young.”

Lofty thoughts, for sure. And easy to conjure on such a fine summit. But as we stand up and take in on last view before heading downhill to a waiting dinner at the station, Barber says: “We are all just little specks in the life of these trees.”

And that is exactly what we must surely look like as we walk down passing under the age-old trees on the steep slope. Small, short-lived specs in the, desolate landscape save for a few venerable groves of bristlecone pines that find this their home.

To learn more see: http://earth.google.com/outreach/cs_adelia.html

Great White Cage

From Dublin Times, St. Petersburg Times, and GT Weekly. Published April 2006

Monterey Bay Aquarium will attempt to keep a great white in captivity
by Bruce Willey

The calm water rippled slightly as a yellowfin tuna sheared through the surface and a green sea turtle came up for air, plowing the water in a lazy breaststroke. Nearly 35 feet down, a soup fin shark circled slowly among the fast-moving tuna, and at the very bottom, an incongruous sight—fully clothed, completely dry tourists, hundreds of them, jaws open and staring through the 13-inch Plexiglas of the million-gallon tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Called the Outer Bay exhibit for its collection of pelagic, or open-ocean, animals, the aquarium is home to one of the largest live-animal displays in the world. But soon, if all goes according to the aquarium’s plan, these pelagic animals may have to share this tank with one of the most understandably feared, yet most maligned and demonized predators in the ocean: the great white shark.

This summer the aquarium scientists will, for the third time, embark on what many aquarists consider to be the Holy Grail of oceanic husbandry: displaying a Carcharodon carcharias, the biting, toothy stuff of Hollywood legend and surfers’ fears. It’s an ambitious and expensive project.

For the past two years, the aquarium has been trying to capture a juvenile white shark off the coast of Southern California, then coax it to feed in captivity with the ultimate goal of transporting the shark—an eight-hour journey up the coast in a specially designed tank with a life support system—and displaying it at the aquarium. Beginning this week, aquarium scientists will again attempt to capture a great white.

The aquarium’s efforts are starting to pay off. Last summer, off the coast of Ventura County in Southern California, where the research and possible capture is taking place, aquarium scientists were able to keep a juvenile white shark in a five-million-gallon, open-ocean tuna pen for five days. On the third day, the 77-pound, year-old female began to eat fish fillets, fish being the primary food source of juveniles until they graduate to blubber-rich seals, sea lions and elephant seals. The scientists eventually turned the shark loose.

“She did extraordinarily well within the confines of the net and began feeding, which is a very good sign,” says Dr. Randy Kochever, 38, science communication manager at the aquarium. “If an animal is stressed or not doing well, it won’t eat.”

So far, aquariums haven’t had much luck with captive white sharks. Since 1955, nearly 30 whites have been placed in captivity. All of them died or were released. In 1981 Sea World of San Diego managed to keep an individual for 16 days, a record. And no one really seems to know why. Big questions like how long great whites live, where and how often they breed, and how many exist remain to be answered, let alone how to keep one alive in a big tank.

Unlocking these mysteries isn’t easy. The majority of research on great whites has been done at the surface of the ocean from the relative safety of a boat or cage when the sharks are in predatory feeding mode. White sharks are elusive, roaming the temperate and tropical oceans, diving to great depths and migrating long distances. Unlike their hard-to-shake stereotype of cold-blooded killing machines, great whites are warm-blooded, intelligent animals whose only crime is the occasional mistaken identity bite on an unlucky human.

“They are scary at times, and it’s an awesome animal,” says 57-year-old, world-renowned shark researcher Dr. Peter Klimley, a biologist who’s studied sharks for more than 30 years and is in favor of putting a great white in captivity “But it’s not a mindless animal, it has very complex behaviors, and by seeing it in an aquarium we could better see the shark for what it is, not some blood-and-guts type thing seen on many of the television nature shows.”

The aquarium hopes to unravel some of these unknowns, in particular if the juveniles are the result of a great white pupping ground in the warmer waters off Southern California. Scientists also attach a satellite tag, a device the size and shape of a microphone with about the same computing power as a Palm Pilot. The tag measures water temperature, pressure and light levels, which can be used to estimate position—information that is eventually beamed up to a satellite when the tag pops off after a few months. Additionally, blood and tissue samples are collected for DNA analysis to determine how closely related the juveniles are, which might shed light on the size of the breeding population.

The aquarium, though, is taking a cautious, conservative approach when it comes to putting a white shark on display. “We want to assure ourselves at every step in the process that we really understand how the animal is doing,” Kochevar says. “If at any point we find the animal is not doing well, we will be in a position to immediately return the shark to the wild.”

But there are some who think a great white should not be captured for display and should remain in the wild. Sean Van Sommeran, 41, director of the Santa Cruz-based Pelagic Shark Research Foundation, is an outspoken critic of captive great whites and believes the aquarium’s motivation adds up to nothing more than ticket sales and a possible mascot for the aquarium.

“Granting they’re successful, the shark will get big (white sharks can grow to 19-feet plus and weigh up to 5,000 pounds), then what are they going to do?” Van Sommeran asks. “Best-case scenario would involve release of the animal, at which point they’ll be releasing a hand-fed, imprinted animal that will be looking to humans for food. That will scare the hell out of any Boogie boarder, surfer, boater that may not be expecting or appreciating that kind of contact. The aquarium is whoring out the animal, and the tank is a bordello. It’s like, ‘come and watch the prisoners play handball as they slowly asphyxiate.’”

Mark Berman, 50, associate director of the International Marine Mammal Project of the Earth Island Institute, an environmental group founded by former Sierra Club president David Brower, agrees. “Keeping animals in captivity is nothing but a circus act,” he says. “If people want to see a great white shark they should see it in a habitat where it belongs—the ocean.”

Still, there’s little doubt the aquarium will generate a lot of attention—and a lot of ticket sales—if they are successful. Of all the animals an aquarium could keep, a great white is one of the highest in terms of public interest. This in turn could inspire more aquariums to display great whites.

“That’s a problem,” Berman says. “The amount of money the aquarium is spending on this project could be put to better use, such as shark conservation. Sharks need our protection, not to be kidnapped to satisfy tourists.”

Kochevar has this to say in defense of putting a great white in the aquarium: “At some level we may just have to agree to disagree. By putting an animal on display we can foster public interest, foster public concern and inspire people to become responsible stewards of the ocean by showing them the real thing. We honestly believe that this is the very best thing we can do to ensure the long-term health of these magnificent animals.”

Whatever happens, one thing is certain: The great white shark is the last great predator on earth that has thus far dodged any lengthy captivity. Killer whales jump through hoops, polar bears swat beach balls, and wolves and tigers pace the walls. But the great white may, in the end, outsmart all efforts to contain its mystery. That in itself is reason to go cautiously and respectfully into the waters the great shark calls home.

Living on the Edge

A saga of seawalls, who wants them, who doesn’t and the fate of California’s disappearing coastline

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.—Anne Sexton

Perched on the crumbling cliffs of Pleasure Point like a giant cormorant drying its wings is Jack O’Neill’s green house. The wetsuit pioneer, the one that made surfing possible in cold water, O’Neill sits at living room table in bare feet, jeans, beard, and of course, the iconic eye patch. He moves with youthful enthusiasm throughout the living room that overlooks the water, though his feeble hearing (cold water? age?) make it necessary to sit to his right side.

O’Neill has lived in this house for 25 years. When he takes a shower in the morning he can look out the brass portholes and check the surf. An old navy surplus door on the bottom floor serves as his beach access. And during a storm or when the waves are large, kelp and seawater can sluice into the house if he forgets to batten the hatches. “You’ve got to pay some dues if you want to live on the coast,” he says.
One of those dues takes the form of the big boulders that jut out in front of the house. Otherwise known as rip rap, these boulders are but one way to shore up the California coastline, a coastline that is receding on average six inches to a foot a year. O’Neill says he has spent more money on boulders and armoring his house against the encroaching sea than he’s spent on the house itself. “The ocean’s going to get us finally,” he says smiling, looking out across the water from what seems more like the bridge of a ship than a house. “I saw a 30-year projection and my house wasn’t there.”

At War With the Ocean?

To begin to answer the question why Jack’s house might not be there in 30 years, it helps to consider that the cliffs and bluffs are eroding largely because of one fact: Sea levels are rising. Whether it’s carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere from our copious consumption of fossil fuels or the natural ebb and flow of climate change (It could be a combination of both) one thing is certain. As the oceans rise, millions of people who live on or near the coast, and the coastal infrastructures themselves, are threatened—from homes to businesses to roads to the benches and beaches we sit on admiring the sunset.

California, with 80 percent of its residents living within an hour’s drive of the coastline, is engulfed in a war with the encroaching Pacific Ocean. As with any war, there is conflict about how to fight it, or whether to fight at all. Of the 1,100 mile California coastline, almost 110 miles—or 10 percent—of the coast is artificially armored by sea walls, rip rap and other anthropogenic structures. In Santa Cruz County alone nearly 30 percent of the coast is armored. At this rate of coastline recession and subsequent armoring, it’s conceivable that the coast of California may join the Great Wall of China as the only man-made structure to be seen from outer space.

Moreover, the cost of shoring up the shore is enormous. Seawalls and rip rap can cost more than $5,000 per linear foot with many more complicated and bigger structures costing much more. The proposed 1,100-foot seawall, or cliff stabilization project along East Cliff Drive in the Pleasure Point area for example, is estimated to cost $4.5 million or over $4,000 a foot when or if completed in 2004.

Beach nourishment programs are equally expensive and often the sand is swept away, either slowly or entirely during a big storm. As a whole, Californians shell out an average of $75 million annually to keep the shoreline intact And some coastal armoring projects fail in a single winter, often because they are poorly or hastily built. Even well-built armoring projects are built to last between 50 and 100 years at best. Which leads to the question: Is it worth the fight?

Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Professor of Earth Science at UC Santa Cruz, has been studying the impacts of coastal armoring for more than two decades. He’s considered one of the experts when it comes to coastal erosion and his expertise is sought throughout the state. We meet at the end Woodrow Avenue along West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz. Even with his fancy brown leather street shoes, Griggs easily negotiates the rip rap boulders and finds a place to sit on the sandstone shelf a few feet from the crashing waves. Incidentally, during last December's storms, this area had to re-armored to protect the road and walkway above.

“There are basically three options,” Griggs says, beginning his tutorial on seashore armoring. "There’s armoring, which has been the traditional one, and then you can tweak that—everything from concrete walls and gunite walls to rip rap boulders. There’s retreat, and that’s happening but it’s not real popular. And then there’s (beach) nourishment."

Griggs points out that the sea level is rising one to two millimeters a year. But there is more at work than just the rising sea. Recently Griggs and a graduate student analyzed historical records dating back to 1910 and concluded that of the storms that caused significant erosion or damage along the coast, 75 percent occurred during El Nino years. With the possibility that the frequency of El Nino’s may be on the rise due to global warming, coupled with rising sea levels, shoreline erosion may become one of the most pressing issues facing beach communities like Santa Cruz.

“I think the real question we need to answer, and it’s not going to be easy,” says Griggs, "[is] if we knew what the climate was going to do. If we knew that it (sea level) wasn’t going to get but a foot higher, then we could hold the line for 50-100 years. The question is, what’s going to happen next? And the best estimates now, by the year 2100, the sea is about three feet higher. That’s probably the median. Some think it will go higher, others think it will be lower. But the fact that it’s still eroding suggests that it’s gaining on us a little bit.”

In the hills of Santa Cruz County it’s possible to see that these sea-level fluctuations are part of the natural process. And the futility of trying to tame the wave-battered coast becomes apparent when you look at the former marine terraces that have been uplifted by geological forces along Highway 1 north of Santa Cruz. These former coastal bluffs point to a time when the coastline was much lower and sea levels was a little higher says Griggs. In fact, most of Santa Cruz, Live Oak and Capitola lie on marine terraces.

"Do you want the whole coastline to look like a wall?" Griggs asks. "I try to be neutral when I’m analyzing a structure or problem, but my aesthetics sense says we deserve something better than that. I think we need to redefine what our main objectives are in the Coastal Act It was written almost 30 years ago. And it didn’t deal with coastal erosion. That was sort of a minor issue. Now, every seawall is a controversy. East Cliff (the proposed sea wall at Pleasure Point) is a good example. We’re still not through the EIR (Environmental Impact Report). They may lose some more cliff before it’s built.”

The Coastal Act is the 1976 initiative that provides policies for the Coastal Commission to manage and protect the coast. Dave Potter, Coastal Commissioner who’s in charge of the Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Mateo County’s coastline says armoring has become one the commission’s biggest issues.
Says Potter: “Developers that build too close to the coast are developmentally blind if they don’t think we have an erosion problem.”

Controversy vs. Compromise

To see just how controversial a seawall can be, let’s go back to Pleasure Point. But first, a stop at the Santa Cruz Redevelopment Agency is in order. Located on the fifth floor of the austerely gray Santa Cruz County government building, Paul Rodriguez—who is in charge of designing the proposed multi-million-dollar Pleasure Point seawall and seeing it through many bureaucratic hoops, public comments, permits and environmental impact reports—sits at a large drafting table. The sea wall is still in its conceptual phase, and wrapping around the walls above Rodriguez’s table is a giant photograph of where the 1,100-foot long, 30-foot high project will go. In addition to the seawall, the redevelopment plan for Pleasure Point also includes landscaping along the cliff and the addition of a park at the western end. The joint project between the Army Corp of Engineers (who will install the wall) and the Redevelopment Agency (who have designed the wall) has already taken five years. Construction is slated to begin in the summer of 2004 if all goes well.
Rodriguez pulls out the plans and lays them on the table. In the main, it looks like an immense periodontal operation. Holes are to be drilled into the cliff, then shot with concrete, and the area behind and in front of the wall would be cleaned and filled in, stabilizing the weakened cliff from further erosion, thus saving the road, the sewer line that parallels underneath the road, the water lines — the pricey property on the other side.

This project, technically called a soil nail wall, is unique in comparison to other sea walls covering the bluffs in either direction, explains Rodriguez. The Redevelopment Agency plans call for the wall to mimic the existing bluff both in color and in form, much like the walls on Highways 17 and 92 (above Half Moon Bay). There will also be two access stairs on either side leading down into the surf and bathrooms for those who refuse to pee in their O’Neill wetsuits.

But some people have voiced strong opposition to the Development Agency’s improvements.
"What’s frustrating is when people take positions and then they don’t listen to reason," says Rodriguez, after he’s explained the project. "You can’t fault people for getting emotional or having opinions about these issues. But it’s just a matter of how you deal with it and how you reach a compromise. The purist, the natural, return-to-earth, group says we shouldn’t be trying to do anything. From a philosophical standpoint I can agree with that. But when you get into a region like this (Pleasure Point) where people are living and there are heavy uses, it’s a kind of ideal, that to my mind, is unattainable.”

Diminishing Pleasures

As its name suggests, Pleasure Point is a sunny microcosm of quaint little homes, a corner market named Elizabeth’s, walkers, joggers and baby buggies cruising the bicycle lane, and surfers hanging out on the crumbling Bermuda grass-covered bluff overlooking the surf. Even Jack O’Neill can be seen taking a nap in the sun on his porch. So it’s easy to see why nostalgia runs high and change comes hard. Not so long ago things cost less, and you didn’t need to make six figures to afford a humble little beach shack here. Or, in the case of this story, you didn’t need a 1,100- foot sea wall.

Dangling from one the many small, sea-sprayed benches lining the bluff is Teresa Ish, vice chairperson and current treasurer of the Santa Cruz chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, a national grass-roots ocean advocacy group. Surfrider has long been opponents of seawalls and have won numerous victories against their installation. Seawalls, they contend, can reflect waves back into the surf, creating backwash and destroying a surfable break. Seawalls also contribute to beach loss by undermining the natural processes of erosion.

"Our perspective," says Ish, "without being too harsh on the Redevelopment Agency, is they have money in their pocket and they want to spend it. They’ve done some great things for Pleasure Point, but we haven’t found they are willing to listen to alternatives. Once the seawall is here there’s not much else you can do."
Some of those alternatives Ish and Surfrider say need to be looked into includes removing the small mish-mash of rip rap lining the base of the bluff that she says contributes to the undermining of the cliff; putting a stricter weight limit for vehicles using the one lane road because the vibrations can affect the stabilization of the cliff; building better curbs and gutters to stop the surface runoff from going over the bluff; and closing the East Cliff drive and making it pedestrian-only.

"Seawalls beget seawalls," Ish says, "Once you start armoring you can’t really stop unless there’s a natural hard object like a granite cliff, which we don’t have around here. The fact is, the beaches do belong to all of us and we stand a chance of losing them if we don’t let nature take its course."

Ish also points out a recent economic study done by Charles Tilly, a graduate student at California State University Monterey Bay. Called Travel Cost Modeling, he estimated the surf at Pleasure Point to be worth $8.4 million annually. He came to that conclusion by surveying people going in and out of the water, asking how much a year they spent on surfing, and found that, on average, 400 people surf at the point every day. It’s hoped that by giving world-renowned surf spot a dollar value it can be treated with the same respectability and policies, that, say, a national or state park is treated.

A similar survey, done in 1997 by San Francisco State University, estimated that California beaches generated $10 billion annually to the economy.

"It sounds like the value of beaches and surfing far exceeds the value of four or five houses," say Ish.
Gary Griggs wagers the value of the coast might be in the trillions of dollars. In some ways it’s like Visa’s heartrending ode to consumerism: Waitress working the tables at the Wharf House on the Capitola Wharf; salmon fishermen out in the Monterey Bay; Jack’s wetsuit trade; expensive homes in harms way? Priceless.

The Bigger Picture

Using a super fast G-4 laptop, a Nikon digital camera and Robinson R44 helicopter, Gabrielle and Kenneth Adelman, a husband and wife team out of Corralitos have been flying up and down the California coast from Mexico to the Oregon border, taking pictures in precise, GPS controlled intervals of 300 yards. Though not an original idea, what they’ve accomplished is nothing short of stunning. After more than 12,000 shots taken offshore at approximately 500-700 feet, the Adelman’s uploaded the results to the Internet, posting the pictures on their Web site, www. californiacoastline.org.

Both are pilots, trading off the duties of getting to a particular stretch of coast they intend to document. Once there, Gabrielle pilots the helicopter and Kenneth hangs out the window and clicks away, handholding the camera to adjust for the copter’s motion.

And what they have created is a permanent record of the changing coastline. Along the way they’ve also photographed violations of the Coastal Act, namely rip rap in front the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay to protect the 18th hole of their golf course which they say the Coastal Commission later discovered after viewing the Adelmans’ Web site. It was the first enforcement action as a result of their pictures.
Upstairs, in their home, situated high in the Corralitos hills, is the nerve center of their Web site. Beanbags and the latest in computers and high-definition monitors attest to the couples’ dot-com past. To play fair, they have also included a picture of their home (from the air of course) on the site. Kenneth calls up a picture of Stillwell Hall, in the former Fort Ord area down the coast. One wing of the condemned, World War II-era building had to be removed before it would have fallen off the bluff. And below sits a large strip of rip rap defending what’s left. The picture illustrates coastal armoring gone bad. On either side of the building the beach and the cliffs have extensively eroded.

From the air the Adelman’s have been shocked by how much armoring they have witnessed, both here in Santa Cruz and California in general. “That’s the biggest thing about seawalls,” says Kenneth, clicking on another picture of the heavily armored Opal Cliffs near Capitola. “Even if you want to say ‘I’m not an environmentalist, I’m a property rights advocate,’ and you say that people own property and they have a God-given right to do whatever they want to do with their property — if we accept that as a premise, then what happens? Do they have an absolute, God-given right to dump rocks on public property [or] to protect their property from their stupidity? I don’t think so.”

“And the thing is," adds Gabrielle, "if your neighbor’s seawall’s energy gets directed to the sides, your cliff goes down faster. So what your neighbor does affects you. So your private property rights are being infringed upon by your neighbor."
"If we educate people about the coast, that’s the first step in saving the coast," Kenneth cuts in.

Disturbing Nature’s Domicile

Closer to home, down at the intertidal zone, graduate student Dawn Osborn is researching another possible effect of coastal armoring on algae and animals. She set out to find, for her Ph.D. dissertation at UC Santa Cruz, if the varying non-native rocks such a granite, basalt and other hard, durable rocks used in armoring might affect the many shoreline species that make the wave-pounding environment their home. Most of these creatures rely on the coming and goings of the tide and are thus physiologically sensitive to heat and where they settle in the intertidal zone, among other factors. Her research began out of an area at the end of Rockview Drive in Pleasure Point and compared how the different species survived on different substrates or rocks.

“Nobody had ever looked at the affects of armoring on these intertidal communities,” Osborn says, sitting at a concrete bench and table overlooking her first site. “I started wondering; the more armoring they do, how is that going to affect what can grow and live on the rocks?”

So far her research focuses on rip rap, rocks that are often quarried in the Central Valley. To be sure she gets uniform results, Osborn cut sections out of the different rock types into four-inch square plates and adhered them to the native mudstone. Since many of the animals and algae take a while to settle, her research is so far inconclusive. But she has found differences in the species preferences for different kinds of non-native rocks.

"When you add rocks you change communities," she says, pointing to the rip rap that is wedged between two native mudstone outcroppings. "What was under that before they threw rock in there?"
Rip rap also moves a lot during storms, she says and the rocks bump and grind against each other killing the things that live on them.

"Over time if they keep adding rip rap and changing the native communities we really could see a different intertidal structure," Osborn says. "If there is very little native rock left we could see big changes in the species that were not originally found on the native mudstone. These will still be intertidal species, and is one better than the other? I don’t know. But I definitely see huge potential for change.”

Up Against A Wall

Two thousand years before Christ avowed the wise man built his house upon a rock and the foolish man built his house upon the sand, the Greeks were building seawalls—this according to John Kasunich, a man that talks as fast as a sand flea can jump, keeps two surfboards at all times in his car, is a member of Surfrider and knows his seawalls. He also happens to be a coastal engineer.

"The people of the Mediterranean have been building bulkheads and harbors and seawalls around their cities for thousands of years," Kasunich says. “If they hadn’t done that back then the coastal erosion process would have receded their coast and those cities wouldn’t have existed. I bring this up because you can’t allow the city of Capitola, for example, to recede back to the railroad tracks. When you’re in an urban area it’s not stupid to maintain an urban area. And I’m not saying let’s urbanize the coastline. But there are many urban areas that exist today along the coast and we must do something to keep them from being undermined by the coastal-erosion process."

Kasunich quotes a study done by local geologist and UC Santa Professor Jerry Weber on the Pleasure Point area, which Kasunich insists also happens to be a good read. In it Weber mapped out where the coastline was in the last ice age, 20-30,000 years ago. The coast at that time was a quarter mile out from where it currently rests. Then Weber showed where the coastline will be in 50 years and 100 years. In 50 years the bluff had receded to across East Cliff Drive into private property.

“That’s not voodoo science," says Kasunich, “So hear me out. The Surfrider Foundation, the Surfer Alliance … they have put up a real fight against the seawall. Just no seawall, seawalls suck. OK, right now they get to sit on benches, run back and forth, check the surf, do anything they want. They’ve got real access, physical and visual. In 50 years they’re not going to have that access. In fact, private property will have that boundary and they (the property owners) are going to have a legal right to protect their homes and then they’ll put in a seawall. So we’re going to ideologically fight the war, no containment—i.e. seawalls—and in 50 years my own kids won’t be able to do what all these people are doing now right along this stretch of beautiful surf and vision? There’s got to be compromise.”

A Lawsuit is Born

Featurewell, Good Times, June 2003

Funny Girl Barbra Streisand got serious recently when she slapped a couple, Kenneth and Gabrielle Adelman, with a $50 million lawsuit. The singer-actress-director, known for her pro-environment convictions and free-speech views, claims Ken Adelman violated her privacy when he took a picture of her colossal estate, perched on a Malibu bluff, from the couple’s helicopter and posted it on the Web.

The lawsuit, filed May 20, claims that the Adelmans’ picture compromises Streisand’s security and violates her right to privacy. The suit also cites California’s anti-paparazzi law designed to prevent people from stalking with “the intent to capture the visual image, sound recording or other physical impression of another person engaging in a personal or familial activity.”

But the Adelmans are not your typical long lens paparazzi. In fact they’re not paparazzi at all. The Adelmans have photographed the entire 1,100-mile coastline of California, except for the restricted airspace above Vandenberg Air Force Base, and uploaded the results to the Internet (www.californiacoastline.org). For the Adelmans’ California Coastal Records Project, Ken Adelman snapped 12,000 images of the coast at an average of 500-feet above the water in public air space. Gabrielle piloted the copter and Ken leaned out the side, taking the pictures with a digital camera and a lens set at 65mm—about the way the human eye sees. Each picture is posted on the couple’s Web site, alongside the latitude and longitude of the helicopter’s position.

The Web site is used by government agencies, environmental groups, universities, publications, and anyone who wants to view the coast from the helicopter’s unique vantage point. The Web site is also interactive, enabling viewers to name the photographs. Streisand’s conspicuous mansion was labeled the “Streisand Estate, Malibu” by an unknown browser to the site. And Streisand’s house, along with everyone else who is lucky enough to have an ocean view, is on the Web site.

To play fair, the Adelmans’ seaside homestead and their large array of solar panels, the largest residential solar installation in the state, is also pictured on their Web site with Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) coordinates.

“One of the things that is important for the public to remember is this is not a picture of her house,” Ken Adelman explains. “This is a picture of the coast that her house happens to be on. And her house only occupies 3 percent of the total frame.”

However, Streisand’s white, Nantucket-style house sticks out like a sore thumb. Two modest-sized homes (in tony Malibu terms) on either side of the estate are also in the photograph. A lone man walks at low tide below her house, perched on the sandstone cliffs, and further down the beach, what looks to be picnickers and a golf cart can also be seen if you squint.

If the image is enlarged, as it is above, one can also spot Streisand’s pixilated pool, numerous balconies, windows, and as the lawsuit states, the “positioning of her parasols and deck chairs.” (But unfortunately, not a suntanning Babs to be found ... or whatever else La Streisand may do on the palatial property.)

The lawsuit claims that the Adelmans’ Web site has caused the celebrity “considerable anxiety.” Streisand’s telephone number is not listed and she couldn’t be reached for comment. Her lawyer, John Gatti, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

However, on Streisand’s own Web site (www.barbrastriesand.com), she posts her thoughts on free speech, saying: “Thank God the constitution enables all citizens to exercise their freedom of speech to say what they believe. That’s what’s great about democracy and what’s great about this country.”

Speaking of free speech rights, the Adelmans’ lawyer, Richard Kendall, says the public has a right to know about the building going on along the coastline, because the public has a great interest in this common resource, our coastline.

“Our view is that Barbra Streisand doesn’t have the legal right to remove the picture from public view, and remove from this environmental labor of love—this project that is designed to provide a record of the entire coast—the little smidgen of environment that she doesn’t want the public to see,” Kendall says. “I think the law is fully on the side of Mr. Adelman in that respect.”

Since the lawsuit was made public on national news broadcasts and in national and international newspapers almost two weeks ago, the Adelmans’ Web site has received nearly 100,000 hits a day. Adelman says he is swamped with almost a dozen interview requests a day from the media.

As a result of the media attention, Streisand’s digs have become a kind of rich-and-famous chum for the curious public, furthering her unwanted scrutiny. However, this isn’t the only Web site that the ultra-private Streisand should lose sleep over. More than one online map to the stars features Streisand’s address with directions and pictures of her house. There’s even one site that shows the house’s interior.

Currently on the Adelmans’ site, “roughly 8 percent of the caption searches are for the Streisand Estate,” Adelman says. “Which is fascinating because we would speculate that most people are coming to the site to see the picture [of her house] because of the publicity. After they look up Streisand, they go look at other things on the Web site.” Those other things that Web browsers are captivated by also happen to be the most comprehensive photographic record of the California coast ever assembled in one public place. It’s a document of a coast that is eroding, on average, a foot a year. It’s a vulnerable coast that is and has been poked, prodded and seawalled by coastal development. But most of all, it’s a beautiful coastline that is worth preserving. So the Adelmans, both of whom are experienced pilots and dot-com millionaires who retired in their thirties, set out to photograph the California coast one frame at a time.

As it turns out, the Web site has served a variety of purposes: from flying watchdog for coastal conservancy groups to scientific work for the University of California. Caltrans, the Coast Guard and the California Coastal Commission have also used it. Even surfers have been known to peruse its pages in search of that secret break (now not-so-secret spots since the site went online in 2002).

“The Web site is an extraordinary planning and educational tool and has enormous benefits and values associated with it,” says Mark Massara, director of the Sierra Club’s coastal program. “It’s one of the more substantial philanthropic efforts ever, and is utilized literally everyday. . . in an effort to call attention to the resources and valuable coastal public trust properties that are being lost and converted to pavement for sprawl and development.”

Adelman says he was shocked when he learned of the lawsuit, but he says he is obliged to fight it “to the death.” A status conference is set for late August in Los Angeles, but Adelman thinks something may happen before then, and believes the lawsuit to be frivolous.

“It’s just such a shame that, for someone that has such similar views about the environment and free speech as me, she (Streisand) feels she needs to fight it in this forum,” says Adelman. “Likewise it’s an irony that for someone who wants her privacy has picked a forum that basically guarantees she gets none.”