How Activists Stopped Developers From Filling in the Bay

Bay Curious

KQED

History, Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.9 • 999 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2024

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the early 1960s, cities around the San Francisco Bay Area proposed plans to fill in the bay waters and expand. At the time, there was no regional agency looking at what all those projects together would do to the bay as whole. That's where three Berkeley women stepped in to save the bay. Additional Reading Read episode transcript EXHIBIT: Voices For the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism Sign up for our newsletter Enter our Sierra Nevada Brewing Company monthly trivia contest Your support makes KQED podcasts possible. You can show your love by going to https://kqed.org/donate/podcasts This story was adapted from the Voices for the Environment podcast. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz and Christopher Beale. Additional support from Sasha Khokha, Dan Brekke, Cesar Saldana, Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, Jasmine Garnett, Carly Severn, Joshua Ling, Holly Kernan and the whole KQED family.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From K-QED. I want to take you back to April 1961. It's a Sunday and copies of the
0:10.1	Oakland Tribune newspaper are hitting doorsteps all over the East Bay.
0:14.5	A big article inside was getting a lot of attention.
0:18.5	The San Francisco Bay, big, briny, and beautiful, the ticket, which brought 4 million people here, has been shrinking
0:26.0	rapidly due to man.
0:28.2	How much more will the next two decades diminish the waterway?
0:31.9	Those were the opening lines of the article written by reporter
0:34.9	Ed Salzman. He'd recently seen a map from the Army Corps of Engineers that showed
0:39.7	all the projects being considered by local governments that would fill in the bay,
0:45.1	creating land where there was once water.
0:48.0	To lovers of the bay, the prospect is anything but pretty. By 2020, the bay could be little more than a wide river.
0:55.2	The story was picked up by other newspapers and soon sparked an environmental revolution.
1:00.6	I said to Esther, I don't know what's going to happen to the day.
1:05.0	Did you see this map and the tribute?
1:08.0	And she said, yes, wasn't it awful?
1:10.0	And I said, well, did you think you would have time to do something about it?
1:15.0	Today on Bay Curious, we're spotlighting three women who saw the future laid out in those
1:22.2	newspaper articles and decided to do something
1:25.3	about it. Their efforts to save the bay had a ripple effect that changed our landscape and
1:32.0	state politics forever.
1:34.0	This episode was adapted from a podcast called Voices for the Environment,
1:39.0	a century of Bay Area Activism.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -238 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KQED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of KQED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.