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215 contEnts The Developmentalist Project A History of Exploitation of Estuary Resources Major Policy Reform Beginning in 1965 National Policy Initiatives The Lost Marshlands of San Francisco Bay What Is a Wetland? New Supreme Court, New Wetlands Policy Buying Back the Bay: The Policy of Cash Synthesis and Future Directions t oday we look out upon a San Francisco Estuary that bears only passing resemblance to that which existed before the arrival of Europeans. In a pioneering article published in Science in 1986, Nichols et al. describe the alterations to San Francisco Bay that have occurred since the California Gold Rush of 1849. They classified the alterations into four categories —diking and filling, pollution, introduction of exotic species, and reduction of fresh water inflow. More than 90% of the Estuary’s tidal wetlands have been diked or filled; contamination of the Estuary by a variety of pollutants is pervasive; the San Francisco Bay and Delta together form one of the world’s most invaded estuaries; and reduction of freshwater inflow by more than half has changed the dynamics of the Estuary’s plant and animal communities. One of the most controversial public policy debates over human use of San Francisco Bay during the past 50 years has been about the right of individuals, corporate entities, or even cities to fill the Bay for economic gain. About one-third of the Bay had already been filled by 1960 when a grass roots movement emerged, calling for a halt to the practice. thE dEvEloPMEntalist ProjEct Public policy, express or implicit, has dictated acceptable human uses of the Estuary since Europeans first colonized the region. Those policies enabled the significant alterations to occur that Nichols et al. (1986) describe. Early in that history the policies were unwritten, expressed in practice rather than law. Nevertheless, they reflected a widely adopted philosophy of resource exploitation that has been described as the “developmentalist project.” Kenneth Pomeranz asserts that nations around the world have been engaged in the developmentalist project for several centuries. He defines the developmentalist project as a set of “commitments to state-building, sedentarization, and intensifying the exploitation of resources” (Burke and Pomeranz 2009). The contributors to the Pomeranz anthology describe the past 500 years as a time during which the relationship between human civilization and the environment has been one almost exclusively of accelerating resource exploitation with little self-imposed restraint. The public is not accustomed to thinking of aChievements anD Challenges Marc Holmes Policy chaPtEr FiFtEEn 216 consErvation and rEstoration development from this perspective. Development has more often been viewed uncritically as progress . Although many ears are quite familiar with the sound of the word environmentalist and we have a shared understanding of its meaning, few have an intuitive grasp of the concept of a developmentalist , one who is committed to promoting and engaging in the minimally regulated development of the landscape. This is no doubt due to the fact that development is as unquestioned an element in our daily lives as is gravity. We presume its legitimacy without question. Yet significant environmental damage has been caused by the unexamined pursuit of development . It is this cultural, or perhaps human, bias in favor of the benefits of continually expanding resource exploitation that has, up until very recently, marked the nature of the modern relationship between the residents of the San Francisco Bay region and the Estuary itself. a history oF ExPloitation oF EstUary rEsoUrcEs The first Californians are believed to have arrived in the region about 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age (Turner 2002). Although these earliest human inhabitants of the region were limited in their ability to manipulate the environment , owing to their primitive technologies, they nonetheless caused documented adverse impacts on the Estuary ecosystem. Investigations of Indian midden sites around the Bay shoreline indicate that diets of the residents changed over time as hunting activities depleted populations of various birds (Broughton 2004). Researchers hypothesize that early European explorers who reported scenes of extraordinarily large flocks of birds were witnessing an avian population expansion that had resulted from the reduction of native Indian hunting pressure caused by population decline due to the introduction of European diseases. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian and Spanish colonizers intensified resource exploitation. One of the most notable impacts of the relatively brief Russian settlement of the area is the near complete destruction of the sea otter population of the Pacific coast, including San Francisco Bay (Lightfoot...

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