San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History, by David D. Schmidt, Backcountry Press: Kneeland, California. 2025
Long-time environmental historian David D. Schmidt spent the past three decades crafting his personal opus—a 630-page encyclopedic account of the San Francisco Bay Area’s history. Today it was announced that his publisher, Backcountry Press of Kneeland California, won the 2026 California Book Award Gold Medal for Contributions to Publishing from the Commonwealth Club of California.
Schmidt’s work is much bigger than the environmental history his title suggests. It’s a comprehensive economic history of the Bay Area too, without the annoying fawning over businessmen and “far-sighted leaders” but rather a clear breakdown of which industries arrived and set up shop, when and where they did so, and how that changed the landscapes and daily lives of the inhabitants, human and more-than-human. Of course his book does offer a uniquely detailed and in-depth environmental history, starting with the wildlife that co-existed in these lands with the indigenous people around the Bay (they’ve become labeled “Ohlone” even though they comprised dozens of identities and language groups) for thousands of years before European colonization. He details the early “harvesting” of vast herds of sea otters in the bay and off the Farallones in the late 1700s-early 1800s, but bookends that story with the return of elephant seals to the coast after WWII, and the eventual return of sea lions to the bay itself. He’s not averse to the anecdotal charm that stories such as Monarch, the last California grizzly, provides, but he excels at juxtaposing the grim toll of decades of slaughter to the buoyant tales of more-than-human life returning and thriving in the 21st century urban Bay Area, as evidenced by the beavers, bald eagles, whales, Tule elk, and even sea otters once again living here.
In twenty extensive chapters, Schmidt provides a flowing narrative account of every major topic that shapes our physical and social environment. Each chapter has helpful lists in sidebar boxes, and most of them feature a color satellite photo serving as a map of the points of interest to follow in that specific chapter. Logging, earthquakes, fires, floods, droughts, industry and pollution, transportation, water supplies, and energy and light… and much more!
Schmidt gives a comprehensive overview of the spread of urban sprawl and the dozens of popular campaigns and initiatives across the Bay Area’s nine counties to halt that spread in favor of parks, agriculture, and open space for more-than-human life. If you wonder about the various ballot propositions that have been the field of conflict for the shape of our urban and non-urban boundaries, Schmidt has a list for each county going back decades. In a late chapter he delves into the history of “People for Open Space” that later becomes the Greenbelt Alliance, a half-century organization that has been at the front lines of negotiations and ballot fights, losing some and winning many more to achieve the remarkable environment in which we are thriving in 2026.
The efforts to fight air and water pollution, and to restrict untrammeled industrial development, are well told here. It’s hard to imagine how stinking and putrid the Bay was, from the late 1800s well into the 1960s, treated as an open sewer by all the municipalities around its shores. For decades it was a broad social consensus that “making land” at the bay shore was a good idea, in no small part because it was smelly and dirty, dominated by industrial uses, and the bay itself didn’t seem like the ecological treasure we now know it to be. The Save the Bay movement that burst upon the scene in 1963 was so successful at mobilizing a broad swath of popular support that the McAteer-Petris Act was passed just two years later in 1965 to temporarily create the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the first regional governance agency in the Bay Area. Schmidt provides a blow-by-blow account of the effort to make it permanent in 1969 in the State Legislature, finally ending with the (surprising) support of then-Governor Ronald Reagan. Given Reagan’s antipathy to government and regulation, it seems surprising in retrospect that he was convinced to make BCDC a permanent agency, but in that era there were still enough “liberal Republicans” who believed in the core principles of conservation that should be at the heart of conservatism that they convinced Reagan to get in front of the flowing tide of popular support in 1969 for environmental preservation.
After detailing the sordid histories of bay sewage and water pollution, Schmidt turns to the movements that saved the bay and the California coast with roots in the 1950s-70s turn to ecological activism. A whole chapter is dedicated to many of the key individuals who helped shape these movements, from obvious luminaries like John Muir and David Brower, to forgotten sheroes like Josephine Clifford McCracken who coined the slogan “Save the Redwoods” to launch the effort to save Big Basin State Park’s redwoods in the Santa Cruz mountains. From pioneering botanist Alice Eastwood to the four women who founded the Marin Conservation League in the 1930s, to botanist Mary Bowerman whose 1944 dissertation on the plants of Mount Diablo provided a key foundation for the decades-long effort to preserve that magnificent land, to the women who founded the Save the Bay movement, and literally dozens more, the rich history of activist engagement is well told. And Schmidt deserves a lot of credit for going beyond the well-trodden paths of the obvious stories told elsewhere to dive deeply into mostly overlooked or unknown tales of the south bay, the peninsula, Napa and Solano counties to the northeast, and much more.
The San Francisco Bay has been home to incredible abundance and was once one of the great fisheries in the world. Millions of salmon once pulsed in and out of the bay and up the major rivers of California in three great surges every year. Early Californians were able to harvest incredible quantities of salmon in the north bay as they made their way to and from the Golden Gate, eventually giving rise to a flourishing salmon canning industry by the 1870s. Through booms and busts that accompanied greater or less runs of salmon, fishermen remained a key part of the Bay Area economy well into the 20th century, but by 1928 about 80% of the original spawning habitat on the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers had been destroyed by dams, canals, and aqueducts. By 1957 the salmon runs had fallen to 3% of the record catches of the 1880s (and even as late as 1910), and it’s only gotten worse since then. Today’s bay and river system sustain a salmon population thanks to the hatcheries maintained by the State of California. But even with that ongoing effort, salmon runs have risen and fallen and sometimes dwindled to less than 1,000 fish!
I was delighted to read a well-researched chapter on the changing species that have made their homes in bay waters from the Gold Rush to the present. Early Californians founded an organization in 1869 called the San Francisco Acclimitization Society to import non-native species of plants, trees, fish, and animals, using the early Transcontinental railroad to transport them. This was a common practice in the 19th century, part of the widespread terraforming that European colonization imposed on other parts of Earth, spreading European species far and wide. This is the source of the striped bass favored by fishermen in the Delta and Bay to this day, in addition to efforts to create fisheries for shad, carp, catfish, and other bass species.
Water wars and the collapse of Delta and Bay fish populations have characterized the last half century. With the bizarre plumbing system known as the California Water Project pumping fresh water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin River systems through the Delta and into the aqueducts feeding the pistachio, mandarin orange, cotton and alfalfa farms of the southern Central Valley, the pumps have devoured countless millions of fish while altering the salinity and flow of the Delta’s hydrology. Efforts to build a peripheral canal, defeated at the ballot box in 1982, have been revived during Jerry Brown’s 3rd and 4th gubernatorial terms, and are being pushed along by Gavin Newsom too, all justified by the facetious argument that it would protect our water system from the inevitable destruction of a major earthquake. The ebb and flow of drought and flood during the past decades compounds the confusion most people feel about the politics and economics of our water supply, only made worse by the climate chaos unfolding in our present era.
It’s hard to imagine now but the Bay also had ample harvests of oysters, shrimp, crabs, and clams for many decades before those fisheries finally gave out due to pollution and habitat loss. Schmidt provides a lively account of the rather long history of where those shellfish proliferated and how the businesses dedicated to harvesting and selling them developed and eventually disappeared. Chinese shrimping villages once existed in several bayshore spots, including today’s China Camp State Park; the Hunters Point peninsula in San Francisco was home to a thriving community of eleven different Chinese shrimping companies until they were evicted by the U.S. Navy prior to WWII. As late as 1930, nearly 3 million pounds of shrimp were harvested from the Bay!
Schmidt’s encyclopedia treatment of our shared environment is a gift that keeps on giving. Want to know about invasive species like feral pigs, Asian clams, or French broom? He’s got a whole chapter on it. How about the history of the cow around the Bay Area (perhaps the greatest ecological time bomb that ever went off here after being introduced by the first Spanish colonists)? Or the rise and fall of Petaluma as the chicken and egg capital of the West? How about a list of every serious earthquake in the Bay Area since the 1600s? Did you know mercury mining was a key ingredient of the Gold Rush and that it happened not just at the New Almaden mine south of San Jose, but in a half dozen key sites from Mount Diablo through Napa and Sonoma counties? And of course we are all living with excessive mercury in our environment now, since after the end of hydraulic mining in the late 19th century where it was used extensively, pulses of mining debris slowly made their way to the floor of the San Francisco bay where methyl mercury remains in the mud, slowly seeping into the food chain.
Schmidt’s book is a gem. The footnotes and bibliographic references provide ample opportunity to verify his sometimes surprising claims and give a handy starting point for the many researchers bound to follow the trails he’s blazed in this excellent volume.
Chris Carlsson is the author of Hidden San Francisco and three other books