A banner day for the Bolsa Chica

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY

Last Thursday marked a momentous occasion for the Bolsa Chica. Many

of us participated in a ceremonial ground-breaking for the

restoration project that will bring life-giving seawater back to the

dried portion of the Bolsa Chica for the first time in more than a

hundred years.

The event signaled a real beginning to restoration, an event that

so many of us have labored for over so many years. It’s almost hard

to believe that it’s finally happening. This battle has gone on for

30 years, which is half of our lives for many of us.

It was good to see so many people at the ceremony who have waging

this fight since the beginning, people like Linda Moon, Charles

Falzon, Loraine Faber, Herb Chatterdon, Shirley Dettloff, Mary Ellen

Houseal, Adrianne Morrison, Ruth Bailey, Dave and Margaret Carlberg,

Ralph and Charlene Bauer, and Peter and Cathy Green. Vic and I were

Johnny-come-latelies in this crowd, since we’ve been involved in the

battle for only a little over two decades.

We moved to Huntington Beach because of the Bolsa Chica.

Postdoctoral fellowships at University of California at Irvine for

Vic and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for me brought us to Southern

California in 1981, but it was the beautiful Bolsa Chica that caused

us to put down roots in Huntington Beach.

We had enjoyed coastal birding in Connecticut when we were in

graduate school. The thought of living so close to this birding

paradise was thrilling, so we searched for a home here instead of

Westminster or Costa Mesa. We thought that a community that had the

foresight, wisdom and environmental conscience to preserve this

fabulous marsh would be a great place to live. Little did we know at

the time that the Bolsa Chica was far from saved.

At the time, we were unaware of just how new that restored section

of the Bolsa Chica really was. The California Department of Fish and

Game had re-contoured the land, created two sand islands for tern

nesting and built the walk bridge across the marsh only three years

before our arrival.

It was on one of our first birding forays to the newly restored

portion of the Bolsa Chica that Vic met Margaret Carlberg, who

informed him of the Amigos de Bolsa Chica and their fight to save the

rest of the Bolsa Chica wetlands. Only 300 acres of that vast salt

marsh were really saved, and only about half of that had been

restored to tidal flushing. The vast majority of the wetland acreage

was slated to become housing and a marina. We were horrified.

Once we learned of the battle to save Bolsa Chica, we knew we had

found both a home and a cause to fight for. Vic had a bachelor’s

degree in political science and a PhD in biology. He was just itching

to find some worthy cause where he could put his schooling to good

use. I had a bachelor’s degree in environmental biology and a PhD in

biomedical science studying a marine wetland worm. I had cut my

environmental teeth with the Sierra Club in Boulder, Colo.

I won’t cop to any personal acts of sabotage in the name of

environmental activism, but our young and rowdy group in the radical

era of the late 1960s was known for cutting down billboards, pulling

up developers’ survey stakes and urinating on ranchers’ cyanide traps

that they had set out to kill coyotes.

The Amigos de Bolsa Chica were a more sedate group, formed from a

League of Women Voters study group. They believed in working through

the system, not against it. Radical ecological sabotage was not their

style. We could live with that and we joined them.

In 1984, Peter Green was preparing to run for city council for the

first time. He and Cathy had spent years of Saturdays at the Bolsa

Chica giving “life in the mud” tours to educate the public about the

value of coastal salt marshes.

Most people are not aware that a coastal salt marsh is more

biologically productive than an Iowa cornfield, and produces more

oxygen than a tropical rainforest. Under the mud lives a host of

worms and shellfish that feed the tens of thousands of migratory

shorebirds that spend the winter here. Explaining to the public how

this ecosystem works and why it is important was a simple and joyous

task.

Peter needed time to devote to his run for city council, so Vic

gladly took over the ecology part of the Bolsa Chica tours and I did

the bird station. That was two decades ago.

A lot of water has passed under the Bolsa Chica walk bridge since

then. The Amigos have aged. It was a gray-haired crowd that cheered

the ground breaking as the first shovels full of sand were turned.

It’s been a long time coming, but the big day was finally here.

We can expect to see ocean water come back through a new channel

in 2007. That’s when the real ecological changes will occur and when

the real celebration can begin.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].