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The Art of a Clean Beach

There's a mystery in the making on the Oakland waterfront, and the first clue isn't a knife in the dumpster but a snackpack wrapper on the beach. Indeed locals scouring the trash and boatwreck-cluttered shoreline discovered a second important clue when they scrutinized the plethora of empty wrappers: no pricetags. Since they're not marked for individual sale, clean-up crews speculate that they may be coming from a school upstream. The detective on the case is Patty St. Louis, one of 150 artists, boatbuilders, woodworkers and other craftspeople who live and/or work on the Fifth Avenue Peninsula near Clinton Basin. Locals here often pop out to this small, ecologically sensitive stretch of shoreline amid the busy Oakland harbor for a breath of fresh air and a look at what St. Louis deems a "large population of watchable wildlife." But geography and local activities have conspired to make the Clinton shoreline both a catch basin for floating trash and an aquatic parking lot for derelict fishing, sailing and pleasure boats.

Neighbors - organized through the one-year-old 5th Avenue Waterfront Alliance - began tackling the trash last September by volunteering for California coastal clean-up day. St. Louis then pulled together an ongoing beach patrol and contacted the Bay Conservation and Development Commission about the boats. They in turn gleaned a promise from the Port of Oakland to spring clean what locals call "Shipwreck Point" this May.

The community's efforts on their shoreline's behalf caught the attention of the state coastal clean-up day organizer, the California Coastal Commission, as well as the Center for Marine Conservation. Last year the Center mobilized over 370,000 volunteers in 90 countries in a campaign to attack what the Center's Seba Sheavly calls "the most solvable marine pollution problem we have."

The two groups were particularly interested in Oakland as a model project for a new Center program aimed at getting beyond the beach clean ups to the sources of local debris, and at empowering communities to change disposal habits. Indeed this spring, the Coastal Commission, as local sponsor, asked 5th Avenue to become the newest of six such model projects across the nation.

"Stopping solid waste pollution is very much a place-based issue," says Sheavly. For a New Jersey boardwalk, for example, the problem is packaging of everything from french fries to salt water taffy, while for Pinellas County Florida, it's 120 marinas in dire need of waste recycling programs. Another model project, this one in Puerto Rico's San Juan Bay, is juggling eight communities with many beachside restaurants and kiosks, not to mention numerous cruise ships and commercial vessels calling into port with their tourists and refuse each week. In this project, locals have been put to work on trash surveys, restaurants on earning "green" certificates, and vendors on switching to more eco-friendly food containers.

The Center for Marine Conservation supports these model projects via small grants, education tools and data cards for logging types of litter collected (toys, condoms, magazines, diapers, fishing lures, syringes, oil drums and hard hats - you name it, it's on the card list). Sheavly plans to develop a tool kit of information gleaned from each model so that other areas can find site-specific approaches for their "kind of beach, kind of trash, and kind of community."

Oakland's close-knit 5th Avenue neighborhood clearly has a unique approach. Since last fall, the Alliance has organized a well-attended naturalist-led estuary walk and a March 21 spring festival complete with water taxi tours and an introduction to the rich histories of local boatbuilders, ironworkers and artisans.

"As an arts community, we respond deeply to the marine aesthetic of our neighborhood," says St. Louis, who recently supervised art students in painting a mural of two rare local birds - the Barrow's Goldeneye and California least tern - on a wall visible both to diners at the Seabreeze restaurant and to wildlife winging by. "I thought a really big picture of the birds might attract some from far away," she says. St. Louis is also making a colorful flag out of the mysterious snackpack wrappers dominating her litter logs. By this summer, she hopes to have tracked down their source. After that, St. Louis hopes to reach out to other neighborhoods, with help from the City and the Center, in an Oakland-wide educational campaign to stop shoreline litter. Only then, perhaps, will all the clues and characters in this waterfront mystery surface.

Contact: Patty St. Louis (510)465-0718 or Seba Sheavly (757)496-0920

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