More about Episode 3: Dirt, Water & Power
- Mar 20
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 12
Episode Highlights
How the Bay Became a City. San Francisco Bay was once a vast, living estuary, home to thriving ecosystems and thousands of Ohlone people. In just a few generations, it was transformed into the foundation of a global city. This episode explores how that transformation happened, and what it cost.
The Gold Rush Was an Environmental Event.
We often picture lone prospectors panning for gold. But in reality gold mining quickly became an industrial operation that reshaped the entire watershed. Hydraulic mining alone blasted apart hillsides, sending enormous volumes of sediment downstream, raising the floor of the Bay, and permanently altering its ecology. Alongside that came mercury, millions of pounds of it, much of which is still circulating in the Bay today.
Turning Water Into Land. As San Francisco grew, the Bay became its raw material. Hills were leveled, shorelines filled. Garbage, rocks, and sediment were dumped into the water to create new land. By the mid-20th century, one-third of San Francisco Bay had been filled in. What was called “reclamation” was, in reality, the conversion of water into real estate.
The Idea of the "Imperial City." Gray Brechin describes San Francisco as an imperial city: one that grows by conquest of its hinterlands, by taking resources from elsewhere. He sees the city not just as a place, but as a system of power. Like London or ancient Rome, San Francisco grew by extracting what it needed, including land from the Bay and water from distant rivers.
The Great Water Grab. To sustain its growth, San Francisco and other cities in the Bay Area reached far beyond their borders. They have taken water from local creeks on the Peninsula, the Tuolumne River in Yosemite, the Mokelumne and American Rivers, and massive state and federal water projects. Today, more than half of the freshwater that once flowed into the Bay is diverted elsewhere.
"Cities Are Crops." One of the most striking ideas in this episode is that cities are a kind of crop, that you grow with water. Water is used for development and to grow the population. Development increases land value. And that value concentrates wealth and power, which allows powerful interests to capture even more water. It's a cycle: turn water into land, land into money, money into power, and power into taking more water.
Power Then and Now. In the past, power in San Francisco was visible; it was newspaper families, railroad barons, and industrialists. Today, it's harder to see. Ownership is hidden behind corporations, LLCs, and investment structures. But the underlying dynamic remains: those who control land and water hold enormous influence over the future of the region.
Who Pays the Price? The costs of this growth have been unevenly distributed. The Ohlone people lost land, culture, and lives. The Bay absorbed sediment, toxins, and fill. The ecosystem continues to struggle under reduced freshwater flows.
And yet, there is also hope. The Bay is cleaner now than it was 50 years ago, thanks to sustained environmental advocacy and the work of organizations like San Francisco Baykeeper. The question for us today is: Can we use the same systems of power that built the city to restore the estuary?
About our guest
Gray Brechin is a historical geographer, architectural historian, and author whose work focuses on California, the environmental impact of cities, and the legacy of labor and New Deal public works. He holds a PhD in geography from U.C. Berkeley, where is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Geography and founder and project scholar of the Living New Deal, which documents New Deal works across the United States.
He is best known as the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, a landmark study that traces how urban growth, powerful elites, and resource extraction reshaped the city, the Bay and the wider Pacific Basin. With the photographer Robert Dawson he wrote the book Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream, which has been called “a necessary reference to all California environmentalists and policymakers.”
Gray is also known for his early work on the Mono Lake Committee, where he played a founding role in turning a small group of concerned researchers and activists into a statewide campaign to stop the destruction of the lake by sending its water to Los Angeles. As a journalist and television producer in San Francisco, he helped expose the poisoning of the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, contributing to its subsequent cleanup. His contributions to scholarship and environmental activism have been recognized with honors such as the California Preservation Foundation's President's Award and the Book Club of California's Oscar Lewis Award for Western History.
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