Faces of the Restoration:
Brian and Katrina Higgins

There are many challenges to restoring natural areas in the heart of a major urban center like the Bay Area, not the least of which is trash. From plastic cups and bottles to rotting tires and boat hulls, Brian and Katrina Higgins have seen it all. On lunch hours, after work and on weekends, with a diligence that surprises even the most avid conservationists, Brian and Katrina Higgins have been picking up and hauling away trash from the Bay including South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project sites. Since the start of this year, they have been responsible for collecting and hauling away over 19 truckloads of trash. We caught up with them earlier this fall to find out more about their amazing contribution to the Restoration Project.

1. What made you decide to take on the challenge of removing trash from the Restoration Project area? Four years ago we started bike riding more as our kids were becoming more independent and heading off to college. But the more we rode, the more we realized there was garbage everywhere. Unfortunately, for Fremont and the South Bay, the prevailing winds blow garbage from all over the bay and delta area and deposit it in the marshes and shorelines. The trash and large items were so pervasive it really detracted from the scenic beauty of the bay and made one concerned for the environment and the wildlife.

Katrina suggested we pick up some of the trash so we took bags on our bike rides and bagged some of the trash and left it on the edge of the levee thinking one of the Refuge trucks that we had seen in the past would stop and put it in the truck and dispose of it. Brian called the Refuge manager and found they did not have anyone patrol the levees but he said that they did have a volunteer program where we could take the Refuge truck and gate keys and pick up the trash bags we leave on the levees ourselves. So, we started bagging more trash on our bike rides and borrowing the Refuge truck about once a month to haul the bags and large items away.

2. When do you find time to do it? With our kids becoming more independent it seemed we had more time. But the more we made the shoreline look good, the more we were inspired to do more at the expense of other things. When you see the trash along the shores and marshes where the wildlife is actively living, it seems more important than mowing the grass around your own house.

3. What areas of the shoreline do you concentrate on? Ten years ago the company we work for moved to the business park next to Coyote Creek Lagoon. The marshes by the 2.5 miles of levee trails were covered with trash when we started working there. Every day at lunch we would take a plastic bag and pick up a few things. After more than three years of lunchtime walks picking up a bag or two full of trash and putting them in the garbage can each day and Coyote Creek Lagoon looked nice. We still pick up the occasional new thing on our lunchtime walks.

Four years ago we started on the Shoreline Trail. It took a little over two years and hauling away 43 truckloads before we declared the Shoreline Trail clean. We still pickup new debris each time we bike ride the Shoreline Trial. After we declared the Shoreline Trail clean we hauled away several truckloads from Ravenswood and the ponds in Alviso. In January 2010 we started a community service volunteer program where people, who have gotten traffic tickets they cannot afford to pay and the courts granted volunteer time instead, can pick up trash around the Refuge. Since we started that program we have started venturing into the parts of the Refuge that are closed to the public like the Stevens Creek area. We have had 37 community service volunteers work a total of 925 hours and pick up 19 truckloads of trash since the start of the year.

Recently we worked to help clean up Pond A8 in Alviso. We hauled away 6 truckloads and about 150 tires from that pond system in the last few months. So now we have covered much of the South Bay. There are still levees that need some cleaning up, but you can only do so much at a time.

4. What are some of the most common pieces of trash that you find? Aside from the everyday bottle, can, and plastic bag, the most common item we pick up that you would not expect is tennis balls. There are many dog owners all around the bay and delta area who throw tennis balls into the water for their dog to fetch. Dogs seem to like this until the dog gets tired and does not fetch it. The winds and the tides push those balls to Fremont and the South Bay. We have picked up thousands of tennis balls in the last four years.

5. What have been some of the strangest things you have collected? Today on our bike ride we picked up our third hotel-sized refrigerator. It was not there a few weeks before. Once we picked up a full sized Jacuzzi. We suggested the native plant program at the refuge could use it as a planter and it is still in the native plant area being used today. If you remember in May of 2009 a 70- foot long wooden fishing boat became disabled and was smashed into the San Mateo Bridge. Most of the boat was salvaged and removed, but hundreds of boards with their nails still sticking straight out were broken off into splinters. We were saddened that our clean Shoreline Trail was littered with hundreds of dangerous objects. We spent three long days picking up splintered boards with wicked nails sticking out and throwing them up on the trail.

6. Have you noticed any changes in quantity, type or the location of trash in the four years you've been doing this? The Refuge looks better, and what does blow up now is cleaner as it has not had months and years to get buried partway under the mud. We have picked up hundreds of tires filled with mud. The tires that drift up now are typically clean and much lighter. We have noticed much of the garbage in the Bay moves around on the high tides each month. So we would clean up an area and it would look good, then after the high tide a fair amount of older looking debris would appear.

We have noticed the amount of trash coming into Coyote Creek Lagoon has gone down dramatically since we cleaned up the Shoreline Trail two years ago and now much of the trash is picked up before it gets blown all the way to the South Bay.

7. Given that the tides are constantly bringing in new material, how do you keep yourselves motivated? Just looking at a clean marsh that looked like a garbage dump before is a lot of motivation. Thinking about the wildlife that lives in the marsh is even more motivation. Thinking about the fishermen that eat the fish that consume the pollutants in the Bay and that is even more motivation.

We have removed 10 boats from around the Refuge, but a couple only after the waves smashed them into small enough pieces for us to haul away. We have seen a 30-foot power boat at Ravenswood get completely destroyed over many months and think about all the fiberglass shavings that went into the environment. We picked up many small pieces over the months. The bottom of the boat and the large motor are still in the bay by the levee. We even removed a 20-foot section of that boat that floated onto the levee by the Shoreline Trail a year after it broke up. It took 4 truck trips and using the refuge generator and power saw to cut it up into 4 sections so we could even move it. We think of it as another large amount of fiberglass that did not get into the Bay environment.

8. When not volunteering, what other kinds of activities/work are you involved in? We have standard 8-to-5 jobs at a small company in Fremont. In our free time we mostly recreate in the outdoors. We bike, hike, and kayak. We have incorporated picking up trash in all three of these activities most of the time. We were at Lake Tahoe last weekend and did the tourist rental raft float trip down the Truckee River. Even then we could not stop ourselves from picking up bottles, cans, flip flops, and even broken raft paddles in the river. You can make it into a game or hobby even. The rental guys did not know what to say when we got out of the raft and they saw the front third of the raft was full of trash that we had obviously picked up from the river. 9. What do you think about the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project? We feel the restoration is a very positive step for the environment, but what we see around the Bay often makes us feel sad about what people have done and are still doing to our environment. To us the Refuge is just part of the Restoration Project, the Restoration Project is just part of the Bay, and the bay is just part of the earth we live on.

10. What do you love most about San Francisco Bay? Is there a place that you like to return to again and again? We love the fact that you can live in a relatively small area (the Bay Area), with millions of other people, and yet just a few miles from our house are miles of trails we can enjoy after work or on the weekend and take in the scenic beauty and wildlife. We love all the levee trails along the Bay. The Shoreline Trail is the closest to our house so we enjoy it the most.

11. What is your vision for the Bay in the next 50 years? We take one week at a time. If you think about the continual flow of trash, or the piles of trash in places we have not gotten to yet, it gets discouraging. We have hopes, but since we are not in charge, and don't have the desire to spend time in meetings, we try to focus on what we can do, not on what isn't being done. Our biggest hope is the Refuge can develop a plan to deal with the trash and large items like boats on a long-term basis. The Refuge could easily have a full-time person working on trash removal and running a community service program as we do to bag most of the small trash. We hope to inspire others to pick up debris while they are out recreating on our public lands all the time. Many of our community service volunteers have expressed great personal satisfaction in what they have done for the environment. It is rare to see people cleaning up the environment on their own. Recently we have seen a few other people picking up debris on their own, so there is more hope for the future.