Conservation Highlights
A Capitol Achievement
The future looks brighter for clean water and fish in California thanks to an uncommon alliance and award-winning legislation.
The biggest environmental news in California isn't very big at all. It's actually a fish ... salmon.
Once the stuff of legends - the first California explorers depicted them as choking streams in massive migrations - salmon populations in the state have hit rock bottom.
Countless baby salmon hatched roughly three years ago in secluded mountain streams whose waters empty into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Since then, the tiny fish slinked great distances - some hundreds of miles - from their quiet birthplaces through the delta to the Golden Gate, slipping unnoticed by bustling Bay Area cities to mature in the nutrient-rich waters of the Pacific.
Recently, a caravan of now-adult salmon numbering in the tens of thousands began their arduous trip back up the Delta to start families of their own - and stave off extinction.
A Perilous Homecoming
Major obstacles to their migration included fishing, shallower and warmer streams due to diversions, sediment that clogs waterways and buries critical spawning habitat, and invasive species that prey on and compete with salmon for resources. Surprisingly, the brakes on our cars were obstacles, too - something that connects nearly all of us to their plight.
Every time you step on your brakes, small amounts of copper residue are deposited on roadways and wind up in waterways like the San Francisco Bay - liquid highways along which these imperiled fish travel. California drivers use their brakes hundreds of millions of times a day, so the cumulative impact of copper is severe. Once dissolved in water, copper can impair salmon's ability to detect predators and find their way back to spawning streams, two essential requirements if they're to rebound.
Hope for the Future
After more than 14 years of leading a diverse public-private alliance and groundbreaking science, Sustainable Conservation passed landmark legislation, Senate Bill 346, that will virtually eliminate copper in brake pads sold in California and throughout North America.
Promoting clean water to help the state's endangered salmon thrive again is just the beginning ...
Supporting a Vital Industry
The brake business is tough ... thin profit margins, unpredictable prices for raw materials, fierce competition on an international scale. You might think that an aggressive law like SB 346 that rewrites the rules for this multi-billion-dollar industry would raise its ire. Think again. More.
Helping Cash-Strapped Cities
SB 346 will help cities across California avoid potentially billions of dollars in new water treatment plants and expensive fines for not meeting water-quality standards, enabling them to redirect much-needed funds to other critical needs. More.
The Sustainable Conservation Difference
Passing SB 346 into law underscores the power of Sustainable Conservation's approach to solving California's most pressing environmental problems: collaboration over confrontation, tangible results over politics. More.
Sustainable Conservation Policy Director J. Stacey Sullivan and Executive Director Ashley Boren.