Sierra Garcia

Reporting on climate change, ocean ecosystems, wildfire and fire management, threatened species, technological breakthroughs and innovation, agricultural labor, and more.

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KneeDeep Times •

Pajaro Residents Weigh in on How to Use of Climate Funds

As his mother chats about housing costs, the stroller-bound baby watches the next table over, where a flour tortilla is folded over into a quesadilla atop an electric cookstove. They’re among the first attendees of the three-hour Climate of Hope Fair in Watsonville, an event organized by the nonprofit Regeneración Pajaro Valley in late September for the agricultural community on the Central Coast to learn and share ideas for allocating climate funds from the California Strategic Growth Council....
KneeDeep Times •

Don't Count on Kelp Forests to Buffer the Coast – KneeDeep Times

“The extent to which waves are actually affected by kelp is quite limited.” Kristen Elsmore When winter storms sent 20-foot waves barreling towards Santa Cruz, California in January 2023, the sea met none of the natural storm breaks it might have encountered on the East Coast: no crests of intricately carved coral reefs, no tangled roots of mangrove forests, no conglomerations of millions of oyster shells. Waves from the open ocean encounter fewer obstacles...
KneeDeep Times •

Knock-On Flood Threat Gets 4-Inch Reality Check – KneeDeep Times

For years, sea level rise planning in the Bay Area has carried a dark asterisk: Protect your own city with caution, or your seawalls and levees might contribute to flooding your neighbors. Fears of cross-bay flooding — or inadvertently foisting extra water onto parts of the San Francisco bayshore by defending other areas of shoreline from rising seas with flood walls — have taken on a life of their own in public discourse from San Rafael to the South Bay. But the magnitude of these redirected ef...
KneeDeep Times •

The North Monterey County Climate Disaster that Wasn't – KneeDeep Times

The long-sidelined community of Pajaro is finally getting support to stop future flooding. Will it be enough? Esperanza rushed from her home with her three children just in time for the Pajaro River to flow over everything the farmworker and her family owned. But the flood that engulfed the entire town of Pajaro on March 11, 2023, wasn’t a straightforward climate disaster, and flooding is far from the only threat a heating planet brings to this low-income agricultural community that straddles M
KneeDeep Times •

Wine Country County Counts for Half of California’s Repeat Home Flooding – KneeDeep Times

On February 15, 1986, somewhere along the Russian River amid the quiet woodlands of unincorporated Sonoma County, a home flooded. The same home flooded again in 1995. Then again in 1997. And again and again. By 2019, the same property had flooded eight times since the 80s, and received more than $750,000 in disaster money from the National Flood Insurance Program. In nearby neighborhoods, dozens of other properties were flooding every five years or more on average, and one unit flooded 20 time
ContraCorriente •

Una advertencia grave para los arrecifes hondureños

«Se siente una impotencia», me dijo en una videollamada. Guerrero es la coordinadora para Honduras de la organización Arrecifes Saludables para Gente Saludable, que hace monitoreo de la salud de todo el sistema arrecifal mesoamericano, que también incluye México, Belice y Guatemala. «Realmente no puedes hacer nada más que documentarlo y regar la voz…pero una solución a corto o mediano plazo, pues no la sé», dijo.
Stanford Magazine •

Our Family Legacy

When my freshman year began, I thought I knew the story of my family’s Stanford connection. Daniel Garcia, ’73—Uncle Dan, to me—was the only one of my grandmother’s five sons to enroll in college. When my father dropped out of high school at age 16, he traveled north from Los Angeles to join his older brother on Stanford’s campus—in his case, as a full-time dishwasher at Tresidder Union. Occasionally, he’d sneak into the back of Daniel’s classes and eavesdrop...
KneeDeep Times •

Two Towns Shortlisted for FEMA Millions – KneeDeep Times

Raúl doesn’t spare much thought for the catastrophic levee failure that could put his neighborhood of many decades underwater. He’s more concerned with the arsenic that has rendered the town’s tap water undrinkable and necessitated bottled water deliveries every few days for the last five years. Despite that complaint, he enjoys life in Grimes, a Colusa County community of a few hundred people surrounded by farmland and nuzzled against an earthen levee that holds back the Sacramento River. In S
KneeDeep Times •

Teaching to Weather the Storms Within – KneeDeep Times

Nose streaming, eyes puffy, the child wails onscreen. He’s perhaps pre-K aged, and in most circumstances, you might assume he was mid-tantrum, perhaps brought on by a spat with a sibling or misplaced favorite toy. But between gasping sobs, the boy in the video explains that he’s upset because of climate change. The viral video is a vivid indicator of how “climate anxiety” affects even the youngest among us. Children, by definition, have no direct civic power and little say in how their lives ar
Estuary News Magazine •

Resurrecting the Carmel River Floodplain

The Carmel River of the late 20th century was a tale of California water extremes writ small. In 1998 it flooded homes again, but in most years, the river was largely reduced to a trickle as it was siphoned off to water the blooming tourist mecca of the Monterey Peninsula. Endangered steelhead trout, members of the southernmost surviving population, would often find their attempts to swim upriver and spawn thwarted by...
Estuary News Magazine •

Climate change is heating, salinizing, and expanding the San Francisco Estuary, a review of nearly 200 scientific studies concludes.

Sea level rise, changing snow and rainfall patterns, and warmer waters are some of the changes already observed in the Estuary and expected to continue through the rest of the century as greenhouse gas concentrations rise. Changes to water are at the heart of the documented and further expected impacts; there’s less of it entering the system overall, but more arriving in torrential bursts, and more saltwater creeping inland from the Bay.
KneeDeep Times •

Seeding Citizen Scientists – KneeDeep Times

In the fall of 2021, ecologist and landscaper Billy Krimmel decided to sow 65 pounds of native seeds all around Davis, and to do everything wrong. Everything wrong, at least, by the standards of the professional landscapers Krimmel’s native landscaping company competes with. The seed disbursers were anybody and everybody in the West Sacramento area who stumbled across the project at various breweries or pop-up events and felt inspired to take home a seed packet in the name of citizen science. I
Estuary News Magazine •

Cutting Green Tape

A novel exemption lawmakers passed to California’s landmark Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in late 2021 has helped fast-track at least four habitat restoration projects so far, with more to follow in the next couple years. The Statutory Exemption for Restoration Projects, or SERP, offers a rare reprieve from California’s stringent environmental review and permitting process — and a clear indication of the urgency the state’s leaders feel in advancing ecological restoration work.
KneeDeep Times •

A South Bay Levee Breaks Ground, And Records – KneeDeep Times

On a drizzly Thursday in April, dozens of reporters, government officials, military brass, conservationists, and bureaucrats gathered beside a weedy shoreline on the edge of San Jose to break ground on an effort worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “We have a grave responsibility to take action, and what you see behind me is an example of that action,” declared Wade Crowfoot, the California Secretary for Natural Resources. The humble surroundings belied the significance of the South San Fran
KneeDeep Times •

Retreat By Any Other Name – KneeDeep Times

Affluence often aligns with stronger resistance to relocation. But an even stronger factor could be how much private versus public land is imperiled. In wealthy San Francisco, a lengthy process of negotiation triumphed with a plan for managed retreat of a beloved public beach, while residents of the remote northern town of King Salmon rallied against the suggestion of relocating from their homes. Nearly three-quarters of the town qualifies as “economically disadvantaged” by federal criteria.
KneeDeep Times •

Realmente Inundado: Observaciones de Las Mareas Más Altas –

Los automóviles que ingresaban a la rampa de la autopista en Mill Valley se derrapaban a través de una sección de cientos de metros de agua salada que les llegaba hasta los tobillos. Junto a la pista del Aeropuerto Internacional de San Francisco, el agua de la bahía brotaba hasta la calle desde un desagüe pluvial. Y en Pacifica, en la costa del condado de San Mateo, cientos de cangrejeros esperanzados en el muelle ignoraron las olas que rompían sobre la acera, y hasta a la carretera junto a la entrada del muelle.
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