A People’s History of SFO
Excerpt from Chapter: Shoreline Futures
By: Eric Porter
SFO, like other airports situated along or near oceans, seas, and estuaries across the globe, is under direct threat from future sea-level rise stemming from racial capitalism’s long development as it has interfaced with atmospheric and geological processes. The question is not whether the airport will be significantly affected by sea-level rise in the future but rather when and by how much.
Knowledge of this threat is nothing new. The sea level has been rising in the Bay Area—about eight inches over the past one hundred years— and common sense has long told observers that runways situated just several feet above bodies of water would be flooded, at least intermittently, if sea levels were to rise significantly. The 1980s witnessed a flurry of government and academic studies prognosticating the effects of sea-level rise on San Francisco Bay and its surrounding communities and infrastructures (including SFO).1 During this decade SFO took some preliminary steps to address the problem by updating and adding earthen berms and seawalls around the facility’s perimeter. In 2015, the Airport Commission secured approval from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a $58 million Shoreline Protection Program to improve about one-half of the facility’s existing bay-facing seawall system. Designed to protect the airport against eleven inches of sea-level rise, the plan was based on some of the rosier estimates from recent studies detailing the potential impacts of rising bay waters on the region by 2050.2
Yet the State of California’s 2017 report, Rising Seas in California, and a 2018 follow-up report, Sea Level Rise Guidance, compelled SFO officials to take into account researchers’ more dismal sea-level rise pre- dictions while also addressing the possibility of additional flooding from one-hundred-year storm surges. According to some of the recent research, including that addressing melting ice sheets, the effects would likely be minimal before 2050 but would increase rapidly after that. Therefore, sea-rise planning should look at 2100 estimates of sea-level rise as well as 2050 estimates. Although one study projected that sea levels could rise about ten feet above 2000 levels by 2100, the report recommended planning based on the more likely scenario that they would increase between 2.4 and 3.4 feet by that date.3
The release of Sea Level Rise Guidance coincided with publication of a study indicating that various parts of the Bay Area, including SFO, were at even great risk from sea-level rise given that they were sinking by as much as ten millimeters a year as a result of the compaction of the landfill and underlying mud deposits upon which they were built. If these predictions were accurate, its authors argued, over half of the airport’s runway and taxiway area might well be underwater by 2100.4 This and other studies published at the end of the 2010s projected that SFO was on its way to becoming part of a mosaic of inundation across the Bay Area that could include Oakland International Airport and the Moffett Airfield, shoreline freeways and other major roadways, parts of San Francisco’s financial district, South Bay technology corporation campuses, tony bayside residential enclaves in Marin County, generally more middle-class communities like Alameda and Foster City, and already-vulnerable low-income, primarily Black and Brown neighbor- hoods in East Oakland, East Palo Alto, and Marin City.5
SFO’s updated Shoreline Protection Plan is best understood within this broader and worsening context of vulnerability. The current plan, as of this writing, is to build steel and concrete walls rising in some areas fifteen to twenty feet above sea level along the eight miles of the airport’s shoreline; add concrete walls to the airport sides of the San Bruno and Millbrae Canals, at the northern and southern ends of the airport respectively; and create an as-yet-to-be-determined barrier to protect the air- port from water spilling over from what could be flooded land to the west. SFO pitched the plan to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors by emphasizing the tremendous economic benefit the facility was providing to the city and the Bay Area more generally in the form of jobs, fees, tax revenues, contracts, purchases, and so on that stemmed directly and indirectly from airport operations. All told, “SFO’s total economic footprint within the Bay Area,” SFO claimed, amounted “to approximately $62.5 billion in business sales, including $20.9 billion in total payroll, and more than 300,000 jobs in the region.” The supervisors approved the $590 million project (with an ultimate cost after interest of as much as $1.7 billion) in September 2019. It was to be paid for with airport revenue bonds that would, in turn, be reimbursed with funds generated by airport leases and concession revenues. Pending environmental review and permitting, the project is scheduled to begin in 2025.6
Other local entities have been moving forward with their own plans for protecting themselves against sea-level rise. The Port of Oakland has embarked on a $46 million project to raise the dike protecting Oakland Airport’s runways and terminals by two feet, although this project would address only estimated sea-level rise through 2050.7 In November 2018, San Francisco voters approved a $425 million project to rebuild the seawall running along the city’s Embarcadero.8 San Mateo County cities along the bay near the airport have been developing their own plans for building or strengthening seawalls.9 In ongoing attempts to raise capital to pay for such mitigation, Oakland, San Francisco, San Mateo County, and Marin County were among the municipal, county, and state governments across the United States that in 2017 filed law- suits against oil, natural gas, and coal companies that sought, unsuccessfully so far, to hold them liable for costs associated with sea-level rise. 9
There have been efforts to coordinate Bay Area sea-level rise mitigation plans so that there is some measure of fairness and equity in this process when it comes to vulnerable populations and municipalities and so that an unsystematic approach to building them does not make sea- level rise worse in some places by diverting water in their direction. The San Francisco Bay Shoreline Adaptation Atlas (2019), for example, encouraged planners to think beyond infrastructural and municipal boundaries and collaborate with others when addressing sea-level rise given that the bay is an “interconnected physical system” that does not adhere to such boundaries. It suggested that Bay Area planners think instead about how their communities (or parts of them) were components of one or more of the thirty “operational landscape units” (OLUs) surrounding the bay that were defined by common physical attributes. The report encouraged local entities to work with other constituencies that shared their OLUs and, when possible, “to identify where nature- based approaches, such as beaches, marshes, and subtidal reefs, can help create a resilient shoreline with multiple benefits.”10
By the time SFO submitted its Shoreline Protection Plan proposal to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for approval, it had been exploring the possibility of coordinating its efforts not only with those of San Mateo County and the California Department of Transportation but also with the surrounding communities of South San Francisco, San Bruno, Millbrae, and Burlingame. This made sense given that SFO and the four cities were all part of the same OLU as identified by the Atlas. But SFO pointed out that these other entities were only just beginning to identify their vulnerabilities and that it was very unlikely that they would have their protection systems in place within the next ten years.11 The uncertain plans for a seawall on the western side of the airport, then, reflected the contingency that SFO might have to go it alone to protect its own interests, leaving its neighbors to fend for themselves, should collaborative projects not be feasible.
The Shoreline Protection Plan was in these ways another articulation of the bottom-line sensibility governing SFO’s vision of “holistic sustainability.” It represented the facility as both site and facilitator of overlapping webs of social, economic, governmental, and environmental relationships that defined the region and enabled it to survive. Climate change represented an existential threat to the facility through sea-level rise, but it also offered a possibility for reimagining airport operations and their role in activating the relationships that sustained the Bay Area. In SFO’s and its supporters’ publicly expressed views, these relationships would ideally be fair and equitable and encourage thriving for the human and nonhuman entities dependent on or protected by a still-functioning airport but only so far as the airport’s own operational survival could be preserved.
It is in part on these terms that SFO moves into the future as an infra- structural manifestation of a succession of regional colonial presents, layered on top of sinking concrete, steel, and landfill upon mud. The airport continues to draw Bay Area inhabitants, human and nonhuman, into contingent, exclusionary, and incorporative relationships, some of which are becoming more visibly bound up in the survival of the planet itself. As before, the reproduction of power through these relationships stems from the operations of the things themselves in complex, multidirectional ways as well as through attempts to mitigate them. So, what might that look like, as SFO, like other airports, tries to sustain itself— and, by extension, as multiple constituents try to sustain themselves— into an uncertain future? And how will such work help to define the Bay Area’s future regional colonial presents?
Whatever happens will remain part of a global story of how, in Julie Sze’s words, “capitalism and carbon live out and through systematic dispossession, production, extraction, and disposability—in short, death and violence.” The neocolonial- and neoliberal-wrought environmental devastation and the killing fields in the Niger Delta and the Amazon headwaters are among the latest manifestations of this history, and over one billion people possibly displaced across the globe by various effects of climate change (water shortages, extreme heat, stronger storms, wildfires, armed conflicts, and, of course, rising seas) by 2050 represents its short-term future.12 But a significant part of this global story of the exercise of asymmetrical power will be the efforts to mitigate and repair the damage wrought by this devastating history linked to the pursuit of wealth and convenience.
The recent past, globally, has been defined not only by new forms of political and economic sovereignty across the globe (albeit often limited and contradictory) but also by the ability of growing numbers of humans to consume more fossil fuels after having that expression of modernity “suppressed” by Western powers.13 Yet the economic growth of developing countries—much deserved, by a certain calculation, after being stymied by European and US interests—and the attendant rise of their carbon emissions have helped bring home the fact that a just distribution of resources and consumption of them rooted in our fossil fuel–based economy is an unfolding disaster that may culminate in the end of humans on earth.14
SFO, as international hub for passengers and cargo, has helped to facilitate this dynamic at a global as well as a local scale. On the one hand, international airports reproduce unequal economic relationships that go hand in hand with continued asymmetries in carbon emission levels. One recent study shows that 1 percent of flyers account for 50 percent of all aircraft emissions, while only 11 percent of the world’s population fly at all in the given year.14 Scaling that up, we know that global megacities, enriched by technology and finance, are leaving cities in “flyover country” behind.15 And we cannot forget that the proliferation of global systems of finance and goods, facilitated by air travel and commerce, is also the path to short-term immiseration for those still left out of this redistribution of resources. Consider what global capital accumulation has done for female Bangladeshi garment factory workers; young men mining coltan for mobile phones in the Democratic Republic of Congo; migrants of all ages and genders risking being caged, being raped, or dying in the desert along the United States’ southern border; the unhoused living in tents, collecting cans, and trading bicycle parts in an increasingly unaffordable Bay Area (and where I live in Santa Cruz), and . . . that list goes on.
Yet airborne commerce simultaneously represents the possible amelioration of some exclusions and inequalities. Industry champions often point out that such commerce fuels economic growth in countries with developing economies such as China, India, and Kenya, enriching the elite, of course, but also sustaining electronics manufacturing, agriculture, and other industries that are lifting at least some workers and their families out of poverty.15 Ditto for the rapidly growing travel and tourism sector—approximately 10 percent of the global economy before the Covid-19 pandemic—which, while leading to profoundly uneven economic development in tourist areas and a decline of status for farmers, factory workers, and others engaged in longer-standing means of supporting themselves, also leads to significant social advancement for others.16
Some have argued that the relatively limited current impact of aviation on global warming for the time being (perhaps 3.5 percent now) relative to its economic benefits suggests that air travel for business and leisure and cargo operations should be encouraged while the world focuses on reducing the greater threat of emissions from burning coal. Yet such a strategy, which could see aviation’s share of global emissions rise to 15–20 percent, might at best only keep the world on the perilous path being defined by current levels of emissions given how entangled air travel and cargo are with other economic sectors (manufacturing, ground transportation, agriculture) that otherwise rely on fossil fuel use.17 Consider, for example, SFO’s claims about its indirect impact on the Bay Area economy. And, of course, if the world becomes more economically just, as the wages of workers across the world increase, even if minimally, in a global economy stimulated by air commerce, those workers will use more fossil fuel directly to heat their homes, cook their food, and get to work, and, indirectly, to grow their food and manufacture the material goods they purchase.18
Wealthier nations and urban areas across the global North will generally be in a better position to mitigate the effects of climate change than their poorer counterparts in the South, but there will be differential responses among rich and poor constituents in both North and South.19 There will no doubt be some measure of displacement from sea-level rise around the Bay Area, perhaps by 2050, certainly by 2100, and everyone will feel some effects. Most likely, poor and working-class people, especially those who are Black, indigenous, and people of color, will be affected more dramatically by sea-level rise in the region. There is, after all, greater probability that wealthier low-lying neighborhoods or what are deemed essential or commercial or transportation infrastructures will be better protected by government-funded mitigation projects than will lower-income flatland neighborhoods.20 If communities are intermittently or permanently inundated, wealthier individuals and small businesses in those areas, generally speaking, as was evident in Houston, New Orleans, and elsewhere in recent decades, will be better equipped, given their social and financial capital, to address their circumstances by rebuilding, relocating, negotiating legal and federal aid systems, and so on.
Yet a future of neoliberal depredation and asymmetrical social power may be complicated by the contingently obligatory relations of people, power, and things defining the region. There may be differential out- comes for lower- or middle-income people in low-lying areas, depending on the extent to which their neighborhoods, by virtue of proximity, fall within the areas covered by projects geared toward protecting wealthier neighborhoods or critical infrastructures. Residents living in modest neighborhoods near US 101 in Marin or San Mateo Counties or Interstate 880 in East Oakland could be protected by projects designed to keep open these major transportation corridors. A multiracial coalition of community activists, environmentalists, and municipal officials in East Palo Alto are already engaged in an impressive array of efforts to make their community more climate resistant, but they could additionally benefit if plans for collaborative shoreline protection ventures with wealthier, neighboring communities and regional planning agencies materialize.21
Also potentially playing a role moving forward is gentrification. Formerly a majority-African American city, now majority-Latinx, East Palo Alto is again undergoing transformation as wealthier, young technology sector workers are moving in. As of this writing, the median home price was just under $1 million. Although it is unclear what this and similar communities will look like decades from now, growing populations of wealthier residents may be able to leverage more clout, tax base, and networks to mitigate the effects of rising bay waters, thus increasing the likelihood that lower-income residents will be protected too—at least those who are not displaced by rising housing costs.
SFO, as assemblage, will continue to play its own role in the local human drama of sea-level rise, displacement, and mitigation. The relatively modest—albeit with extraordinarily high home prices—neighbor- hoods of Bayside Manor in Millbrae and Lomita Park in San Bruno might benefit from a successful collaboration between SFO and its neighbors. But if SFO ends up acting on its own to build a seawall on the landward side of its perimeter before those cities complete projects of their own, their low-lying neighborhoods may experience even greater flooding. And even a successful collaboration between SFO and its immediate neighbors may well increase flooding in areas elsewhere near the bay that remain unprotected.22
Meanwhile, sustained employment at SFO may indeed enable some residents of these and other low- and middle-income neighborhoods to better endure the effects of climate change. As discussed earlier, airport work for Black and Filipinx workers has been a site of advancement but also of marginality, as it has been for others. SFO is a site where racial and gendered asymmetries emanating from long histories of colonial encounter and labor exploitation continue to play out. Even with new- found commitments to “social equity,” hierarchies of status, pay, and relative permanence are likely to be exacerbated by job cuts and reductions of hours stemming from climate-related rising operational costs and disruptions. Yet for some, SFO will remain a source of steady work, enabling them and their families to maintain some measure of stability amid challenging circumstances.
But workers in a future “carbon-neutral” airport that facilities the release of huge amounts of Scope 3 emissions will, of course, be implicated in further climate change. Not as much as the oil companies who made great profits and exacted exorbitant human and environmental costs extracting fossil fuels over the years and then did what they could since the 1960s, and especially since the late 1970s, to diminish public knowledge of the long-term climatic impacts of the burning of these fuels and to stymie government regulation of that burning.23 And not as much as the local governments now suing the oil economies that have up until very recently promoted carbon-centered development. And not as much as the airlines, and not as much as frequent-flying cosmopolitan business and leisure travelers. But to the extent that airport workers sustain the operation, commute to and from work, and use their wages to travel by air, they will, collectively, like other less wealthy people across the globe, play a growing role in the deterioration of the planet as populations grow and individuals use more carbon resources.
SFO as heavy infrastructure on sinking Ramaytush Ohlone land, dumping carbon into the atmosphere even as the facility becomes greener, will in these and other ways reproduce the Bay Area’s multiple colonial pasts and presents, articulated or disarticulated as they will be, to and from the colonial pasts and presents of other places. SFO’s “sustainability,” then, is ultimately a descriptor of a current set of environ- mentally and socially focused policies and of present and future manifestations of a history of reproducing power in the Bay Area. SFO does not represent the whole story of our networked, regional colonial present and its possible futures, yet as a uniquely visible, spectacular and mundane, deeply symbolic assemblage, it offers insights about the social, political, cultural, and economic dynamics that have shaped the layers of colonial encounter that have defined the region over the past century and will do so into as much as we have of a future.
How humans will ultimately respond to the climate crisis remains an open question. Despite the recent and more obvious local signs of the crisis—fires and smoke, drought and excessive heat, floods and mudslides when rainstorms do actually happen—there are signs all around the region that the forces of business as usual hold firm, that many people are too entrenched in their routines and their investments in comfort, convenience, God, or ideology to move beyond denial. Some, well aware of what’s coming, are moving forward with a cynical understanding, shared by elites and members of the middle classes across the globe, that poor people, Indigenous people, and people of color—by virtue of previous acts of marginalization and dispossession that put them in harm’s way in urban heat islands, low-lying areas, and marginal reservation lands with limited resources to take action on their own behalf—will just have to bear the brunt of the effects of global warming.24 Such awareness is often paired with the belief that new security measures will be necessary to keep their responses to those effects (both political and migratory) in check.25 Some are paralyzed by the unfathomableness of it all, while governments are paralyzed by partisan, bureaucratic, or budgetary dysfunction. Some are putting their faith in technological or market-based fixes. Some of the most marginalized and aggrieved are simply trying to survive other crises.
But California and the Bay Area in particular remain key nodes of activism around climate change, and many of their residents, individually and collectively, are working toward a reparative future by engaging in important small acts in the arenas of environmental justice, ecological restoration, scientific and social research, education, urban gardening and food redistribution, and old-fashioned protest.26 Local Indigenous peoples have been important leaders in such efforts. Members of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, for example, have been working with state agencies and conservation groups on ecological restoration projects on the Peninsula that “seek to show how Indigenous practices of land management are critical in addressing climate collapse.” These include the restoration of trout and salmon habitats in San Mateo County creeks.27 The Indigenous women-led Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in the East Bay has dedicated itself “to heal and transform the legacies of colonization, genocide, and patriarchy and to do the work our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.” At the time of this writing they were in the process of establishing a series of Himmetkas, or “culturally based emergency response hub[s],” designed to ameliorate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and other crises through the creation of ceremonial space, food and medicine gardens, stores of medicine and clean water, and other community resources.28
Such work is necessary: small acts, as they are, they stem from broader projects of sovereignty and cultural revitalization that remain, as they always have been, the most foundationally important responses to the networked colonialisms and imperialisms set in motion in the region by Spanish soldiers and missionaries, Californio ranchers, and Anglo financiers, and lived by most of the rest of us through a multiplicity of historically unfolding assemblages. These decolonial responses point to a possible future, very different from the one most of us who live in and around the Bay Area have the capacity to pursue. Perhaps there is hope for a successful movement—and real reform, with land repatriation and wealth redistribution accompanying environmental repair—to follow this lead despite the proliferation of signs that the enormity of the problems generated by climate change and the sum total of human refusals to deal with it will just be too extensive to over- come, by anyone. Some of that struggle may well manifest itself at and around SFO as long as it remains open, and SFO, in turn, may well continue to be a touchstone for analyzing the relationships that have defined the region—at least as long as people still have the luxury of analyzing things.
It is fitting that San Francisco Bay will be a primary agent in what comes next. After long being filled, silted, polluted, littered, sonically assaulted, and warmed over, the bay (and whatever living things are left in it), with its expanding waters most recently the product of the longer durée of racial capitalism, will continue its epochal processes of rising and falling, moved by the earth’s and moon’s gravitational pulls and changing winds. As it transforms the contours of surrounding tidelands and makes new tidelands, it will approach, surround, and perhaps even move within the airport. The bay will thus, by extension, help redefine the colonial presents of the future, with its intrusive, brackish water demanding of those people who inhabit it a more holistic, planetary perspective than many of us hold today when it comes to understanding connections among humans, other forms of life, and their built and nature-made surroundings.29
Eric Porter is Professor of History, History of Consciousness, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
SOURCES
- Sze, Julie. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 81.
- Institute for Economics and Peace, Ecological Threat Register 2020, 4.
- Ghosh, Great Derangement, 107–10; Mitchell, Carbon Democracy.
- As Amitav Ghosh argues, “Inasmuch as the fruits of the carbon economy constitute wealth, and inasmuch as the poor of the global south have historically been deprived of this wealth, it is certainly true, by every available canon of distributive justice, that they are entitled to a greater share of the rewards of that economy. But even to enter into that argument is to recognize how deeply we are mired in the Great Derangement: our lives and our choices are enframed in a pattern of history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but toward our self-annihilation.” Great Derangement, 110–11.
- “One Percent of the World’s Population Accounts for More Than Half of Flying Emissions,” Lund University, News, November 19, 2020, www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/one-percent-worlds-population-accounts-more-half- flying-emissions.
- Emily Badger, “The Megacity, Untethered,” New York Times, December 24, 2017.
- Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis, 337–38.
- For an account of the contradictory effects of tourism on a region (specifically, Mexico’s Yúcatan Peninsula), see Córdoba Azcárate, Stuck with Tourism.
- Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis, 335–44; Griggs and Howarth, Politics of Airport Expansion, 67, 308–9; Ritchie, “Climate Change and Flying.”
- Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital,” 11.
- Sengupta, “Crisis Right Now,” New York Times.
- Lise Alves, “San Francisco Bay Area’s Multifront Plans,” Miami Beach Times.
- Kevin Stark and Ezra David Romero, “What Can the Bay Area Do about Rising Seas? East Palo Alto Has a Few Great Answers,” KQED, April 22, 2021, http://www.kqed.org/science/1973805/climate-solutions-in-east-palo-alto; Gennady Sheyner, “With Baylands under Flood Threat, Palo Alto Explores Projects to Address Sea Level Rise,” Palo Alto Online, September 8, 2020, http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/09/07/with-baylands-under-flood-threat-palo-alto-explores-projects-to-address-sea-level-rise.
- The potential of local sea-rise mitigation projects to increase flooding elsewhere in the Bay Area is discussed in Hummel et al., “Economic Evaluation.”
- Rich, Losing Earth.
- Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, “How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering,” New York Times, August 24, 2020; Christopher Flavelle and Kalen Goodluck, “Dispossessed, Again,” New York Times, October 28, 2021.
- Ghosh, Great Derangement, 143–49.
- For a survey of such activity across California, see Merenlender and Buhler, Climate Stewardship.
- Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, “Purpose Statement,” accessed June 24, 2021, http://www.ramaytush.org/about.html.
- Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, “Our Vision,” accessed July 20, 2021, https://sogoreate-landtrust.org.
- Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital,” 23. As Chakrabarty puts it, “The realization that humans—all humans, rich or poor—come late in the planet’s life and dwell more in the position of passing guests than possessive hosts has to be an integral part of the perspective from which we pursue our all-too-human but legitimate quest for justice on issues to do with the iniquitous impact of anthropogenic climate change.”