Environment

The federal government has been collecting the Harbor Maintenance Tax from port customers for years with the specific purpose of port maintenance and dredging. When the government increased the tax in 1990, it did so with the explicit promise that all dredging needs would be met with funds collected from the tax, according to Port of Oakland’s spokesperson Marilyn Sandifur. Today, in the long, drawn-out battle over port funds, Port of Oakland officials claim the government has not released sufficient funds for maintenance over the years, and the proof is in the channels’ depths.

Oakland’s inaugural Veg Week starts this weekend. A number of events geared toward community education about meatless lifestyle choices will be taking place from April 15-21.

The Oakland Food Policy Council is an organization dedicated to developing a local food system that can feed all citizens of the city in a healthy, sustainable way. The 21-seat council, which was established in 2005 with seed money from the city, meets monthly to work on initiatives that address some of Oakland’s most pressing food concerns, like poor nutrition, access to fresh produce and antiquated laws.

At first glance Christopher and Gerald Dixon seem like any other pair of twins. They look alike, dress similarly and play together. But Gerald is autistic and Christopher isn’t. The boys were one of 1100 twin pairs who participated in the largest ever study of Autism in twins, the California Autism Twins Study (CATS). The study found that the environment plays a much bigger role in causing autism than previously thought.

Oaksterdam University, a center that offers training for workers in the marijuana industry, and several of the organization’s related buildings were raided Monday morning by federal agents. According to Dale Sky Jones, Oaksterdam University’s executive chancellor, federal agents raided five Oaksterdam-related locations around 8 am, including the home of founder Richard Lee and the organization’s downtown dispensary, storage unit, school, and the former site of the Blue Sky coffee shop, the last four of which are located on Broadway in…

There is great news for fishermen and salmon lovers. This year’s projected salmon count in watersheds around the bay is higher than it has been in years. Last year only about 115,000 salmon were counted swimming from the bay up the Sacramento River. This year the projected count is over 800,000.

Across the country bugs are popping up on restaurant menus and on Internet cooking shows and blogs. They’re the focus of festivals and a main ingredient in a number of proposed future foods, like granola bars and seasonings. You can definitely find bugs on the menu here in the Bay Area. Fried wax moth larvae tacos are served at the Don Bugito food cart in San Francisco and chocolate-coated fried grasshoppers made a crunchy addition to Oakland’s homemade ice creams at Lush Gelato last summer. East Bay resident Scott Bower, founded a group for like-minded foodies—the Bay Area Bug Eating Society—back in 1999, and the poster-child of edible bug consumption, Daniella Martin, hails from the area as well.

The San Francisco Bar Pilots navigate all the ships through the San Francisco Bay. They take the occasional cruise ship in and out of Monterey Bay, as well as piloting commercial vessels as far up the Sacramento River as Stockton, but the majority of the traffic comes from the Oakland port.

As the number of homeless and illegal boat dwellers has increased, they say, so has a chronic wave of thefts that has kept marinas on both sides of the Oakland estuary under siege. Meanwhile, they complain, the illegal estuary dwellers are causing a host of environmental problems by disposing of sewage in the water or abandoning their boats, which can leach toxic substances as they disintegrate.