From Trash Heaps to Park Land

Apple Park is perfect. A circle of glass and light, there’s a park inside the circle, complete with sports fields, health care facilities, a pond and fruit trees. The lunchroom is so bright and so white they could film a remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey in it. This may be the very center of the Bay Area that invents new things, making the old things into bricks, trash. What hold does history have on the pure light of innovation?

And yet, even here, every once in a while, someone must throw away a takeout container from the hamburger they snuck past their coworkers. The basic debris of modern life has no place here, but it must have a place. Like other trash in Cupertino, it gets trucked across the Bay to Newby Island, a waste mountain in the very southeast corner of the San Francisco Bay, which serves as the primary landfill for the heart of Silicon Valley, where Google, Intel and a host of would-be and has-been tech concerns have campuses.

Think of it as something like a watershed, but for trash. Newby Island drains some of the most expensive places on this green earth. Two of the five most expensive ZIP codes in the US are in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley sucks in money from all over the world—ad rubles from Russia, iPhone yen, Google ads placed in Ethiopia—and here, it’s used to build sweet little neighborhoods stitched with bike lanes, where a modest 3 bedroom house might run $4 million. And when little Johnny tosses out yet another broken toy, it goes to a place like Newby Island.

When you imagine a landfill, you might think of a huge, open pit. But now, it’s common practice at Newby, as well as other facilities, to cover the trash with dirt. The trash forms massive hills, with just a small patch open for dumping. At the edge of the landfill, the trash heap, covered by dirt, rises roughly 100 feet over the Bay flats. Thanks to an environmental deal cut in the 1980s—preserving a large stand of pickleweed and waterfowl habitat—you can hike a sun-baked gravel road right up to it, passing through the strangest part of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. On your left, waddlings of ducks hunker down in a muddy ditch. On your right, in an anonymous lot, every parked car is a Tesla.

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The berm is made of millions of cubic feet of trash, topped with California’s characteristic dead grass. This is the hot part of the Bay, and on the day I visited last year, it was probably 100 degrees, cloudless. Down at the base of the trash heap, where the Coyote Creek Slough widened out into a few substantial acres of wetlands, it was peaceful and cooler. At the end of the trail, someone had placed three forlorn chairs facing the water, which is murky and rich with birds that twittered in the marsh grass around me. Somewhere, gently, I could hear the beeping of trucks dumping another load of garbage. It was quiet, though. A white truck came barreling down a road on the trash berm that I hadn’t noticed before. Dust rose, and then the vehicle disappeared up and into the landfill, which remained as invisible as the inside of a computer.

Today’s Bayshore is ringed by landfills, retired and still operational. At least 16 of them have been converted into parks, according to the environmental group Save the Bay. To look at these locations is to see a different Bay Area, a Bay where physical work was done, before this place came to control production, not engage in it.

You can pick out many of these former sites because they are built big and flat on the top like a dam. If you really start to look around the Bay, anywhere you see hills down at the water, you can be pretty sure those are a former landfill. We are walking on the refuse of the past, as the earth’s tiny creatures slowly convert it into a habitat.

Much of what we take to be “the land” is something more complex in the Bay’s inner ring. In Oakland, for example, there were tidal estuaries that would have made most of the west side of the city one big muddy slop pile. But we filled it into land.

Fill is literally all around the Bay. At one point, the US Commerce Department projected that by the 2020s, “the Bay could be little more than a wide river,” as the Oakland Tribune put it. Making new land was a long-established practice along the shoreline, and it was only because of major environmental activism that the practice ended in the Bay, preserving the shoreline more-or-less as it was in the 1960s. Slowly, the Bayshore became a place for recreation, not manufacturing explosives, tanning hides or dumping garbage. The jobs that relied on an ugly, polluted bay went elsewhere, taking the wages to other shores, degrading other waters. Quite a trade.

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So, now, you can traipse along the remnants of a former gunpowder manufactory in Pinole. Or you can visit the outsider art installations on the Albany Bulb, the red valerian and their bright pink blooms cascading down some combination of rocks and bricks and cement. Hell, there is a whole island out in the middle of the Bay that was built just for one of those World Fairs in 1939. Now, Treasure Island lies mostly abandoned, but someday in the future, it could be home to thousands as developers reconstruct it into a multibillion-dollar futurescape. What alchemy!

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It doesn’t take voyaging beyond the heart of San Francisco, though, to encounter this history. Downtown is, to a considerable degree, fill. Some ships that sailed here for the Gold Rush simply stopped and got buried over time. There are dozens just sitting there under the asphalt and cement. Workers tunneling regularly hit them. The Google spinout that produced the mixed-reality game, Pokemon Go, even took its name from one of them: Niantic.

I think a lot about whether it matters that people know this history. What does anyone care if the street was once used tires and diapers? What does it mean that there’s a ship filled with old whiskey bottles, coffee cans of buttons and Bibles under the coffee shop? The world we have now was built atop the previous generations’ hopes and wreckage.

There is great hope that through a reckoning (that is the word everyone uses), the nation will be transformed. History is imagined as an almost magical catalyst—apply it to race relations or the collapse of trade unions or coal plants, and surely something must happen. If you can see how the current structures of society are put together, if you know you are walking on trash, then maybe you will dismantle, abolish, reimagine.

Along a road in Emeryville called Shellmound, Ohlone native people once placed their own food refuse and buried their dead until they were dispossessed of their land, and it became an amusement park, and then a shopping center. People protest every few months and have for years. And yet, the sunglass cart keeps selling knock-off eyewear to the people leaving from P.F. Chang’s. As a society, we do not face up to the most basic of our dirty histories—where our trash went and how it formed the literal landscape of our lives. What chance do we ever have to tackle the other tragedies that brought our country and economy into existence?

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Consider the landfill again. Making a landfill into a park takes the work of bureaucrats in the capital, workers on the ground and even tiny microbes eating trash deep in the piles of our history. To make a new America, we’ll need cellular-level change scaled across a continent. And in that sense, maybe our ruins should be seen as a redeemable dump rather than a reified skeleton like the Acropolis or the Constitution. The answers to our dilemmas will not come from digging, but from growing new things within and atop. And it is those novel forces of life that will actually transmute our history, not the other way around.

At César Chávez Park almost directly across from the Golden Gate in the water off Berkeley, a trash hill creates the most perfect kite-flying conditions. Children run over verdant landscape, dragons and quadrangles fluttering above them, ground squirrels skittering for underground burrows. Some green cover can hide so much. And yet: are the kites not flying and the children not running free?

Maybe there is something to the Bay Area’s refusal to remember, the tech industry most especially. Both the American right and left have a strange obsession with our past, choosing moments and people to elevate as special. But the answers don’t actually lie back there. At best, history can help us unlearn, get to zero, know the ground we are standing on. Beyond that, we have to make new paths, ideas and institutions. Silicon Valley at least gets that. It is not walking backwards into this century. The future must be created, and we can’t leave that to the people encased in a perfect circle of glass and light.