y found in 19 storm drains along some of San Diego's most popular surfing beaches was disgusting: Total coliform bacteria counts—which should be below 1,000 parts per million (ppm) for safe swimming—as high as 1.6 million ppm; counts of sewage-loving fecal coliform—which should be below 200 ppm for safe swimming—as high as 240,000. Armed with hard data, Donna launched a tireless campaign to get warning signs posted by the storm drains, fix leaking sewer pipes, require more stringent beach-water monitoring, and divert the worst offending drains into the sewer system.
Her activism eventually catapulted her onto the city council in 2001, one of the few Democrats to win a seat in the largely Republican town. Such is the power of her clean water message that Donna has twice nearly won the mayor's seat, losing by 8 percent last November to a former police chief. With city hall wracked with scandals and mountains of debt from the previous administration, San Diegans chose the conservative cop over the radical clean water activist.
Donna takes it all in stride. Since she began her campaign in the mid-1990s, the city has experienced 70 percent fewer sewage spills and 60 percent fewer beach closures. The beaches are better, she says, but there's much more to be done, like restoring the San Diego River and upgrading the Point Loma wastewater plant to secondary treatment.
"One of the jabs against me was, She may know clean water, but what's she know about running a city?" Donna says with that husky laugh. "Let me tell you, dirty water, dirty politics, it all comes from the same source."
II. THE CONCERNED SCIENTIST
In which a marine scholar uses science and charm to sound the alarm about the state of the coasts
Far from the beaches of San Diego, a dozen or so young men and women in foul-weather gear and fleece scramble over a rocky Oregon headland on a low-tide scientific quest. Some collect bright orange pot scrubbers and gray squares of Plexiglas bolted amid a carpet of brown mussels. Others filter seawater through a sieve or measure the location of floppy sea palms with a transit. One student even scours the tide pools for sea urchin tube feet for something she calls the Urchin Genome Project.
Amid the blitzkrieg of data collection, a woman with short reddish brown hair, green Wellies, and gold sea star earrings hops from rock to rock, passing out organic chocolate, lending a hand or a word of advice when needed. Jane Lubchenco and her husband and colleague, Bruce Menge, both of Oregon State University, have tried to understand this salty world for the past 28 years—and with that gain a greater understanding of the fundamental ecological principles that govern all life on Earth.
"The rocky intertidal area is incredibly good for studying the interactions between land and oceans," says Lubchenco, a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Pew Oceans Commission. "We're trying to understand the linkages and how they're affected by human activity. Nutrient pollution, global warming, fishing, a whole number of things are all coming together right along the littoral zone."
Today, however, the two scientists are trying to wrap their brains around one of the knottiest problems in marine biology: recruitment, or how many young of a species come into a system each year. Unlike land animals, in which the young stay within a population, ocean species tend to spread their little guys to the currents, while receiving others from afar, making it impossible for fisheries managers to know how much of a stock fishermen can sustainably catch each year. After years of trial and error, Menge discovered that plastic pot scrubbers are the perfect media for catching baby mussels, while Plexiglas squares coated with scratchy nonslip paint are the perfect landing spots for baby barnacles. And baby mussels and barnacles act much like baby rockfish and Dungeness crabs, two species worth millions to West Coast fishermen each year.
"It looks clean, and compared with other parts of the world it is," Lubchenco 