OUR SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: WATER

Sustainability Spotlight: Alumni

KEEPING POLLUTION AT BAY

Sejal Choksi-Chugh 96Ox 98C, Executive Director of San Francisco Baykeeper 

As the executive director of San Francisco Baykeeper, Sejal Choksi-Chugh 96Ox 98C heads a staff of fourteen people charged with stopping pollution and other threats from harming the San Francisco Bay and its tributaries. The nonprofit even has a patrol boat and a team of 10 volunteer skippers who regularly monitor pollution and other harmful activities.

 Baykeeper’s program centers on two key intersections of science and law. The first is investigating the scope of pollution around the Bay. The second is holding corporate polluters and government agencies accountable to environmental laws and policies to reduce the pollution.

“We’ve identified roughly 1,100 shoreline sites where floods in these areas could deposit more toxins into the bay,” Choksi-Chugh says. To educate residents about these shoreline threats, her team mounted a Google car camera on a pontoon boat, sharing imagery of hundreds of places that could be exposed to flooding due to sea-level rise.

 Another important tenet of Baykeeper’s mission is to promote cleaner energy sources. “There are a lot of proposals for oil refinery and coal facility expansion near the Bay,” she says. “We are doing what we can to block them and fight for clean energy alternatives.”

 West Coast water wars are another daily battle — with Baykeeper frequently advising locals about the benefits of reduced water consumption. “Right now, we have more water being taken out of the rivers than is healthy,” Choksi-Chugh says.

—Brian Hudgins