Letter: Response to T. Jack Foster on Saltworks

It’s not surprising to see how T. Jack Foster feels about developing the Redwood City Saltworks ("The economics of the Saltworks issue” in the April 19 edition of The Daily Journal), given his family’s history of plundering the bay for their own economic benefit (where did Foster City get its name, after all?). That piece of information in and of itself should be enough to send the average reader running in the opposite direction regarding what to do with the Saltworks to adopt Save the Bay’s proposal to restore all of this ecologically sensitive land back to its pristine state.

Foster sees the Saltworks as property that "has not been a part of the Bay since 1900.” What’s funny about this is that at some point in time humans as a species will no longer exist, and the Saltworks will revert to baylands as it was and should be. Since the 1950’s and early 60s, the Bay Area has been a leader in the movement towards looking at our world differently than those that would dam, pave and otherwise deface just about every inch of our environment.

Clearly Foster didn’t get the message that environmental awareness is about taking a long-term view of our surroundings instead of fighting the natural world to stuff as much money into our pockets as quickly as possible.

Saving the saltworks in order to preserve the unique habitat known as San Francisco Bay is the truly visionary action to take here, and Foster and his developer buddies need to keep their greedy paws off of this treasure that belongs to all of us.

Gerald Clark

San Jose