March 31st, 2025

Creeks provide comforts that are appealing to all people. Photo by Zhihao Wang

When Home Is Creekside: A Call for Coexistence

By Dr. Gregory Pasternack, UC Davis

​In the early afternoon each day, children from Browns Valley TK-8 School in Napa pour outside on the last bell. A number of them make their way across the street to Buhman Park where they flock past the official “keep out” signs to go down into Brown’s Creek. Some sit huddled on the bank socializing, while others play in and around the stream. They’re doing what comes natural to many of us and which many parents wish their kids would or could do, rather than fixate on screens- despite the equally forceful desire and actions of adults to sanitize and sandbox children’s lives away from wild spaces.

I am not particularly literary, but consider this viewpoint from Moby Dick author Herman Melville: “But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley… What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him…but that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

And so it has come to pass that when people find themselves without a house and disconnected from the communities built by and for housed people, they naturally make their way across the streets and down into the creeks. They seek safety, peace, freedom, and really just to survive. In California, they are doing this in the thousands to tens of thousands of people- and growing. It may come as a surprised but we actually know relatively little about these people, and in fact we know almost as little about the streams they are moving into. I am leading a program to change that, to become educated about the social and environmental scope of current affairs in our regional Bay Area urban stream corridors. But this is not a story about that, this is the story about the people and the crisis.

To housed people, environmentalists, and urban planners, it is as if masses of undesirable humanity have suddenly appeared out of nowhere and caused a host of problems. Backyard creeks are no longer safe for recreation. Feces, trash, and pollution are overwhelming nature. Decades of planning, cleaning up, and conserving riparian and aquatic species now seem to have been for naught. This simplistic mindset leads to the conclusion that the people themselves are THE problem, and when faced with a people-problem, then the typical societal solution is force. Force comes in the form of criminalization, police, and bulldozers- even bulldozing people to death for mere lack of bothering to even check if tents are empty before crushing them and their content. Human life is very cheap in this mindset.

If we pause to think deeper, how do we frame our understanding of the problem at hand? There are many ways to do that, but I want to share with you the thinking I have developed and where it has led me in my efforts.

Let’s begin by considering how housed people use the environment and how they are financially subsidized and enabled to do so. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited park in the U.S., with 12 million visitors per year yielding a density impact of 23 visitors per acre (5th ranked density). It has an annual base budget of $22 million. That budget pays for maintenance and infrastructure, conservation and resource management, visitor education and services, and emergency services and law enforcement, among other activities. Now, imagine if all that money was removed. How do you think that park would look within 1 year? What kinds of problems can you imagine would arise?

In the 2023–2024 fiscal year, the California Department of Parks and Recreation received a budget of ~$1 billion that served ~80 million visitors to state parks. Of that, >$876 million was used to support the day-to-day operations of state parks and >$11 million built or improves park infrastructure. Now, imagine if all that money was removed. How do you think that our state parks would look within 1 year? What kinds of problems can you imagine would arise?

These thought exercises have led me to a revelation. The viewpoint that unhoused people are ruining nature is not really a problem about people. Instead, it is a problem about the unjust allocation of parks, recreation, and natural resource protection funds to almost exclusively serve housed people. As a society, we maintain vast areas of land and water on the chance that housed people will go there and use them. But here we are- thousands to tens of thousands of unhoused Americans are choosing to go to nature to use it for similar activities and our society refuses to spend money to support them with comparable services that housed Americans get. Of course there are some differences, but there is no natural law dictating that governments cannot flexibly adjust their allocations and activities on the basis of what people are doing. To some reasonable point, governments should follow citizens to where they go with their needs. More and more people are moving into urban stream corridors and using them intensively, so resources should follow, which might also then necessitate changing laws and regulations accordingly.

On the basis of this thinking and through many discussions with people in the SF Bay Area, I have developed a new vision for blending social and environmental stewardship of urban stream corridors in support of the unhoused people and native species residing in them. I call it “coexistence restoration”. For starters, we have to move beyond the privileged myth that humans are not a natural part of riverscapes. We have to allow, enable, and support unhoused people to live in our urban stream corridors, recognizing that many houses already exist in them, despite typically violating modern environmental management concepts and practices. Of course, we also need to protect and expand ecological functioning in those corridors in areas used by housed and unhoused people. That said, unless someone can come up with 2.5 million new housing units in California by 2031, then the reality is that people are going to be living along streams anyway - it’s unstoppable, whether or not you agree that it’s morally wrong to push around tens of thousands of people from one spot to another with no real solution present. So how do we do this- how do we allow both humans and rivers to be dynamic entities living together? 

Coexistence restoration would have to involve putting together a team of folks spanning expertise and community representatives to develop the specifications for what we would want a site to achieve. I imagine we need a park/recreation expert to help share the lessons of how one designs an effective camp site. We need a blend of environmental scientists to share lessons about the hazards to avoid and ecological functions to promote. We need health and safety experts to avoid the pitfalls that shelters have experienced in California as a resulting of facing far more societal problems than they are designed and funded to address, as recently reported by Cal Matters. And of course we need community leaders from government and NGOs as well as interested citizens to drive what creates a humanitarian outcome. We will also have to overcome entrenched regulatory frameworks that would preclude things like growing food trees and vines along a river instead of planting native trees that produce no food. And probably more I have not even thought of yet. It is a grand challenge, for sure, but one we should strive for.

Ultimately, there is no easy, cheap answer - but we also do not need to spend lots of “new” money on it either, we just have to reallocate funds justly between housed an unhoused citizens. I hope society does not fall for the expeditious path of blaming the victim by taking us down another dark period of incarcerating large numbers of people at high cost with little to show for it, as we saw with the “War Against Drugs”. I understand that many housed people just want to turn away and not look at other’s suffering. I myself often feel paralyzed by the scope of problems facing human civilization. Yet, I have found hope and inspiration among folks such as those at SOS Richmond, Daily Acts, Grid Alternatives, South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition, our local Resource Conservation Districts, and many more. I have taken to heart that even as an academic and a river scientist, there are things I can do to help. In a world that we all must share, I believe we can adapt and grow to help each other. This is coexistence restoration.

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SOS Staffer, Mike Tyner, helping clean up a creekside encampment. Photo by Maurice Tierney.