After seeing wetlands restoration under way in the Florida Everglades and the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, Ted and Margaret Godshalk knew they had a job to do in rehabilitating the salt marsh in their own National City neighborhood.
“My mother in law has been in the neighborhood for 90 years. That’s part of why it’s so important to us,” says Ted.
Ted had additional motivation. He is executive director of Paradise Creek Educational Park, a non-profit organization working to restore this urban salt marsh creek that links the vast city watershed to San Diego Bay and surrounding mountains.
“We went to the Everglades and to Alaska, and all that fact gathering led us to believe we could do it, too,” Ted says. “It’s nice to work in Alaska, but you have personal contact with it when it is your own neighborhood.”
The National City couple is a driving force behind the salt marsh restoration at Paradise Creek, which serves as home to crabs, egrets, snails and various wetland plants within a working-class area of auto repair and painting shops, industrial warehouses and modest homes.
It is a project that serves two purposes—promoting a cleaner, more natural environment and demonstrating why a healthy marsh can actually save water.
Passing motorists often overlook the half-mile stretch of marsh, which is about the size of four city blocks. To the uninitiated, the creek could be mistaken for a dumping area—and has been, for years. Even if they catch a glimpse of the creek when zipping through the neighborhood of modest homes and auto body shops, people may not appreciate its importance. The creek has long been a dumping ground for used motor oil, batteries and other flotsam that threaten the wildlife and the ocean, just a few hundred yards away.
“People growing up here—because it was so abused—looked at the creek as a polluted sewage system, I suppose,” Margaret says. “It had been used as a dumping ground for decades.”
The Educational Park was created in 1999 on a half-mile stretch of the creek adjacent to Hoover Elementary School, where Margaret teaches fourth grade. In 2005, National City received a $75,000 City Makeover grant from the Metropolitan Water District to help expand the park by providing a wetland pond vegetated with salt marsh plants, coastal sage upland habitat, and interpretive signage to educate the public about the watershed and environmental issues.
The project uses native plants and an automatic irrigation controller to keep the water use to a minimum while the plants are being established, with the water requirements dropping each year until they can survive without supplemental irrigation. National City officials expect that even after the park grows by about 14,000 square feet, water use will be slashed one-third compared to today.
“Metropolitan’s grant is going to help put in native plants and signage, and irrigation—temporary irrigation —because, ideally, the plants won’t need it after a point in time,” Margaret says. “Kids can start seeing it’s not just about the water and the stream to the ocean. It’s about the upland, what they do in their own neighborhoods, their own yards.”
The creek offers Margaret’s classes and others a hands-on science lesson that teaches the importance of ecology both in grand terms and in their backyard. Class participants conduct water quality tests for some of the most important measures of a healthy marsh—dissolved oxygen, phosphates, nitrates, turbidity, and pH. They track their findings in logs to see how the quality changes, then discuss what or who are the culprits.
Salt marshes are transitional areas between land and water, occurring along the inter-tidal shore of estuaries where salt content ranges from near-ocean strength to near fresh. Wetlands destruction can lead to a less water-efficient environment—plants that thrive in a salt marsh are replaced by invasive species or water-thirsty non-native grasses that require supplemental water to remain healthy.
The Paradise Creek project’s main water conservation comes from the switch from high-water-use grass to native plants and a weather-controlled irrigation system that automatically adjusts watering times depending upon the amount of recent rainfall. More important for the community, however, may be the creek-side pathways and boardwalk that will offer a living, outdoor classroom for the community to learn about the beauty and benefits of native habitats—from water conservation to providing critical nesting places for birds.
Kids taking pride in change
That’s the message the Godshalks want kids to hear.
“After our first trip out they ask me ‘Are we going to the creek today?’” Margaret says. “It’s the same excitement I felt as an adult when I started learning about the creek and noticing these beautiful birds, learning about the invertebrates, the California horn snail.
“After learning about how precious that wetland is, there’s a 180-degree turnaround, a feeling of pride in what you have in your very own back yard,” she says. “That whole feeling of pride and stewardship, that’s what I’m going after.”
Kids who are part of Ted’s after-school “Egret Club” participate in monthly creek cleanup days, earning credits that can be redeemed for a free kayak trip on the South San Diego Bay, where lessons are reinforced about the importance of keeping the watershed healthy as it flows to the sea.
“The exciting thing about it is that this is going to keep growing, it’s boundless,” Margaret says. “Hopefully at one point we’re going to step back and just let the kids be the ones who are the stewards.”
