Issue date: February 02, 2000
By ANDREA GEMMET
It is a bleak, rain-drenched Monday morning at Kanditorei in Ladera, but David Smernoff, 41, is looking on the bright side.
"All this rain is good for the native grasses we planted at Arastradero," says the Portola Valley resident.
Most of the patrons at the busy coffee shop are gearing up for a soggy commute and look like native grasses are the last things on their minds. Coming from Mr. Smernoff, who was recently named Bay Area Action's environmental volunteer of the decade, the remark isn't too surprising.
Mr. Smernoff is the driving force behind the Arastradero Preserve Stewardship Project, a collaboration between the city of Palo Alto and Bay Area Action, a local nonprofit environmental organization.
The preserve, which is in Palo Alto adjacent to Portola Valley, encompasses several miles of hiking trails through grasslands and graceful native oak trees. When work on the project started in 1997, Arastradero was also home to several derelict buildings, five species of prickly and aggressive thistles, and numerous other invasive exotic plants that were killing native plants and animals.
While the battle against the thistles and exotic plants is still being waged, trails have been repaired and widened, native plants re-introduced, and the old buildings dismantled and recycled. And Mr. Smernoff's had a hand in all of it.
Since he's been involved with the project, Mr. Smernoff has lobbied city officials, organized volunteers, stored tools, cleared trails, uprooted and chopped down scores of invasive plants, and learned the essentials of building de-construction.
Susan Stansbury, the director of Bay Area Action, calls the Arastradero project a testament to Mr. Smernoff's tenacity.
"Just getting a contract with Palo Alto took a lot of hard work and perseverance, and he was there all the way," she says.
Naming Mr. Smernoff the volunteer of the decade is Bay Area Action's way of recognizing his commitment and hard work for the group, says Ms. Stansbury.
"I don't think (BAA) would be anywhere near as successful (without him)," she says. "I don't even know if it would exist."
It was by working on Earth Day 1990 while he was a biology graduate student at Stanford that Mr. Smernoff got involved with the local environmental activists who went on to found Bay Area Action. With the exception of a year he spent doing post-doctorate work in France, he's been involved with Bay Area Action -- and local environmental causes -- ever since.
With a degree in environmental management from the University of San Francisco and a job at NASA's Ames Research Center studying the creation of closed eco-systems for spacecraft and planets, it's easy to see why local environmental groups are happy to have Mr. Smernoff on board.
Mary Davey, a member of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District's board of directors, says that his knowledge and dedication made him a valuable contributor during the three years he served on the board. Mr. Smernoff gave up his seat on the board in 1998 when he left his Mountain View district to move to Portola Valley.
She credits Mr. Smernoff with getting younger people involved in the Open Space District, and with bringing mountain bikers -- a controversial group -- into the fold.
Whether to allow mountain bicyclists to use trails in the district's 24 preserves has been a divisive issue for board members, who are concerned that the bikers cause erosion, trample delicate habitats, irritate hikers and create illegal trails.
"David made all of us look at it more objectively," says Ms. Davey. "He opened our eyes to the fact that there are many mountain bike people out there and he acted as a liaison between the board and (them)."
Mr. Smernoff says he agrees that mountain bikes can be damaging, but thinks that by educating the cyclists, the Open Space District can quell most of the problems.
"There are people vandalizing the district's open space preserves, and I think they should be put in jail," he says. "But there are other very responsible riders, ones who work on the trails."
Betsy Crowder, who represents Portola Valley, Atherton, Menlo Park and Woodside on the Open Space District board, says she considers Mr. Smernoff's support of mountain bikers his one failing as an environmentalist.
"He was always in favor of environmental things, like using tree-free paper and restoring the preserves, with one exception: He was an advocate for mountain bicycling," Ms. Crowder says. "My feeling is that it's not environmentally friendly.
Despite the mountain bike flap, it's clear that Mr. Smernoff is deeply concerned about environmental causes, both local and global.
"I don't think a lot of people see the urgency in the problems that we have," he says.
He says one of the problems is that the earth's eco-systems can absorb a lot of stress before they reach the breaking point. By the time there is a problem big enough to get people's attention, it could be too late. He uses toxins that come from plastics as an example.
"Hospitals burn plastics which releases dioxin, which is one of the most potent carcinogens," he says. "Which makes more people sick, which means there's more plastics in the hospitals that you're burning. At what point do you have this big shift, where there are huge outbreaks of cancer? We just don't know enough to know where those points are."
The sensible approach is to follow the precautionary principle and not do something if you don't know enough about its effects on the environment or on human health, he says.
"We operate under the opposite principle," he says. "We do something and keep doing it until it causes a problem that's a crisis."
Mr. Smernoff speaks passionately about the importance of protecting the environment, but at the same time understands that activists need to keep a healthy perspective about their own limitations.
"One of the biggest problems at Bay Area Action is burning people out," he says. "People get overwhelmed and over-committed."
He says it's difficult not to get depressed once you've seen how urgent and enormous the problems facing the world are. He says he knows one activist who has become clinically depressed by the state of the environment.
"There are times when I get that way myself. I think everyone I work with goes through bouts of feeling overwhelmed and ineffective, like things are just going from bad to worse," Mr. Smernoff says.
It's important to focus on attainable goals, and to try to keep environmental projects enjoyable, which is something Bay Area Action does very well, he says.
It also helps to have enough time to devote to environmental projects, something increasingly rare in the fast-paced economy of Silicon Valley.
Mr. Smernoff made time for his extensive volunteer commitments by turning down a 20-percent pay raise in exchange for working only four days a week at NASA. Despite having a job with flexible hours, he says there are times when his energy for his environmental work flags.
"There are some Saturdays when I sure don't want to get up (to go to Arastradero," he says.
On one such Saturday, he forced himself to drive the tools out to the preserve and found an east Menlo Park teacher with seven or eight students waiting for him, ready to help out.
"It turned out to be such a fun day," Mr. Smernoff says.
The kids, who had never been to the preserve before, got absorbed in tearing out huge clumps of the invasive grasses that are choking out the preserve's native plants, he says. The kids climbed oak trees, held lizards, and even got rides on the horse of a equestrian who happened by.
"By the end of the day, I was so jazzed," Mr. Smernoff recalls.
He says he remembers that day whenever his enthusiasm for the project flags.
"I say to myself, yeah but I'll bet something today happens that will make it all worthwhile," he says, his eyes twinkling.
It's easy to see that not only does Mr. Smernoff derive great satisfaction from his environmental work, but he's able to pass that enthusiasm on to others.
"He has a great sense of humor, and he keeps things light and fun," says Ms. Stansbury of Bay Area Action. "I think he's inspiring. People like to do things with him."
While he says he'd like to find ways to fund more paid staff positions for projects like the Arastradero Preserve, Mr. Smernoff says he is committed to the idea of having local people participate in the creation and maintenance of local open space preserves.
"Not only is it healing for the environment, but it's also healing for people," he says.
He says he hopes that community volunteers will be able to build the solar-powered interpretive center planned for the Arastradero Preserve. Plans for the interpretive center project are headed to Palo Alto's Architectural Review Board for final approval this spring.
The center, which will employ straw bale-construction techniques and rely solely on solar energy, will be an example of sustainable building practices, he says. Besides being a place for people to change their boots and use the bathroom, he says the center will house an office where staff can collect data on efforts to restore native plants. By keeping careful records, he hopes that the Arastradero Preserve will serve as a successful model for habitat restoration that can be used by other local parks and preserves.
Besides volunteering, there are a lot of things people can do to decrease pollution and improve the environment, says Mr. Smernoff. Some of the biggest ecological impacts people can have come from their choice of transportation, whether they purchase organic produce, and whether they eat a meat-based diet, he says.
The huge scale of environmental damage is never going to be slowed or reversed unless everyone takes action, he says.
"The government can't do everything and it shouldn't do everything," Mr. Smernoff says. "People need to take responsibility."
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