Bay Area entrepreneur envisions new purposes for land, ways to save planet
One day while [civil engineer James Levine] was looking out at the bay from his Emeryville office, Levine was struck by the steep unnatural riprap shoreline surrounding most of the bay that discourage wildlife from gathering there. He also thought about the many tons of sediment that needed to be dredged from the bay so that big ships could pass — and what he could do with that fill to encourage wildlife habitat elsewhere. Thus was born the Montezuma Wetlands Project in Solano County, a private initiative begun in the early 2000s that addresses two problems: the historic loss of wetlands and how one can responsibly dispose of millions of cubic yards of sediments dredged annually from San Francisco Bay Area ports, harbors and channels.