AV Essay
East Bay Waterfront Park Description
The Area of Inquiry I have chose is the side of East Bay Water Front park along the East Bay Drive Northeast. This area is along the water, with there is a small area of vegetation and trees, a small dock and on the other side of the road are some houses. It looks out over East Bay were you can see poles sticking out of the water to warn boats of shallow waters, and the other side of the park. The surrounding roads are decently busy and log truck often drive on them. The tide changes have caused parts of the edges of the water line to erode away. Depending on the tide one can see the sediments on the “beach” of East Bay which consist mostly with silt and mud, leading me to know that the energy level is low here.
“Place”
At the start of the study this area was nothing more then a park that needed better maintenance. Over the time I spent there I began to feel a connection to it. I began to collect memories here, both mine and others. Memories such as the time I had attempted to climb one of the trees for a better picture and fallen out of it, or of the graffiti and trash left around the area (how it got there, who was responsible and why). I looked into the history of the area and learned about the changes it has gone threw to look the way it does today, and I looked into the future to see how it will change again. The time I spent here and researching it, the more my connection of place with East Bay grew.
Personal Reflection
At the start of my study at the East Bay Waterfront Park I was determined to not get attached to it. I wanted to view it as a scientific study and with those one must distance themselves emotionally from the object or area of study. I took field notes with my personal options and kept the facts purely on science of my observations. However did come to love basking in the small meadow like area with the smell of the ocean and surrounding flowers filling my nose. On my most recent trip I was horrified to see the flowers and long grass that I enjoyed sitting in to have been cut between my visits. It made me feel sick. How could someone do that to the only spark of natural beauty in this area? All around it is concrete roads, houses, man-made paths, and human planted vegetation. This was the only area left in East Bay that had any sort of nature feel to it. Â Overall I accomplished my goal of keeping my study scientific but failed because i did grow emotionally attached to my area of inquiry.
Current and Future Waterline
Currently the waterline is 29.1 meters from the road on a regular mid-tide but in the future it will be much higher and will be 12.5 meters over the road. This creates threats for the ecosystem at East Bay because it will kill of much of the vegetation and cause the wildlife to find new homes. This is also bad of the the marine ecosystem because many of the creatures that live in the inter tidal zone  require hard substrates and if the water rises it will create content erosion of this area because it is made up of sediments dredged from the ocean and there will be few hard substrates for the marine life to attach too, causing a drop in certain species population.
