Shaye Wolfe

Shaye Wolf

M.S., Marine Sciences, Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,

The Coronado Islands are located off the coast of Baja California, just south of the Mexican border. As part of her research for a master’s degree in ocean sciences, graduate student Shaye Wolf documented the large and diverse populations of seabirds that nest on the Coronado Islands. These include the largest known colony of the rare Xantus’s murrelet, a small seabird listed as endangered under Mexican law and threatened in California.

While she was doing her research, Wolf learned that Chevron was planning to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal less than 700 yards from the south island, which hosts the Xantus’s murrelet colony. The murrelets and four other species that nest on the island are nocturnal, and Wolf was especially concerned about the effects of the terminal’s lights.

“These nocturnal seabirds are very sensitive to artificial light, and the tremendous amount of lighting from the terminals and tankers would have been devastating,” Wolf says. “It doesn’t make sense to put a big industrial facility the size of a football field right next to a biodiversity hot spot.”

Through her husband Doug Bevington, a UCSC graduate student in sociology studying environmental advocacy groups, Wolf learned that a cross-border legal challenge could be filed through the Commission for Environmental Cooperation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Bevington, who earned his Ph.D. in June, contacted Jay Tutchton, director of the Environmental Law Clinical Partnership at the University of Denver, who agreed to help them file a petition with the NAFTA Commission.

Wolf wrote the science portion of the petition, Tutchton wrote the legal portion, and Bevington assembled a coalition of environmental groups to join them. Filed in 2005, the petition ultimately led to Chevron’s announcement in March 2007 that it was abandoning its plans to build the LNG facility at the Coronado Islands site. Wolf earned a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology this year and now works for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.

See also Molly Church on lead and condors.