"I wrote this when I read that San Francisco Bay was about half the size it had been when Sir Francis Drake first sailed into it. I wasn't expecting it to become an environmental anthem. Most topical songs quickly become outdated; it's unfortunate that this one hasn't. There was a big fuss in San Francisco at the time about dumping garbage in the bay, not as trash but as landfill to build new waterfront condominiums. So that sort of inspired it all. I sang it at a folk song club party one night, and Faith Petric stuck a microphone in my face. "Larry Hanks learned it from Faith, and he went and sang it at some festival in Michigan, where Michael Cooney learned it, and that's who Pete Seeger learned it from. And that's the folk process: the oral transmission of song from one person to another."