James Levine is a civil engineer. He’s also an entrepreneur, environmental marketing consultant, a developer and someone who figures out how to resolve various challenges concurrently in a way that he hopes positive aspects all.

A single day though he was seeking out at the bay from his Emeryville office, Levine was struck by the steep unnatural riprap shoreline bordering most of the bay that discourage wildlife from collecting there. He also imagined about the many tons of sediment that necessary to be dredged from the bay so that significant ships could move — and what he could do with that fill to persuade wildlife habitat in other places.

“I understood that for the reason that wildlife genuinely want additional shallow, variegated places, and that if I could safely use dredged sediment to generate people, I could supply an economic answer for the ports, which are dropping billions of pounds of achievable profits mainly because they couldn’t get the major ships in, and make remarkable habitat at the very same time,” he said.

As a result was born the Montezuma Wetlands Venture in Solano County, a non-public initiative started in the early 2000s that addresses two problems: the historic loss of wetlands and how one can responsibly dispose of thousands and thousands of cubic yards of sediments dredged annually from San Francisco Bay Area ports, harbors and channels.

Formerly one particular of the most valuable habitats in the San Francisco Bay area, the Montezuma Wetlands, subsequent to Suisun Marsh around Collinsville, were diked for agricultural use in the late 1800s. It was not right up until late 2020 that the levees were being breached as part of Levine’s 15-calendar year undertaking to return the area to its unique wetlands, employing dredged fill from the bay to restore habitat.

“Sometimes difficulties are so complicated that they’re usually only solved if you can merge two or three difficulties jointly, and obtain an integrated resolution,” Levine, CEO of Montezuma H2o LLC, reported.

Levine’s firm pioneered the use of dredged sediment to restore wetlands, now an more and more common system. And the brackish h2o habitat at the recently shaped Montezuma Wetlands will help a variety of species, including smelt and tiny salmon, when the adjacent restored marsh will be…