kathrin howard, sierra club, we support the resolution. i'm going to talk a little bit about eel grass. our environment is made up with many small delicate building blocks that interact to create the natural world. one such building block is the sea grass with the somewhat unappealing name of eel grass. it's so important to the health of its ecosystem it is known as a keystone species. if it does not do well, then the lives that depend on it will do poory. that is system to what happened in the eastern united states when a disease wiped out the eel grass and wiped out one species and severely damaged other ones. in san francisco, eel grass for birds to lay their eggs. eel grass meadows catch minute partials floating in the water and deposit them on the bay floor, slowly building up the sandy and muddy bottom. large beds of eel grass can absorb shock waves, protecting adjacent shorelines, but eel grass is also sensitive to water clarity, to changes in currents, to increases or decreases in the sentiment it lives in and to changes in depth o