Delta Blues

(Page 3 of 5)

In Rio Vista Coglianese found a community oriented to the water, one that celebrated its civic pride at a striped bass festival every year. "The fish were jumping," she says. "Old Man River was rolling along."

Stories abound about the thriving aquatic life in the mid-century delta. Roger Mammon, a sportfisherman active in delta wildlife issues, talks about an old-timer who as a child visited the San Joaquin River during the striped-bass spawn. "There were so many fish that the water would be white with their milt," Mammon tells me, using the technical term for the striper's sperm. By slapping a towel on the water, the old-timer's grandfather could trick males to the surface, then scoop them out with a net. Now, a day of fishing often yields just one or two bass.

Peter Moyle, a fish biologist at the University of California, Davis, is even more worried about the delta smelt, a tiny, translucent native fish that smells pleasantly like cucumbers. Declared threatened by the state and federal governments in 1993, the delta smelt has seen its numbers plunge 97 percent since then.

Because it evolved to live in one particular estuary and spends its entire life cycle in that system, the smelt is uniquely sensitive to changing delta conditions. Indeed, the same factors that have killed off the smelt are partly responsible for the collapse of other populations, including Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, greentail sturgeon, and Sacramento splittail. This year, in an unprecedented move, the state and federal governments shut down California's commercial salmon fishery because of record low numbers.

Scientists point to many possible reasons for this free fall: toxic pesticides, shrinking rearing habitat, and the invasion of the overbite clam, which hogs the estuary's plankton. But the key suspects are the pumping stations that quench California's thirst. Pumping alters the natural flow of the delta, wreaking havoc with fish habitat. Not only that: the animals get lethally trapped in the pumps, which suck water with such force that they reverse the flow of two smaller rivers, the Old and the Middle.

The fish crisis goes beyond the delta's ecology: it has set off a legal chain reaction that affects both drinking water and food supplies. Last year, in response to a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and four other organizations, U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger restricted pumping between December and June, when delta smelt venture nearest the pumps. In addition, in July 2008 he ordered federal and state water managers to come up with a plan to protect native salmon and steelhead.

Environmentalists say that by curtailing water exports, the rulings will improve the delta's water quality. But they acknowledge a flip side that needs California's attention: others are going without needed water. Particularly hard hit is the San Joaquin Valley, which the historian Kevin Starr once described as "the most productive unnatural environment on Earth." The valley's eight counties grow more than $20 billion worth of crops each year, more than the rest of California combined (and more than any other state, for that matter). This year, valley farmers left about 10 percent of their land -- some 200,000 acres normally devoted to tomatoes, peppers, and cotton -- unplanted because of delta water restrictions, according to Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition. Several thousand additional acres were planted but later abandoned. "It's a dire situation," Wade says.

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