Delta Blues

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There is no "single silver bullet" to solve the problems of the delta, says Barry Nelson, director of NRDC's Western Water Project. "We're going to need a portfolio of responses." Scientists, environmentalists, water managers, and farmers all favor the creation of managed floodplains -- chunks of agricultural land that seasonally collect excess floodwater, taking pressure off levees and reducing the risk of breaches. Not only do these "bypasses" lower flood levels, but they also make exceptional habitat for fish like salmon and steelhead. Farmers can still plant seasonal crops -- the flooding typically occurs in the winter -- and they get paid for accepting some risk of crop loss. The one existing floodplain in the delta, the Yolo Bypass, has helped keep nearby Sacramento, which sits just 17 feet above sea level, above water. This year NRDC negotiated with a developer to set aside land for a second bypass near the south delta town of Lathrop.

Not all the suggested fixes are so popular, though. Limiting development preserves habitat and decreases flood risks, but it also harms town governments that are desperate for property tax revenues. Idling or slowing the water pumps benefits fish, but it creates hardships for San Joaquin Valley farmers and Southern California water managers. Underlying any talk of solutions is a deeply contentious question: who makes the sacrifices necessary to save the delta?

One of the most compelling -- and most criticized -- voices in the debate belongs to Jeffrey Mount, the geologist. Impassioned and self-confident, he has become the de facto spokesman for an interdisciplinary team of researchers who have produced two major reports for the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). The reports generated considerable buzz when they were released in February 2007 and July 2008.

Mount and his colleagues argue that the delta's woes stem from efforts to keep it in its current state: a predictable freshwater system stripped of the physical complexity that defined it until the nineteenth century. Before human intervention, Mount says, "it must have been a maze of tule marshes, with thousands of channels in it." Today "the 1,100 miles of levees have utterly separated the water from the land."

Historically, Mount says, the delta was a "disturbance regime"; its plants and animals "evolved in a system that would occasionally get salty." A healthier delta, the PPIC says, would again change with the seasons, with fluctuations in the level of salt water flowing in and out. To bring this about, the PPIC recommends reengineering the delta to create a "mosaic" of interconnected habitats. This might include letting some levees fail -- particularly those closest to San Francisco Bay, which protect the most subsided and least valuable islands -- or intentionally breaching levees and allowing farmland to flood, compensating landowners for their losses. Mount acknowledges that some unflooded farmland would also have to be taken out of production as the delta gets saltier. He calls this a necessary trade-off but not a ruinous one: the six delta counties produce only 2 percent of California's farm sales. Mount warns that if humans don't reengineer the delta, nature will take it back in its own helter-skelter way.

This is where the debate grows contentious. Mount's critics, many of whom live in the delta, insist that the 2007 report misinterprets the science -- and that the delta was historically a freshwater system. Exhibit No. 1 for them is the work of Greg Gartrell, an environmental engineer with the Contra Costa Water District, which overlaps the delta. Gartrell has examined a century's worth of salinity records, along with studies that dated algae and seeds with carbon 14 to determine the estuary's historic salinity. "The past 100 years has been far saltier than any period in the last 800 years," he concludes.

The dispute remains unresolved. Tina Swanson, a biologist who heads the Bay Institute, a research and advocacy group that focuses on the delta and its surrounding watershed, served as an expert witness in the delta smelt lawsuit. She agrees with Gartrell that "historically, the delta may not have gotten all that salty." Even so, she says, letting it get periodically saltier "might not be a bad management tool." Creating a new disturbance regime, she says, could allow native species to flourish again and make it harder for invasive pests like the overbite clam to survive.

But local residents worry about the impact of salt water on today's delta, with its farm-based economy. "If ag goes down, these communities don't have any real reason to exist," says Marci Coglianese, the former mayor of Rio Vista. "I don't think the people that are sitting on the campus -- that aren't down here -- really understand the consequences of what they're proposing." She believes a more aggressive effort to shore up levees should be the first step toward protecting the delta. "There are ways to engineer out of this if you want to make the investment," she insists. The PPIC says that even with the $1.4 billion needed to upgrade the levees to meet federal standards, a "levees as usual" approach would have no guarantee of success.

Mount's proposal for a fluctuating delta has an even bigger consequence: because of periodic salt water intrusion, the delta would no longer be a reliable source of water for export. In its July 2008 report, the PPIC proposes two possible solutions. The one that would benefit the estuary the most, giving its fish populations the best chance to recover, is simply to end exports, letting the rest of California fend for itself. But the authors acknowledge that this would cost at least $1.5 billion a year and prove "catastrophic" to the state's farm economy. That's why they ultimately come down in favor of a second course, one that horrifies many delta residents: building a multibillion-dollar canal to divert freshwater away from the Sacramento River before it reaches the delta.

The logic is straightforward: with lawsuits and unstable levees threatening to shut down the pumps, the delta can no longer reliably provide water to outsiders. A canal would bypass this unstable system, guaranteeing uninterrupted deliveries to Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley. An alternative favored by some state planners would split the water between a peripheral canal and the current system.

Voters rejected a canal in 1982, but the proposal is again on the table, with the support of valley farm interests, Southern California water users, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration. They say the delta's precarious dirt levees pose too great a risk. "Do you want two-thirds of the people in the state of California to have their water supply solely predicated on something that was never engineered in the first place?" asks Jerry Johns, deputy director of the state Department of Water Resources. "As we go into the future, the threats are so large that we're going to have to consider some other system."

Mount and his colleagues say a peripheral canal, by decoupling the Tracy pumps from the delta, could potentially help the estuary's fish recover. Other advocates insist it's possible to build a canal while providing the delta with adequate freshwater, though they have offered no detailed plans. But those living in the delta don't believe the reassurances. They see the canal as a step toward their communities' abandonment. If the delta doesn't export water, they fear, it will lose its value to other Californians, and the state government would no longer have any incentive to maintain levees or control salt levels.

"The delta will be the region that's written off, like New Orleans," says Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, who runs Restore the Delta, an unusually broad coalition of clergy, business leaders, farmers, sportfishermen, duck hunters, and environmentalists. State leaders have done little to allay those fears of abandonment. "Bluntly?" asks Roger Mammon, the fisherman (and Restore the Delta steering committee member), when I ask about the peripheral canal. "It could conceivably be the death of the delta."

That sentiment runs deep. Tom Zuckerman, the attorney, worries so much that a canal would mean "the end of agriculture" in the delta that he's willing to spend his retirement, and his savings, fighting it. "A lot of people I know in this area feel the same way," he says. "It's part of our blood here, and we're not going to sit by and allow a big transfer ditch to be built right through our midst."

The overriding dilemma here is that California is growing rapidly but its water supply isn't. Any long-term solution must be predicated on finding ways to use less water.

"When you look at the history of water development in California, there's a very clear pattern of growing cities looking for the next river to tap into," says Barry Nelson of NRDC, who works with Restore the Delta. "Over the course of the last decade, we've run out of rivers." Nelson talks about one remaining water source: a "virtual river" consisting of water saved by efficiency and reuse, along with captured storm water and cleaned-up groundwater. There are hints that state officials are coming around: Governor Schwarzenegger has called for a 20 percent reduction in per-capita urban water use by 2020. A similar measure is making its way through the state legislature.

Three years ago a detailed report by the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based think tank, called for better land-use planning, higher efficiency standards for appliances like washing machines, improvements in crop irrigation, and better consumer education. Peter Gleick, the institute's president, says those changes can come about with little hardship and no new inventions. "But it's going to require more effort than we've put into water management," he says. "In the past we've always assumed, ‘Let's just find a new supply.' Well, if there's anything that the delta is telling us in its ecological death throes, it's that this paradigm has failed. There is no more unclaimed water."

This article made possible by a grant from the Josephine Patterson Albright Fund for Special Features.