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PART 3: THE FORGOTTEN DELTA
Effort to restore the ecosystem faces challenges
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By Ruth Dusseault • Bay City News
ALMOST 200 YEARS ago, Argonauts tore open Sierra mountainsides with water cannons in search of gold. The runoff raised the floor of San Francisco’s Bay Delta watershed all the way from Sacramento to the Golden Gate.
The land that once flourished with life and diversity soon became an arena for reclamation, where farmers, emboldened by federal permits, built levees to drain tracts of marsh enough to take a plow. What flowed from the Delta in the 19th century was gold.
What flowed from it in the 20th century was food. The treasure of the 21st century is water.
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As the Delta faces rising sea levels and the threat of earthquakes, the state asserts the need for a tunnel to secure fresh water for 27 million people. But to understand how this landscape arrived in its fragile state and the challenges of its restoration, we must look back to a time before industrialism—before Europeans arrived.
“This landscape is like nothing else on Earth,” Chuck Bonham, the director of California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, said before the California Water Resources Control Board in 2024. He painted a vivid picture of a once-abundant ecosystem — a land teeming with grizzly bears, tule elk, and millions of birds navigating complex habitats. The Delta was an intricate tapestry of hundreds of creeks and two mighty rivers converging into an estuary rivaled only by Botswana’s Okavango Delta, he said.
“There is a strong scientific basis that demonstrates the value of reconnecting rivers to floodplains. And this is proving especially true for young salmon, because they feed in that shallow, food rich habitat type.” Bonham said of restoration efforts, “We’ve got to do this.”
The California Water Resources Control Board is responsible for issuing permits for water rights under state law. It must also periodically update regulations for sustaining water quality in the San Francisco Bay and Delta watersheds known as the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan. It does that under both federal and state law.
Voluntary agreements
The most recent updated regulations were originally due in 2015 but were delayed due to a megadrought. The plan for the lower part of the Deta was approved in 2018 during the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom took office in 2019, he suspended regulations and focused on negotiating voluntary agreements between the water contractors and the state. Newsom also removed the chair of the Water Board, Felicia Marcus, who believed too much water was being exported from the Delta.
With the voluntary agreements, the water contractors proposed coming up with their own plans for increasing the amount of water in the Delta, which was far less than the Water Board was proposing. The board’s Lower San Joaquin River regulations and a framework for the rest of the Bay-Delta Plan found that more water was needed to rebuild fish habitat and meet the requirements of the Endangered Species Act.
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Those voluntary agreements, known as VAs, are currently under review. If approved by the Water Board, they could be accepted as a method of reaching regulatory compliance. They might face lawsuits from environmental, tribal, and Delta water interests. The VAs might also be turned down by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“In theory, an adequate combination of active habitat restoration and increased flows could do more for the fish faster,” said Marcus. “However, I am skeptical, because there just isn’t enough water added. We do not know what the Water Board will do. They should complete the legally supportable regulations, and then add some water and accountability mechanisms if they are to accept the agreements.”
The water contractors signed a mutual agreement in 2022 to meet a set of collective goals to make changes that would save threatened and endangered species, like salmon and Delta smelt which need cooler, shallower water habitats.
They promised to collectively provide the Delta with an additional 750,000 acre-feet of water over 2019 Trump Administration amounts, which were already much lower than they were during the Obama Administration, so the additions do not add much. They agreed to restore 45,000 acres of aquatic habitat, and to increase salmon population by 25% over 8 years. The state budgeted $2.9 billion for these restoration projects, which is overseen by Chuck Bonham at the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Traditional ecological knowledge
Delta tribes, which have sustained a memory of the Delta before industrialism, were not invited into this process. Neither were the salmon fishers, whose members had an intimate working knowledge of salmon migration patterns and habitats.
Tribes and fishers said they were not invited for their input until 2024, after the water agencies completed their plans. Their type of first-hand relationship with the landscape is known as “traditional ecological knowledge.”
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“Traditional knowledge is going to save the Delta,” said Malissa Tayaba, Vice Chair of the Shingle Springs Band of the Miwok tribe, one of the tribes that once thrived in the Delta. “It’s about allowing the landscape to do what it naturally does.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service defines traditional ecological knowledge as different from western science because it takes a holistic approach. It uses data that comes from people who work directly with natural resources and integrate that experience into daily life. The tribe also uses it to sustain it cultural identity.
“I think that what happened is as the state progressed,” Tayaba said. “I don’t think that they saw land the way we did.”
Tayaba is also an advisor to the Bay-Delta Plan and the tribe’s director of traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. Part of that canon of knowledge involves seeing the landscape as a co-habitant rather than a commercial resource, a paradigm shift for the role of humans from extractor to steward.
We’re taught that you never leave a plant the way you found it. You make it better. Whether that’s fluffing the dirt, taking off the dead parts, that plant’s going to grow better.
Malissa Tayaba, Vice Chair, Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Tribe
“We’re taught that you never leave a plant the way you found it. You make it better. Whether that’s fluffing the dirt, taking off the dead parts, that plant’s going to grow better,” Tayaba said.
Scientific management
Alison Whipple, of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, published an ecological History of the Delta in 2012. It was funded by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, which discovered that it didn’t really know what the original Delta looked like. It needed a baseline reference for restoration. Whipple and her team at the Institute brought together thousands of historical sources from the archives of early European settlers. What she found and then visualized was an abundant freshwater landscape that was almost immediately commodified.
One major environmental consequence in the Central Delta resulted from the removal of tule grass, which had naturally accumulated over centuries, forming rich soil known as peat. Whipple’s research revealed how settlers in their early reclamation efforts used steam rollers, sheep, and fires to clear the tule, quickly destroying significant layers of soil and lowering the land.
Techniques like tule farming on Twitchell Island aim to rebuild lost peat, but the process takes decades or centuries. Whipple said sea level rise provides opportunities to restore transition zones around the edges of the Delta, which could eventually reflect the historical Delta marshlands.
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Carson Jeffries, a field monitor and fish biologist at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, focuses his research on creating shallow, inundated habitats in floodplains and intertidal areas to provide food sources for juvenile fish, noting that these habitats are currently lacking in the Delta.
Both scientists address the potential impacts of climate change, such as levee failures which could draw salt water into the Delta.
“What happens when those levees fail, when the land is 30ft below sea level, is you don’t have a marsh anymore, you just have a lake,” said Jeffries. “And that lake is predominantly going to be occupied by non-native species. And it’s not super productive.”
“So then you have a different landscape,” said Whipple. “It comes to a question of, are we trying to put the landscape into a trajectory that is more supportive for native species, and one that we think is going to be more resilient and able to adapt to climate change in the future? Or are we going to let these sorts of novel ecosystems go how they may, as we continue on our business-as-usual path?”
We triage drought, we triage flood, we triage when levees fail. … And the thing that gets me is that the environment always loses in triage.
Carson Jeffries, UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences
Jeffries struggles with the contrast of scientific management and the indigenous perspective.
“Right now, we put Band-Aids on things that don’t deal with the actual solutions,” he said. “We triage drought, we triage flood, we triage when levees fail, like. And the thing that gets me is that the environment always loses in triage,” said Jeffries.
“I love fish like I spend my time fishing. I like to eat fish. I spend my time with my head underwater counting fish. But there’s a different kind of connection with fish that the tribe has,” he said.
“I just want to have a floodplain connected to the river,” said Jeffries. “I’m not even asking for very much, let alone think about the source of value that the river brings to us as humanity. It is one thing to tell a manager, ‘I need to do this because we get more fish.’ It’s another thing to say, ‘I want to do this to restore it as a source of value to humanity.’ They’d say you can’t quantify that. It’s really hard, and that is the space that I currently live in, and I struggle with it every day.”
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Audio credits
Additional audio licensed under Creative Commons public domain: SwayingKeysRev1 by Bigvegie, CC0; lowgrowl_drift.wav by wgwgsa, CC0; Beeps & Brakes ~Construction Site Trucks by Bon_Vivant_Pictures, CC0; guitar by Nick Wenner.
This series is a production of Bay City News, presented in collaboration with Climate One and Northern California Public Media. For more on this story and other news in the Greater Bay Area, visit localnewsmatters.org.
The post The Tunnel Vision, Part 3: The forgotten Delta — Effort to restore ecosystem faces challenge appeared first on Local News Matters.