Water war begs for compromise; Bill Jennings on the real culprits in the Delta (and, surprisingly, it’s not Southern California!)
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 17, 2008 at 10:38 pmFrom the Tracy Press, this commentary by Jon Mendelson:
For many, the slow death of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a mystery. Experts of all stripes, special commissions, even blue ribbon task forces have tried to tackle the Delta’s problems for decades. All, so far, have been unsuccessful.
For Bill Jennings, longtime activist and watcher of the waterways, the answers to fixing the Delta’s woes are simple: Take less water out, pour less bad stuff in, don’t introduce animals where they don’t belong.
What a concept.
The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance director, formerly of Deltakeeper fame, has dedicated years to carrying out his three-point solution to the three-point problem of excess water exports, high pollution and invasive species that plagues California’s most important river system.
Often, his mission has been fulfilled in the courtroom. Jennings and his organizations have filed hundreds of lawsuits to force those who rely on the Delta to treat it with more care. His outfit’s most recent suit is against Stockton for a sewage system Jennings calls “the worst we’ve seen.”
Jennings has no tolerance for those who abuse the waterway Californians rely on to grow their food, fill their glasses, wash away waste, incubate wildlife and be a waterskiing wonderland on weekends. That includes cities like Stockton, whose wastewater treatment system allegedly racked up 1,500 sewage spills in five years.
Ask Jennings who truly wears the black hats in the shootout over Delta water, though, and you’ll get a far-from-standard response. To hear him tell it, most folks in NorCal have it all wrong. “The problem’s not the people in the LA basin,” he said last week. “It’s not even the issue for most of the farmers.”
According to Jennings, the main culprits for damaging the Delta — and those at fault for drying up the San Joaquin River somewhere north of Friant Dam — are the corporate farms tilling thousands of acres of alfalfa and cotton in the middle of what was once a grassland desert.
“What really is killing the Delta is using that subsidized water to grow subsidized crops on impaired land that never should have been farmed in the first place.”
Read more from the Tracy Press by clicking here.
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