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Delta Blues: With much-needed funding unavailable, California farmers and nature lovers are fighting over dwindling water resources

Posted by: Maven on March 19, 2009 at 7:40 am

From MetroActive:

DAWN on the Delta. As the sun peeks out from behind the John A. Nejedly Bridge near Antioch, a small flock of terns flaps up to the concrete trusses and rests on a set of nooks in the construction.

Below, on the San Joaquin River, the low buzzing of an outboard motor mixes with the calls of the terns and the thud-thud of wheels rolling over the bridge’s ribbed surface. The smell of wet marsh air mostly overpowers the occasional hit of fertilizer carried east on the winds from some nearby farm, while slowly, the water world comes to life under the yawning gaze of a new day’s sun.

This is a morning on the new Sacramento Bay Delta. True, the birds have been around for eons, the bridges are fairly old and most of the farms have been here for 100 years or more. But the Delta seen on this March morning is different from the one seen last year or the year before. It’s an environment that through erosion, damming, dredging and river redirecting has changed so dramatically that maps more than 20 years old are nearly useless.

It’s also an environment on the brink. More than two-thirds of California residents get drinking water from the Delta and more than 3 million acres of the state’s crops are fed from it. Hundreds of species—more than 20 of them endangered—live or travel through in countless tributaries, streams and bays. And each of these demands is backed by passionate voices and powerful people, all with their own idea on how best to change the Delta.

But while nearly everybody agrees that more change is coming, whether that change will be for better or worse for California’s ecology, economy and health and welfare is still up in the air. All that’s for sure is that with aging levees, dying species and the slow intrusion of seawater into the overpumped soil, things can’t go on the way they are now.

Read more from MetroActive by clicking here.

March 19, 2009 · Filed Under Delta Issues

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