The River (Once) Wild

Story and Photos by Jeremy Miller

Can environmentalists restore California's river of agriculture without destroying its farmers?

At the turn-of-the-century, a spawning Chinook salmon could swim from the ocean to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada without much trouble. In the 350-mile course of the San Joaquin River, the fish would wind its way through a nexus of small islands and salt marshes of the San Joaquin Delta before finding open waters leading, to the foot of the mountains and the rushing streams above. Today, the journey for that same fish is an impossibility. To reach its native spawning grounds, it must navigate a gauntlet of dams and reservoirs, pass by 11 power plants and circumvent 500 miles of canals. In two sections of the river that account for approximately 60 miles between Fresno and the San Joaquin River Delta, there is no water at all.

The demise of the San Joaquin River and its salmon is rooted in an ambitious plan known as the Central Valley Project. Begun in the 1930s, the federally funded project includes a series of dams, reservoirs and canals designed to rescue California’s farmers from the Dust Bowl and make water a reliable commodity in the fertile, yet dry valleys of central California. These plans have succeeded in turning the Central Valley into a vast Mediterranean garden and infusing hundreds-of-billions of dollars into the California economy. Yet, the costs have also been staggering. In order to make oranges, grapes and avocados grow where sage and creosote once held dominion, vast quantities of fertilizer and water have been pumped into the land. In order to quench the annual demand for water (enough to flood the state of Connecticut in more than two feet of it), much of the river’s lower reaches have been sucked dry. In the waters of Kesterson Reservoir, an important spot for migratory birds—and where runoff from the region’s farms was pumped until 1983—toxins like selenium and methyl mercury are 400 times higher than EPA allowable standards. And as the blue waters have disappeared, so have the schools of hundreds of thousands of Chinook salmon that once swam upriver from the Pacific to the foot of the Sierras to spawn.

But last July may have marked the beginning of a new era of environmental stewardship for the San Joaquin River. The National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) and a host of other environmental groups won a major legal victory. After 16 years of proceedings, the court found the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) and local water authorities in violation of the Endangered Species Act for not providing adequate water to sustain Chinook salmon habitat. The court ruled that the flow must be restored. However, environmentalists are now grappling with the question of whether or not the ruined ecosystems of the San Joaquin—and its ancient salmon runs—can be revived merely by adding clean, clear Sierra Nevada water.

Those on the losing end of the lawsuit, like Friant Water Users Authority president Ron Jacobsma, say that the “just add water” plan can’t be achieved without enormous costs in dollars, jobs and farmland. Logistically, Jacobsma says, the two dry sections of river between Los Banos and Mendota are currently not ready to contain any amount of water. Presently, the river in these stretches resembles a flood plain where water would fan out and absorb into the parched earth. Dredging and covering the riverbed with a semi-permeable fill to prevent water loss would approach $600 million, he says. “There is no river there anymore. It would have to be recreated—what is “natural” about that?” Jacobsma asked. Then there is the water that would be lost to the region’s farms, which he says would cost California between 10,000 and 20,000 farming jobs and nearly $600 million, or about 2% of annual revenue for the Central Valley.

The NRDC’s legal case was built on lost salmon, so it is little wonder that the Chinook has emerged as the icon of the river’s rejuvenation. Before the completion of the Central Valley Project in the late 50s, the San Joaquin was the southernmost salmon run in North America. River lore tells of spring-spawning salmon schools so large that residents living near the banks were kept awake at night by the sound of fins slapping on sandbars. Another legend tells of salmon so plentiful that one could cross the river by walking across their backs. Today, only in the wettest of years when excess water is released from the high dams do a few of these resilient fish return to their former spawning grounds. The Chinook is by no means the only species that has suffered under poor water management: the thicktail chub, the splittail and the delta smelt are all San Joaquin natives and are all endangered or extinct.

While it may be simplistic to measure success by a single species, environmentalists say the return of the Chinook would be a measurable first step in the recovery of the river; and that coaxing the salmon back to this native waterway may not be difficult. In spite of barriers like low-head dams, a maze of flood bypass channels and extensively polluted segments, Christina Swanson of the Bay Institute says that clean Sierra water will attract fish back to their native spawning grounds. To support her claim, she points to Putah Creek, a fast-flowing tributary of the San Joaquin. There, in 1998, after a major dam was dismantled, salmon made their way from the Pacific back to the stream where they had not been seen for 40 years. “These are resilient fish. If you can provide adequate water conditions, then you’re going to capture the rest,” says Swanson.

A trip to Stockton, 40 miles east of San Francisco, reveals the seriousness of the San Joaquin’s “secondary” problems. The river here is a brew of fertilizer, algae, pesticides and sewage. In late October, the water is the color of chocolate milk. Here, in Stockton’s deepwater shipping channel—where the San Joaquin River, slows, widens and deepens before flowing into San Pablo Bay—algal blooms fed by fertilizers and sewage have suffocated the river. Here, too, fishermen hoping to snag a few salmon or stripers to bring home to their families lean out over the murky water as semis pass on their way to Port Stockton, a massive oil refining and shipping complex. Locals call this stretch of river “ Lake Antifreeze,” because in the summer the algal blooms turn the water an iridescent green. A fisherman, a house painter by trade, says the needs of local fishermen are always trumped by the insatiable thirst of local farms. “This section needs to be flushed out. The wastes, nitrates and fertilizers build up here. The salmon don’t even get up through here anymore. The stripers are not safe to eat. But these guys don’t have much. They eat them anyway.” He will not give his name out of fear of offending the “farmers and politicians” who inhabit the big homes, the ones he paints, on the other side of town. But more than fisherman and fish depend on water quality in the river and wetlands around Stockton: 22 million residents in the Los Angeles metro area get drinking water piped to them from the San Joaquin Delta, 450 miles to the north.

Another major consequence of stealing water from the river’s main channel is becoming visible today: the San Joaquin Delta is eroding. The problem is that the natural flow of new sediment into the delta has, effectively, stopped. As water has been sucked away from the river by farms upstream, the nutrient-starved peat soils anchoring the Delta ecosystem dry up and disintegrate. The land sinks and, sometimes, collapses all together. Farmland and wildlife habitat is lost. As the land sinks, the massive levees that hold back saltwater also subside. So engineers are engaged in a constant battle to stop the sea from rushing in. When one of these levees collapse—as has happened at least 65 times on the delta since 1805, according to the state Department of Water Resources—seawater floods hundreds of thousands of acres of low-lying farmland. Additionally, Los Angeles’ freshwater supply could also be damaged, if not lost altogether. As time passes, the situation gets worse. According to the USGS, much of the delta today has sunk to more than 25 feet below sea level, leaving large swaths vulnerable to levee failure. “This pattern of soil loss in the delta can’t be maintained,” said Bill Fleenor, a hydrologist at UC Davis . “But if water is put back into the channel the organic soils may eventually have a chance to recover.”

Soil salinization is another problem of long-term, structural inaction in the Central Valley. As farms in the middle stretches of the river continue to grow, they rely more heavily on water pumped in from downstream to irrigate their crops. Although this water is ten times more salty than the fresh water that once flowed in from upstream, it is the only water source available to them, Over the years, the salt deposits accumulate in the soil, which after years of buildup becomes unsuitable for crops. As history has shown, soil salinization has ruined massive tracts of farmland in the Tigris-Euphrates Delta and in the basins of the Indus and Nile Rivers. Thus, the repercussions could be severe for western valley farmers who use the saline water and do nothing to get rid of the resulting soil salt deposits, says USGS hydrologist Charlie Kratzer.

To the handful of optimists who dare to believe that the San Joaquin and its salmon can be restored without destroying the farms of the Central Valley, the solution lies in better management, updated infrastructure and enhanced technology. Farmers of the Central Valley, spurred on by cheap water and huge subsidies, have had little incentive to update their water infrastructure, says Jim Metropulos of the Sierra Club. Eighty-year-old canals in the Friant-Kern system continue to bring limited water to patchwork farms; and no canals currently exist to import water from the wetter Northern Central Valley. In terms of management, large, bureaucratic organizations, like the Friant Water Authority and the joint state and federal body that manages the Central Valley, CALFED, deliver water to huge areas, yet provide little oversight after water is diverted into the canal system, Metropulos says. He and other advocates of efficiency say that new irrigation links with the northern Central Valley; better monitoring and allocation systems that would allow water managers to move water where it’s needed most; updated irrigation systems with computerized sprinklers that measure out each drop of water; and improved drainage systems that remove salt from the soil could save hundreds-of-thousands of gallons of San Joaquin water, and thousands of acres of farmland, each year. “There are ways for the river to recover and the farmers to get the water they need. But the management of the system will have to change,” says Metropulos.

With the size and complexity of the task at hand, most involved think it will take at least 20 years to make all the necessary changes. The overriding reality is that water management in the Central Valley must change; the challenge is compounded by the task of restoring a badly damaged river. However, if today’s environmentalists, farmers and water managers can move with the same alacrity and purpose as they did in the 1930s—to undo the harms created in that era—the farms, the salmon and the communities of the San Joaquin may have a swimming chance of survival.