RIVERS ARE BEING MANAGED TO BENEFIT INFLUENTIAL WATER INTERESTS, WHILE SALMON AND WATER QUALITY SUFFER
For thousands of years, the rivers of the Sierra Nevada and other regions of the state had salmon populations beyond imagination. Historically, many hundreds of thousands of salmon and steelhead moved from the ocean through San Francisco Bay and the Delta to enter the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.
At confluences with tributaries, pulses of fish moved into the Mokelumne, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, Merced, and other regional rivers in seasonal waves of returning salmon and steelhead. Native tribes depended on the bountiful supply of fish, as did bears, eagles, ospreys, and many other wildlife species.
But since the early conversion of California’s landscape, agricultural interests and other major water users have dammed every major river and have diverted the vast majority of river flows. 80% of all the water used in California goes to agriculture, and Ag interests have influential political power in the state.
When the State Water Board in 2018 finally agreed that the best science proved the need for far more water to be left in rivers that flow into the Bay/Delta, the Board reluctantly approved a policy that would significantly improve conditions for endangered salmon and for water quality in the rivers. The Water Board mandated that at least 30% of river flows must be left in the Merced, Tuolumne, and Stanislaus Rivers.
But the Water Board never actually implemented that Plan due to effective lobbying by agriculture and other water interests. Now, 8 years later, the Governor and the Water Board are both siding with water interests instead of taking needed actions to save salmon populations and to meet basic water quality goals.
Our CSERC staff has repeatedly invested huge amounts of time and effort into advocating for rivers and aquatic species. We’ve read through hundreds of pages of Water Board studies and reports. We’ve testified many times before the Board. Charming Board members listen respectfully to us and other conservation representatives, members of Tribes, fishermen, and scientists. They thank us for our testimony. And then they turn away and discuss how to best meet the demands of agricultural interests and developers.
The state continues to choose – over and over again – to shrug off the minimum needs of threatened fish species and the natural aquatic ecosystem. Money, political clout, and highly effective lobbyists advocate for the status quo – or worse, for taking even more water out of rivers during dry water years.
CSERC never gives up in our mission to defend water, wildlife, and wild places, but it can be incredibly frustrating and discouraging to see how politicians from both parties rationalize Water Board actions that clearly favor big money interests and major water consumers.
For salmon in particular, time is literally running out.
Spring-run chinook salmon numbers have plummeted in the last decade, and fall-run numbers are low to dismal, year after year, in all of the region except for the Mokelumne River. In that river, massive releases of hatchery fish manage to keep that river’s salmon numbers usually higher than the other rivers.
CSERC continues to engage in all of our region’s federal river management plans (FERC planning processes) and in the State Water Board’s river and Bay/Delta planning. Our staff has a clear recognition of the economic and political power that agriculture holds in California. But it is unethical and unacceptable for our society to push salmon to the edge of extinction in many rivers or to allow so little water to flow that toxic algal blooms periodically erupt in rivers that should run cold, clear, and pure.
Salmon are a direct tie to thousands of years of humans connecting to the natural world. We have no right to manage rivers in ways that may lead to their extirpation.
CSERC’s goal is to use legal and political strategies to move past all the political hurdles and to get California – both the State Water Board and the legislature – to follow legal mandates and their oaths – to represent all the people of the state by requiring far more water to be left in our region’s rivers to enable salmon populations to recover and water quality objectives to be met.
