Where Is California’s Water? The Delta Smelt Is Hogging It

COMMENTARY

The Los Angeles fires have ravaged portions of the city. Spreading first in mountain valleys outside of the city, they moved rapidly into Los Angeles neighborhoods. 

Many are debating what is causing these fires to get worse. One theory is that the state and federal bans on controlled burns — put in place due to environmentalist policy efforts — have increased the fuel load.

California also has a water problem. Firefighters have literally encountered dry hydrants. Los Angeles has long encountered water supply problems, which are worsened by conservation efforts.

Indeed, conservationist efforts are often at odds with human flourishing. This is particularly a problem in California, which suffers through droughts, yet will not use available water resources. Another example is a yearslong battle over a small minnow-like fish called the delta smelt.

Environmentalists have a history of using seemingly insignificant animals to block human flourishing. In 1979, a controversy was struck in Tennessee over a darter fish and a dam. According to a recent account, opponents of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee went snorkeling and found darter fish they claimed as a new discovery and named it the snail darter. This fish was deemed a subspecies that was rare and specific to that location in Tennessee. This breed was nearly identical to another fish, called the stargazing darter, which was not endangered or rare. Recently, the snail darter and stargazing darter were, in fact, determined to be the same. 

But this did not stop the environmentalists. Using the Endangered Species Act, dam opponents blocked the construction of the dam. This led to a yearslong power struggle where both the Supreme Court and Congress had to weigh in. Ultimately, the dam was built after Congress amended the ESA to specifically allow the Tellico Dam. But this kicked off a strategy that is dubbed the “conservation species concept,” meaning a rare species is found so that it can have a downstream conservation implication.

A very similar dispute is playing out in California today. There, a fish resides in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a waterway in the heart of the state’s water distribution system. This river delta serves as a major water hub for California, providing water to about 30 million people and irrigating 6 million acres of farmland from Northern California to populated areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley and Orange County as well as farmlands like San Joaquin Valley. 

Citizens and farmers alike are beholden to facilities managed and regulated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The Central Valley Project, which is a network of dams, reservoirs, canals, hydroelectric powerplants and other facilities, controls the waters that flow into the previously mentioned areas. These waters are the historical home to the delta smelt.

Like the fictitious fish that held up the Tellico Dam project, the delta smelt was found only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and nowhere else in the world. This invoked the ESA, which prevents projects from causing further harm or threat to endangered organisms. 

To save the delta smelt, waters that could otherwise flow down to farmers and citizens is held up by the Central Valley Project to keep waters at a sufficient level where the delta smelt resides. But this causes significant human harm. One San Joaquin farmer reports that pumping restrictions from 2020 to 2021 caused him to leave his farms barren and unproductive. Even healthy rainfall does not bring him water under this policy.

Water policy that prevents the flow of water to farmers not only hurts the farmers, but all Americans. After all, farmers feed all of us. Even if what they grow is still available to us, it reduces the supply and makes those products more expensive.  

To make matters worse, the preservation efforts have not worked. The delta smelt has continued to dwindle in population and is now virtually extinct. Yet the solution is to continue throttling water and introducing lab-grown smelt into the waterways.

President Donald Trump’s first administration relaxed environmental regulations to allow for more free flow of water. Biden’s administration, along with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s, worked to instill regulations that had the opposite effect. 

Farmers need urgent reform to fix this problem. Their livelihood, and our food supply, depend upon it. And perhaps this water will be needed to put out future fires in California.

Throttling water to save a small fish that is going extinct anyway should not stand in the way of human flourishing. 

Curtis Schube is the executive director for Council to Modernize Governance, a think tank committed to making the administration of government more efficient, representative and restrained. He is formerly a constitutional and administrative law attorney. He can be reached here.