Food & Climate
US President-elect Donald Trump renewed his battles against the environment and its defenders after the outbreak of Los Angeles wildfires. He repeated his mockery of attempts to preserve the small smelt fish in the Northern California Delta, describing them as “worthless fish.” He did the same thing during his election campaign when he ran for his first term, describing them as no more than 3 inches long. What’s the story?
Trump said in a social media post on Wednesday that Governor Gavin Newsom failure to sign what he called a “water restoration declaration” had led to the “ultimate price…being paid”, according to many reports seen by “Food & Climate” platform.
“Newsom refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Trump said.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water”.
Los Angeles Wildfires and Delta smelt relation
When the Trump administration presented a new plan exporting more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta five years ago, state officials and environmentalists objected that the new rules would increase the chances that salmon, smelt and steelhead would go extinct, according to “Calmatters“.
John Durand, a research scientist at the University of California, said: “the smelt are a small fish, and now they’re a rare fish, but they still loom large over all our environmental and water policies”, according to “The Guardian”.
For conservationists and ecologists like Durand, the delta smelt are harbingers, their diminishing numbers a signal that the delta’s ecosystem is dangerously close to collapse.
For California farmers with thousands of acres to irrigate and millions of dollars on the line, the smelt are in the way – the state listed the species as endangered in 2009, and in effect constrained how much water can be pulled from the delta.
Soon after UC Davis researchers first began sampling in the delta, nearly 40 years ago, the delta smelt populations suffered a huge blow: their numbers had suddenly declined by more than 80%. Their numbers dipped even lower after a period of extended drought in the late 80s and early 90s, then lower still during California’s most recent drought, which lasted from 2012 through 2016. During these dry spells, California’s cities and farms needed to pump more and more delta water – leaving these fish without enough fresh, cold water to survive.
The trouble is, the behemoth pumps run by the state and federal government, which can draw up to 10,000 and 5,500 cubic feet of water per second, respectively, can cause rivers to run backward, sucking smelt and other fish into their system. “The problem is, while they’re going through that system of canals, or waiting in a truck, they’re exposed to all these other fish, all these predators that are happily snacking on them the whole time,” says Jon Rosenfield, a fish biologist at San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental watchdog group.
Researchers say it’s unclear how many delta smelt still exist in the wild. “I’d guess at least a thousand or more, but we have no way of actually knowing,” Durand says. “At this point, they barely register in the ecosystem.”
Trump’s comments
Trump’s comments after raging Los Angeles wildfires were not the first time. At a March 2016 campaign (During his campaign that won the US presidency for the first time) rally in Fresno, California – in the state’s agricultural heartland – then presidential candidate Trump mocked the environmentalists who were desperate “to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish”.
“They have farms here and they don’t get water,” he said, as the crowd, holding up green “Farmers for Trump” signs booed. “It is so ridiculous they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea.” That night, Trump promised the farmers more water. Ever since then, his administration has been making moves to make good on that pledge.
In 2019, Trump signed a memorandum directing federal agencies to review and roll back environmental standards slowing down the flow of water to farms in the Central Valley. In February this year, the president nominated David Bernhardt to serve as his interior secretary.
Before joining the administration, Bernhardt worked as a lobbyist and lawyer for the Westlands Water District, the nation’s largest agricultural water contractor. The agency serves some of California’s wealthiest, most powerful farmers – delivering up to 1.19m acre-feet of irrigation water from the delta each year.
In response to the federal government’s chipping away of protections for endangered fish, environmental and fishing industry groups have banded together to sue the federal government, as well, alleging that fewer protections for smelt, steelhead trout, and Chinook salmon will devastate the delta ecosystem and commercial fisheries will be the collateral.
California’s state government has joined the morass as well: California’s governor Gavin Newsom declared that the state is drafting litigation as well. “As stewards of this state’s remarkable natural resources, we must do everything in our power to protect them,” Newsom announced. “The next generations of Californians deserve nothing less.”
However, a 2019 study by Rosenfield and his colleagues at the San Francisco Bay Institute and the Nature Conservancy found that the amount of water the pumps could pull was most often limited by the need to keep saltwater at bay.