Death of a species, then of a landscape

The Delta is a risk landscape, for sure. Among the things the DNP website was created to do is to disseminate information (and opinion, true) and educate those who need it about the causes and future implications of those risks.

For example, too often one sees the argument put forth that if the levees were breached the Delta could return to its pre-reclamation estuary state. It couldn’t.

If the levees were breached, most of the Delta would become a twenty-foot deep brackish sea. It would take centuries, if not millennia, of deposition before the Delta’s land rose to be a tidal swampy ecosystem.

Another example, more a concern actually, is that if a tunnel or peripheral canal bypassed the Delta, then there would be no public impulse to maintain the Delta’s fragile ecosystem.

Given the brackish sea implication of levee failure, it is important to understand that in the Delta, ecosystems are really infrastructure, not nature. This is why the “co-equal goals” principle has to throw lots of money at ecosystem repair - because here, to repair ecosystem is to build infrastructure. Not to breach a few levees.

But when push comes to shove, is “co-equal” a principle that will hold? The DNP has its doubts, and new polling suggest they might be confirmed

Since Proposition 13 was passed all those years ago, the state’s voters record on taxing themselves to pay for things they need isn’t exactly forward-thinking

If Senator Feinstein’s recent public statements are any indication of what happens when push comes to shove regarding federal environmental law, one might extrapolate that a brackish-sea-Delta future awaits. Westlands may be the first victim, but it probably won’t be the last, either.

The death of a species first, then of a strange and beautiful landscape.