The Delta

The Delta is a productive agricultural region with an increasingly uncertain future.

Located just east of and draining into San Francisco Bay, it was once a vast freshwater tidal estuary, and was reclaimed for farming in the 19th century. Since then, the land contained within its roughly 1200 miles of levees has subsided at a rate of 3 inches per year.

Today, much of the Delta is 20 to 30 feet below the level of the surrounding rivers. The levees protect the land they enclose and a vital water supply for Southern and Central California, regions making growing demands on the Delta’s water.

Federal and state agencies subsidize maintenance of critical levees, perhaps 30% of the total. The rest are private levees, whose landowners struggle to maintain them in the face of a globalizing agriculture market and other place-specific economic pressures. Infrastructural planning currently underway is an acknowledgement that the current levee maintenance situation is unsustainable.