The Sacramento Delta: A Gordian Knot - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 211

number had dropped to about thirty-nine thousand, which Paul Johnson , founder of
the Monterey Fish Market, called “far too few to support fishing.” California's salmon
runs are “collapsing,” he wrote, thanks to the water withdrawals by “powerful corporate
agricultural interests.”
But farmers vociferously disagree, saying there is no proof that water diversions to
their fields led to fish kills. Restricting how much water they could use, farmers said,
forced them to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land and led to a 40 per-
cent unemployment rate in towns such as Mendota. By diverting into the ocean billions
of gallons of water the farmers desperately need, said Representative Tom McClintock
(R-Granite Bay), federal regulators aim “to indulge the environmental let's pet project,
the Delta smelt.”
In the summer of 2009, farmers erected signs in the west side of the San Joaquin Val-
ley bemoaning a CONGRESS-CREATED DUST BOWL . The Fox News personality Sean Hannity
flew into the valley with a camera crew to say, “The government has put the interests of
a two-inch minnow before [farmers]!” And Representative Devin Nunes , who was try-
ing to persuade federal regulators to ignore the Endangered Species Act when allocating
water to farmers, declared, “The radical environmental groups have … been trying to
turn this into a desert.”
But this argument is specious. Commenting on Hannity's proclamation, Jon Stewart
noted on heDailyShow,“he government should stop meddling in the business of the
farmers, who would actually still be living in a desert if not for government meddling.”
The west side of the Central Valley did face drought and unemployment in 2009, but
it was not facing anything close to Dust Bowl shortages. While Fresno County officials
described 2009 as a “dire year” for agricultural production, that was only in comparison
to 2008, a record year, when the county produced $5.7 billion worth of products, rep-
resenting a nearly 6 percent increase over 2007. Mendota suffered unemployment, but
that was not new: according to state statistics, the town's unemployment rate has fallen
below 25 percent only twice between 2000 and 2010. Perhaps Hannity's most disingenu-
ous argument is that Washington is “sacrificing farmers for fish.” There is no question
that the many dams, pumps, and aqueducts, and the wasteful use of Delta water by ir-
rigators has destroyed the region's fisheries and those who make their living from them.
“We're looking at an ecosystem that's in severe peril,” said Rodney R. McInnis , re-
gional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “It's not just the Delta
smelt that are affected, but the salmon runs and killer whales and coastal communities.”
The West Coast fishing season runs from May to October and results in an average
harvest of eight hundred thousand fish, from California to Oregon. In April 2008, fed-
eral regulators canceled the fishing of chinook salmon for the first time since the birth
of the industry 150 years earlier. When state regulators closed the salmon fishery for a