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Opinion|The Otherworldly California Waterway That Keeps Exploding Into Politics
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/opinion/california-delta-water.html
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The sprawling estuary about 70 miles inland from San Francisco feels distinctly out of place — more like the swampy Florida Everglades than arid California. But from that confluence of two great rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, 1,100 miles of webbed waterways and levees send upward of six million acre-feet of freshwater a year to thirstier parts of the state, from farms in the San Joaquin Valley to the Southern California megalopolis. Known as the California Delta, the estuary is among the state’s most important sources of water — and most consistent flash points over environmental protection.
Donald Trump first saw the political utility of the estuary in 2016 on the campaign trail, when he denied the existence of a drought in California, claiming that the state had wasted its precious freshwater by sending it into the ocean. He was referring to a fight over diverting water from the Delta to protect a native fish species called the delta smelt, and he was implicitly siding with farmers who argued they were more deserving of the water than the federally threatened species. He revisited this battle in his first term as president, but environmentalists stopped him in the courts from redirecting more water to farmers.
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This January, he waded back into the issue, accusing California Democrats of prioritizing the delta smelt over helping Los Angeles fight out-of-control wildfires, even though water from the estuary would most likely not have made a difference for firefighters. He used the fires to implicitly challenge legal protections of endangered species and in a memo gave the secretaries of commerce and the interior 90 days to find ways to divert more Delta water for cities and farms that he claimed “desperately need” it.
For Mr. Trump and some conservatives, the California Delta is a potent symbol of environmentalism’s overreach and the incompatibility of farming and conservation. And by meddling in California’s water debates, he stokes a host of tensions: between state and federal water management, urban Los Angeles and the rural Delta, and agricultural and residential uses.
But the so-called war over California’s water is a dangerous, flawed trope that reduces certain water uses to right or wrong, and turns the Delta into a place with no local stakes. Faced with threats of drought, climate change and water scarcity, we should not reduce this place to a warring of two — or even many — sides.
