After three years of war between fish and man, the farmers in the San Joaquin Valley have finally won a battle.
It has taken three years of fallow fields, seasonally over-priced produce and farmers and their families standing in food lines for the realization to come that humans and their livelihood are more important than a 3-inch endangered bait fish, the Delta smelt. That’s three years too long, but farmers and those needing water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are still elated.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger issued a 126-page decision involving the threatened Delta smelt stating water officials must consider humans along with the fish in limiting use of the Delta for irrigation. This decision comes just days after a similar ruling on endangered salmon in the Delta. The judge was convinced by the arguments of water users that research by the federal government did not prove that increased pumping from the Delta greatly harmed the smelt.
“We are very pleased and very happy,” says Sarah Woolf of California’s Westlands Water District. “It has finally been recognized that what needs to be focused on is the whole environment and how everything is interrelated.”
Judge Wanger’s ruling proves that the environmentalist movement has gone too far. Even though water deliveries to the Valley have been restricted for years, the population of fish in the Delta has continued to decline. Clearly, water deliveries are not solely to blame for fish populations and therefore farmers should not be punished any longer.
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