A new model for ag and water management
The 24-hour news cycle famously focuses on bad news. If you pick up a paper, turn on the radio or glance at your news feed there’s no shortage of world catastrophe, calamity and tragedy. But when we manage to put down our newspapers, tablets and phones and look at what is actually happening around us, we often get a very different picture. The same applies to California’s environmental news stories where the headlines are often filled with drought, climate change, water shortages and impending extinction. But this litany of doom and gloom, while not necessarily untrue, is far from the only story worth telling.
For instance did you know that waterfowl population counts in the Central Valley over the last several years are at all time highs. You read that right, the highest numbers ever recorded for most species! That’s a pretty good story worth telling. A big reason for this is the partnership known as the Central Valley Joint Venture
for waterbirds, one of the great conservation success stories of the last several decades; definitely in California but also nationally. In the late 1970’s these same bird populations were at all time lows. But through innovation, collaboration and several decades of hard work government agencies, conservation groups, farmers and water users working together have been able to turn those declines around. Meanwhile fish populations today are at all time lows.
It is high time to replicate the tactics for fish that worked so well for the birds. This seems especially important when literally dozens of other models and efforts to organize fish conservation in the Central Valley and Delta have failed to halt the persistent slide towards extinction of salmon, smelt, sturgeon and other native fish species despite hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.
Photo by Jacob Katz