2 On April 1, 2015, Governor Jerry Brown announced California’s first-ever mandatory statewide water restrictions, calling for a 25% reduction in urban water use from 2013 levels.

Standing on dry grass where there should have been five feet of snow, the governor said, “We are in a historic drought—and that demands unprecedented action.” Notably absent from the restrictions are any cutbacks in water use by the agriculture industry which accounts for 80% of California’s annual water usage.

Karen Cunningham

Oakley, CA

Delta Rancher

7 Karen Cunningham is a Delta cattle rancher for a longtime ranching family that has had to sell off a third of its herd due to the lack of grazing land caused by the drought. She says the ranchers in the Central Valley face the same problems as she does in the Delta, but fears that any water grab could further threaten her ability to keep her cattle healthy.

“They have the same problems as the ranchers up here as far as the hill ground not having any water on it, and not growing any feed,” she says. “My ranch is in the Delta and I see every day the way the ecosystem is changing, and it just makes me sick that they are going to try to take all that water. We're sub-irrigated so when they take fresh water out of the Delta, the water that comes under my ground is most likely going to be extremely salty and going to have more of the selenium and pesticides. So now we're going to get all the garbage … tainting our feed.”

“Every 10 to 12 years, you have a dry period in California. That's where we live and you have to deal with it,” Cunningham says, commenting on the politicization of the drought. “To use it as a platform to get these tunnels through, it's unbelievable to me because the water still isn't there. Tunnels or not, the water is not there to take. If they go in and build these things, they will take what little remains.”

John Simpkin

El Dorado County, CA

American River Kayaker

8According to a 2009 state report, non-motorized boating is a $1.7 billion industry in California.

John Simpkin, a kayaker who has lived along the American River since he was seven, said before the past year, he'd never seen the water so low in the wintertime. Kayakers and rafters rely on scheduled dam releases to increase the flow for their runs. Because it is a critically dry year, the scheduled releases have been reduced. “Most people don't kayak when the water is this low,” he said. “There's a number of rafting companies up here and those guys will be out of business if they can't put people in the river.”

Simpkin, who kayaks in the American River about 150 times a year, knows some people who are feeling the burn. One such person is Keith Miller, who owns California Canoe and Kayak in Oakland. “Normally, this time of the year, hundreds of paddlers would be out on the coastal streams and in the beautiful wild and scenic rivers. But there's no water right now,” Miller said of the 2014 whitewater season.

Jim Jones

Gold River, CA

Delta Fisherman

9Jim Jones, who serves on the Advisory Council of the Save the American River Association, has lived along the Sacramento River tributary for 40 years.

He said in 2014 that many of the local fishing groups, and even the tackle shops and river guides, whose very livelihoods depend on recreational fishing, asked the Department of Fish & Game to close the American River and other streams and rivers to sport fishermen. With water levels too low, the fishermen feared the eggs laid by the spawning Chinook and steelhead were at risk of dying in the shallow water.

When a salmon spawns, it lays its eggs in shallow gravelly areas called redds. Typically, the riffling water flowing through the shallows supplies oxygen to the developing fish, but with such low water levels many of the redds are either receiving low oxygen flow or are completely dewatered, killing the eggs.

“There are thousands of people who depend on the salmon and the steelhead for their living, whether it's the commercial fishermen, the recreational fishermen, the fly shops, the bait shops,” Jones says. “These are not subsidized people. They have to make a living. They are members of the true free market system, not like the welfare farmers, people in the San Joaquin Valley and the billionaires from Beverly Hills who get millions of dollars of subsidies every year.”

Fishermen

Ft. Bragg, CA

Commercial Salmon Fishermen

10 Commercial fishermen are just now beginning to feel the effects of the drought in the form of restrictions on the water. If the salmon can’t spawn in the rivers this year—due to the drought or water transfers or both—fishermen will feel the pain in the coming seasons. John McManus, head of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, says commercial fishermen better be saving their money.

“There is fear developing among the fishermen about the future, because they know the drought will catch up with them and bite them in the butt,” he says. “Their wealth is typically tied up in their boats and their permit to fish salmon, which can be transferred. After good years, the value of those permits goes up due to the limited number of them. But the converse is also true … If you cashed out after last year, you would've done OK. But in the next few years, things could get a lot harder.”

Jonas Minton

Sacramento, CA

Water Policy Expert

11Jonas Minton is a water policy advisor for the Planning and Conservation League, an environmental non-profit in Sacramento. “This drought is bringing into focus an even more harsh reality,” Minton says.

“For decades, California has been using more water than Mother Nature has provided. Each year we have overspent on the order of 3–4 million acre feet of water. Much of this has been unsustainable overdrafting from groundwater that was accumulated literally over centuries."

"In addition, we have stolen water from our rivers and bays with the tragic consequence of ecosystem destruction."

With 1,400 reservoirs in California, Minton says that in 2014, the agencies provided much of the available water to corporate agricultural interests in the Central Valley primarily to feed the almond and pistachios farms, water intensive crops planted in the middle of a desert.

Tom Frantz

Shafter, CA

Retired Teacher and Farmer

12 Tom Frantz, a retired school teacher and almond farmer who has lived in Kern County his whole life, understands the hurt that his neighbors are experiencing.

“The drought is already costing billions of dollars and it can go far higher,” he says. “Some farmers don't have enough water from underground and are looking to buy water from wherever they can to save some trees. They just want the minimum water, not even to get a crop, just to keep the trees alive. It's a serious business, but we have to balance all of that."

"We don't want to see any extremes in any directions. I don't want to see plans to cut off the environmental protections, but I also don't want to see hundreds of acres of permanent crops die off.”

Caleen Sisk

McCloud River Watershed, CA

Tribal leader of the Winnemem Wintu tribe

16 The drought crisis has revealed a number of serious problems with the way water is managed in California. That wasteful, polluting practices like oil and gas exploration are allowed to continue in the midst of an acute water shortage shows there is still a long way to go toward rethinking the management of such a precious resource. That massive, taxpayer-subsidized farms are planting water intensive crops like almonds in the middle of semi-arid regions that, even in a wet year, don’t naturally receive enough rainfall to sustain the crops should force a similar rethinking of California’s agricultural practices.

 

1.1 gallons of water per almond

Icon created by Kate Vogel for the Noun Project.

Caleen Sisk, leader of the Winnemem Wintu tribe, believes the problems are rooted in a history of disregard for the ebbs and flows of the natural world.

"The salmon for us are the indicators of how healthy our world is," says Sisk. The Winnemem Wintu tribe has inhabited the McCloud River watershed area near present-day Redding, California for 6,000 years.

The man-made destruction of the natural hydrology of the region through the damming of rivers and diversion of water has decimated the salmon population and forced the displacement of the tribe from its traditional lands. The tribe now denounces any project that could further damage the natural waterways, including Governor Brown's Twin Tunnel proposal.

"We don't start out to be activists or protesters, but when there's nowhere else in the world that you can go to protect your way of life and your culture for future generations, you have to do something," Sisk said.

Noel Ledesma

Salinas Valley, CA

Organic Farmer

17 The water crisis has produced its fair share of bad ideas, panic, and political opportunism, but it can also be the catalyst that forces positive change. There are already good actors who have long understood the need for conservation.

Noel Ledesma is one such person. Noel’s father owns Ledesma Farms, an organic operation with acreage in the South Bay and near Fresno in the Central Valley. The Ledesma family has operated for years under a lean water system, primarily relying on drip methods and water recycling technology.

“We only use what we need. We don’t spill,” he says. When the family uses sprinklers on crops that demand more of a soaking, such as squash or cucumbers, the farmers “either use it really late at night after everything has cooled down, or really early in the morning so that the water can penetrate the soil without evaporating … My father has been doing it for 15 years, because for him, it's commonsense. Why waste if you don’t have to?”

18 Earthjustice is fighting a series of legal battles related to various areas affected by the drought. Besides litigating against destructive fracking practices, the organization is fighting for strong protections of endangered fish species, and the renegotiation of long-term water contracts with corporate agriculture interests that were established under an inadequate and since-invalidated biological opinion. Earthjustice is also representing the grassroots organization Restore the Delta in ongoing hearings before California’s State Water Resources Control Board that will determine the future of the Twin Tunnels proposal.

"We're talking about agreements that hand over a disproportionate share of California's real wealth—its water—to one industry for a fraction of its value, all at the expense of taxpayers, urban water users, and many other businesses and industries in this state," says Earthjustice Attorney Trent Orr. (Read Q&A on the drought.)

"But we don't have to accept these ill-conceived water contracts or the wholesale subsidization of corporate agriculture that they reflect as foregone conclusions. Earthjustice represents fishing organizations, Native Americans, and local, regional, and national environmental organizations in fighting on this issue and many other fronts to ensure the Bay-Delta's health—and the health of all the communities and businesses it supports.”

By Maggie Caldwell and Chris Jordan-Bloch.
First published February 11, 2014. Updated September 7, 2016.