The Supreme Court upheld protections for a tiny fish, preserving an important tenet of the Endangered Species Act. Now the Trump administration wants to undo that victory.
California water management is not about protecting animals over people. It’s about coddling powerful special interests at the expense of average citizens, Delta farmers, commercial and sport fisherfolk—and a healthy Delta ecosystem.
Notes from a trip to the San Francisco Bay Delta to hear stories from people who would be directly impacted by a plan to pump massive amounts of freshwater out of the Delta to farms in the southern Central Valley.
In 2008, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that water operations in California must be altered to protect the delta smelt from extinction. The Service issued a biological opinion about the effects that the federal and state water projects’ pumping of massive quantities of water from the Delta would have on this threatened species,…