By Ryan Christopher Jones, Doctoral Candidate, Harvard University
On President Trump’s first day in office for the second time, he signed twenty-six executive orders, including one dramatically titled “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism To Provide Water To Southern California.” The next day in his first news conference, he was asked about the Los Angeles fires and gave a response that left commentators aghast at its inaccuracy, he said, “They [California] have a valve, and it’s turned like, think of a sink but multiply it times many thousands of times, the size of it—it’s massive. And you turn it back toward Los Angeles. Why aren’t they doing it? Either they either have a death wish, or they’re stupid, or there’s something else going on that we don’t understand, but we want the water that they’re throwing away to be used for California, and that includes the farmers of California.”
To translate: the “sink” he was talking about is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and my doctoral research field site; the “valve” is the series of intrastate infrastructures that divert water from Northern California to central and southern parts of the state; and “putting people over fish” is a dig at California environmentalists that—as some claim—are protecting an endangered fish species called the Delta Smelt at the cost of farmers and cities (Scoville 2024). The president’s response is a complicated set of claims riddled with fabrications, mischaracterizations, and an “incredible lack of understanding of how California water works,” yet it is representative of the high-stakes, historical tensions over California’s competing watersheds. About 75% of California’s rain and snow falls north of Sacramento, while 80% of the state’s water demand comes from south of Sacramento (DWR n.d.)–a perceived imbalance between populations and natural resources that has rather crudely characterized California as an “upside-down” state (McWilliams 1949: 317).
Currently, two massive projects divert water from the Delta: the federal Central Valley Project (water deliveries starting in the 1940s), and the State Water Project that controls the California Aqueduct (water deliveries starting in 1960). The proposed yet controversial Delta Conveyance Project (henceforth, DCP) would transport upwards of an additional one million acre-feet of water from the Delta southwards every year (DWR 2024).
With so much water diverted away from the Delta, many locals are fearful of attrition: that over time, the Delta’s natural flows will slow in response to additional water deliveries towards drier regions. I’ve spoken to water experts who believe this outcome is unlikely, yet the fears remain, as research has shown how water transfers strain natural flows to various degrees (Meador 1992). Though California’s so-called “water wars” is a historically fraught and problematic framing (Katz 2011), it has nevertheless also been a durable and portable trope as populations rise while water resources decline. The most infamous of these conflicts was when Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Water District looked eastward to the Owens Valley as a source of water for its growing metropolis in the first decade of the 20th century. The city acquired water rights and built canals that shipped water 233 miles to Los Angeles. It only took thirteen years from 1913-1926 for Los Angeles to extract enough water from the Owens Valley to turn the Owens Lake dry (Herbst and Prather 2014), so Delta advocates often point to this fate when expressing anxieties that the Delta, too, could be extracted into extinction.
California’s water politics are a complex web of historical and legal conflicts that are notoriously difficult to decipher, independent of President Trump’s misinformation. Since his election in November 2024, environmental lawyers, conservationists, columnists, and journalists have made projections and expressed opinions on Trump’s influence on California water policy. Although the federal government has long had a pivotal role in the state’s water management since The New Deal creation of the Central Valley Project, this new layer of federal antagonism now hangs over one of the most complex water systems on the planet (Carle 2009: 92). These are the conditions in which I now find myself doing doctoral research in the California Delta, mapping out the contested perspectives of California water conflicts. As the political discourse of water shifts in response to seasonal change and drought, an attention to a hydrosociality1 in flux is a perspective that anthropology is well-suited to observe over time (Anand 2011; Ballestero 2019; Radonic 2019).
As I prepare to return to the field full time later this year, it has been a curious experience to witness my field site turn into a highly mediatized, political “battleground” in real time—lies, half-truths, and all. As such, the Delta has suddenly become infused with a renewed yet unstable urgency. In the summers of 2023 and 2024, I conducted preliminary dissertation fieldwork in the Delta, driving through the region’s 1,100 miles of levees, taking pictures of its waterscapes, and talking to fishers, landowners, farm-workers, levee engineers, and others about their relationships to local waterways. Their most common response was a general disapproval of the Delta Conveyance Project—a constant point of local frustration as many often claimed that the state was “stealing” Delta water, and that those in power didn’t care for the well-being of the Delta or its people. This disapproval, however, does not seem to be a blanket position against all water transfer projects. Instead, it indicates localized support for the Delta as a situated location (Trouillot 2003)—a conceptualization of place that prioritizes the “embodied knowledges” (Haraway 1988: 583) of communities as shaped by and “in relation to their environments” (Radonic and Kelly-Richards 2015: 391). In the Delta, this manifests as a collective priority for specific Delta interests, and against those of the rest of California. This could be seen in the countless signs and billboards scattered throughout the region with the demand to “Stop the Tunnels,” a reference to earlier iterations of the project that would have built a series of tunnels under, through, or adjacent to the Delta.
Presently, the DCP is championed by Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, though over the project’s tumultuous sixty-plus year history, both Republican and Democratic governors have supported it (Anthrop 1982). In some ways, this makes local opposition to Delta Conveyance a somewhat bipartisan issue, though the particularities of who supports what–and for which reasons–remains an entanglement requiring extended fieldwork to piece apart. Fellow Delta researcher and Tufts environmental sociologist Caleb Scoville recently told me that “the partisan valence of the tunnel is muddled” because its interpretations are seen through a web of interests that don’t cleanly align with binary left-right politics. The protracted fights between a Democratic governor and a Republican president, and the persistent tensions between state and federal water governance will only compound and complicate these fights in the Delta. In this respect, the large-scale water transfer becomes a critical object of anthropological analysis (Hoag 2019), as water’s various conduits of rivers, canals, tunnels, and aqueducts create different spatial contexts (Appadurai 1986: 16) through which water’s meaning is constantly negotiated. In other words: water means different things at different sites along its infrastructural or natural paths, so it is therefore productive to trace how political discourse shows up in particular interpretations of water’s volatility.
Conservatives in the Delta who easily resist the DCP because it was seen a liberal initiative must now situate their disapproval with a Republican president who has continued to name the Delta as a political target. In June 2024 I met a man named Scott2 from Southern California who regularly vacations in the Delta with his family. When speaking to me about the DCP, Scott said “I’m as conservative as they come, but taking water out of here and sending it to LA is just a bad idea.” The but is a curious qualifier, as it signals a belief that conservatives should support the DCP despite it being a presently Democratic initiative. I would have assumed that his status as Southern Californian—and possible beneficiary of Delta water—would more qualify his potential support for the plan over his conservatism. These kinds of surprising ethnographic encounters will help this research map water’s multiplicities (Babidge 2021; Walsh and Vogt 2021) as it moves through and away from the Delta.
While this research engages with broader scales of water policy at both the federal and state levels, I am most interested in understanding how California water politics are interpreted by the people who have forged personal, intimate relationships with Delta waterways. These perspectives are essential to map how individuals and communities in the Delta choose to assign blame, praise, support, or disapproval of water policies that have direct, material consequences in the region. How will anti-environmental federal policies impact the day-to-day for local fishers, farmers, and water-rights owners? How do these groups interact with the physical footprint of water infrastructures coursing through the Delta, as they are dominant objects in the region’s built environment? And how do these politics change over time, moving individuals either towards or away from caring for “the environment” (Agrawal 2005)?
In the Delta, discourses about water most often materialize through contests between environmental and human use. The Endangered Species Act protects species like the threatened Delta smelt—labeled a “stupid little fish” by former Congressman Devin Nunes (Scoville 2019) and “essentially worthless” by Donald Trump—illustrating the ideological framing of environmental water use3 as wasteful (Cantor 2017). Due to its small size and perceived lack of charisma, the smelt has struggled to capture the popular imagination in contrast to culturally celebrated fish like salmon and steelhead which are also listed under California Endangered Species Act. A Stockton-based environmental justice advocate told me that the environmental justice movement should have been more strategic during initial fights over the smelt: “We should have worked with local tribes and imbued the smelt with the characteristics of the hero; we should have had smelt festivals.” Theoretically, this would have constructed the smelt as more culturally valuable than it is currently perceived, making it more difficult for anti-environmentalists to attack it on the grounds of it being ‘worthless.’ The smelt also serves as a crucial indicator species for the overall health of the Delta ecosystem, yet is now functionally extinct in the wild (Lakoff 2016; CDFW 2021). Its near-extinction underscores the broader implications of declining freshwater flows, which sustain not only native species but also social and ecological benefits such as flushing pollutants, protecting wetlands, replenishing shoreline sands, maintaining fisheries, (U.S. Geological Survey et al. 2017), and arguably the most important function of strong Delta flows: to keep saltwater from intruding too deep inland (Stroshane 2015).
The Delta has been a fraught and contested region far before this federal administration made it a target. What is at play in the Delta right now is a competition of processes unfolding at wildly different paces: the seasonal fluctuations of the hydrologic cycle, the breakneck political landscape and a correspondingly manic news cycle, the prolonged crawl of litigation, and the long erosion of environmental systems. In my past career as a photojournalist, the pressure to produce and publish in response to breaking news meant that extended reporting trips were few and far between. In a present political era that is often led by daily and uncertain chaos, I come to my environmental research with a newfound, relative luxury of time. Here, an ethnographic presence will allow me to process the rough tumult of California water conflicts with a timeline more attuned to the Delta’s own natural rhythms. One that resists the compulsion to chase immediacy, and instead to trace the deeper currents that have shaped this physical and political landscape over time.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Daisy Hunter-Haydon and Caleb Scoville for their insights and feedback on the development of this essay. And I’d also like to share my gratitude to Alice Gabriner and the Center for Contemporary Documentation for their continued support of my work and research in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Footnotes
References
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