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By Root 1518 0

during the first four years of the drought, the Department of Water Resources and the Bureau had no choice but to cut the growers off. In 1991 and again in 1992, the CVP had just over five million acre-feet in storage in May (when most runoff has entered the reservoirs), and the growers—irrigating millions of acres—could have used it all up by July. But now there was an entirely new reason why they couldn’t let much of the water go. By 1992, the winter-run chinook was listed as a threatened species by the federal government and as an endangered species by the state of California. The spring-run salmon was not yet listed because, as part of the recovery plan, almost all salmon fishing off California and Oregon might have had to be banned. (By the fall of 1992, however, the spring run, now represented by fewer than a thousand survivors, looked as if it might be listed too.) The late-fall-run chinook was regarded by fisheries biologists as a species of special concern, which meant that it might have to be listed too. It was not inconceivable, if the drought went on, that almost every salmon in California might eventually join the endangered species list.

The San Joaquin Valley growers, of course, were inclined to blame the whole situation on everything and everyone but themselves: if not exclusively on nature’s drought, then on high-seas drift-net fishing, on ocean warming, on overfishing by the West Coast salmon fleet (the most drastically policed fishing fleet in the world), on dredge spoils dumped into San Francisco Bay, on seals and sea lions, on logging in the watersheds, on polluted runoff from abandoned mines—on any cause with a quarter-gram of plausibility. All of these horrors resulted in the loss of some fish; all of them combined are less responsible than the combination of empty rivers, intolerably warm rivers, and rivers flowing in reverse toward power and wealth.

So the fate of California agriculture is now helplessly entwined—because of its insatiable thirst for water—with the fate of the California salmon fisheries. In October of 1992, Congressman George Miller of California, the new chairman of the House Interior Committee, and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey saw their Central Valley Project Reform Act blown through the House and Senate and onto the president’s desk. Members of Congress from the Northwest voted for the bill in order to protect their own salmon fleets; members from urban California voted for the bill because their constituents had endured severe water rationing while agriculture had not; members from nearly every other state voted for the bill because, in their opinion, agribusiness in California has gotten everything it wanted for far too long, often at the expense of farmers in their own states. Among other things, the Miller-Bradley legislation takes 800,000 acre-feet of water from agriculture and dedicates it to wetlands and fisheries—the first such reallocation since the Central Valley Project Act was passed in 1933. The only question is whether it isn’t already too late. In the fall of 1992, more than 300 of the 350-odd salmon boats that comprise the fleet at Fort Bragg, California, were for sale, and winter-run salmon from the class of 1991, tatters of evolution, were being reared for tanks at San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium, like the condors at the San Diego Zoo.

“You can replant an orchard and have it back in ten years,” Zeke Grader told me one morning in the summer of 1992. “You lose a salmon that took twenty thousand years to evolve and you never get it back. The fishermen know that closing the season is their only choice. They know it’s their only hope—if they have to starve for a year, or two, or a decade, it’s the only way to save their industry. We’re chucking a whole heritage. Fishing is the oldest industry in California. You have to go up the coast to appreciate the despair. Even then you really can’t. You just can’t. Everyone’s broke. Everyone’s living off relatives or on welfare. This was pure plunder. It’s basically like the bison and the Indians: The settlers and