[env-trinity] Bringing a River Back to Life -- When Water Is More Than a Commodity

[Tom Stokely]

----- Forwarded by Margie Whitnah
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=8b9973723e6ba8007305ea6b38f1f440 
Bringing a River Back to Life -- When Water Is More Than a Commodity 

Pacific News Service, Commentary, Tim Holt, Aug 09, 2005 

Editor's Note: Native Americans across the nation are restoring land and waterways, but 
they face a dominant culture whose agencies are often charged with simultaneously 
protecting and exploiting nature. 

DUNSMUIR, Calif.--They are gradually emerging from the deep shadows of the dominant 
culture. Across the Great Plains, Indians are bringing back the buffalo, the wild mustang 
and the wolf. In my own region of Northern California the 2,200-member Hoopa Valley tribe is 
making headway in their effort to restore a river and a fishery that had sustained them for 
10,000 years. 

The Indians bring a kind of practical environmentalism to the ongoing debate over our 
relationship to the land and its resources. It is an environmentalism tied to a particular 
place, one that's been their home for thousands of years. They have learned to live within 
the limits of its resources. 

But native peoples must contend with powerful, rapacious forces in the larger society that 
view rivers as irrigation ditches, and water as nothing more than a commodity to be 
bought and sold. 

The Hupas and a neighboring tribe, the Yuroks, struggled for 40 years to restore their 
river after it was drained by dams and diversions. The farmers of the San Joaquin Valley, 
300 miles to the south, began siphoning water from the Trinity after they'd depleted their 
groundwater and tapped out the rivers in their own region. 

Last May, after a protracted legal struggle with those farmers, the Hupas finally saw 
flows restored to their decimated river -- at a level only about half the Trinity's historic 
flows but sufficient to bring salmon populations back to sustainable levels, according to 
government biologists. 

But even this minimal restoration is far from assured. The Hupas' legal victory didn't put 
an end to the mentality that drained their river in the first place. The federal Bureau of 
Reclamation, the agency that built the Trinity's dams and diversions, recently promised its 
water customers to the south an additional million acre-feet of water over the next 20 
years, a 15 percent increase over the current level of deliveries. 

To achieve this, the Bureau will need to tap more deeply into the Trinity's two reservoirs. 
In dry years, the river's drained reservoirs won't be able to provide the cool water required 
for spawning salmon and steelhead, so any gains in the fishery made in previous years 
could easily be wiped out. 

To give itself more flexibility, the Bureau has dropped strict guidelines that previously 
regulated flows from Northern California dams to protect salmon. This move has raised 
cries of alarm from state officials who fear efforts to restore endangered fish will be 
jeopardized, not only in the Trinity but in the state's main river system, the Sacramento. 

The Bureau currently finds itself on both sides of this issue. On the one hand, it is charged 
with carrying out the physical restoration of the Trinity, reshaping it from the straight 
channel of the post-dam era to a meandering stream with the quiet side pools necessary 
for spawning and nurturing young salmon. Ironically, the benefits from this painstaking 
work are now jeopardized by this same Bureau's plans to ship more water down south. 
What we are witnessing here is a full-blown case of bureaucratic schizophrenia, an agency 
trying to practice resource stewardship and resource exploitation at the same time, in the 
same river. 

And it gets even crazier. Some of the Bureau's water customers down south won't even be 
able to use the additional water the Bureau plans to ship them. In part this is due to 
reduced planting because of falling commodity prices. There are other problems: The 
Bureau's biggest agricultural customer, the San Joaquin valley's sprawling Westlands 
Water District, has started reducing its planted acreage due to chronically poor drainage 
and the accumulation of toxic chemicals and salt in its soils. 

But the additional water the Bureau's customers are getting definitely won't go to waste. 
The extra, taxpayer-subsidized water can be sold in the increasingly lucrative open 
market, where agricultural districts can get at least double what they pay the federal 
government for it. 

It took the Hoopas and their allies 40 years to halt the draining of their river and begin the 
restoration of its fishery. But the system that drained the river in the first place, the 
system hijacked long ago by corporate farming interests, remains firmly in place, poised 
to exploit the increasingly valuable commodity it receives at taxpayer expense. From that 
bottom-line perspective, the use of water to grow crops is just one more "option," and its 
use to improve the health of rivers and their fisheries makes no sense at all. 

  PNS contributor Tim Holt is an environmental writer living in the Mt. Shasta region of 
  Northern California. He is author of "Songs of the Simple Life," a collection of essays.
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