Water allocation

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WHY “FISH VS. FARMERS” IS A FALSE DICHOTOMY
By: Trent Orr

Trent Orr makes his case for the allocation of more water to environment by citing the example of salmon migration. Orr, criticizes Senator Feinstein’s decision to back a bipartisan bill being passed through the senate during the current drought conditions. This bill extricates the “protections for the San Francisco bay estuary”, in order to allocate more water to the central valley agriculture and cities. This will lead to endangering the rare species of fish like Chinook salmon, steel head and green sturgeon etc. (Lochhead, 2014).
Under ideal weather conditions, these fish require to complete their natural life cycle of swimming to the ocean and then coming back to the rivers in three years to reproduce. Because of the bill being passed, the water connecting rivers and the bay to the ocean is not present there anymore. Therefore, the smolts become susceptible to higher temperatures and predation; so most of them cannot make it to the ocean. Few others that are transported through tankers to the ocean by fisheries have a broken imprinting cycle, so they do not remember their way back to the bay to reproduce. These factors lead to the drastic drop in the number of fish, leading to an unpleasant imbalance in the ecosystem (Skelton, 2014).
The author also highlights the fact that obstructing the fresh water to flow through the delta, will deteriorate the quality of drinking water because of higher quantities of salt present.
Environmentalists have strongly opposed this bill and feel that politicians have used the arid weather conditions as a subterfuge to assault the environmental regulations that they have been eyeing for a long time (Goodyear, 2014).

The depleting sa...

... middle of paper ...

... fish. Retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Feinstein-pressure- on-water-boosts-farms-over-fish-5390533.php#page-1 Orr, T. (2014, April 28). Why "fish vs. farmers" is a false dichotomy.
Retrieved from http://earthjustice.org/blog/2014-april/why-fish-vs-farmers-is-a- false-dichotomy. Skelton, G. (2014, February 19). Water war boils down to farmers vs. fishermen. Los Angeles
Times. Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/19/local/la-me-cap- drought-20140220 Strom, S. (2014, April 2014). California’s Thirsting Farmland. The New York Times.
Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/business/energy-
environment/californias-thirsting-farmland.html

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