Terrain » Summer 2002

The Mokelumne

Laird Townsend — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:56:29 +0000

At 8,000 feet in the Sierra, between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite Valley, twin miniature lakes gather the headwaters of the Mokelumne River, which provides the drinking water for the East Bay. By the time the river finds its way into San Francisco Bay, the Mokelumne has touched on most of the biggest issues in California, and the nation: not just clean water, but preservation of forest, open space, organic farming, endangered species — and sacred sites.
Down to 4,000 feet, the watershed provides habitat for pine marten, Yosemite toad, and other rare animals protected by federal wilderness designation. It is here that grateful East Bay water users could go on pilgrimage to their snowmelt, amid the area’s granite canyons and remote old-growth forests. “This is an amazing place.” says a local conservationist. “Yosemite has nothing on Mokelumne Canyon.”
In the upper watershed, Pacific Gas & Electric operates the kind of hydroelectric facilities it wants to remove from regulation statewide, via bankruptcy proceedings. It has long wanted an unregulated subsidiary to operate dams at maximum profit to pay debts. That would provide incentive to flush or withhold water with little regard to ecosystems. In a similar spirit, speculators are awaiting a federal ruling on California’s lucrative long-term energy contracts. If upheld, they would provide incentive to build the array of natural gas power plants that are in the pipeline, awaiting financing.
Where the river winds down to private land at about 3,500 feet, the voracious Sierra Pacific Industries has begun clearcutting the Mokelumne’s slopes. Elsewhere in the range, the US Forest Service has chosen a management plan to modify such appetites, preserving declining species on its more than 11.5 million Sierra acres. But the plan, with its various loopholes and timber challenges, leaves an unanswered question, with the lives of California spotted owls, Pacific fishers, and rural towns in the balance: Does logging prevent or intensify forest fires?
At 700 feet, Pardee reservoir aqueducts pipe the “Southwest Fork” to the residents of the East Bay, where Contra Costa
County would like more water to build a sprawling 1,400-unit complex in Tassajara Valley. EBMUD must decide whether to supply the water — especially considering a possible drought. In Southern California, the Metropolitan Water District has faced a similar dilemma; it is poised to engage a private water speculator in a multi-million dollar water deal, bitterly opposed by environmentalists.
After feeding farmers in Lodi, the Mokelumne meets with the San Joaquin River, bearer of an oversalinized agricultural load, as author Gray Brechin points out. On the valley’s east side, a USGS survey found an array of contamination, including fertilizer-based nitrates at levels that frequently exceed drinking water standards. Miles to the south, in the San Gabriel Valley, working-class communities have won the right to sue private water suppliers over such contamination.
As the San Joaquin drains the 300-mile long valley, it carries the runoff from overstressed farmlands, including 2,000 to 5,000 acres of Bt cotton, entirely too close to organic-cotton plots. As Dan Rademacher reports, genetically engineered crops, even in test plots, can cross-pollinate natural crops, robbing farmers of their right to offer GE-free corn and canola. The next battleground will be wheat.
The Mokelumne, at its source the traditional territory of the Sierra Miwok, eventually drains to San Francisco Bay, which provided a rich life for their Ohlone relatives. Sacred mortuary sites at Coyote Hills and West Berkeley could be affected by pending development. In the latter, archaeologists have found everything from arrowheads to ritually buried coyotes — testimony to the wild, healthy, thriving historical communities by the bay — and to the reverence for the source of it all.
That reverence remains. When they returned to Shoshone Mountain, 69 years after the US closed off their land for nuclear testing, Paiute and Western Shoshone elders knew exactly what they would find — rock cairns marking vision quests and ceremonies that may date back 12,000 years. In fighting commercial development — in this case a large wind-energy farm — the tribes have renewed ancient ties: “We were here in the beginning, and we’re going to continue to be here.”
On the Gila River Reservation in Arizona, one tribal councilwoman has squared off against a different commercial development — a medical waste incinerator, the kind that activists shut down in Oakland. Those Bay Area-based activists have rallied behind the tribe, providing education and support for a larger vision of preventing air pollution — “Not in anyone’s back yard.”

Liquid Solar

Staff Reporter — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:52:27 +0000

The sweet smell of biodiesel was a concern in the founding of Yellowstone’s National Park Truck-in-the-Park program.
In 1994, as rangers prepared to run one 4×4 truck on the vegetable-oil fuel, they worried that aromas from the tailpipe would attract the park’s beloved bears.
By March 2002, the truck had run more than 180,000 miles with no modifications to its engine or fuel system — and no incidents with curious bears.
“Animals don’t bother with it, so that’s fine,” said Howard Haines, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality official who founded and coordinated the program.
In September 1998, the engine manufacturer sent mechanics to tear down and analyze the motor. They found scant wear and no carbon build-up from the rapeseed-based oil, Haines said. Yellowstone’s biodiesel, which costs only about 15 cents more per gallon wholesale than petroleum diesel, achieves equivalent mileage and acceleration — and burns cleaner. “The taxpayers will have their vehicles last longer,” Haines said.
But it’s good for more than just engines.
In June 2000, Congress announced that biodiesel had passed the health effects testing requirements of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. The tests found the fuel poses no health threat, has no toxic byproducts, is completely biodegradable, and contains no sulfur or carcinogenic compounds. Compared to petroleum diesel, biodiesel produced slightly more nitrogen oxides, but
• 93% fewer hydrocarbons (a major precursor to ground-level ozone, the main component of smog).
• 30% less particulate matter (later studies found 55% to 85% less).
• 50% less carbon monoxide.
• 50% to 85% less carcinogenic aromatics, like benzene and toluene.
• Zero sulfur oxides and sulfates
(contributing factors to acid rain).
The Congressional figures, compiled in 1998 by the US Department of Energy and the US Department of Agriculture, also found biodiesel reduces net emissions of the global warming agent carbon dioxide by 78%.
Not surprisingly, the Truck-in-the-Park program has become a model. From the one 4×4 in 1994, the Yellowstone region will have 120 biodiesel vehicles operating this summer, including in at least four of the largest local cities, which seek to improve visibility and reduce petrodiesel odors. “The people in the area have liked it, too,” said Haines.
Use of a rapeseed-based biodiesel has remained high for the last 15 or 20 years in Europe — at about 250 million gallons per year, said Jenna Higgins of the National Biodiesel Board, an industry association in Jefferson City, Missouri. Biodiesel runs only in diesel engines, which power proportionately more vehicles in Europe than in the US.
But the United States is rapidly catching up. While no hard numbers on biodiesel use exist, the National Biodiesel Board estimates that US use increased 30-fold in the past two full years — from 500,000 gallons in 1999 to nearly 15 million gallons in 2001. That’s expected to quadruple to 60 million gallons in 2002, Higgins said.
“We’re adding two or three fleets a week,” said Keith Ciampa of World Energy, a Massachusetts-based biodiesel wholesaler, who said his client load has grown 100-fold in just over two years — from two in 1999 to more than 200 in 2002.
“US Air Force, US Marines, Manhattan Post Office, University of Massachusetts Amherst: You name it.”
Convenience is part of the attraction. Diesel engines, which cause combustion by compression rather than spark, require no retrofitting for biodiesel.
Most biodiesel — usually made from oil left over from restaurants or soymeal processing — goes to centrally fueled fleets, where bulk purchases are easy. In most cases, fueling stations mix in 80% diesel to make “B20” fuel, which reduces prices and helps in cold weather. Petroleum becomes too viscous for the engine to start at about 5°; blended biodiesel, or B20, at about 8-10°; pure B100 at about 25° to 30°.
But by early 2001, the recycling programs of San Jose and of Berkeley’s Ecology Center became the first municipal programs in the nation to use B100.
“Diesel engines are extremely sturdy; they’ll be on the road for at least another generation,” said Dave Williamson, Ecology Center recycling manager, whose 10 biodiesel trucks “kept one ton of particulates out of the air” in 2001. “Why not run them on a cleaner, smarter fuel — one that is not in short supply?”
By definition, fossil fuels will someday be in short supply.
“The oil industry has had a 100-year head start, a trillion dollars of fueling and distribution infrastructure, and we protect it with our lives, literally,” said Ciampa. “But the country realizes it’s a security problem now. That’s never been more obvious than these days.”
In the wake of the Persian Gulf War, Congress passed the 1992 Energy Policy Act mandating how state and federal agencies and utility companies could help reduce petroleum use: buy vehicles that could use alternative fuels. A 1998 law allowed fleet managers to simply convert to biodiesel for compliance, and they did. Demand soared, lowering wholesale prices from about $2.50–$4.50 a gallon to just over $1.50, Ciampa said.
But biodiesel has also attracted users, like the Blue and Gold ferry in San Francisco and Deer Valley school district in Phoenix, to whom the mandate doesn’t apply. “A growing number of our clients are school bus fleets,” says Ciampa. “The managers are starting to recognize just how toxic diesel exhaust is.”
So are many individuals.
About 20 gas stations nationwide, including in South Carolina, Michigan, and Massachusetts, offer “liquid solar” to the public, said Ciampa. San Francisco’s Olympian station was the nation’s first to do so, in February 2001. Olympian’s B100 prices are about 60 cents a gallon higher than for their standard diesel. Any diesel car can tap the pump. Since its debut, biodiesel has nearly quadrupled in sales, said Olympian manager Tom Burke.
In February 2002, the US Senate Finance Committee voted a one-cent per gallon reduction in excise tax “for every 1% of biodiesel that is blended into standard diesel fuel — up to 20%.” Though it reinforces putting mostly petroleum in the gas tank, the incentive would be “a huge step in the right direction,” said Joshua Tickell, author of From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank: The Complete Guide to Using Vegetable Oil as a Fuel. “Oil is the single most powerful industry in the world and we’ve been trying to pass bills like this for years. Here the edifice may be cracking.”
Just what Dr. Rudolf Diesel had hoped.
At the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, the French-born thermal engineer and social theorist ran his namesake engine on peanut oil — in deliberate defiance of a petroleum-dominated industrial age. Vegetable oil is easier to obtain and process than petroleum, but has a higher “flashpoint” — it needs a much stronger spark to ignite. By offering a compression-based engine that got around that, Diesel sought not only to help the common worker bypass petroleum cartels but also to “help considerably in the development of agriculture.”
Early on, the petroleum industry appropriated Diesel’s engine. Even now, Gulf Oil sponsors the biodiesel wholesaler World Energy. But biodiesel is still agricultural, and easy to make: To process it, you take raw vegetable oil or grease and “transesterify” it — adding alcohol, lye, or another catalyst. That splits off glycerine, which can gum up a fuel injector. At the Berkeley Biodiesel Project, people can even make their own: “Bring your checkbook and gloves, and be prepared to stir the pot,” said coordinator Jon Bauer.
Much biodiesel uses french-fry oil, but virgin soy oil dominates; billions of gallons of it remain after soymeal processing. From the Fryer reports that palm oil (yielding about 4,600 pounds of oil per acre) is far more efficient than soy (345 pounds). Europe uses mostly rapeseed (canola) (915 pounds), whose planting also serves to preserve open space. And algae, as yet commercially unavailable, “is 1,000% more efficient in acres used than soy,” said author Tickell.
No advocate claims that biodiesel production should displace food acreage. If all 60 billion gallons of diesel used in the US each year came from soy crops, it would require roughly 1.4 billion acres — about three times the total cropland in the US. But if rapeseed were grown on cropland now fallowed by the US government for economic reasons, the oil could, combined with used cooking oil, supply 25% of the nation’s entire diesel capacity, said Tickell. Biodiesel staples soy and rapeseed have genetically engineered varieties controlled by agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland. But organic farms could also supply sources of biodiesel, said Tickell.
As Ciampa put it: “We’re trying not just to displace petroleum and clean up the environment — but to shift the cash stream to US farms.”

When We Bombed the World

Alexander Cockburn — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:50:28 +0000

The Cold War may be over but its legacy remains hot and deadly. A new report estimates that fallout from open-air nuclear testing will eventually kill more than 15,000 Americans and cause at least 80,000 cancers, and that nuclear testing has exposed to radiation nearly everyone who resided in the United States from 1951 to 2000.
The August 2001 report, prepared by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), is remarkable for several reasons, not least because it’s the first time the US government has released an assessment of the spread and consequences of fallout from global nuclear testing. It’s also the first time that the government has admitted that cancer deaths nationwide have been caused by the testing. Previously, the government had only admitted adverse consequences to “downwinders” in states adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.
The report was commissioned by Congress in 1998 following public uproar over a 1997 study by the NCI that investigated the fallout of only one radionuclide, iodine-131, and its link to thyroid cancers. Iodine-131 was dropped as fallout across dairy country, where it was consumed by cows and goats, and concentrated in their milk.
This examination of global fallout is much broader, tracking, among other things, exposure to cesium-137. In addition to that from the Nevada Test Site, the NCI/CDC study also looked at fallout from US tests in the Marshall Islands and Johnson Atoll, British explosions at the Christmas Islands and Soviet testing at Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya.
The irradiation of the global environment has been a uniquely cooperative endeavor, with all the nuclear superpowers contributing. In total, the US has carried out 1,030 nuclear weapons tests; the former Soviet Union, 715; France, 210; Britain, 45; China, 47.
The US body count is hidden in the accumulation of cancers such as thyroid (2,500 deaths), leukemia (550 deaths), and radiogenic cancers from external exposure (11,000 deaths) and internal exposure (3,000 deaths).
“Hot spots occurred thousands of miles away from the test sites,” said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, which analyzed the data. “Hot spots due to testing in Nevada occurred as far away as New York and Maine. Hot spots from US Pacific-area testing and Soviet testing were scattered across the US from California, Oregon, and Washington to New Hampshire, Vermont and North Carolina.”
The NCI/CDC study only looked at results of tests conducted from 1951 through 1962. That excluded Chinese tests, some Soviet tests, most French atmospheric testing in the Pacific, pre-1951 US testing in the Marshall Islands, the 1945 New Mexico tests, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and ventings from US and Soviet underground tests.
The fallout statistics don’t account for other deaths and illnesses, including those of uranium miners, nuclear plant workers, and neighbors of such production facilities as Hanford and Rocky Flats.
The National Cancer Institute/Centers for Disease Control study gathered dust for at least six months, as the Bush administration and Congress tussled over how to control the import of its grim conclusions. Even in the 1950s, the Pentagon and the old Atomic Energy Commission knew that Nevada Test Site fallout was spreading across the country and into Canada and Mexico. Yet they concealed this until February 2002. Although the United States has been grievously tardy in owning up to inflicting this horror on its own people, it is ahead of other nuclear nations, which remain morbidly quiet on the subject.
The tally of the dead and dying from the 11 years of testing doesn’t seem to have given the nuclear hawks the slightest pause. Indeed, the Bush administration’s new Nuclear Posture Review calls for the development and testing of new nuclear “bunker-busters.” This would abridge the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and put another generation at risk.
“Today’s nuclear arsenal continues to reflect its Cold War origin, characterized by moderate delivery accuracy, limited earth penetrator capability, high yield warheads, silo and sea-based ballistic missiles with multiple independent reentry vehicles, and limited retargeting capability,” said the Pentagon review to Congress in January 2002. “New capabilities must be developed to defeat emerging threats such as hard and deeply buried targets . . . to find and attack mobile and relocatable targets, to defeat chemical or biological agents, and to improve accuracy and limit collateral damage.”
“While the United States is making every effort to maintain the stockpile without additional nuclear testing, this may not be possible for the indefinite future,” warned Defense Department strategists.
Before Bush signs off on new nuclear weapons testing, he should scrutinize the fallout maps that accompany the NCI/
CDC study. They are eerily similar to the famous electoral map of 2000. The cancers have fallen most heavily on the American heartland that, with the Supreme Court, handed Bush the White House.
It would be too much to expect that the next time Bush barks about Saddam Hussein killing his own people he would refer to those maps — and to their frightful record of atomic victims.

The Right to Grow Organic

Dan Rademacher — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:49:02 +0000

Arnold Taylor and his son farm 3,500 acres south of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The Taylors raise organic beef, and grow organic-certified wheat, oats, barley, mustard, lentils, and, until recently, canola. Since the advent of genetically engineered (GE) canola in the mid-1990s, organic growers in Saskatchewan have had an increasingly difficult time finding untainted seed and keeping their fields free of contaminated GE pollen from neighboring farms.
“Organic canola is pretty much not in existence [in Saskatchewan],” Taylor said. “You can’t buy seed because seed is all contaminated. We had a farmer two years ago that had to go 500 miles to get uncontaminated seed.” And if you can find seed, Taylor added, the traders who buy canola and sell it internationally face the major risk of having a load of organic canola rejected once it gets to Europe. “The traders have told us that they’re just not selling it because there’s too much risk,” Taylor told Terrain.
But Taylor and the group he leads are fighting back with a class-action lawsuit against GE canola sellers Monsanto and Aventis CropScience. The suit would enforce liability for the damage done by GE canola and head off similar potential damage to wheat, which is being developed into genetically engineered strains. “We have the right to grow [organic] canola, and they’ve taken that right away from us,” said Taylor, who is the president of the Saskatchewan Organic Directorate, an umbrella group that represents organic farmers, grain buyers, and consumers. “Our rotations depend on wheat. If [GE] wheat comes in, it would become very difficult to be an organic farmer in Saskatchewan.”
According to the Statement of Claim filed in January in the Saskatchewan provincial court, the suit aims to enforce strict liability on the two companies on multiple fronts: negligence, nuisance, non-natural use of land, trespass of the companies’ seed on farmers’ lands, air pollution with pollen and seed, and failure to fulfill required environmental impact studies for both the uncontrolled release of GE canola and new test plots of GE wheat. Once the suit passes its first hurdle, getting certified as a class action, farmers elsewhere in Canada will be able to join it.
“We want to hold the companies responsible for the consequences of their seed,” Taylor said. “They put GE canola out on an unconfined-release basis. They had no border strips or information for growers. They just assumed that they were going to be able to browbeat everyone into accepting it.” But, as Taylor pointed out, consumers in Europe and Japan are steadfastly resisting GE crops: Europe rejects all crops with more than 1% GE content, and Japan’s limit is just 0.5% — and farmers like Taylor are paying the price.
Few Legal Precedents
Liability for genetic engineering’s consequences, from current pollen drift to potential problems like pesticide resistance, remains ill-defined. Traditional crop insurance in the US, according to Paul Horel of the insurance industry–sponsored Crop Insurance Research Bureau, covers only natural events like hail. Though weather is inherently unpredictable, insurance companies can reliably predict overall average losses from hail, Horel said. Not so with GE contamination. “It’s a pretty dicey thing for private companies to pick up,” he said. “They would have to get reinsurance, and I’m not sure that there’s enough reinsurance out there.”
The two main GE liability battlegrounds thus far are the current debates over crop contamination and the StarLink debacle of 2000, when GE corn approved in the US only for animal feed was found in taco shells and other consumer products.
In the StarLink case, Aventis CropScience, which made and sold the seed, ended up voluntarily paying farmers and elevators for their losses, after several states’ attorneys general threatened to file suit. “The best response in a case like this is for them to get out their checkbook and pay for all the costs,” said Iowa State University Professor Neil Harl, a foremost expert on agricultural law. “Initially, they weren’t quite as forthcoming as they were later with a little prodding from the attorneys general.”
But since the case didn’t go to court, it set no new legal precedents. The only other precedent that might apply, said Harl, is the established liability that pesticide sprayers have if they damage or contaminate adjacent farmland. But genetically altered crops pose much greater challenges in proving who caused what damage. “With spray, you have just one firm spraying on one day,” Harl said. “With pollen, it can drift any direction, 30 feet or a mile or so. You can imagine a lawsuit, and the defense lawyers would just have a field day talking about all the different ways [contamination] could have happened.”
Harl said he has been encouraging farmers in Iowa to explicitly not guarantee that their crops are free of GE content. He helped the state government develop a form for farmers to shed any responsibility for the marketability of their crops in overseas markets that won’t buy GE products. Without such a form, farmers who know that their grain is heading to Europe are giving what Harl called an “implied warranty” that their crop will be accepted — and grain buyers could sue farmers if their grain is rejected for having too much GE content.
Such a suit would be very difficult for a grain buyer to win, since any load of grain might contain portions from numerous farms, but some grain elevators in Iowa actually made a form, similar in appearance to Harl’s state form, that turned liability back on to the farmer.
“There’s a huge power play,” said Bill Wenzel, national director of the Farmer-to-Farmer Campaign, a nationwide effort to build farmer opposition to GE crops. “Regardless of the pressure being applied by industry, [farmers] will continue to fight for GE-free seed.”
Lost in a Sea of GE
Organic corn in the US Midwest may be following the same road as canola in Canada. David Vetter has been growing certified organic corn and other crops on his 288-acre farm in central Nebraska since the 1970s. His farming, along with the organic grain-processing business he runs on his farm, pays the bills — but the farm’s profits are about equal to the premium Vetter gets because his produce is certified organic.
That premium may be in danger from contamination by genetically altered crops. Vetter, who stopped using canola in his grain business several years ago for fear of GE contamination, has been rigorously testing both his seed and his crops for genetically altered content for the past four years. The tests came up positive in 2000 and 2001. “It’s gotten now where seed suppliers won’t even guarantee their seeds,” Vetter said. “It’s at the point now where I don’t believe that you can buy corn in this country and guarantee that it has no [genetically altered content].”
Researchers at the University of Maine released study results in February that showed that GE corn cross-pollinates natural corn at about 1% or less for test plots grown 100 to 130 feet apart. That may sound insignificant, but the US Department of Agriculture organic standards have zero tolerance for GE content. Study author Michael Vayda downplayed the danger for organic farmers. “It’s a matter of knowing what your neighbors are planting, and setting border rows,” he told Terrain.
But Vetter, whose 288-acre farm is only 15% to 20% the size of his neighbors’, says he can’t afford to lose cropland to buffer strips and other unplantable areas. And last year, Vetter had to scramble to find corn entirely free of GE content for one customer. That corn was of a lower grade, and the customer hasn’t been back. Plus, Vetter had to pay to test the corn. “I spent $1,500 myself on testing to sell a load of corn worth about $4,000. There’s no future in that.”
“Those costs should belong to whoever owns that technology,” Vetter said. “And the farmers don’t own the technology, they rent it. The companies own it. If my neighbor bought a tractor that has no control mechanism, and it [gets loose and] destroys my crops, you can bet that my neighbor or the person who sold him the technology would have to pay for it.”
Bread and Butter Fight
Liability for the damage done by GE canola and corn is critical, but the real fight, said farmers in North Dakota, will be over Monsanto’s experimental GE Roundup Ready wheat, the herbicide-tolerant strain awaiting approval by the US Food and Drug Administration.
The Saskatchewan lawsuit contains demands for injunctions against even the current field-testing of GE wheat. Widespread open planting of GE wheat across the grain belt poses obvious risks, but Taylor said even small field tests pose a real danger. A recent tornado swept up entire fields of GE canola in southern Manitoba. “A test plot of wheat, a tornado would take out the whole works, and who knows where it will end up,” he said.
Conventional wheat farmers in the United States are just as alarmed. Todd Leake, a wheat farmer in Emerado, North Dakota, paints a doomsday scenario for the contamination of the nation’s entire wheat seed stock. Hybridized wheat “foundation seed,” the source for most farmers’ wheat, must be grown anew every year, and many of the university plots where it is grown, said Leake, are near test plots for GE wheat.
“What we fear is that not only will the new varieties of research wheat be contaminated by the GE traits, but also that those will be expanded and the problem will [spread] across the continent,” Leake said. “Within a matter of years, we could completely contaminate the entire continent’s wheat supply.”
“Everybody wants genetically modified wheat stopped, except Monsanto,” Leake said. “Everybody eats bread, and this is where the battle is going to be fought.”
Leake is a member of the Dakota Resource Council, a grassroots group promoting sustainable agriculture. It’s planning to lobby for restrictions on open field trials of GE wheat, petition US Secretary of Agriculture Anne Veneman for a moratorium on GE wheat, and keep her department from authorizing any market release.
“In so many languages, the word for wheat is synonymous with life. I think that the fight over wheat is going to be the defining moment in the fight over genetic modification, because we’re at the point where we haven’t screwed it up yet,” Leake said. “What we need to do is to make [our resistance] quite clear to the secretary of agriculture, the executives of corporations, the researchers at universities, and our senators and representatives.”

Desert Water Marketing Plan Nears Key Vote

Irene Lyn — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:45:24 +0000

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) could vote as early as June on Cadiz Inc.’s unprecedented proposal to store water under its privately owned desert land for resale to municipal customers.
“No water project of this size has ever been undertaken between a public agency like the MWD and a private company,” said Jane Kelly, director of Public Citizen’s California office, who called the upcoming vote “an issue of mind-boggling consequences.” [See Terrain, Fall 2000, Fall 2001.]
Santa Monica–based Cadiz wants to build a 35-mile pipeline from the MWD’s Colorado River Aqueduct through the eastern Mojave Desert, transferring wet-year agricultural runoff into aquifer storage approximately 15 miles south of the Mojave National Preserve.
Cadiz also would draw up to 1.5 million acre-feet of native water over 50 years from aquifers under its 27,000 desert acres.
During dry years, it would sell native water and charge fees for stored aqueduct water to MWD and its 17 million customers.
“If water is made into a marketplace commodity, the public will lose all control over this resource,” said Kelly. “If you think what Enron did to electricity was bad, wait until you see what Cadiz could do to water.”
In April, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was expected to uphold its final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) allowing Cadiz to build its pipeline on the border of two wilderness areas.
Environmentalists, who are now lobbying the 37-member MWD board, have blasted the BLM’s findings.
Cadiz and the MWD claim they can extract 70,000 acre-feet of the native groundwater per year harmlessly; the US Geological Survey puts the natural recharge rate near 5,000 acre-feet per year.
Overdraft could dry up springs, causing massive dust storms over the 100 square miles around Bristol and Cadiz lakes; and jeopardize desert bighorn sheep and the endangered desert tortoise, said Bob Ellis of the conservation group Desert Survivors.
BLM, claiming a lack of scientific consensus on recharge rates, proposes a “Groundwater Monitoring and Management Plan” to prevent overdrafting.
“It’s insane to try and build this entire project with no guidelines in place to protect the ecosystem and aquifer,” said Public Citizen’s Kelly. “The MWD could spend over $100 million on the pipeline and discover a shortage of groundwater.”
MWD Vice President for External Affairs Adan Ortega said a technical review panel would annually limit extraction of native water to safe levels, and MWD would voluntarily draw only stored aqueduct water “for the first 15 years,” as it weans itself off Colorado River surplus.
“[But] we would have to prepay for 30,000 acre-feet of indigenous water over 50 years. [If that’s not available,] our board would want some security from that loss.”
Southern California consumers could find themselves paying higher rates for “a big ill-informed investment,” said Ellis.
MWD, which has invested $2 million in the plan so far, would pay at least $75 million to build the facilities, and up to $800 million dollars for the water, Ortega said.
Should the MWD vote for approval, the Eugene, Oregon-based Western Environmental Law Center (WELC) will sue the US Department of the Interior to block the current version of the project, said WELC attorney Simeon Herskovits. But Public Citizen said the plan is lobbying MWD to make sure it doesn’t get that far.
Updates: Public Citizen: (510) 663-0888, www.citizen.org. To contact MWD board members, call (213) 217-6000.

Sierra Management Plan under Fire

Megan Peterson — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:44:48 +0000

An innovative Sierra Nevada fire-management plan faces threats from significant loopholes, a logging-intensive federal law, and a Bush administration review, forest ecologists say.
Generally lauded by environmentalists for its biology-based prescriptions, the $12 million Sierra Nevada Framework, approved in January 2001, cuts logging levels by two-thirds on 11.5 million acres in 11 National Forests.
“From the [logging-friendly] US Forest Service, the Framework is the most developed and probably best analysis of fire issues to date,” said Timothy Ingalsbee of the Eugene, Oregon–based Western Fire Ecology Center. “This is the best of what they could do.”
Based largely on congressionally mandated research, the Framework reduces current logging levels of over 300 million to about 100 million board feet annually over the next five years, and restricts logging of trees larger than 12 inches in diameter. It breaks with some fire management conventions, including “mapping out grid blocks of clearcuts,” says Ingalsbee. “Some of the fuel reductions at least attempt to mimic natural fire disturbances.” For the most part, he said, the Framework also avoids “linear fuel breaks,” which create hot, dry conditions that exacerbate fire.
Ranging in elevation from 2,000 to 12,000 feet, the Sierra’s conifer forests include giant sequoia; white, red, and Douglas fir; ponderosa and Jeffrey pine; incense cedar, and others.
The Framework addresses what it calls a 7% to 11% annual decline in California spotted owl populations over the past fifteen years. The plan restricts logging on 4 million acres of old-growth forest, where owls thrive, and maintains 2.6 million acres of designated wilderness areas and scenic river corridors.
But there are loopholes. And the Bush administration is reexamining the original plan, threatening to weaken it further.
“The Framework just barely met [viability] requirements for the California spotted owl and the Pacific fisher,” said Chad Hanson, director of the Cedar Ridge, California–based John Muir Foundation.
Both species need large trees for shelter; the owl uses trees 11 inches or more in diameter. The Framework allows logging of trees up to 20 inches in diameter in “wildland-urban interface,” which it says is habitat for about 34% of the owls in the range.
The Framework also allows virtual clearcuts any time the Forest Service claims that a fire has killed at least 75% of a stand’s trees, but Forest Service Project Manager Steve Clausen confirmed that the agency will often claim as “dead” those trees burned enough to die within about two years. “[This can] result in the harvesting of trees which would
otherwise live,” said John Muir Project legal coordinator Rachel Fazio. “Depending on the species, between 40% and 60% are not dead and will not die from fire injuries.”
Even dead large trees provide shelter for the owl and the fisher.
In allowing logging to fragment habitat, the Framework also fails on “sound conservation and biology principles” that require habitat corridors, Hanson said. As Fazio put it: “The fishers need to connect with their relatives in the Klamath-Siskiyou forests.”
The population of fishers, relatives of mink and otter, “is hanging on by a thread in the Sequoia and southern Sierra National Forests,” said a recent Sierra Nevada Protection Campaign report. “[The Framework] suggests the fisher will be extirpated in less than 50 years.”
The most surprising loophole turned up in a September 2001 proposal — which the Forest Service wants to implement by September 2002 — to allow more than 70,000 acres of controversial fuel break zones in the Plumas and Lassen national forests. The “Administrative Study,” ostensibly to investigate how owls would respond to “small silvicultural treatments,” was mentioned but not analyzed in the Framework. Hanson said it introduces some “devastating” quarter-mile-wide fuel breaks, which remove mature trees up to 34 inches in diameter.
“That’s obscene. That’s the least flammable tree in the forest,” said Ingalsbee. “[The plan] doesn’t reduce the fire danger. It increases it. These little clearcuts cause the air to get hotter and drier and rise and suck out all the moisture from adjacent stands. And when you open up a quarter-mile of grassy, brushy areas to sun and wind, fires can race across, long before firefighters can reach there. It is destructive fragmentation of the forest.”
Some fuel-break options reduce canopy to 40%; California spotted owls need 50% canopy cover to live.
The study also allows half-acre to two-acre clearcuts on approximately 4,000 acres of owl habitat.
The Forest Service’s Clausen said the logging removes fuel, reflecting an overall fire management strategy: “To get the forest so that we won’t have catastrophic fires, you often need to thin stands.”
Under the 1998 Quincy Library Group Act, the Forest Service was supposed to allow fuel-break zones on about 60,000 acres a year for five years in Plumas, Lassen, and the Sierraville district of Tahoe National Forest. From 1999 to 2004, these — along with 8,700 acres of clearcut per year — would have more than doubled the logging over the 1.5 million-acre project area.
The Quincy Act allowed logging of trees up to 30 inches in diameter, but recent Quincy timber sales on the 4,000-acre owl habitat have no upper tree-size limit, Fazio said.
The Framework has significantly reduced the Quincy Plan’s logging of large trees and large areas of canopy. The restrictions apply to Quincy sales only after February 2001, but the Forest Service has grandfathered in more intensive sales and exempted 5,000 acres of two-acre clearcuts that target goshawk habitat, including old growth, Hanson said.
Michael Jackson, an attorney and founding member of the Quincy Library Group, said the Act would restore the forests to a natural open state, for which local creatures have evolved. “In 1904, the number of stems was around 200 per acre, whereas in 2000, there was an average 1,280 stems per acre,” said Jackson. “There are only two ways to return to more open stands; one is a chainsaw, the other is a drip torch.”
But Ingalsbee said the plan fails to emphasize the best proven method of reducing fire danger: the removal of underlying weeds. “As in most every Forest Service fire-reduction project, the first thing they want to do is haul out the logs when they ought to be dealing with the dead needles, twigs, and brush, that don’t have any kind of commercial extraction value but the most fire hazard potential.” According to a successful lawsuit by Arcata-based Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, the Forest Service has also failed to study the effects of maintaining fuel breaks with herbicides. To address the June 2001 herbicides
ruling, the agency has revised an Environmental Impact Statement, now under consideration by US district judge Lawrence K. Karlton.
“It hasn’t held up any sales,” Fazio said.
In December 2001, at the request of the Bush administration’s Forest Service chief, California Regional Forester Jack Blackwell proposed “a broad review of the elements of and basis for the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment.” The year-long review would re-examine the framework, and the public record it’s based on, “to evaluate any needed changes, [including] more flexibility in aggressive fuels treatment” and “implementation of the Quincy Project.”
Craig Thomas, conservation director for the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign, a six-year-old coalition of 76 California environmental groups, said the Framework will stand up to the review and any revisions. “Messing with the Endangered Species Act is a big loser for them politically, and they [the administration] know it.”

Residents Rally for “Rarest of Mosaics”

Jacob Drew — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:42:50 +0000

Fremont residents have unofficially weighed in against the development of open space next to Coyote Hills Regional Park, which houses gray fox, deer, native willow groves, more than 170 bird species, and a series of Native American burial mounds.
The 1,064-acre park, just west of privately owned ranchland targeted by a developer, “is the best freshwater marsh in the whole East Bay,” said San Francisco Bay Area naturalist and ornithologist Dr. Howard Cogswell.
In a February 2002 survey of registered Fremont voters for Friends of the Ridgelands, more than 80% told San Francisco-based David Binder Research that they would like to restrict development on the 427-acre Patterson Ranch. It insulates the park from a large industrial center and dense residential section to the east.
“The ranch serves as a buffer to Coyote Hills,” said Meg Gleason, co-chair of Friends of Coyote Hills and Fremont. “Development (would) irrevocably degrade the integrity and quality of the park both for recreational users and for wildlife.”
In December 2001, San Mateo-based Frisbie Planning Co. targeted the ranch for a commercial center, major sports park, elementary school, and 1,800 units of housing — up from 1,200 units in a February 2000 plan.
Developer Richard Frisbie said the proposal would protect against threats to the “beautiful area.”
The Friends of Coyote Hills’ website disagreed: “The development will cause more noise, traffic, air pollution, and a large influx of domestic cats and other domestic animals. Cats will endanger the already fragile California quail population.”
At least 173 bird species, including such uncommon ones as tricolored blackbirds, golden eagles, and white-tailed kites, have been observed in the park and ranch area, Cogswell said.
Developing the ranch would gobble up prime “herb-covered hunting space for open-space birds,” Cogswell said. Losing habitat, he said, would affect meadowlarks, pheasants, winter-foraging ducks, migrating shorebirds, and especially raptors, including hawks and owls that forage in the open grassland.
One of the Bay’s last pre-European habitats runs through the ranch and park, according to a 1999 study sponsored by the US EPA and the regional water quality board. “The diked wetlands east of Coyote Hills [Patterson Ranch Property] support the largest remaining willow groves in the baylands ecosystem,” said the Baylands Ecosystem Habitat report. Seasonal and diked wetland and a permanent freshwater pond also dot the site.
“It is the rarest of all mosaics left in the Bay Area,” said Josh Collins of the San Francisco
Estuary Institute. “The particular blend of riparian, willow grove, seasonal wetland, and tidal marsh preferred by indigenous peoples is almost completely gone except [at] Coyote Hills.”
In studying the extensive Native American use of the site, archaeologists like Alan Leventhal of San Jose State University have found Ohlone graves on Patterson Ranch and in the park. “The chances of hitting cemetery sites are very high,” he says. “It was a densely occupied locality with a variety of mortuary sites that spanned thousands of years.”
In December 2001, Frisbie applied to change the ranch’s open-space zoning to residential. City officials could not say when the plan would undergo an Environmental Impact Report, which would precede a city council vote expected as early as mid-2003.
Amid pressure from local environmentalists, the council in February excluded the Patterson Ranch plan from its “Housing Element,” a state-mandated plan to build 6,700 residences before 2006 to keep commuters near Fremont’s new jobs.
As early as April, the US Army Corps of Engineers was planning to rule on how much of the ranch constituted “wetlands,” which could curtail the land available for building.
But the Corps ruling, the council vote, and the survey won’t bind the council to stop the project — or stop the developer from suing the Corps, or the council, over unfavorable rulings or claims of “taking of the property,” said councilman Bob Wasserman.
“Will [the voter survey] influence us?” asked Wasserman. “Certainly. Ultimately, the council is going to have to make some very very tough decisions.”

Montezuma Wetlands Suit

Staff Reporter — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:41:44 +0000

Two Bay Area activist groups have filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue to block the Montezuma Wetlands Project, an effort to dump toxic dredge spoils from the Port of Oakland and elsewhere into Solano County marshland for “restoration.”
The February notice, which could enjoin the project, charges that developer LFR Levine-Fricke violated the US Endangered Species Act (ESA), and that the Army Corps of Engineers illegally ignored more than two-thirds of the endangered fairy and tadpole shrimp affected by the project.
“This is a criminal project in terms of the ESA,” said Leslie Emmington, with co-plaintiff Friends of Suisun Marsh.
The Corps’ permit for the project covered about an acre of vernal pools, home to endangered shrimp. But it relied on a US Fish and Wildlife Service study addressing just a quarter acre of habitat.
“There’s an ESA because species are lost by attrition,” said Jonathan Kaplan, with co-plaintiff WaterKeepers Northern California. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
In April, the plaintiffs were deciding whether to seek an injunction to halt construction, which can occur only between April 15 and October 15 due to restrictions protecting migrating and breeding birds, said lead attorney Michael Lozeau of EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund.

Clean Water Victory

Staff Reporter — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:40:54 +0000

Working-class communities in the San Gabriel Valley and Pomona areas east of Los Angeles have won a state Supreme Court ruling that allows water users to sue privately owned water suppliers, as well as public water companies, over contamination of the water supply.
The private water suppliers had argued that only the state Public Utilities Commission regulated their water quality.
“It’s a very important ruling,” said Chris Rideout, an attorney at the Los Angeles firm Rose, Klein and Marian, representing some 2,000 plaintiffs buoyed by the February ruling. “This decision potentially affects customers of private water suppliers all over the state.”
From Arcadia to West Covina, from the 1950s through the 1980s, individual plaintiffs in some dozen lawsuits drank water containing perchlorate and volatile organic chemicals such as trichlorethylene, N-nitrosodimethylamine, and methyl ethyl ketone. The suit claims water users got cancer, blood disorders, and damaged nervous systems from the chemicals discharged by aerospace contractor Aerojet and other companies in the 1950s and 1960s. With the contamination migrating underground toward southeast Los Angeles, 31 drinking-water wells have closed, their water replaced by Colorado River water.
Aerojet and seven other companies reached a tentative agreement with water companies in January for an $80 million cleanup. This agreement doesn’t affect the individuals’ suits, which will now proceed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

The Broken Promised Land

Gray Brechin — Sat, 16 Mar 2002 06:39:48 +0000

Ten years ago, photographer Robert Dawson and I set out to update ecologist Ray Dasmann’s 1965 classic The Destruction of California. We had both watched the Golden State tarnish as its population doubled in the nearly three decades since we had read Dasmann’s sobering warning. Our update, the 1997 Farewell, Promised Land, devotes one chapter to the “coerced cornucopia” of California agriculture. Not surprisingly, some readers have had difficulty accepting its grim conclusion: that “California’s farming is on the way out.” As one reviewer put it: “In what century will this happen?” After all, there’s so much agriculture in California that it seems (to use an adjective commonly employed in the 19th century for things long gone in ours) inexhaustible. What could possibly curtail or end California’s much-vaunted $29.5 billion farming cornucopia?
Let’s start with urbanization in California’s premier growing region, the San Joaquin Valley. A vast 300-mile-long basin walled by the Sierra Nevada, Tehachapi Mountains, and Coast Range, the San Joaquin constitutes the southern two-thirds of California’s Great Central Valley. Both portions of the Central Valley are in jeopardy. But compared to the wetter, better-drained Sacramento Valley, the San Joaquin suffers from more salinization, more pollution, and more sprawl.
In 1995, the American Farmland Trust (AFT) released a study predicting that a vast low-density megalopolis would cover one million additional acres of mostly prime farmland from Sacramento to Bakersfield by 2040. “Driven by one of the nation’s highest population growth rates,” the report concluded, “urban development is threatening to transform this magnificent valley from a patchwork quilt of farms and natural areas into an urban desert.” (Hold that last noun: it’ll be back.) The AFT’s consultants estimated the direct loss of agricultural commodity sales at $2.1 billion, with an additional loss to support-businesses of $3.2 billion. Unless cities grow more compactly, the cost of providing public services to new low-density sprawl would exceed the revenues collected by Central Valley cities by about $1 billion a year, forcing tax increases or service cutbacks in its many impoverished areas.
Two years after issuing its warning, AFT released a nationwide survey, calling the Sacramento–San Joaquin Valley the most threatened farmland in the United States. Trust president Ralph Grossi — a third-generation rancher — told the San Francisco Chronicle that cities are “sprawling over some of the most productive farmland in the world.”
The trend has not abated, according to researchers at the Modesto-based Great Valley Center: In the San Joaquin Valley alone, from 1996 to 1998, urban development claimed 14,414 more acres, almost half of them prime farmland — up 25% over the previous two-year period.
If you look out of the plane on a night flight from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, you’ll see the dazzling plain of lights on lands that only decades ago produced food. Those lights stretch virtually unbroken from the Santa Monica Mountains to Mexico. Northeast lies darkness where the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains momentarily dam the city’s flood — but the Tejon Ranch Company wants to develop that too, with water from the California Aqueduct. Beyond, other luminous nets mark the cities of the eastern San Joaquin as they coalesce along the freeways and around vast shopping malls, spreading haphazardly in response to rising land values in the Bay Area and Southern California.
The AFT report predicts that 2.5 million additional acres will be lost to such growth — the victim of a one-third mile “zone of conflict” around the cities, whose dwellers would object to farm odors and pesticides. The zone will hamper food production by forcing farms to move to less productive land, while worsening traffic congestion and air and water pollution. Growing cities will also further compete with farming for decreasing supplies of fresh water. In all, over half of the San Joaquin Valley’s cultivated cropland will likely be lost or severely impaired by urbanization alone in the next 40 years — even as the growth of those cities greatly increases their demand for food and fiber.
The reason is simple. As Farewell, Promised Land put it: “Soil produces more on lot sales than in cotton, cattle or almonds.”
As writers such as Peter Schrag in Paradise Lost and Stephanie Pincetl in Transforming California have documented, profit, payoffs, and PR will shape both the physical and political landscape of California as long as cities are the highest-value crop that land can grow. Both authors note how 1978’s state Proposition 13 enshrined into public policy the drive to urbanize by permanently capping property taxes, starving municipalities of revenue. To compensate, municipalities develop land to reap taxes, especially the vacant land so desired by developers.
But why the state’s prime farmlands?
One: They’re often convenient to the core of historical farm towns, now large cities. Two: Flat and fertile bottomlands (floodplains) constitute the cheapest places on which to build.
Without laws limiting development in harm’s way, floodplains are gold mines for powerful landowners like Newhall Land Company. In the 1960s, for example, when Newhall sought a plan for a new city on one of its ranches north of the San Fernando Valley, the noted architect Warren Callister suggested an Italian-style hilltown on ridgetops in order to preserve rich soils and orchards on the floodplain of the Santa Clarita River. The company quickly junked Callister’s plan as too expensive, opting to replicate San Fernando sprawl in the new “masterplanned” city of Valencia. Thomas L. Lee, company chairman, expressed the ethos that largely drives urbanization: “Newhall Land’s legacy is not of agriculture for the sake of agriculture, but of utilizing land as a resource.”
With sufficiently anti-social accounting, that “resource” can become enormously lucrative. Newhall’s family law firm, Brobeck Harrison & Phleger, quietly engineered an elaborate legal shelter known as a master limited partnership to shield the company and heirs from taxes to provide public services, causing its stock value to soar in the 1980s. The law firm’s 1996 yearbook noted that “the key to Newhall’s future value was to continue to maximize the value of Newhall’s land holdings,” (i.e., to “make city”).
Of course, politics drives the process. Campaign contributions, which once went by a shorter and ruder name, are known in the San Joaquin as “ag lettuce.” Such political donations make more than salad for great land baronies such as Newhall, Tejon Ranch, Kern County Land, and J.G. Boswell, by providing access to the public treasury or freedom from regulation and taxation. In 1982, for example, agribusiness lobbyists persuaded Congress and the Reagan administration to “reform” — gut — the 1902 Reclamation Act. However unenforced it was, that law had specifically prohibited absentee-owned farms of more than 160 acres from receiving subsidized water.
Taxpayer-funded water makes the “ag lettuce” grow, but the plumbing gets it there. Once opened in 1971, the California Aqueduct of the State Water Project sucked water from the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta in Northern California and moved it south, uphill along the arid west side of the San Joaquin Valley and over the Tehachapi Mountains to Los Angeles. As it subtracted prodigious amounts of freshwater from Northern California’s already degraded Bay-Delta ecosystem, the Aqueduct encouraged speculation on farm, range, and desert lands with the promise of cheap water. As it opened the alkali-impregnated soils of the western San Joaquin to irrigated agribusiness, it also opened Southern California to total urbanization. In conjunction with the federally run Central Valley Project, it could bring similar urbanization to the San Joaquin Valley.
In Farewell, I noted that in 1992, 21 water agencies then supplying more than 35 million western city dwellers formed a lobbying group called the Western Urban Water Coalition to wrest more water from growers. Such a move signaled an historic break in the long-standing alliance between California’s urban and rural water districts. It’s not clear whether urban voters will ultimately have the clout to take what they want. But in the State Water Project alone, rights to 115,000 acre-feet have been transferred from permanent agriculture to urban areas since 1997, according to the state Department of Water Resources.
What kind of cities will constitute the “urban desert”? Chief among the enticements of subdivisions with arcadian place-names in instant cities such as Tracy are $250,000 sticker prices for their three-bedroom houses. Relative affordability draws commuters ever farther from their places of work, exacerbating traffic, energy consumption, divorce rates, and air pollution in the process. When you add to local exhaust that which is imported to the San Joaquin by prevailing winds from Bay Area cities, and throw in an endemic inversion layer that acts to hold smog, pesticides, and dust close to the ground, you begin to understand why both people and plants increasingly suffer in the valley’s thickening miasma. In 1992, federal tests ranked the valley’s air worse than that of New York and Chicago. The California Farm Bureau reports that the University of California has “documented 25% to 30% yield losses in many crops in the Central Valley due to air pollution.” Fast-growing Fresno now has among the highest childhood asthma morbidity and mortality rates in the nation. The Fresno Bee recently reported that the city’s Superintendent of Schools, Santiago Wood, reluctantly decided to stay on the job despite severe breathing problems. Wood must carry an inhaler, a standard accessory of the gasping students in his district.
Industrialized agriculture and growing cities are crowding what little is left of the native environment, as we are reminded by William L. Preston’s Vanishing Landscapes: Land and Life in the Tulare Lake Basin. Reconstructing from historic accounts the biotic richness once contained by this now desiccated valley, Preston shows how agribusiness and cities have almost entirely extirpated the native grasses, wildflowers, riparian vegetation, fish, birds, lakes, rivers, antelope, and original people. Farewell mentioned the degraded 1,600-acre Jepson Prairie Preserve near Fairfield. It is one of the last and largest stands of native grasses left in the 15-million-acre Central Valley.
Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. The American Farmland Trust’s “urban desert” perspective, which Farewell shares, actually goes back 138 years to geographer George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. In that seminal book published in 1864, Marsh extrapolated from observations he made in the United States and the Mediterranean to conclude that humanity was rapidly and blindly ruining its home to accommodate its growing numbers and appetites. He observed that much of the once-habitable world had already been desertified and locally impoverished by the demands of peoples and cities long gone.
The Council on Environmental Quality’s 1981 report Desertification of the United States enumerated the major symptoms of permanent desertification:
• Declining groundwater tables
• Salinization of topsoil and water
• Reduction of surface waters
• Unnaturally high soil erosion
• Desolation of native vegetation
Among the six regions studied, the report noted that only the San Joaquin Valley could claim all five symptoms. The first three are inextricably connected with contamination of both ground and surface waters by nitrates and pesticides.
Within decades, the San Joaquin’s artesian wells and pumps have removed groundwater impounded over the ages of geologic time. Where there are clay or silt subsoils, parts of the valley have subsided as much as 30 feet, permanently destroying subterranean storage capacity while causing millions of dollars in damage, much of that from expensive re-leveling of fields for flood-irrigation and repair of bridges and other infrastructure.
The California Aqueduct was at least partly intended to replace the demand for groundwater with runoff imported to the San Joaquin from Northern California. But UC Berkeley soil science professor T.N. Narasimhan says pumping continues to extract about a million acre-feet per year, from as far down as 2,000 feet.
Growers in parts of the San Joaquin Valley must go to such great depths for water because that near the surface is often brackish, especially on the arid west side where locally occurring and imported salts are rapidly building up in the shallow aquifers.
In nature, all freshwater will normally leach salts: dissolved chloride, sulfate, bicarbonate, and carbonate minerals. When it evaporates, the water leaves behind the salts — usually sodium sulfate, calcium sulfate, or sodium chloride in the Central Valley. The valley is naturally saline from millennia of mountain runoff on all sides. But the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley is worse, especially on the west side; the Tulare Basin, site of a former lake, has no natural outlet. The lake used to occasionally flood into the San Joaquin Valley. But it’s gone; the basin hasn’t discharged to the San Francisco Bay since about 1868. Into that closed basin, the irrigation water arrives from the north, exacerbating the salinity.
But the soil was naturally saline to start with. In an interview, US Geological Survey hydrologist Walt Swain recalled a 1950s report from the US Bureau of Reclamation noting that a square mile of western San Joaquin soil, when flushed, produced 200,000 parts per million (ppm) of salts — six times that of seawater. The Bureau flushed most of it into the San Joaquin River, though some went into the aquifer. Narasimhan cited a euphemism occasionally used in agricultural reports: “Salt is being stored in the shallow aquifer.” The demand for water — which carries those salts with it — has not abated, because much new production in California has gone into permanent crops such as orchards. “You go into a drought period and you don’t have the luxury of saying I’m just gonna fallow the land this year,” said Swain. “So groundwater pumping will increase in any year that the surface deliveries drop.” That pumping will build up salts in the soil as well as the aquifer.
On the eastern side of the valley, where soils are more porous and less saline, groundwater presents different problems. A 1998 report issued by the National Water-Quality Assessment Program (NAWQA) of the US Geological Survey pointed out that groundwater is the primary source of drinking water for the majority of the population of the San Joaquin Valley now concentrated on the east side. “Millions of pounds of pesticides and fertilizer have been used on agricultural land in the valley. Fertilizer-based nitrate concentrations in ground water frequently exceed drinking water standards.” Residents who cannot afford bottled water must do with tapwater, which perhaps contributes to the multiple health problems and high miscarriage rates of farmworkers. Many also suffer from direct exposure to sprays, but toxic drinking water was a problem at least as far back as 1969 when Environment magazine published an article titled “Poisoning the Wells.”
Natural and human-made chemicals have poisoned not only the groundwater but also surface waters, especially those draining off the western side of the valley into the Tulare Basin, the vast region of internal drainage in the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley.
But in that region, salts are the main problem. Some Westside Valley soils were naturally saline enough to be classified as non-irrigable. Groundwater pumping there eventually lowered the water table enough that crop root zones could be flushed of salts by irrigation water. Farmers must apply enough water to keep root zones flushed, but avoid drowning roots. In dry regions, especially where evaporating water leaves salts in soils, more water (the “leach fraction”) must be used to flush root zones. This puts off the salt problem, but doesn’t solve it. Every flush brings more salts.
One proposed solution: In the 1960s, federal engineers designed their water projects in the San Joaquin to work with a trunk sewer — the $500 million San Luis Master Drain, which would carry water away from the fields to San Francisco Bay. A layer of clay with low permeability underlies the soils on the west side. Unless flushed and drained, those lands quickly become waterlogged and too salty for crop production.
As designed, the drain would have carried waste water north, dumping it into the Delta near Antioch then into San Francisco Bay. In 1969, former chief of California’s Environmental Sanitation Division Frank M. Stead warned that extractions of fresh water from the Delta would soon “convert it to a wastewater system too saline to support [Delta] agriculture and completely disruptive to the ecology.” Stead cited a federal report of the time saying that the Delta water quality would be so degraded that drainwater would actually improve it: “This tortured logic has never been presented to the people in straightforward language,” he charged.
By the mid-1970s, cost and environmental opposition stopped the half-built drain north of Los Banos, about 100 miles shy of its goal. The US Bureau of Reclamation then diverted the drain’s agricultural drainwater, which was unfit for human consumption, into holding ponds at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge near Los Banos. It was supposed to benefit migratory birds elsewhere deprived of fresh water. At the time, most scientists had thought the selenium concentrations there relatively benign. Years later, however, US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Felix Smith defied Bureau attempts to gag him and went public with high bird mortality and grotesque birth defects at Kesterson. Ranchers on the west side had long known that the soil there was bad, sickening and killing their cattle. The culprit at Kesterson turned out to be toxic levels of soluble selenium leached from those soils and flushed downhill in the waste water. In 1984-85, I helped to blow the whistle on the poisoned refuge while working at KQED in San Francisco.
US Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel shut down Kesterson in 1986 and capped evaporation ponds in the vicinity. Unfortunately, the waste problem didn’t go away; it worsened and expanded. By 1997, the Wall Street Journal reported dangerously high levels of selenium in the surface water, plants, and animals at Kesterson despite the $30 million federal “cleanup.” Farther south, with no drain, growers had also created private evaporation ponds that attracted migratory birds. In those ponds, as Lisa Viani reported in a 1996 issue of Terrain, selenium concentrations far higher than at Kesterson killed an estimated 10,000 birds annually.
Others simply used the all-but-dry bed of the San Joaquin River as a de facto master drain. Back in 1944, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Friant Dam abruptly killed the river when it shunted most of its flow down the east side of the valley in the Friant-Kern Canal. When the river vanished, so did its salmon run and much of the Bay Area’s fishing industry. Now the river carries a nasty soup of salts, boron, pesticides, nitrates, selenium and anything else that it picks up along the way. The NAWQA study found “a wide variety of pesticides . . . in the San Joaquin River and its tributaries, some at concentrations high enough to adversely impact aquatic life.” Descendants of the Yokuts tribe no longer regard the few reeds they can find growing along its course safe for use in traditional basket making. That foul mix dumps directly into the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. The state and federal pumps suck the stuff out of the Delta pool and include it in the drinking water of 40% of Californians.
But the aqueducts also re-circulate the waste, exacerbating the salt buildup. The Bureau of Reclamation’s Delta-Mendota Canal delivers roughly one million tons of Delta salts a year back into the San Joaquin Valley, adding to its resident salts, pesticides, fertilizers, and petroleum derivatives. Furthermore, as Orinda soil scientist Richard Strong points out, reliance on fertilizers in lieu of soil-building lowers water retention in agricultural lands, requiring yet more irrigation, which brings with it more salt. Bob and I saw in the San Joaquin Valley the same white encrustation that has killed civilizations since salt rendered the Fertile Crescent a desert. We’re simply doing it faster than the Mesopotamians could with their low-tech irrigation.
“At [salt levels of] about 1,250 parts per million (ppm), you start seeing some interesting problems with agriculture,” says USGS’ Swain. “In some native water above the San Joaquin clay layer, salinization has reached about 1,000 ppm. During the drought in the late 1980s, some irrigation districts were pumping 2,200 to 2,500 ppm. They cannot sustain agriculture on that.”
In the absence of drastic changes in water management, that will be the future of the valley: “It doesn’t matter if it’s 40 years or 100,” says Swain. “If you sit down and do some calculations, you know this.”
So in addition to rampant urbanization, sterilized soils, disappearing and contaminated groundwater, and toxic air, what is going on in the San Joaquin Valley will progressively and inevitably affect the rest of California through the state’s human-made plumbing system. That is what federal and state water officials, developers, water marketers, and agribusiness leaders do not want widely known — that in order to keep production going and subsidies flowing until they can replace farming with higher-value cities, growers will poison the valley’s water supply and the little that remains of its wildlife.
In their minds, no doubt, more publicly funded high-tech solutions — the San Luis Drain or the oft-proposed Peripheral Canal around the Delta or genetic engineering, along with much positive thinking — will pull the fat out of the fire. Or they won’t have to, for as novelist Frank Norris wrote in his 1901 novel The Octopus about those California “farmers” who treated their soil like mines: “When at last the land, worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then they would have all made fortunes. “ Representative George Miller notes that the enormously powerful Westlands Water District now wants US taxpayers to pay its members to retire bad land it was not supposed to irrigate in the first place, while allowing it to further profit by selling their water rights to growing cities. Like those others who have recently plundered corporations, depositors, and federal and foreign treasuries, those “farmers” will likely retire to someplace relatively clean, when their chickens come home to roost — if they can find such a place.
Summing up two leading causes of the coming crisis in the San Joaquin, Narasimhan says, “One is the soil becoming unsuitable for agriculture; then the other is the degradation of the water itself, both in the shallow aquifer and at great depth. The whole landscape changes because of the soil changes. Then it affects the plant life, the animal life, and so on.”
And then there’s fossil fuel. With its voracious appetite for fertilizers, chemicals, field machinery, refrigeration, and food and water delivery systems, agribusiness translates prodigious quantities of oil into food. It thus depends on uninterrupted supplies of cheap petroleum and natural gas — resources increasingly menaced by depletion and political instability. Pushing agriculture from prime to marginal soils requires yet more energy to grow and harvest crops, but “this is no longer a viable option,” writes the California Farm Bureau Federation’s recent report on the Central Valley. “We cannot expect the same kinds of yields nor remain competitive in a global market if agriculture is pushed onto lower-quality soils that require higher inputs.” As part of a worldwide phenomenon, the climatic instability caused by the use of that energy will render farming still more chancy.
Without the kind of land-use controls to which the Golden State has been allergic, one other intervention will very likely deliver a coup de grâce to the San Joaquin’s farming. Powerful forces are once again priming California voters to fund and build another high-tech solution to its transportation woes — a $25-$30 billion “bullet train” between the Bay Area and Southern California. Such a train will hopefully reduce air traffic and auto traffic between the state’s two urban nodes, and it may well bring badly needed jobs to the depressed valley. But, just as with the State Water Project and BART before it, I have little doubt that developers, large landholders, engineering contractors, and their financial allies are salivating at the prospect of turning the entire San Joaquin Basin into a commuting suburb of the state’s two major urban areas, thereby joining them together. Drawn primarily by low housing prices rather than safe air and water or abundant fresh food, the new settlers will move into a toxic urban desert not of nature’s making but of forces and individuals far beyond their acquaintance or ken. And what, then, will they eat and drink, and what will replenish their souls?