Meet The Fish That Conquered California

That little silver beauty is the beloved delta smelt, aka The Scourge of California Agriculture. No, it's not a pest. No, it doesn't eat crops. No, it doesn't carry any known transmittable diseases. So why is it a scourge, you ask? Because it's basically useless, kinda ugly, and it's questionably an endangered species. Sort of like California Republicans, only smaller.

California is in the middle of a financial and economic crisis unheard of in its state history since the Great Depression (you know, the one that FDR took from a simple depression and turned into a "great" depression). California has been, and probably still is, the most important agricultural state in the union. But none of that matters when you're trying to protect delta smelt. Now I have a problem taking this fish seriously, if only because "smelt" sounds like the British past tense of "smell." But environmentalists and other fishy cuckoos take it very seriously, and have decided that in the midst of an economic crisis, the smartest thing we can do is to kill California agriculture.

You're all familiar with the Delta region of Lousiana, but few outside California know that the California Delta is the source of most of the agriculture that spreads from there into the San Joaquin Valley. The San Joaquin Valley is the most productive agricultural area in the world. Or at least it was. The Delta is formed by the confluence of the American, Mokelumne, Cosumnes and Calaveras Rivers, which then pour into the Sacramento region and the San Joaquin Valley. Non-Californians have heard over and over that California has a water problem. That's not correct. Central and Southern California have a water problem. Northern California has plenty of water, much of which is shared with the other two sections.

So naturally (was that a bad choice of words?) the environmentalists have succeeded in cutting off millions of acre-feet of water in order to protect the delta smelt. Now if you took all the delta smelt there are, and gathered them together, they wouldn't amount to a full day's meal for a herd of hungry cats. The agriculture fed by those waters that the little fish live in feeds millions of human beings and supports the business and labor of thousands more. But if the little buggers die out, it will apparently destroy the delicate eco-balance of the banana slug, the fern fly, and probably the damned spotted owls. Or at least so the eco-freaks tell us.

Are you getting the picture here? Humans, bad. Business, bad. Nature, good. Smelt don't smell. Or something like that. By the way, do you know how to stop a smelt from smelling? Cut off his nose. But I digress. As the Delta water is allowed to take its "natural" course in order not to inconvenience dear little fishies, millions of gallons of water which would otherwise have been used in the farming areas via the California aqueducts instead simply pour out into the San Francisco Bay and out to sea. Meanwhile, the livelihoods of tens of thousands of farm workers and agricultural business owners go into the dumper. Well, they're just people out to make money, so who cares if they have to go on unemployment, into bankruptcy and live on welfare?

The eco-freaks want nothing less than to dismantle the entire State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project, which have made the Golden State very green for many years. The eco-cuckoos have been blocking agricultural maintenance and progress for years by abusing the environmental protection and endangered species rules. Lawsuit after lawsuit. The delta smelt has been on the endangered species list since 1993, but only recently has it become the cause du jour. You see, if the "natural flow" of the rivers continues to be interrupted by the water projects instead of allowed to flow through the itty-bitty streams the itty-bitty smelt live in, the poor innocent smelt will die (of course there's no way of proving that, or even any reason to care, but facts don't interfere with zealotry). Having the projects pour enough water into these swimming holes to maintain the itty bitty fiddies is not good enough. It has to flow "naturally."

Hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland are being forced out of production because the pumps that divert the water to the Central (San Joaquin) Valley will further threaten the silver beauties. Kern County estimates that 145,000 acres in Kern were completely idled or under-irrigated just in the last year. That loss alone was about $100 million. UC Davis estimates the loss this year to the San Joaquin Valley to be between $482 and $647 million. Total losses are expected to hit over $3 billion. Aw, it's only money. And we're talkin' endangered fishies here.

Of course, there have been other side effects. Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler says: "The cost of agricultural losses are immense, but they are not the only losses. Tangentially related action prevents land-clearing, development of any kind, and forced 'naturism.' In 1993, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prevented Riverside County residents from clearing firebreaks around their homes for fear of disturbing the habitat of the Stephen's kangaroo rat. The 'save the rat' law was more important than the laws requiring clearing brush and dry foliage. The result was the disastrous series of wildfires in the area." Well, think positive, professor. Barbecued kangaroo rat is delicious (or so I'm told).

And California authorities, along with their press and local TV claques, have an explanation for the agricultural losses. It's not the fish, it's the drought. Well, duh. When you don't have water, things get dry, and you have, voila, a drought. Except it's all a fiction. The drought exists only because the water isn't flowing. California has suffered from a three-year dry spell, but "dry" is in the eye of the smelter. Rainfall is down, but since the snow melt and the reduced rain volume still provide about 110% of California's agricultural water needs, the only thing that is standing (or swimming) between the source and the terminus is the delta smelt. Families in the richest farmland in America face crushing poverty. The state deficit continues to escalate, in large part because of lost revenues in agriculture.

At long last, one judge has started to listen. The EPA the CEPA, federal Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Game, and other offshoots of the bureaucratic/legal cancer have never included the balancing argument of the impact on the human population. Somebody forgot that even the lowly, intrusive human is an animal entitled to legal protection. Judge Wanger has ruled that physical and economic human considerations must be part of the formula. Representative Tom McClintock (R-Placerville) noted at a recent congressional hearing that the overwhelming volume of evidence says that the closing of the pumps and the reintroduction of "natural flow" have done absolutely nothing to change the declining smelt population. It is a naturally disappearing species, which needs to go on to its fishy reward as 99% of all species have done long before man ever arrived on the scene.

Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a full-blown eco-nut, has declared that the drought combined with global warming "will cause California's vineyards and farms to vanish by the end of the 21st century if we fail to combat warming. We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." Ah, Chu, did anyone ever tell you that the water doesn't flow when you turn off the tap? Guess they don't teach that at the university. The only endangered species here is the human race, and it's not endangered by drought or global warming, it's endangered by fools like Chu. And the delta smelt.