As devastating wildfires continue to rip through Los Angeles, killing at least 10 people so far and forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate or try to, President-elect Donald Trump has decided to direct his anger at a fish. It’s not the strong Santa Ana winds that fuel the fire. Not unusually dry weather. Not a steady march of home development in fire-prone areas.
a fish
A post On Truth Social Wednesday morning, Trump blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for depriving the LA region of water because he wanted to protect “an essentially worthless fish called smelt.” Trump slams Newsom for not endorsing water restoration announcement does not existPer Newsom’s office. He also noted that protecting the delta smelt — a small fish species found only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a vast wetland in Northern California — has left some fire hydrants running dry in parts of LA. (Earlier this week, fire hydrants around Pacific Palisade ran dry, not because the city ran out of water but because Water stress and other infrastructure issues.)
This isn’t the first time Trump has badmouthed the fish. For nearly a decade now, incoming presidents have claimed that they can solve California’s incredibly complex water problems simply by rolling back regulations designed to help eradicate the Delta smelt skirt, as E&E News reports. Jennifer Yaknin reports. These problems lie not in the drought, Trump claims, but in democratic rules that restrain private interests. The temperature is actually rising Drought has made California even drier.
Other GOP leaders and conservative hosts have noticed the smell, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. In a 2011 speech, he blamed Delta smelt protection for “destroying” lives in the Central Valley. “A faceless government is taking away their lifeline, water, everything because of a 3 inch fish” Palin said. “Where I come from, a 3-inch fish, we call that bait.”
A few years ago, right-wing commentator Sean Hannity devoted an entire episode of his primetime show to the Delta smelt. In front of the crowd in the central valley, He told his audience that “the farms of this once fertile region have all dried up because the government has put the interests of the 2 inch minnow ahead of all the great men you see here tonight.”
Why do right-wing leaders have so much beef with these humble little fish?
Delta odor is largely absent
The delta smell is not a polar bear or a tiger. It looks like any other nondescript small fish. But worthless? It’s just rude but not wrong.
Silvery and thin, the delta smelt is native to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, meaning it is found nowhere else on earth. And according to Andrew Rypel, an aquatic ecologist at the University of California, Davis, it’s been a linchpin of delta ecosystems for most of our planet’s time — perhaps thousands of years.
“Everything ate it,” he said, from salmon to sharks to people. “Historically the species had a tremendous value. It provided energy for the entire food web.”
Rypel said the smelt was used among the most common species in the estuary. But beginning in the mid-20th century, a dangerous decline in fish began in step with the delta’s widespread deteriorating health. Invasive clams and oysters were introduced and competed with fish for food. Water flowing from agricultural land is polluted. And billions of gallons of water were pumped from the Delta and distributed to farms and cities, including San Francisco.
These fish can be killed directly by the water pump, Rypel said, if they get sucked into or get stuck in the intake filter. More importantly, decades of water pumping and diverting have changed water levels, temperatures, and salinity, dramatically altering the habitats in which smelt have adapted.
“We’re putting ecosystems in a perpetual state of drought through water extraction and increasing climate change,” Rypel said. “Droughts are longer and more durable. The smell just can’t handle it.”
Their population was mostly destroyed.
In the 1990s, the delta smelt was listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act and state laws. In 2009, California elevated the fish’s status to endangered, and their numbers appear to have declined since then. Although these fish can be difficult to spot, survey wildlife in the estuary A single delta scent failed to launch In recent years this is why experts like Rypel have described them as “functionally extinct” – meaning they are so rare that they effectively provide no function in their ecosystem, such as feeding predators. Rypel estimates there are fewer than 100 of them left in the wild. (As a last-ditch effort to save the species, UC Davis bred the fish in captivity on land.)
Why Trump cares — or rather, no — About Delta Odor
In an effort to prevent extinction, the delta smelt is protected under both state and federal laws. These protections narrowly limit when and how much water can be pumped from the delta to provide enough fresh water for fish and reduce blockages — when fish are trapped against intake valves. Under these rules, more water flows into the ocean. Much larger pumping restrictions, however, have more to do with ensuring that saline water does not move upstream and make the water unusable for cities and farms.
Farmers don’t love This prohibitionEspecially during drought. Regulations designed to help fish can limit how much water farmers get to irrigate their crops (although things like drought and efforts to limit salinity have a greater impact on how much water flows to California farmland). Hoping to garner more political support, Trump and other right-wing leaders have criticized the regulations for years, blaming them — and, in turn, the fish — for suffering farmers, a key part of their political base. This makes sense. There is the modern Republican Party A history of criticism of the Endangered Species Act. Trump, for his part, won the election for president on a platform that promised deregulation, especially as it related to environmental protection.
In the end, Trump’s hostility to this fish isn’t really about a fish. It’s about increasing the perspective that regulations are bad for everyday Americans. As Tufts University sociologist Caleb Scoville says Keep it this summer“Statements about Delta smelt are politically reinforced through links to partisan positions that have little to do with water.”
It’s hardly surprising that Trump blames a strong Democratic governor and regulations as the reason LA is burning.
To be clear, they don’t.
The rules to prevent the Delta smell from disappearing have nothing to do with the catastrophic wildfires in LA. For one, the problem wasn’t lack of water. Also, most of the city’s water doesn’t even come from Northern California, according to Alistair Bland Report at CalMatters.
Right now, the Metropolitan Water District, one of LA’s supply sources, “has the most water stored in its system in the agency’s history,” Mark Gould, director of water shortages at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, told Bland.
Delta odor is a red herring. A valid question, however, is why would California and the federal government protect a species that is essentially extinct?
The fish are still hanging, Rypel suspected. So improving the health of estuaries can help existing individuals survive – it can prevent extinction. Continued efforts are also made for this Reintroduce captive-style odors More likely to succeed.
Increased freshwater flows also benefit other species, including the highly prized Chinook salmon and the related longfin smelt, both of which are declining. In July, the US Fish and Wildlife Service Listed The San Francisco Delta population of longfin is listed as endangered. And again, outflows from the delta prevent saltwater from spreading inland and threatening drinking water — and crops.
“In California, 83 percent of our native fish are threatened with extinction,” Rypel said. “All these native California species are going to the Delta smelt. It’s just that smell is happening faster.”
In fact, the delta smelt is just one part of a much broader trend. A New research in the journal the nature It has been found that one in four freshwater species are threatened with extinction globally.
“We’ve actually been very effective in water engineering and being more efficient in water use,” Rypel told me. “It’s just that we haven’t figured out how to have ecosystems at the same time.”
