The Myth of the Breeze

Aerial Perspectives

I have begun to research the Delta in search of infor­ma­tion on Fishermen.

Why exam­ine the Delta for this infor­ma­tion? In some ways, the Delta is an arbi­trary scale at which to look. Envi­ron­men­tal processes are intri­cately inter­con­nected and bind­ing our­selves within ‘the Delta’ is sim­ply a way of mak­ing these com­plex­i­ties a bit more man­age­able. Indeed, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has defined legal bound­aries that make it mis­lead­ingly sim­ple to deter­mine what is included and what is excluded from the dis­cus­sion. Writ­ings on the Cen­tral Val­ley, the Sacra­mento Val­ley, and even the San Fran­cisco bay inter­sect with the Delta. The term is a geo­log­i­cal one, refer­ring to the space at the mouth of a river where the chan­nel of a river dis­solves into marshy wet­lands. Our local Delta is rec­og­nized as a site of his­toric impor­tance and present concern.

In our case, there are two rivers at play. The Delta is the con­flu­ence of the Sacra­mento and San Joaquin Rivers. Once, the Delta was the place where the rivers dis­solved into marsh­land and salt water inter­min­gled with fresh­wa­ter. The Delta has since been con­structed by feats of engineering–transforming an oth­er­wise unin­hab­it­able wet­land into a series of islands and water­ways specif­i­cally aimed at trans­port­ing water to the masses. As Kevin Starr writes, “this eco-region sus­tains within itself every pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive legacy of the way that Amer­i­cans have re-structured the envi­ron­ment since seiz­ing Cal­i­for­nia from Mex­ico in 1846.” The Delta is a messy place. The way it exists now in no way resem­bles the way it existed before the set­tle­ment of Cal­i­for­nia. The Delta is so messy, in fact, that the first gov­er­nance body cre­ated to ‘man­age’ the Delta col­lapsed under its own stress. Most Californian’s get their water from the Delta, as do more than 18,000 farm­ers of the Cen­tral Val­ley who are in need of irri­ga­tion. There are lit­er­ally mil­lions of stake­hold­ers depen­dent on the future suc­cess of the Delta.

(Image from Google Maps. Pretty sure I’m required to say that.)