Aerial Perspectives

By Aubrey on March 19, 2008 | | Comments (0)

delta_port
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.)