Saving the San Joaquin River

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“A Force for Nature” tells the story of the Natural Resources Defense Council — one of the largest and most successful environmental organizations in the world — which has helped establish many of the laws that protect our air, our water and our land.
“A Force for Nature” tells the story of the Natural Resources Defense Council — one of the largest and most successful environmental organizations in the world — which has helped establish many of the laws that protect our air, our water and our land.
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John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, likened the San Joaquin River Delta, with its immense oak forests and wetlands and its teeming wildlife, to the Garden of Eden.
John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, likened the San Joaquin River Delta, with its immense oak forests and wetlands and its teeming wildlife, to the Garden of Eden.

The following is an excerpt from A Force for Nature: The Story of NRDC and the Fight to Save Our Planet by John H. Adams and Patricia Adams, with George Black (Chronicle Books, 2010). Since its inception in 1970, the Natural Resources Defense Council has grown to include 1.3 million members and activists. A Force for Nature chronicles the organization’s challenges and victories in safeguarding our planet throughout the past four decades. This excerpt is from Chapter 20, “The Rule of Law.”

The San Joaquin is the second longest river in California. It rises among the snowfields of the Sierra Nevada, close to Yosemite National Park, and joins the Sacramento River 350 miles downstream to form the largest estuary on the West Coast. John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, likened the estuary, or delta, with its immense oak forests and wetlands and its teeming wildlife, to the Garden of Eden.

Yet by the late 20th century, Californians were barely aware of the San Joaquin, for it no longer existed as a real river in any meaningful sense. The problems began with a huge hydroelectric dam on the upper river in the early 1900s. The wholesale re-engineering of the San Joaquin got under way when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation decided “surplus water” from the river should be exported to other areas as part of the massive Central Valley Project, launched in 1933 to transform arid areas into productive agricultural land and shield California’s farmers from economic ruin in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Starting in 1940, the bureau built major dams on both the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. It was the 319-foot-high Friant Dam near Fresno that ripped the heart out of the San Joaquin.

The dam rerouted 95 percent of the flow of the river into two big irrigation channels, watering about a million acres of cotton, corn, fruit, almonds, alfalfa, wheat and other cropland up and down the eastern slopes of the San Joaquin Valley. Fresno County became the richest agricultural county in the United States, and the San Joaquin became, as the Amicus Journal once put it, “both tub and toilet” for California’s agribusiness boom. Below the Friant Dam, more than 60 miles of the river ran bone-dry in all but the wettest years. Flows that did emerge farther downstream were often heavily polluted by agricultural runoff and municipal sewage outflows.

Meanwhile, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta had also been grossly deformed. Giant pumps installed in the 1950s and 1960s reversed the flow of the lower reaches of both rivers to channel water southward to the California Aqueduct. Although the delta provides water for 23 million people, including part of the drinking water supply for almost two-thirds of California’s population, it was so polluted that tens of millions of dollars had to be spent each year on purification plants. The loss of the freshwater inflow from the San Joaquin had wiped out one of the richest salmon fisheries on the West Coast. Old-timers can still remember when the sound of thousands of Chinook salmon thrashing their way upstream at the site of the Friant Dam would keep people awake at night.

  • Published on Nov 2, 2010
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