Flood! Three Perspectives on the Inland Sea

In the distant time, when a now mythical subculture known as “moderate Republican” once existed amongst the folded hills and valleys of America, I landed a job as wetlands policy coordinator for the California Resources Agency. The job, really a glorified internship, played to my strengths as a recent elite liberal arts college graduate, and to my Gemini personality. There were scores of interconnected wetlands policy topics to investigate, and while I wasn’t always the best about keeping my hair short in a moderate Republican kind of way, I think I was successful at maintaining a genuinely open, curious perspective about all wetlands policy issues. That is, all except one.

Maybe it was my Taurus rising sign already bulling its way forward, but it became quickly apparent to me that California “wetlands policy” at base boiled down not to mitigation banking, and not to conservation easements, and not to Clean Water Act Section 404(b)(1) guidelines, but to setting back river levees. My superiors at the Agency gave me a hard time for constantly sneaking this concept back into policy drafts. I remember once receiving the single-word marginalia comment “flood!” written in red pen. If emojis had existed at the time, the comment would have come with a little circular eye roll.

The fancy quasi-scientific term for setting back river levees is “multi-objective floodplain management.” And the basic reality of wetlands policy, then and now, is that California, once home to some of the most extensive and productive marshland ecosystems in North America, has lost more than ninety percent of its former wetlands. Why? We have tended to manage river systems around a single objective: maximum efficiency and profit.

The brief but comprehensive wetlands policy statement our team eventually came up with, encapsulated in this August 1993 Executive Order, still reads to me as an excellent, fully reasonable, moderate in the best of senses blueprint for getting California to “no overall net loss,” the stated goal of the policy. But if California ever wants to restore wetland ecosystems beyond the roughly ten percent vestige that still exists, we’re going to have to get beyond no net loss. We need to face up to a difficult, expensive, but potentially transformative project of giving rivers and streams room to do more moving around.

***

This old personal tale is on my mind right now primarily due to the deluge California has experienced over the past month. This article says that nine atmospheric rivers delivered a 32 trillion gallon wallop. Such a number, of course, is so huge as to be almost meaningless – and in any case it’s rainfall in specific places that matters when if comes to flooding. Another impressive and more local statistic is the 367 inches (over thirty feet!) of season-to-date snowfall that have come down at my favorite ski resort, Kirkwood. Whatever number you want to look at, we’ve experienced a lot of rain and snow.

All of the rainfall makes me want to update my old policy knowledge about multi-objective floodplain management, but that will take some time. For now though I have some good photos and links to share. Here, to begin with, are three sets of personal photographs:

The first shows the current hydrological situation from the air:

The second is a closer-up view on what a wet year looks like in both the mountains and valley:

The third shows one of the most unassuming but wisest features of the river management infrastructure that undergirds California’s economy:

The Sacramento Weir pictured in the last set of photographs is part of a larger system of weirs and bypasses developed roughly a century ago. The definitive book on this weir and bypass system is Battling the Inland Sea, by UCSB historian Robert Kelley. A beautiful aerial photo of the system at work, together with a visual simulation of the bypasses filling up, can be found on the California Water Blog. Another beautiful. lower down aerial photo of the Sacramento Weir in full open stage can be found on the website for the online publication “Sacramento Valley.”

I am grateful for the existence of the weir and bypass system on the lower Sacramento, especially during a year like this one. More than that, I want to note that the photographs above show physical evidence of a time when the US was capable of taking on big, complicated, politically fraught infrastructure challenges, and solving them. There’s something very poignant in this sense about a historical artifact like the Department of Water Resources map pictured here , dated 1928.

The time has long since come for conservatives to stop badmouthing and defunding government, and for liberals to stop setting regulatory and public input hurdles in the way of the efficient provision of public infrastructure. Both sides need to figure out how build infrastructure within cost structures comparable with international competitors (much like we need to figure out how to deliver health care and higher education within internationally competitive and morally legitimate cost structures, unlike what we see today). And yes, this will include change from within organized labor, an institution I lionized in my previous post.

Still, I want to be careful not to engage in too much “both sides” thinking. With the demise of the moderate Republicans and the devolution of the Republican party into an institution no longer even committed to democratic elections, there’s presently no hope of improvement on the conservative side. I still believe it didn’t have to end up this way, but we need to face reality. There’s nothing for it but for we Democrats to become grown-up champions of government infrastructure provision, and to set back the regulatory levees and uncompetitive business practices we’ve constructed in the path of getting the job done.