Delta 101
Posted on | April 10, 2011 | 1 Comment
Chris Austin, editor of the newsfeed Aquafornia for the Water Education Foundation, has added yet another slide show to her personal website Maven’s Photoblog. This time her subject is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the US Pacific Coast. “Northern Californians think Southern Californians want to drain it dry,” she writes. “Southern Californians, for the most part, don’t even know where the Delta is, much less why it would be important to them.”
It’s important because, fed by the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Mokelumne, Cosumnes and Calaveras rivers, roughly half the state’s snowmelt, including drinking water for more than 20 million Californians, runs through its tributaries. For anyone wishing to learn about the Delta, its fisheries, its farms, its wildlife and the water that we export from it, Austin’s new slide show is a good place to start. To understand the modern world logic of how exporting its water can be styled as a “conservation plan,” click here. To read how the Delta is ranked by American Rivers, here. For a US Geological Survey fact sheet, here. There are any number of good references on the Delta, but because Austin’s day job involves every morning posting the churning newspaper articles about what we are doing to the troubled water hub of California, she is a skilled curator of its story. So check out her slide show.
Tags: chance of rain > Chris Austin > Delta slide show > Emily Green
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April 12th, 2011 @ 1:07 pm
Water is an excuse for the northern disdain of southern California. More than three quarters of the water siphoned off the Sacramento Delta goes to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, yet I don’t hear any Bay Area vitriol directed at Fresno or Bakersfield. I’m eager to conserve water, but I doubt it will change why they despise us so.