Stop
Governor Jerry Brown, Natural Resources Secretary John Laird and Deputy
Secretary Jerry Meral from overseeing the Death of the Delta. Attend
the news conference outside the Bay Delta Conservation Plan meeting on
Thursday, April 4, at noon in Sacramento at the Red Lion Woodlake
Conference Center, 500 Leisure Lane.
Peripheral tunnel opponents will hold "Death of Delta" funeral
Coffin will be delivered to Jerry Meral, tunnel point man
by Dan Bacher
Posted with permission at Censored News
I
have a long and personal relationship with the Sacramento-San Joaquin
River Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas.
I
was first introduced to the Delta by my late father, Alfred, who first
took me fishing in Miner Slough for catfish and striped bass when I was
10 years old in 1964. As a civil engineer for Cal Trans, he wanted to
check up on some bridges in the Delta that he had designed. I caught
three catfish, while he landed one striped bass in our first 30 minutes
of fishing.
The
Delta was a magical world that I hadn't known before existed. I was
amazed by the winding sloughs, the wide variety of crops ranging from
pears, to grapes to broccoli and the impeccable fishery. The striped
bass fishery at that time was at its historical height, with the DFG
estimating a population of around 3 million fish.
Since
then I have fished many hundreds of hours on the Delta for stripers,
catfish, black bass, crappie and sturgeon, having many memorable days
while fishing from boat and bank on the estuary. The epic striper
population of the mid-sixties is long gone, due to water exports to
corporate agribusiness and southern California, although there was a
rebound of stripers from 1995 to 2002, when the fishery reached over an
estimated 1.5 million. At the same time, the same water exports that
hammered the striped bass also resulted in precipitous declines of
Chinook salmon, steelhead, Delta smelt, Sacramento splittail, green
sturgeon and other fish speices.
Meanwhile,
I became involved in the battle to save the fishery with United Anglers
of California for over 20 years. I worked closely with Hal Bonslett,
the late publisher of the Fish Sniffer magazine, on the board of that
organization. When a brave group of state and federal fishery scientists
revealed in 2005 that pelagic fish species - Delta smelt, longfin
smelt, threadfin shad and striped bass - had declined to record low
population levels - fishermen and environmentalists began organizing a
campaign to stop the campaign.
Gary
Adams of the California Striped Bass Association, West Delta Chapter,
and I began a series of conversations about the need to form a coalition
that would unite all of the people, including recreational anglers,
commercial fishermen, family farmers, grassroots environmentalists,
Indian Tribes and Delta residents, seeking to restore the Delta under
one banner. Other folks began to agree with us. As a result, a group of
people from diverse backgrounds ended up meeting in an office in
Stockton in 2006 to form the group "Restore the Delta."
Since
then Restore the Delta has done a lot of great work, including
producing a documentary movie, "Over Troubled Waters," filling up
legislative hearings with opponents of the peripheral tunnels, staging
protests and rallies at the State Capitol and coordinating an intensive
media campaign against the tunnels.
However,
as one who has had a long history as a creative cultural activist and
writer, one thing I have seen missing in the campaign against the
tunnels by Restore the Delta and other organizations has been creative,
fun events that other activists have used successfully in the
environmental, anti-globalization and indigenous rights movements.
Today
I'm very happy to say that Restore the Delta and other opponents of
Gov. Jerry Brown's rush to build peripheral tunnels that would drain the
Delta and doom salmon and other Pacific fisheries will do something
different and present California Natural Resources Agency Deputy
Director Jerry Meral, the Administration's point man for the project,
with a coffin on Thursday at a public meeting on the tunnels plan.
Opponents
will hold a news conference outside the meeting, and then deliver the
coffin to the Brown Administration, which is now fast-tracking the
construction of the tunnels through the Bay Delta Conservation Plan
(BDCP). I strongly urge everybody to attend this great event!
"The
proposed Peripheral Tunnels will kill the Delta, the fisheries and the
Delta farms," said Delta water expert Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla,
Executive Director of Restore the Delta. "The coffin will be painted
with Delta place names and values that would be lost."
"Restore
the Delta opposes a project that would exterminate salmon runs, destroy
sustainable family farms and saddle taxpayers with tens of billions in
debt, mainly to benefit a small number of huge corporate agribusinesses
on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley," said Barrigan-Parrilla
said.
The
event will feature Restore the Delta Executive Director Barbara
Barrigan-Parrilla; Bill Jennings, Executive Director of the California
Sportfishing Protection Alliance; Steve Heringer, Delta farmer and
vintner; and other opponents of Jerry Brown's plan to drain the Delta.
The
press conference will take place at 12:00 pm, Thursday, April 4, 2013,
Red Lion Woodlake Conference Center, 500 Leisure Lane, Sacramento
Restore
the Delta is a 10,000-member grassroots organization committed to
making the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta fishable, swimmable, drinkable,
and farmable to benefit all of California. Restore the Delta works to
improve water quality so that fisheries and farming can thrive together
again in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. http://www.restorethedelta.org
For more information, contact: Contact: Steve Hopcraft 916/457-5546; steve [at] hopcraft.comTwitter: @shopcraft; or Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla 209/479-2053 barbara [at] restorethedelta.org; Twitter: @RestoretheDelta
No comments:
Post a Comment