ESTUARY PEARLS: Diversity in Bay Delta science, Art and science, Delta smelt – a scapefish, Connectivity on all levels in the Delta, and Consensus on salmon
“People underestimate the risk of staying the same,” said Melissa Jones, environmental equity activist and director of a coalition of the Bay Area’s health departments, during one of half-a-dozen diversity-themed talks at the 11th Biennial Bay-Delta Science Conference.
Indeed, the historically white-male-science-data-dense event had a fresh vibe this year, emanating from the open-door theme, the free zoom access and chat exchanges, and a universal dose of Covid-spread humility. Talks both honored young scientists of color and young activists conducting community-based science in Stockton and East Palo Alto, and also challenged established scientists to make room at the table.
Acknowledging privilege is key to ceding privilege to others,” said Levi Lewis, a UC Davis scientist with a multi-racial background who just took over the famous Hobbs fish lab. “We are all gatekeepers.”
Levi and co-plenary presenter Priya Shukla narrated interesting parallels between the scope of their biological research and their personal histories. Both enjoyed access to nature as children, for example, which fueled their curiosity about science. Shukla, who’s family immigrated from India, closed her talk by suggesting the return of a giant jewel in the Queen of England’s crown to its country of extraction might achieve some cultural healing.
“What is your Kohinoor diamond?” she asked the science conference audience. “What could you give up to seed opportunity?”
Author: Ariel Rubissow Okamoto | Picture: Lewis holding white sturgeon in Delta. Photo: Jim Ervin
Art, science, and nature have a long history of cross-pollination that can help communicate complex scientific ideas, diffuse divisiveness, and inspire creature caring.
“Until science became so specialized, there wasn’t as much a divide between science and art,” said San Francisco Estuary Institute’s senior designer, Ruth Askevold, during a conference panel on the intersection of art and science. Other panelists shared insights about their work.
“Artistic renderings can be more useful than photographs for identification, because an artist can call attention to particular aspects of that organism,” said the University of Kansas’ Rene P. Martin, originator of the popular #sundayfishsketch hashtag.
Another panelist, Regional San’s chief scientist Lisa Thompson, described working with U.C. Davis and photographer Dave Giordano to create a series of fish portraits. What started out as a way to identify fish turned into something more.
“It’s hard to get people to conserve something if they don’t know what it looks like, or have only seen it as a filet in a grocery store,” she said. “Hopefully work like this helps people think a little bit more about conserving animals.”
Author: Aleta George | Illustration: Rene P. Martin
“Entrepreneurs of political division”—not its actual impact on water policy—have turned the Delta smelt into a national scapefish. In a departure from typical conference fare, Tufts University sociologist Caleb Scoville’s presentation “From California’s Water Wars to America’s Culture Wars” used Twitter tweets, Google searches, and newspaper op-eds to examine how the Delta smelt became a politically charged symbol of environmentalist excess and regulatory overreach. His data show that public and media reactions don’t map to changes in regulations, water conveyance, or drought, however.
“What if the controversy operates according to a political and media logic divorced from water operations?” Scoville asked.
Anti-environmental op-eds mentioning the Delta smelt were six times more likely not to be about water than pro-environmental pieces. They also tended not to mention salmon, whose protected status also affects water policy. Anti-smelt opinion was also stronger outside California.
Tellingly, by far the highest peak in Google searches for “Delta smelt” followed a diatribe by Fox personality Sean Hannity, one of those entrepreneurs of division.
“Hannity … didn’t report the controversy; he helped create it,” said Scoville. He noted that the small size of the smelt makes it the epitome of “uncharismatic microfauna,” an easy target for ridicule.
“The Delta smelt is a vehicle through which California water politics became enrolled in the national politics of ‘us versus them’, part of a broader, emotionally charged partisan politics that has nothing to do with water,” he concluded.
Author: Joe Eaton
The Delta connects to its world in six ways, none of them working all that well.
Reporting on last year’s Estuary Connectivity Symposium at Davis during this year’s conference, Annika Keeley of the Delta Science Program noted that the obvious longitudinal connections–up and down the channels–are only one dimension to consider.
Lateral connections bind the waterways to adjacent wetlands, forests, floodplains, forests, and pollution sources. Vertical connections link surface flows with groundwater, a two-way exchange impeded, for instance, when water tables are lowered by pumping to keep fields on subsided islands dry. Lattice connections radiate outwards along habitat corridors, including field and road margins, that are undervalued and often blocked. Ecoscape connections reach farther, even internationally, as through bird migration.
Finally, human response–the social connection–suffers from a “scale mismatch” between narrowly defined governance structures and widely interlinked ecological processes. The Delta Stewardship Council, says Keeley, is distinctive in that “its mission really is to connect” agencies and realms of knowledge. Its limitation is its narrow geographical reach.
Author: John Hart | Image: Delta social linkages. Lubell et al. 2014. Ecology and Society.
By polling stakeholders about measures to help salmon, a new study seeks to ease the way to consensus—but also confirms familiar sticking points. In a conference talk exploring work for the interagency Collaborative Adaptive Management Team, ESSA Technologies crystallized 44 much-discussed interventions for salmonids and asked well-informed survey participants to rank them.
Three groups of actions emerged: “no brainers,” effective and popular but sometimes very expensive; “low hanging fruit,” widely accepted and easy to implement; and bones of contention, measures deemed effective but lacking consensus (yellow box, above). Among the latter were control of striped bass; study of juvenile salmonid habitat use within the Delta; and, naturally, questions of water flows and conveyance.
“The benefit of more precisely identifying who disagrees and why,” suggests ESSA’s Natascia Tamburello, “is that you can develop more targeted approaches to reducing disagreement instead of just letting people stew in their set points of view.”
John Hart | Image:44 measures for salmon recovery scored for level of perceived benefit and agreement.Conference abstracts and recordings of the actual talks are available online, with some log-in requirements, for the next few weeks.
Art, science, and nature have a long history of cross-pollination that can help communicate complex scientific ideas, diffuse divisiveness, and inspire creature caring.
“Entrepreneurs of political division”—not its actual impact on water policy—have turned the Delta smelt into a national scapefish. In a departure from typical conference fare, Tufts University sociologist Caleb Scoville’s presentation “From California’s Water Wars to America’s Culture Wars” used Twitter tweets, Google searches, and newspaper op-eds to examine how the Delta smelt became a politically charged symbol of environmentalist excess and regulatory overreach. His data show that public and media reactions don’t map to changes in regulations, water conveyance, or drought, however.
The Delta connects to its world in six ways, none of them working all that well. 
By polling stakeholders about measures to help salmon, a new study seeks to ease the way to consensus—but also confirms familiar sticking points. In a conference talk exploring work for the interagency Collaborative Adaptive Management Team, ESSA Technologies crystallized 44 much-discussed interventions for salmonids and asked well-informed survey participants to rank them.
