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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Argh. I am so sick of this PR line about the fucking fish from the farmers and conservatives. I'm very disappointed to see Wired framing the story this way.

I am not a big fish lover. I don't personally care about the Delta Smelt. But it's going extinct because farmers took up so much of the freshwater supply for so long and then screamed whenever any water was diverted. You know, California also has a multi-billion dollar freshwater fish industry. The Delta Smelt is important not because it's such an amazing fish but because it's a good proxy for the viability of our salmon fisheries and others like trout.

This sort of zero-sum thinking is at the root of our environmental and political problems. We're playing beggar-my-neighbor with increasingly scarce resources instead of saying 'look, we have multiple stakeholders here with a variety of economic interests, and ultimately we are all in this together.' It's very depressing >:-(

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>>saying 'look, we have multiple stakeholders here with a variety of economic interests

But that's what they saying! The guy said the 6 fish weren't worth the water they were loosing.

The bigger problem is that if we start doing the math in terms of finances we would invariably loose many of our national treasures as the value of natural resources are hard to tabulate, whereas the potential gains from their use can be easily portrayed as `capital` and enabling of further production. More troubling we might opt for short-term technologies with sub-optimal long-term payoffs like fossil fuels.

Indeed, the people who aggressively portray themselves as `stakeholders` are often whose who want to act against the interests of the community.

What we need here are principles.

We're not doing it for 6 fish. 6 fish are all we have left this year, whereas it used to be several thousand fish. (Edit: I should say that we have only found 6 in the annual survey. There might be hundreds or thousands in total; I don't know the exact relationship between the sample and the overall population,a nd I'm not sure anyone has an exact number.) We only found out that there are only 6 left about 3 weeks ago. The amount of water allocated doesn't immediately get adjusted to reflect the fish population.

Also, it's not meaningful to look at the water allocation on a water-per-individual-fish basis. What's the point of diverting this water at all? To ensure that there's a flow on a particular river tributary to allow fish to swim upstream to spawn. How much does it need? That's very much a function of the geography of the river - its length, composition, elevation and so on, and the length of time that you need to ensure water flow for successful spawning. Any number of fish, whether it's 6 or 6 million, need to ave water flowing along the whole length of the river if they're to swim upstream to spawn.

So look, if these are in fact the last 6 delta smelt in existence that's sad but I'm not going to lose sleep if they die. Maybe we can put their DNA in cryogenic storage and reintroduce it someday or something. But if we decide to cut off that water, then we have to accept that probably nothing spawns in this tributary of the Sacramento river at all and that whole branch of the river dies, potentially affecting many other species.

If it helps, think of the river like part of the interstate highway system. You can try to save money on maintenance or so, but if a major bridge goes out then whole large sections of freeway become useless.

I agree there is lots of misinformation on this issue. But how is it not a zero sum issue? Either the water goes to the farms or to the fish. No matter how much we talk, hold hands or sing kumbaya we can't have both.

BTW - I think the underlying problem is pretty clear: water is being allocated by a broken and unresponsive legal/regulatory system. It needs to be replaced with a market so water goes to it highest and best use. Hopefully this can help restore some sanity to our collective decision making.

PS - At a conservative $500 an acre-foot that's $6 million for six fish!

Many decisions are zero sum if considered in a single moment of time, but not when considered over a longer-term perspective. Obviously the thing being left out is, this wasn't about saving 6 individual fish, it was about saving a handful of the surviving members of a species of fish that they're attempting to repopulate.

Remember "do things that don't scale" - you save 6 fish so in a couple decades you'll be at 60,000.

Because a functioning ecosystem benefits everyone. As someone else pointed out, fish swimming upstream to spawn deposit nutrients from the ocean that help to replenish the land.

On market solutions, they can work in many cases but they're not a panacea. For example, it may be economical for golf course owners to keep using a lot of water because they can make fat money from charging expensive green fees, but that doesn't mean that watering golf courses is more economically efficient over the long run.

What this guy says. Amen. Smartest thing I've seen on this topic.

Awesome, good to see this type of thinking is backed up. Sadly, I am for the first time starting to underestimate the value of large scale farming in California. It is becoming big business instead off a good source of food, at least at a level that goes back into Californians. This might open a can of hate, but why don't we just ban exportation of our farmed food in for example a red zone district due to water shortage, i.e. it can only feed us. I bet the water usage would drop significantly.

>why don't we just ban exportation of our farmed food in for example a red zone district due to water shortage, i.e. it can only feed us. I bet the water usage would drop significantly.

Or instead of idiotic regulations that will be gamed and filled with loopholes, just make the farmers pay the market rate for water. That will drive up the cost of the farm output enough that it won't be competitive and farmers won't need so much water.

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