This Land Is My Land

 If you want to understand why, after more than three decades of dedicated service, the Endangered Species Act may soon be replaced with legislation more friendly to farmers and landowners, you have only to stand on the banks of the San Joaquin River with Mario Santoyo, assistant general manager of the Friant Water Authority, and listen to him describe how concern for a dwindling species may wreck his community. Embroiled in legal battles since 1988, Friant has been ordered several times by federal courts to release enough water into the ailing San Joaquin River to support wild salmon. But Santoyo is having none of it. “To do that will take us out of play economically,” says Santoyo. “It scares the hell out of us. We are living the Endangered Species Act nightmare.”

Santoyo would be a fool to argue that the 319-foot-high Friant Dam, which stops up the San Joaquin River at a reservoir called Millerton Lake 20-odd miles northeast of Fresno, has not been a juggernaut for anadromous Chinook salmon, the kind of fish that swim heroically from the open ocean to spawning grounds high in the mountains. What Santoyo argues instead is that, since the Friant Dam was completed in 1944 by a post-Depression federal government determined to turn a barren valley fertile, an entire economy and culture have grown up in its shadow, “and to take all that away — it’s just wrong.”

Santoyo’s way of looking at the world explains why Congressman Richard Pombo, chairman of the House Committee on Resources, has become a local hero. A Republican from the Central Valley city of Tracy who last month pushed a bill through the House stripping the Endangered Species Act of its habitat provisions, Pombo argues that he was prevented from making money off his ranch land because it provided habitat for the endangered San Joaquin kit fox. Like Pombo, Santoyo thinks the act has allowed environmentalists to put the needs of rare creatures over those of humans. “I think where he’s coming from is not a whole lot different from other folks up here,” Santoyo says. “We want to put some balance in how that act is put into place.”

Ninety-five percent of Friant’s water goes to some 15,000 farmers who occupy a million acres — roughly 60 acres per farmer. Unlike the large, corporate farms on the valley’s west side, or the Westlands, the East Valley’s farmers manage small plots and live lean, says Santoyo. “Your margin of profit is pretty slim out here,” he says. If anything happens — anything like the freezes that killed so many orange trees in the late 1980s and early ’90s, sending valley farmers to Washington begging for help — “then you’ve got nothing left.”

Victor Lopez, the labor-friendly mayor of the small Central Valley city of Orange Cove, remembers those freezes. He also remembers devastating droughts, when “we were rationed to 10 gallons a day. There was no irrigating. We washed dishes and threw water on the lawn. Whole families bathed themselves in the same water.” But these days, he fears an environmentally friendly court decision more than he fears the weather. “We have a very good conservation program year ’round because we’re so afraid,” he says. “We rely solely on our citrus trees, and if you don’t water them, they die.”

Back in 1974, around the same time most of the country’s environmental legislation was taking effect, Lopez was working in the Central Valley’s fields, demanding that Big Agriculture’s bosses provide full-time day care for farm workers’ children. He succeeded, guaranteeing himself 30 years in office. And he cannot grasp the rationale for releasing Friant’s water to support salmon when the people in his community will suffer from the loss.

“I’ve never eaten a fish in my life,” he says, laughing. “I have nothing against fish, but I’m a person that values number one human beings. And I cannot understand how endangered species can be more important than human lives.”

Pombo, says Lopez, “is a good, good man. He understands what we’re going through here.”

Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the primary litigant against Friant, says he also understands what the farmers of the East Valley are going through. But he doesn’t have much patience with Friant’s constant appeals of court decisions. Other water districts throughout the state, such as the ones that serve rice farmers on the Sacramento River, have had to adapt to changes in environmental law; so should Friant.

“Friant is an exception to every other major dam in the state in that it doesn’t release a drop of water into the [California] Delta or the river,” says Nelson. Since 1950, when California’s then-Attorney General Pat Brown declared Friant’s federal managers exempt from a state law protecting fish downstream, Friant’s water users “have been isolated from the regulatory world,” says Nelson. “They haven’t had to deal with the Endangered Species Act or the Clean Water Act or any of the regulatory requirements that have affected any other water user. They’re still living in the 1940s.”