by Langdon Cook
Trenor was so sure of himself. But I found his candor bracing. Most of us suffer a form of paralysis, unsure of how anything we do can possibly make a difference. The very infrastructure of our lives hardly allows it. Every day I drive my kids somewhere: to school or soccer practice or music lessons. Our family lives in a house twice the size of what was considered normal a century ago (our hundred-year-old Craftsman having been torn down to the studs and replaced two decades ago, like so many others in Seattle). Martha and I worry about our kids’ 529 college accounts and our own retirement. And yet our lives are peppered with small gestures: the weekly recycling and composting, reusing plastic bags, doing the laundry with eco-approved soap, the occasional volunteer work. Such small gestures. Trenor, on the other hand, had completely tailored his life to fit his beliefs. It was both inspiring and intimidating.
Katz couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer. “Why did you work for Greenpeace anyway?”
“The better question is, why am I not anymore? The fundamental flaw with Greenpeace and many organizations like it is that at the end of the day the metric for success is the behavior of other people. I don’t believe we can control or affect other people. I think the real work we have to do isn’t about that. The metrics that we should use for success are about how we change ourselves, how we live, what we create—not by telling other people what to do.”
“But what about education?” I asked him. Most American consumers probably didn’t know the difference between a farmed salmon and a wild salmon, much less a hatchery salmon. How could you possibly make an informed decision if you didn’t even realize there was a decision to make? Groups like Greenpeace, it seemed to me, were trying to educate the public, sometimes in provocative ways.
“Education only makes sense for people who already share the same values,” Trenor replied. “When Tataki opened, we were the first sustainable sushi restaurant in the world. Now there are about twenty. Most of them came to us and asked how to do it. When I’m on my deathbed and looking back on my life, I want to know that I was on this side, that I did everything I could to do this the right way. I can’t change other people and I can’t change this industry. I don’t want to define my life by what other people do. I want to define it by what I did. Maybe Tataki makes no difference, but screw it. I gave something to the world that was an example of a different way to use this cuisine that we can stand by.”
Before we left, fisheries biologist Jacob Katz handed sustainable-sushi entrepreneur Casson Trenor a parting gift: a two-kilogram bag of semi-brown short-grained rice. Sushi rice. A little design of a California license plate decorated the bottom of the package: Ca Grown. The upper-right corner of the package was covered by a triangular sticker with the image of a baby salmon on it: the Nigiri Project. This was Katz’s brainchild. “The world’s first salmon-friendly rice,” it said. Trenor, in his double-buttoned black smock, took the gift and made a slight bow in the Japanese style.
THE CONTROL TOWER WAVERED slightly in the distance, an optical illusion created by a low-lying fog, as the intense California sun evaporated what little moisture remained from the previous day’s brief spate. Too little rain, too late. Despite fall weather patterns that teased drought relief, winter had not been kind to the state. We were driving across the Sacramento Valley on I-5 toward the agricultural community of Woodland, about twenty miles northwest of the state capital. After a record January that didn’t see a single drop of rain, a storm had finally come in off the Pacific and dumped a couple of inches. That was all it took for the Sacramento River to turn dark and indignant. “During a typical storm, that airport over there would be under about twenty-six feet of water,” Jacob Katz said. But an extensive system of levees now keeps the river mostly contained within the main channel, preventing flooding of the city and many other nearby towns. This is not what nature had in mind.
Floodplains are dynamic places, with fluctuations of dry and wet that promote a diversity of plant and animal species adapted to conditions that can change as quickly as a politician looking for votes. Modern cities, on the other hand, don’t much care for the wet part. We’ve solved the problem by walling off our cities in flood-prone areas with levees. New Orleans, much of it below sea level and sinking, is famous for its network of levees (and its failed levees), without which it would cease to exist. Though less extreme an example, Sacramento owes its prosperity to levees too. Three major rivers converge near the city: the namesake Sacramento, the American, and the Feather. These and many others running off the Sierra Nevada and coastal mountains contributed the alluvial sediments that make the Central Valley such a rich place to farm. Fifteen miles west of Sacramento is Davis, home of UC Davis, one of the nation’s top agricultural universities, where both Rene Henery and Jacob Katz got their doctoral degrees. It is farm country, no doubt about it, and it’s the place where Katz was raised. His parents were part of the back-to-the-land movement in the sixties.
“My dad came here bearded, straight off the kibbutz in Israel.” It was the beginning of organic farming in California. Katz remembers the many guests his parents entertained when he was a kid, the musicians and intellectuals and counterculture heroes. The Berkeley “food conspiracies”—collectives that enabled people to buy directly from farmers—gave a generation raised on TV dinners an inkling of the power of real food. In 1976, Governor Jerry Brown made Katz’s father the president of the State Reclamation Board (later renamed the Central Valley Flood Protection Board), overseeing water management for the state—an inconceivable appointment a generation earlier, when conservationists were looked at like communists.
We drove past another levee, its grassy slope towering over our car like a cresting wave, and Katz explained that we were now officially within the drainage of the Yolo Bypass. “The bypass is a simple idea. The Sacramento Valley gets way too much water to just wall it in. Three storms came in a row—1903, 1907, 1911—and each one put the entire valley underwater. It became very clear that high water had to be rerouted—bypassed around cities and ag.” Yolo Bypass, the lowest point in the valley, became the designated route for flooding. When it rains, the river rises up over its levee and spills into the bypass. We followed a rutted track up onto the bypass levee itself, a mound of dirt and gravel wide enough to allow for an access road, which ran in a straight line into the distance. This was the highest ground for miles around, and I suppose I expected to find a wasteland fanning out below, a place repeatedly bullied by the Sacramento River’s overflow, just a lifeless gully. But it was quite the opposite. The bypass was brimming with woods and brush and grasses that made a stark contrast with the monotony of straight-edged agricultural land on the other side of the levee, where a farmer had planted a new orchard in neat rows, a water-sucking pistachio crop with an expected life span of about thirty years. Though the bypass lacked large expanses of tule—a type of giant sedge that characterized the wetlands of pre-agricultural California—a ragged collection of old walnut orchards, cottonwoods, and sycamores invited a surprising abundance of birdlife, which was now darting among the trees: bluebirds, kestrels, a pair of acorn woodpeckers in a stand of oaks. All of this land had just been wallowing in a couple of inches of floodwater a few days ago. Because of such floods, most farming in the bypass occurs in dry summer months; the rest of the year it’s a de facto wildlife preserve, and come winter it becomes a pressure release valve, as Katz put it, with the ability to carry four times more water than the main-stem Sacramento. This water, like water everywhere around the globe, is a key ingredient in biodiversity, not to mention a draw for both adult and juvenile salmon, which find its current irresistible at flood stage. Attraction pulse, the biologists call it—just the sort of rushing current a salmon wants to nose into on its upstream spawning mission.
Katz has a knack for explaining complicated systems in simple terms. “It comes down to solar energy being the source of all life. Fish have to eat. Levees starve river systems by keeping them swift, deep, and with very little surface
area. When you allow the river to spread out, it’s a big solar cell.” He was talking about a process we all learn about in school but rarely think about: photosynthesis. Plants use the sun’s energy to make carbohydrates, creating the base of the food chain and at the same time releasing oxygen as a byproduct. Life on earth depends on this process. In the case of floodplains, the algae turn the sunlight into sugars that nourish zooplankton, which in turn feed salmon fry—and so on, up the food chain, which of course includes human beings too. “Almost all of our large civilizations developed along large river systems,” Katz added. But rivers are messy and always changing. Every once in a while, he said, a nice warm Pineapple Express—a moisture-laden winter storm from the South Pacific—settles over California’s mountain snowpack, and so much water gets liberated both from the rain and the melted snow that there’s no way to keep it all within the banks of the Sacramento. “So we have this bypass system.” The river pours over its banks into the bypass, and this human-engineered process was proving, counterintuitively, to be a useful conservation tool. “If you give the river a little room,” Katz explained, “you allow the natural processes that are the engines of productivity to work. We can integrate that back into an intensely managed system, one that’s not going to be restored—you’re not going to have wall-to-wall tules—but we can have places where we have real productivity.”
Neither Rene nor Katz likes the word restoration. They prefer reconciliation, with its subtext of resolving long-simmering feuds. “The idea of restoration for most people is to put something back the way it was,” Rene said. “There’s a growing consensus that the land will never be as it was. We live in a dynamic space; things are always changing. The future is unknown. It’s not a fixed point.” In other words, the landscape isn’t a rusted ’65 Mustang waiting under a tarp for a new owner with deep pockets. The best we can do to heal old wounds is to reconcile the land with new uses that help to bring it into some sort of balance. The Yolo Bypass, for instance. The irony is that it might prove to be better habitat than the channelized and reengineered river itself, if we let it.
“This is a process,” Rene stressed. “We need to educate people to think of land as having inherent habitat value. Once we do that within the existing economic structure, hopefully my kids will just tear down the whole system and build a new one.”
We parked on the levee and got out. Meadowlarks threw back their heads and sang of coming spring from perches below us in the scrub that stretched for a mile or more across the bypass. After a short hike, we stood on the concrete berm of Fremont Weir, where a small gap had been knocked out of the wall. Beyond the gap, a ditch ran a hundred yards to the Sacramento River. Katz called the gap a grudging acknowledgment by the powers that be that fish use the bypass during high flows. Right now, barring a few puddles left over from the last flood, the bypass was dry. But the next time a few inches of rain fell, the river would top its levee and spill across Fremont Weir like a waterfall. The water would inundate all sixty thousand acres of Yolo Bypass and flow down into the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta near Rio Vista, some forty miles to the south. Meanwhile, salmon migrating up the river to spawn, including a nearly extinct winter run of chinook, take their cues from the current. Ignoring the wishes of certain bureaucrats, they enter the bypass and follow a grid of interconnected canals until, if they’re lucky, they reach this small gap in the Fremont Weir. With high water, a few tail shakes is all it takes to squirm through the gap and back into the Sacramento. Once the floodwaters recede, however, the fish find just a concrete wall to bang their heads against instead. As water levels drop, the bypass remains inundated, continuing to attract salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, and other native fish, despite lacking any connection back to the river upstream.
In December 2013, a storm flooded the bypass, per design, except this time the water cleared quickly and revealed what was feared yet seldom seen: hundreds, possibly thousands, of stranded chinook salmon wallowing about in the receding water, exhausted and confused by the barriers that kept them from reaching their spawning grounds, including six hundred of the winter runs, an estimated 10 percent of the total. “For years we’d been saying there were a lot of fish up here. Now we could actually see them, and we saw that the coded wire tags in their noses showed they were endangered winter runs.” Katz and others made rescue attempts, and though they managed to capture and relocate three hundred adults, it was doubtful any of them lived to spawn.
The good news, Katz said, is the state is looking into a permanent fix that will improve the small gap in the weir and give the salmon a chance to continue upstream. The bad news? The cost will be something like a billion dollars when the many ancillary line items are totaled up, an amount that seems all out of proportion to the hacked partial fix that someone had already done for next to nothing with a backhoe. Rene was hardly surprised by such numbers. “For every person who’s involved, you just add the amount of money to the process that it takes to make them feel included and properly compensated. When I worked on a project in Guatemala, they complained about corruption. In the United States we’ve enshrined our corruption in a thing called bureaucracy and the legal system—and the price tag is a lot higher.”
For a far smaller price—about $50 million—Katz was doing experiments that might in the future transform the Yolo Bypass from fish killer to fish nurturer, with consequences for a good chunk of the Sacramento floodplains. With the same sort of audacious thinking that transformed the world during the Industrial Revolution, people like Katz and Rene were dreaming up schemes to walk civilization back from the brink. “You have to get close enough to the precipice to make it real,” Katz said with a chuckle. Rene agreed. Even so, there was no going back to Eden, that much was clear. As Rene put it, this new thinking was a form of survival that would impact human beings as much as salmon in the future. “Usually there are people who, when they see the cliff, they get really resourceful really quickly, and those are the early adopters,” he said. “They’re open to change. When you get to the precipice, the minority that are open to change become the leaders who keep their friends from going off the edge.”
Salmon populations in California are certainly leaning over that precipice, but so are people in many ways. Innumerable studies appear year after year linking human health to the environment. Bird diversity, for instance, can be correlated to the health of a community. City planners across the country are busying themselves boosting tree canopy and safeguarding green spaces. This isn’t wacky New Age stuff. Whether they know it or not, people need a semblance of nature around them. To this end, simple, even graceful solutions can be found—for instance, letting the Yolo Bypass provide the functionality that was lost a century ago with the diking and channelizing of the Sacramento River. Back then, when the levees were built, no one understood the biological importance of floodplains. They were something to be controlled. Now we know that such messy and inconvenient places provide ideal habitat for many species, especially baby salmon, which historically used the floodplains as nurseries where they could grow quickly and strengthen before making the dangerous trip into a hungry ocean.
As we drove south along the bypass to our next stop, Knaggs Ranch, Katz pointed out a series of rectangular fields submerged in water—the paddies responsible for a good portion of the nation’s rice harvest. Such a crop requires flooding, and the lower Sacramento is ideal for this sort of farming. Traditionally, California rice farmers irrigated their fields in late winter, during the rainy season, and then drained them post harvest in the spring. Other agricultural fields in the bypass then got cultivated in the summer with warm-weather crops such as tomatoes. The Nigiri Project’s idea is to hold shallow water for months at a time. After being farmed in the summer dry season, the bypass will be flooded for ducks and geese in fall, followed by a midwinter drawdown to create mudflats for migratory shorebirds; by late winter the shallow water will provide ideal habitat for young salmon and rice growers. “Then you drain the water out,”
Katz said, and the fish go too. In order to do this properly, some of the levees would need to be breached, with gates installed to control water flow in and out. The word breach—whether you’re talking about Sacramento levees or Snake River dams—is not a word Big Ag likes to hear.
Knaggs Ranch, where the Nigiri Project pilot test was up and running, had an experimental plot of nine rice paddies in a row. Each one was surrounded by a berm of plowed soil the width of a city sidewalk that acted as a dike, keeping water contained within the paddy. A canal ran the length of the plot. In many ways this setup was analogous to the relationship between the Sacramento River and the Yolo Bypass, just on a smaller scale. The canal—straight, narrow, and deep—was like the river. We parked in a muddy lot beside a utility shed and followed Katz over to the canal, where he took an aquarium net and dipped it into the murky water. The net came up empty. Next we walked over to one of the rice paddies adjacent to the canal—the Yolo Bypass in miniature, at flood stage. Again Katz dredged his aquarium net through the water. This time he came up with what looked like a thick sludge of green algae. I took a closer look. The green stuff was writhing in the fine mesh, alive with hundreds of microscopic organisms collectively known as zooplankton. Shallower, warmer, and spread across a much larger area, here the water combined with Katz’s “solar cell” had done its work. “Fish filet mignon,” Katz said, with a knowing laugh that suggested he might have tasted this smorgasbord himself out of deep scientific curiosity.
