California salmon are endangered. So is the Democrats’ environmentalism | Opinion
Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series by Sacramento Bee opinion writer Tom Philp examining the precipitous decline of California’s wild salmon and what can be done to head off extinction of the iconic fish.
In the eyes of the world, California was supposed to be the green city on the hill, the showcase of environmental stewardship fueled by a new economy advancing clean energy, smarter growth and sustainable living.
Instead, today’s California has more homeless people than anywhere in the country, the priciest gasoline and electricity and residents migrating to other states.
California’s once-vaunted brand of environmentalism is in trouble. The Democratic Party, which has run the state nearly singlehandedly for years, is frantically trying to reframe itself as the champions of affordability as its political brand, in the words of Gov. Gavin Newsom, has become “toxic.”
This isn’t a good time for an iconic state species like California salmon to find itself on the brink of survival and in desperate need of some human help. For the state’s natural world, the timing of a political recalibration by Democrats couldn’t be worse.
There is precious little political space for Californians to worry about anything other than themselves.
“What’s most existential at the moment is paying rent on Friday,” said Mike Madrid, a longtime California political consultant and a vocal critic of a Democratic agenda. The party’s environmentalism “is a veneer,” he said.
California loves to study water solutions
Salmon advocates have been urging a set of state water regulators to update how they manage the waters of the Sacramento River so that key fish species like salmon have enough flows when they need them. Yet here, in the most important watershed for California salmon, the State Water Resources Control Board hasn’t managed to modernize its water management any time this century.
This body manages California’s wildly complicated water rights system and is supposed to enforce both the state and federal Clean Water Acts. Its Bay Delta Water Quality Control Plan is a foundational document that balances the competing uses of water in throughout Northern California the environment and the economy.
The last time the board updated flow obligations for the Sacramento River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, however, was in 1999. Then, regulators counted 10,100 endangered spring-run salmon in Northern California. Last year, the number had plummeted to 2,862.
Salmon researchers like Carson Jeffres long for more flows for young salmon to help them swim downstream to the Pacific Ocean, particularly in the first few storms in case the rains stop and another deadly drought begins. Former Gov. Jerry Brown and current Gov. Gavin Newsom have advanced their own compromise, an eight-year experiment known as Healthy Rivers to test the benefit of more habitat and some new flows.
Even though the water board began efforts to update water management back in 2009, it failed to get the job done during the Brown administration and may double that feat under Newsom. The board recently announced it hasn’t sufficiently analyzed the matter and doesn’t expect a draft until December. If the board ultimately approves this eight-year Healthy Rivers plan, it will take longer to have deliberated it than to implement it.
“Delay benefits a handful of water users, and it’s catastrophic for the environment,” said Barry Nelson, a longtime California environmental activist who now represents salmon fishermen.
Democrats own California’s paralysis of analysis. They control the governor’s office and the Legislature. They pick all the board members. And then they years too long to make vital decisions.
Why liberal hotbeds resist giving salmon more water
California has no more symbolic center of liberalism than San Francisco, where the civic goal is to use the automobile only a fifth of time for city trips by 2030. Yet the city’s environmentalism doesn’t extend to preserving California’s natural world and its iconic salmon when it means giving up a lot of water.
San Francisco’s water supply originates in Yosemite National Park as part of the San Joaquin River watershed, and makes it to the Bay Area by gravity via a network of tunnels and pipelines. When the same state water board managed to make a decision in 2022 on the San Joaquin and redirect more water to the environment to help fish including salmon, San Francisco sued.
Increasing flows in June “constitutes a waste and unreasonable use of water,” San Francisco wrote in 2022, “because there are few, if any, Central Valley fall-run Chinook salmon present in the system and migrating at that time.”
The city’s stinginess to provide more water for wildlife is rooted in how California’s antiquated water rights system shares in environmental responsibilities. San Francisco’s rights date back to before 1914, when the state began regulating new users of water and gave senior users priority, meaning the new users have to give up water first.
In California, a senior water right “is like a God-given right,” said Felicia Marcus, former chair of the California Water Resources Control Board, the state’s top water regulator.
San Francisco is hardly alone in its reluctance to voluntarily give the environment more water. Liberal East Bay communities like Berkeley have senior water rights as well that are just as fiercely defended.
Democrats have long resisted modernizing a water rights system that has made salmon somebody else’s problem. Protecting their own liberal cities always comes first.
When too much bureaucracy can hurt salmon
In 2021 help for salmon appeared to be on the way. The largest tidal wetlands restoration process in history was nearing final approval, targeting the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where most young migrating salmon die before reaching the ocean. The restoration of Lookout Slough was primed to provide 3,500 acres of desperately needed food and shelter.
Then a little-known state bureaucracy, ironically known as the Delta Stewardship Council, voted to reject this project.
Restoration backers, the council ruled, had not used the “best available science” when analyzing how many fishermen in the region would be displaced by a project meant to help salmon. It took a second, deeper look into human fishing habits in the region for the council in 2022 to reverse itself and to let habitat restoration in the Delta move forward. It’s impossible to estimate how delaying this project a year hurt the environment, but it certainly didn’t help.
This is yet another regulatory body (five council members) that is entirely picked by Democrats, either by Newsom or legislative leaders. It was created in 2009 to promote environmental restoration. Instead, on its first big vote, it said no.
Somewhere down the line, California Democrats began to confuse process with progress. And with their attention these days elsewhere, there’s little prospect for change.
The environment has changed and Democrats have not
Madrid said the only Californians still passionate about environmental preservation are largely its economic beneficiaries. The only state demographic that still “cares deeply,” Madrid said, are “white, wealthy, college-educated, homeowners and older.”
Save for the removal of four dams on the Klamath River, an endeavor launched prior to his election, Gavin Newsom has presided over the demise of one of California’s most iconic species. In a period that has called for bold decisions and new directions, he has been focussed elsewhere. Salmon belongs squarely in an environmentally-minded governor’s climate change agenda. Newsom’s attention has always been elsewhere.
Salmon may be without a human savior right now, but there still is hope. There may be nothing helpful coming from the halls of power in Sacramento. But there is a new generation of researchers and tribal leaders ready to fill the leadership void with some ideas of their own.
This story was originally published November 30, 2025 at 12:29 PM with the headline "California salmon are endangered. So is the Democrats’ environmentalism | Opinion."