Current water policies in the Delta encourage “shifting baselines” that gradually degrade ecosystems. But ongoing work on the Klamath River shows that restoring ecosystems to a better state than the status quo is possible.
By Alastair Bland
Among the jumbled boulders on the Klamath River’s Ishi Pishi Falls, Ron Reed learned to fish with a traditional salmon dipnet when he was just a few years old. Chinook and coho, Reed remembers, clogged the water below the tumbling rapids during peak migration times.
“All I remember is salmon, all over the place,” says Reed, a 62-year-old elder and ceremonial leader of the Karuk tribe. “We caught so many, sometimes all we’d need by noon.”
Since the 1960s, salmon habitat along the length of the Klamath and its tributaries has deteriorated, thanks to the construction of dams and the diversion of water to irrigate farms. In response, salmon runs have plunged. A similar trend has occurred throughout California, with returns in most major salmon rivers recently at or near record lows. This prompted officials to ban commercial and recreational fishing statewide in 2023, a closure that has extended through 2024.
As salmon wane, tribal relations with the fish have changed, especially in the youngest generation.
“They see us fishing, but they don’t see us catching anything,” Reed says of his grandchildren.
Indeed, fishers today pursue salmon—when regulations permit—with increasingly subdued expectations of what they’ll bring home. Many anglers scarcely even realize they’re plying less productive waters, reflecting a process known to ecologists and fishery experts as “shifting baselines,” by which successive generations of people in a changing world collectively forget how things once were. Instead, they assume recent environmental conditions are reflective of historic ones. It’s a dangerous progression, since it means that some resources don’t just vanish but are entirely forgotten. Once that happens, restoration becomes nearly impossible.
While the gradual shift of baselines is natural, embedded into the interplay of human lifespans and the fact that things change, there is a troubling element at play: Many important environmental rules and policies, designed to protect and conserve nature, can facilitate the process.
This is happening in California, environmental policy experts say, as regulations intended to protect natural resources–and the rules that govern water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta–allow incremental damage to habitat and wild spaces, with little regard for long-term cumulative impacts. Some laws and policies attempt to do better by explicitly prohibiting any further harm to degraded habitat and imperiled species, but they rarely improve environmental conditions and reverse damage done. With time, habitat and species dwindle away, and eventually discussions of bringing them back go silent.
Along the Klamath River, however, Tribes and environmentalists are pushing back against the vanishing of the river’s fish. They have spearheaded a dramatic restoration project featuring the removal of four dams and the replanting of denuded reservoir banks. The work, they hope, could help turn back the clock and revive ailing salmon runs.
“The idea is to get to a place of plenty again,” said Barry McCovey, 46, a Yurok member who directs the tribe’s fisheries program. “That’s the goal, that when my kids are my age things will have shifted back, or forward, to a better place.”
Elsewhere in the state, declining biological biodiversity and abundance have become accepted norms of change. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the Delta and the rivers that feed the San Francisco Estuary. At this central hub of California’s water supply distribution system, at least five fish species have steadily declined for decades. Several runs of Chinook salmon are teetering on the edge of viability. So are green and white sturgeon. The Delta smelt, once common, is considered functionally extinct, and with feeble efforts at play to rebuild the species.
“All these species that we think of as being endangered and on the precipice of disappearing, we’ve forgotten that they used to be abundant, and there were actually fisheries for most of them,” said Jon Rosenfield, science director at San Francisco Baykeeper.
He sees the shift of baselines, and the slow change in what society expects of the natural world, as a silent killer of the Bay-Delta ecosystem.
So does Jeffrey Mount, a water supply management expert at the Public Policy Institute of California.
“One of the challenges of shifting baselines is that we have so fundamentally altered everything about the Delta that it’s very difficult to define what the baseline is anymore,” Mount said.
Basis of Baselines?
In the scientific realm, a baseline is a fixed set of data that can be used as a yardstick to measure change in a system. Accurately tracking global warming, sea level, and deforestation, for instance, requires having firm baseline measurements from the past. But when a baseline, through poorly kept records and societal amnesia, heaves free of its anchor and drifts along with the tides of change, understanding what’s been lost becomes essentially impossible.
For restoration and conservation interests, losing track of historical baselines is a devastating effect—and one that author Deborah Cramer described in her 2015 book The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, an Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey. She wrote, “We so easily settle for the diminished world around us … Unaware of what we have lost, we cannot imagine what we might restore.” In a sociopolitical context, author George Orwell invoked a similar progression in the 1940s. His dystopian novels Animal Farm and 1984 featured government schemes to incrementally edit and rewrite history, so that civilian masses forgot the past and accepted increasingly degraded social conditions.
In 1995, Canadian fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined the term “shifting baselines” as he described how researchers often use environmental conditions at the start of their careers as de facto baselines. Since then, the expression has resonated with environmentalists everywhere who have watched biodiversity decline despite frantic campaigns to preserve it.
Mount explained that one of the key policy mechanisms that paves the way for shifting baselines is the frequent inclusion in regulatory language of clauses that allow activities—including water exports from the Delta—on the premise that they cause no additional impacts to imperiled species and ecosystems.
“But what if things are already in terrible condition?” Mount said.
Mount called the 2016 Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act a “classic example” of a protective regulation inadvertently facilitating environmental decline. In the section detailing California water management, the WIIN Act states its intention to maximize Delta exports while avoiding “additional adverse effects” on threatened and endangered fish species. In doing so, it establishes as a baseline a diminished ecological state, with multiple fish species already approaching extinction.
“It locks in a shifted baseline,” he said.
The California Environmental Quality Act—usually called CEQA, or see-quah—is often hailed as the state’s bedrock environmental law. While CEQA aims to protect the environment from the potential significant impacts of building new infrastructure, housing, and businesses, some environmentalists fault it for allowing small damages, one project at a time, to add up. In effect, significant impacts can be avoided in a single project, but the sum effect of many is that species and their habitat disappear.
“It’s become a real strategy to say in CEQA documents that projects don’t worsen the status quo,” said Barry Nelson, a water policy expert with the Golden State Salmon Association. “The problem, of course, is that the status quo has us on a waterslide to disaster.”
In some cases, CEQA mandates that project developers—for instance, someone planning to deforest a site and plant a vineyard—make certain, usually through paid consultants, that they will not harm imperiled species or habitat.
“The project applicant hires all kinds of experts to come out, look around, and say there’s nothing there,” said Kellie Anderson, an environmental advocate in Napa County who has lobbied for years against the continuing conversion of native woodlands into wine country.
Such site visits may allow work to begin, after which it is even less likely that threatened or endangered species will frequent the area, which can make it easier for the next project to sail through the environmental inspection process without complications. Over time, habitat disappears—and baselines shift—under the guise that there have been no significant impacts.
Anderson faults the failure of officials to adequately enforce CEQA for “the overall incremental destruction of our environment.”
Scarcity Becomes the Norm?
In the Delta, the complex rules that govern the diversion of water from the estuary while minding environmental needs also allow ecological baselines to stealthily migrate. A group of environmental organizations recently challenged the California Department of Water Resources’ proposal to modify its operation of its South Delta pumping stations—a change that requires an Environmental Impact Report under CEQA. In their August 5 protest letter, the advocates noted that the water agency made a similar change to its operations in 2020 that has exacerbated the environmental problems afflicting several threatened and endangered fishes in the Delta. “Those project impacts were not fully mitigated, as required under [the California Endangered Species Act],” they wrote.
Now, explained Rosenfield, who has led the protest, the latest attempt to incorporate a package of water sharing rules known as the Voluntary Agreements into state and federal Delta water operations sets existing degraded conditions as the baseline upon which new changes in operations will, at best, do no further harm. (Changing flow baselines are also a problem.) More likely, he said, they will accelerate population declines in smelt, salmon, and sturgeon.
U.C. Davis biologist Peter Moyle, who has studied California’s freshwater fishes for more than 50 years, said state and federal endangered species protections can have the unintended effect of making scarcity an accepted norm for animals and plants that were once abundant.
“Once a species is listed under the Endangered Species Act, the listing conditions tend to become the baseline conditions,” Moyle said.
Shifting baselines have affected countless species struggling to keep their footing in an anthropocentric world. One key problem is that the scarcer many plants and animals become, the less humans are interested in them, which may weaken public support for their conservation, furthering their troubles and hastening their decline. It’s a vicious cycle that can quietly drive a species to extinction.
Other self-reinforcing feedback loops also drive the problem of shifting baselines as it develops, according to researchers Masashi Soga, of the University of Tokyo, and Kevin Gaston, of the University of Exeter. In a 2018 analysis in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the scientists described how people who experience a degraded environment become increasingly tolerant of such conditions, and in turn less motivated to support or participate in restoration. Even when policymakers attempt to repair a damaged environment, the scientists explained, they may unwittingly set insufficient targets for restoration such that, even in the best of outcomes, full restoration is not achieved.
Though it’s a known nemesis of conservation work, “shifting baseline syndrome,” as Soga and Gaston call it, is widely ignored. They wrote that the trend “represents an enormous challenge for the conservation, restoration and management of [the Earth’s] environment. Despite this prognosis, however, environmental scientists have, to date, paid remarkably little attention to [shifting baseline syndrome].”
Soga and Gaston noted that the almost constant diminishment for millennia of the Earth’s non-human world has conditioned people to expect little else. They described an “increased societal tolerance for progressive environmental degradation, such as decline in wildlife populations, loss of natural habitats, and increasing pollution.”
In other words, we are so accustomed to seeing the natural world deteriorate that true restoration is usually not considered a realistic prospect.
Rosenfield observes the same paradigm: “We’re operating under this assumption that things can’t get better, they can only get a little worse.”
But maybe not in the Klamath River basin, as local tribes aim not to partially mitigate the ecological impacts of dams but entirely undo them. If they succeed, they and other project partners could start an almost unheard of process that has been referred to as “lifting baselines.”
“My children will have a relationship with salmon, but it will be different than what mine was,” the Yurok’s McCovey said. He expects “it will be based more on conservation and a different type of reverence, where they understand these fish are in a fight for survival and where we as a people are in a fight for survival.”
Reed, with the Karuk, says time is of the essence as he and other leaders, while growing older, teach children about cultural ways that are at risk of slipping away and being forgotten.
“Our generation has an obligation, because a lot of the knowledge we have could be lost,” he said. “How we transmit that information to the next generation is very critical to the future of indigenous society.”
Produced for Maven’s Notebook by Estuary News Group, with support from the Delta Stewardship Council.
