Jane Wolff is the author of Delta Primer: A Field Guide to the California Delta. After studying
documentary filmmaking and getting a graduate degree in landscape architecture, she worked in a landscape architecture office in San Francisco. A traveling fellowship took her to the Netherlands to study the history of land reclamation. That experience led to her interest in the Delta.
BC: What’s the background of this book?
JW: I started the project to educate broad audiences about the Delta and its importance to California’s future. I’d had an eye-opening experience at a job with some landscape architects in Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s. I’d never spent any time in the suburbs before, and I found myself working on a housing project on the last orchard in Cupertino. I was really shocked at the way development was homogenizing the Santa Clara Valley, and it bothered me that design professionals weren’t doing anything to question the agenda of the developers. I wondered what someone like me could do to suggest other alternatives for the future of the landscape.
I left the Silicon Valley job and started teaching part-time at the California College of Arts and Crafts. I first heard about the Delta from a friend at CCAC, who thought it sounded similar to the Netherlands. I got even more interested when I found out that the Delta’s at the center of all the issues that are shaping California’s landscape–the changing economics of agriculture, environmental politics, suburban development, and the endless demand for water. The Delta’s a critical link in California’s ecology and economy, but most of the people in the state don’t even know it exists. That’s a huge problem
I started the project in my spare time while I taught at CCAC and kept working on it when I went back into practice as a designer. Eventually I realized that an academic job would be a better platform. So I started teaching full time, first at Ohio State and then in the architecture and urban design programs at Washington University.
BC: The Delta’s manmade, isn’t it?
JW: That’s too simple. It’s really a product of interactions between natural processes and what people have done. In 1850, when California was first being settled, the whole region between Sacramento and Tracy and between Stockton and Suisun Bay was a tidal estuary. The Sacramento River, the San Joaquin, and all of their tributaries came together there and formed the Delta, where their water spread out again in rivers and sloughs that are called distributary channels. From the Delta, all that water went into the Bay. The land was just above sea level, and it was covered with cattails and tules.
In 1851, the Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act made land ownership in the Delta possible, and people started reclaiming it. First, they built small levees to protect the land from seasonal flooding. Then they began farming.
Those two activities changed the Delta forever in ways that no one had expected. For one thing, the soil, which was peat, began to react with oxygen, and it literally disappeared into the air. The level of the ground got lower and lower. At the same time, the levees were making the level of water in the rivers higher and higher. During floods they stopped the rivers from spreading out over the land, but that meant the water held in the channels was higher than it would have been naturally. It also meant that the alluvial material carried by the rivers was deposited in the channels instead of on the floodplain, and so the channel bottoms got higher too. Flooding became a hazard all the time, not just during the rainy season.
Now most of the Delta is below sea level, and it has to be protected by big levees. Some of the Delta’s islands are 20 feet below the level of the water in the rivers. Keeping the land dry is a big problem. Groundwater comes to the surface on the subsided islands, and it has to be pumped up and out into the rivers.
BC: What other changes have people made to the landscape?
JW: The Delta has become a primary water source for Southern California. In the ’50s, the federal government began pumping water from the Delta to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. Then, in the ’70s, the state began pumping to Los Angeles and San Diego. The Delta’s importance to those metropolitan centers is going to become even greater because of what’s happening in Colorado River politics.
For a long time, Los Angeles got more than its share of water from the Colorado because upstream states like Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico didn’t use all the water that was supposed to be theirs. Now the population in those places has boomed, and technology has been developed to hold the water until people need it. The process is called groundwater banking: water from the Colorado is put into the aquifer and held there until it’s wanted. So the upstream states won’t let Los Angeles have their water allotments anymore.
