PART 3: THE FORGOTTEN DELTA

Effort to restore the ecosystem faces challenges

A Miwok tribal member wears a traditional handmade head dress based on the markings of a Flicker woodpecker. Aug 24, 2024. Indigenous people have called the Delta home since long before California’s settlers reclaimed its fertile soils with earthen levees. Today, efforts are underway to restore the Delta habitat to what it once was. (Ruth Dusseault/ Bay City News)

By Ruth Dusseault • Bay City News

October 24, 2024

ALMOST 200 YEARS ago, Argonauts tore open Sierra mountainsides with water cannons in search of gold. The runoff raised the floor of San Francisco’s Bay Delta watershed all the way from Sacramento to the Golden Gate.

The land that once flourished with life and diversity soon became an arena for reclamation, where farmers, emboldened by federal permits, built levees to drain tracts of marsh enough to take a plow. What flowed from the Delta in the 19th century was gold.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.