PBS Documentary on Salmon

Salmon: Running the Gauntlet, aired on PBS's Nature series a couple of weeks ago. It's a look at salmon troubles in the Columbia River Basin and the efforts to stop their steep decline. Nicely shot, with some terrific underwater footage, it touches on some of the politics of salmon, but not in great depth.

While many of the issues are similar to the ongoing problems in the Delta, there are also many key differences. In the Columbia Basin, it's more of a fight over dams impeding the salmon's journey upriver to their spawning grounds, while in the Delta it's a fight over adequate water flows, and not just for salmon.

You can watch the whole episode here.

BDCP Plan Blasted By Fed Panel

The Bay-Delta Conservation Plan was always a tough task - putting together environmentalists, government agencies and water users to come up with a comprehensive plan for the immense amount of water flowing through the Delta and utilized for agriculture and SoCal water supplies, not to mention the health of the Bay-Delta ecosystem.

The National Research Council slammed the effort yesterday, especially the BDCP's advocacy of a new "conveyance system," which means a peripheral canal or tunnel. California had close to record snowfall this past winter and some of the urgency has seeped out of efforts to fix the Delta, but this is a problem that won't go away and the longer the delay, the more it's going to cost and the more damage to all of the state's water users, human and otherwise.

Read more here from the SF Chron.