By Caleb Scoville

The Delta Smelt is a small, endangered fish that lives exclusively in the heart of the state’s water distribution system, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. At times, regulations to protect smelt affect conveyance of water to 35 million Californians and the state’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry. As Peter Moyle put it in a 2022 post, “Few native species are as controversial as Delta Smelt.”

This means that the controversy can be explained in terms of how protecting the species impacts the flow of water to farms and cities, right? Not exactly.

As an environmental sociologist, I study the interplay among human interests, institutions, cultural meanings, and society’s relationship with nonhuman nature. I have been studying various aspects of the Delta Smelt case for years, drawing on a wide array of evidence, from archival documents to expert interviews to field observations. My research on the controversy focuses on the species’ portrayal in the media, its political mobilization, and public interest in the topic.

In a peer-reviewed article recently published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, I show that the dynamics and character of the Delta Smelt controversy are better explained by national partisan divisions than as a regional struggle for access to water.

The Delta Smelt Controversy and the Flows of Water

According to the dominant journalistic framing, the Delta Smelt is politically explosive due to the perceived zero-sum nature of California’s limited water supply: more water for fish means less water for people (and the agricultural industry in particular). There is a grain of truth in this diagnosis. If the Delta Smelt hadn’t been listed under the Endangered Species Act, the species would likely have languished in obscurity. However, I wanted to move beyond this to find out if the intensity of the controversy surrounding the species actually corresponded to its impact on water flows over time.

It does not. Years when protecting the Delta Smelt cost farms and cities more water were not years during which there was more discussion of the species in traditional media, more Google searches or tweets (posts on the social media site Twitter, now called X) about the species, or more debates about the species in Congress (Figure 2). To explain the Delta Smelt controversy, I would have to understand its significance beyond the world of water policy.

Explaining the Delta Smelt Controversy

Although none of the indicators of social interest in the Delta Smelt correlate strongly with the flow of fresh water through the Delta, all social interest indicators are strongly correlated with each other. What explains this coherence? A major part of the answer is that elites in the media and electoral politics have raised the profile of the Delta Smelt with the American public.

Google search data provide a particularly clear window into this aspect of the controversy. Trends in search volume for the term “Delta Smelt” from the nation’s most widely used search engine are the best available proxy for interest in the topic among the broader population. Figure 3 shows that the largest spike in Google search interest in the smelt by far happened in September 2009, which corresponds not to a significant event in the world of California water policy but to conservative political commentator Sean Hannity’s special featuring the Delta Smelt on Fox News. Hannity dedicated an entire episode of his highly-rated primetime television show to Delta Smelt, during which he attributed water scarcity and Great Recession-era economic hardships experienced in California’s Central Valley to measures taken to protect the species. In a false, but politically evocative assertion, Hannity told his audience that “farms in this once fertile area have dried up all because the government has put the interest of a two-inch minnow before all the great people that you see out here tonight.”

Hannity’s special exemplifies an important feature of the Delta Smelt controversy: although the protection of the species is a California matter, when the controversy exploded, it did so on the national stage. To investigate this process systematically, I conducted a content analysis of 1,256 opinion articles (including op-eds, editorials, and letters to the editor) mentioning the Delta Smelt. I classified opinion articles by their position on environmental protection: positive (pro), negative (anti), or ambiguous. I found that the negative skew of the discourse on the Delta Smelt is driven by geographically distant actors targeting audiences with no direct stake in the distribution of water from the Delta. Opinion articles that mentioned the Delta Smelt and expressed a negative opinion about environmental protections were disproportionately published in outlets targeting audiences outside of California (Figure 5). Within the subset of publications targeting a California audience, the modal position taken by opinion article writers was a positive position on providing environmental protections. 

To better understand the meaning of the controversy on its own terms, I dug into how the Delta Smelt was discussed in these opinion articles. While defenders of environmental protections were extremely likely to discuss the Delta Smelt in concrete terms related to California water issues, opponents often used the Delta Smelt as an example or an illustration of some other problem. Negative opinion articles were four times as likely not to be principally about California water issues at all, and were more than twice as likely to include references to partisan terms or unrelated hot-button social issues (e.g., abortion or gay rights), as compared to opinion articles expressing support for environmental protection. All of this suggests that the venomous nature of the controversy is not simply an outgrowth of a water conflict but an effect of the story of the Delta Smelt becoming woven into a national partisan narrative that evokes antagonistic senses of “us” versus “them.”

Why the Delta Smelt?

One might wonder why the Delta Smelt is so specifically controversial when it is not the only endangered species that affects the flow of water to California’s farms and cities. For instance, the practical implications of protecting Chinook salmon and the Delta Smelt are virtually indistinguishable, and the former even tends to regulate conveyance from the Delta more than the latter.

I found that when voicing opposition to environmental protections, opinion writers were much more likely to mention the Delta Smelt in isolation, conveniently ignoring the plight of its larger and more majestic cousin, the Chinook salmon, which, unlike smelt, supports a commercial and recreational fishery (Figure 6). Writers in favor of protecting the Delta Smelt, on the other hand, tend to mention the two species together. The contrasting reactions to the two fish, and the frequent pejorative usage of descriptors like “tiny” or “little,” suggest that the Delta Smelt’s small size, lack of charisma, and absence of direct economic or culinary value make it the perfect vessel for the often implicit but politically potent message that “they” (in this case, imagined liberal environmentalists in faraway cities) care less about “you” (ordinary hardworking Americans) than a tiny fish.

The Upshot

Responding to the decline of the Delta ecosystem and adapting California’s water infrastructure to a changing climate are serious challenges. It may be at once comforting and disturbing to learn that the Delta Smelt controversy hangs on these issues less than initially meets the eye. My study suggests that when the Delta Smelt comes up in a heated political conversation or in the national media, what is really at stake is often not the distribution of water, but emotionally saturated stories that activate partisan identity. For this reason, the assumption that redistributing water would dampen the controversy likely rests on a misdiagnosis. The controversy may have origins in California water policy, but vitriolic views on the Delta Smelt tend to be abstracted from the details of that context. Instead, statements about the Delta Smelt are made politically powerful through links to partisan positions that have little, if anything, to do with water.

Yet the Delta Smelt’s divisive status is not entirely irrelevant to California’s water challenges. The controversy contributes to a climate of animosity and distrust that is among the main obstacles to addressing natural resource problems in California and beyond. Tackling the great environmental challenges of the twenty-first century will require reframing these problems in ways that resonate with a broad base of people across existing social divisions. Attempting to do so may often feel like swimming upstream, but the future of California’s water resources and aquatic ecosystems is too important to surrender to petty partisanship.

The full study on the Delta Smelt controversy can be found here.

Caleb Scoville is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University. He grew up in northern California and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Caleb’s work centers on the politics of environmental knowledge and the dynamics of environmental controversies. He is writing a book on the case of the Delta Smelt.

Further Reading

Alagona, P.S. 2013. After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California. University of California Press.

Lakoff, A. 2016. The Indicator Species: Tracking Ecosystem Collapse in Arid California. Public Culture 28.2: 237-259.

Moyle P.B. 2015. Prepare for Extinction of Delta Smelt. California WaterBlog, https://californiawaterblog.com/2015/03/18/prepare-for-extinction-of-delta-smelt/

Moyle, P.B., J. A. Hobbs, and J. R. Durand. 2018. Delta Smelt and the Politics of Water in California. Fisheries 43:42-51.

Moyle, P.B., K. Bork, J. Durand, T. Hung, and A.L. Rypel. 2019. Futures for Delta Smelt. California WaterBlog, https://californiawaterblog.com/2019/12/15/futures-for-delta-smelt/

Reis, G.J., J.K. Howard, and J.A. Rosenfield. 2019. Clarifying Effects of Environmental Protections on Freshwater Flows To—And Water Exports From—The San Francisco Bay Estuary. San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science 17.1.

Scoville, C. 2022. Constructing Environmental Compliance: Law, Science, and Endangered Species Conservation in California’s Delta. American Journal of Sociology 127.4: 1094-1150.

Scoville, C. 2024. How to Divide People with Things: Division Entrepreneurs, Wedges, and the Delta Smelt Controversy. American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Online First. 

Scoville, C. 2019. Hydraulic Society and a “Stupid Little Fish”: Toward a Historical Ontology of Endangerment. Theory and Society 48.1: 1-37.