California’s dying salmon test our environmental values. We’re flunking | Opinion

Editor’s note: This is the first in an ongoing series by Sacramento Bee opinion writer Tom Philp examining the precipitous decline of California’s wild salmon and what can be done to head off extinction of the iconic fish.

California salmon are as central to our historic identity as the symbol on our state flag, the California grizzly. It is a sad and ironic tragedy that the grizzly has been extinct for generations. What does it say about us if salmon may soon follow?

California is known around the globe for its commitment to environmentalism. But the state is struggling in the present. Much is chronicled on how California is not on target to meet climate change goals, such as our pioneering plans for “net zero” emissions of global warming gases in just two decades. There is less attention on how the state is equally failing the signature inhabitants of its natural world.

Losing salmon would be an ecological disaster for our freshwater ecosystems, forests, riverbanks and other native species if their links to the salmon were severed. Healthy salmon runs mean jobs for Californians, but the industry generating $1 billion is at risk, and is a historic piece of California’s culture.

The demise of the salmon would be the latest indignity that California visited upon Native American tribes clinging to a heritage wedded to the salmon since long before any of us got here. One tribe links its very survival to this one species of fish.

“We have to follow the salmon,” said Caleen Sisk, the chief of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. The tribe lives at the headwaters of the McCloud River, and the construction of Shasta Dam there in the 1930s blocked adult salmon from spawning where they had for centuries. Salmon, she said, “want to come home.”

Centuries ago, as her tribal history is told, salmon first had the power of speaking while humans did not. The Creator was worried about the future of humans. Salmon agreed to surrender their voice to help humans live.

The tribe has been the voice for salmon ever since. And now, a state with 39.5 million humans is turning its back on its past.

How a world renowned fishery slowly collapsed

When the Gold Rush began, the state’s population of salmon rivaled any in the world — Russia, Alaska, anywhere. The estimated population was somewhere in the low millions. By 1975, the population that returns every winter had dwindled to 35,596. Last year, it had fallen to 1,367.

“Basically, we sit on the edge of extinction,” said Jeffrey Mount, a longtime expert in California rivers formerly at the University of California at Davis who now conducts research at the Public Policy Institute of California. There have been successes, most notably the removal of dams in the far north of the state that connect to the Pacific via the Klamath River. It is the primary wild population of the Sacramento River watershed with the dangerously dwindling numbers.

Among the untold insults to salmon, perhaps the biggest was the construction of dams such as Shasta during the Depression to tame the major Sierra rivers and make this society possible. Foothill dams typically block 95% of of native salmon spawning grounds high in the cold waters such as the McCloud.

If salmon manage to reproduce below these dams, then they are forced to feed and grow on only 5% of their original floodplain. The rest was blocked long ago by levees to protect Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto and all the communities of the Central Valley.

Nature’s perfect launching pad toward adulthood was a marshland of food and shelter the size of Rhode Island, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Yet now the Delta is a network of rock-lined rivers frozen in place by 1,110 miles of levees (more miles than California has coastline). The berms protect farmland and the nation’s two largest water supply pumping facilities, the federal Central Valley Project (CVP) and State Water Project, yet another source of human-caused mortality.

A fish meant for mountains is confined to the valley

In President Donald Trump’s quest for more ”beautiful water” for Central Valley farmers, that may mean emptying Shasta Dam of more cold water every year and diverting it from the Delta and into the CVP aqueduct. “There is tremendous pressure to move water south of the Delta right now,” Mount said.

So with fewer and fewer places over decades for salmon to give birth, feed or hide amid more and more threats to survival, now looms the potentially final blow: climate change.

A species designed to reproduce in the cool upstream waters of the Sierra is now physically confined to reproducing in the increasingly hot valley. Nearly an entire run of salmon that migrated upstream in the winter died in a recent year when the Sacramento River was too hot for the eggs to survive.

The earlier arrival of spring is deadly as well. Young salmon swimming in water approaching 68 degrees grow lethargic, even as the fish that love to eat them, predators like bass, grow hungrier.

It’s not uncommon for upwards of 90% of juvenile salmon to die in the Delta or upstream. The ocean population has been too small for commercial fishing since 2022.

“We have never seen a three-year closure before,” said Barry Nelson, a long-time water activist and a leading voice of the industry.

A lethal combination of Sacramento politics

Now, salmon face a lethal combination of Sacramento politics.

Any Trump effort to release more water from reservoirs like Shasta for water supplies would risk another deadly cycle for salmon in the next drought.

Democrats, meanwhile, have essentially relegated traditional environmental concerns to the background as crises on homelessness, energy and property insurance costs have dominated the Sacramento agenda. The state’s thicket of environmental laws and processes, meanwhile, has delayed a key water management decision on the Sacramento River for literally decades.

The laws enacted a half-century ago to protect species like salmon are no match for today. An environmental regulation best designed to ban a toxic chemical cannot similarly eradicate the impacts throughout the ecosystem of climate change. And with salmon there is no single solution, but many. Our systems are not designed to find the smartest set of actions, much less implement them.

California without salmon is an empty home

A library is nothing without its books, a museum is meaningless without its art. California’s natural landscapes are heading toward a similar fate. We are heading toward a future with our famous vistas still intact, yet with fewer of the native residents who once called them home.

A legendary vow made long ago to care for salmon, for their role in sustaining the state, is being broken. There may be time to turn things around, but the opportunity is slipping away — and we will be the lesser for it.

Arguably no Californian more than Caleen Sisk of the Winnemem Wintu uses her voice to speak for salmon. Her role as chief is to try to understand what they are trying to say. Salmon, the most iconic species ever to live in our waters, now need help. “If we can hear it,” Sisk recently said to a summer gathering of her tribe. “If we can hold it in our hearts.”

This story was originally published October 3, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "California’s dying salmon test our environmental values. We’re flunking | Opinion."