Critically Endangered

According to Donald Trump, the LA fires can be blamed on ‘an essentially worthless fish called a smelt’, which lives in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in Northern California. On Truth Social, Trump accused California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, of having ‘refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the north, to flow daily into many parts of California.’

This was not true. ‘There is no such document as the water restoration declaration,’ Newsom’s office responded. ‘That is pure fiction.’ Los Angeles takes most of its water not from the delta but from the Owens Valley (Payahuunadü, the ‘land of flowing water’), the Colorado River and from groundwater.

It is true, though, that Trump, in his first presidency, called for more water transfers in California, and Newsom blocked them. What was at stake was never water for Los Angeles, but for California’s Central Valley, which produces up to 18 per cent of US agricultural output by value. It’s industrialised, financialised agribusiness, fuelled by hydrological engineering at a vast scale: 8.6 km³ of water is delivered through the canals of the Central Valley Project each year, most of it coming from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. But two periods of drought between 2007 and 2016 meant farmers had to withdraw hundreds of thousands of acres from cultivation.

In February 2020, Trump spoke at a rally in Bakersfield to announce billions of dollars to repair and extend water infrastructure in the Central Valley. ‘All the farmland will be green and beautiful,’ he told the crowd. So when Newsom announced he would file a lawsuit to stop the president’s initiative in order to protect the ‘highly imperilled’ smelt and other delta fish, Trump wasn’t best pleased.

The delta smelt was at the time functionally extinct: since 2016, surveys in the estuary had failed to find a single fish (though captive breeding populations exist, and have since been released back into the delta). They are delicate creatures. According to Katherine Sun, who works for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, they are ‘relatively weak swimmers’ and have to be transported in round containers because otherwise they ‘get stuck in corners, they get stressed out, and they die’. Their numbers started to decline in the mid-20th century as water in the delta became polluted by farm run-off, and billions of gallons were pumped out to supply farms and cities, changing the salinity. Invasive clams ate the smelt’s lunch. The population collapsed and in 1993 the fish was listed as ‘threatened’ under the US Endangered Species Act as well as California’s own ESA. In 2009, the state upgraded the delta smelt’s status to ‘endangered’.

The federal ESA was enacted in 1973. A recent study estimated that 291 species would have disappeared were it not for ESA protections, and 99 per cent of species listed on it have survived. One of its requirements is that that ‘any action authorised, funded or carried out’ by a federal agency ‘is not likely to jeopardise the continued existence’ of an endangered or threatened species, or ‘destroy or adversely modify’ the ‘critical habitat’ essential to its survival. Which is why Trump couldn’t get his way.

Trump is not the only Republican to denigrate the delta smelt. In 2010, the California congressman Tom McClintock spoke out against ‘the wilful destruction of 500,000 acres of American farmland by these massive water diversions, all for the enjoyment and amusement of the three-inch-long delta smelt’. In 2011, Sarah Palin blamed the smelt’s habitat protections for taking away the ‘lifeline’ of Central Valley farmers. ‘Where I come from,’ she said, ‘a three-inch fish, we call that bait.’ David Bernhardt worked as a lobbyist for the farmers until shortly before he joined the first Trump administration as secretary of the interior. Under his jurisdiction, the US Fish and Wildlife Service released a ‘biological opinion’ that pumping water from the delta would not harm the fish. Scientists were outraged, citrus growers jubilant. Lawsuits followed.

In December I tried to see another endangered fish on the ESA list, the Devils Hole pupfish. These silvery iridescent creatures live in a single cave just 22 metres long and 3.5 metres wide, surrounded by the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, Nevada. The species has been completely isolated since the end of the last Ice Age, between ten and twenty thousand years ago, when the great lake that filled Death Valley receded, fragmenting pupfish populations into separate ecological niches. Devils Hole is thought to be ‘the smallest habitat in the world containing the entire population of a vertebrate species’, and its pupfish may be the most inbred species in the world: any two individuals are on average 58 per cent genetically identical.

People used to climb down into the cave and sit in the warm water, drinking beer, partying with the pupfish. But since 2013, when the pupfish population dropped to just 35 individuals, the entrance to the cave has been fenced off. There is a viewing tunnel of sorts, but from twenty metres away, in a dark pool, the inch-long fish are nowhere to be seen.

Ash Meadows, ‘the Galapagos of the Mojave Desert’, provides habitat for 26 plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Its wetlands are fed by fossil water more than ten thousand years old, which comes to the surface in over thirty seeps and springs. Yet in December 2024 it was bone dry. Winter is the rainy season in Southern California and the Mojave, but this winter the rains didn’t come. Los Angeles had only 0.06 inches between July 2024 and early January, its second driest period in almost 150 years. This, unlike the delta smelt, contributed to the fires.

At Crystal Spring, a couple of miles from Devils Hole, the alkali meadows were dried to a crisp and invasive tamarisk trees sprawled grey-brown over the boardwalk. Yet the springs were beautiful, the water bright turquoise from dissolved minerals. And in a small, clear stream flowing through reeds, three Ash Meadows Amargosa pupfish were swimming against the current. A sign on the boardwalk described them as ‘playful’; they’re called pupfish because they reminded the ichthyologist Carl L. Hubbs of puppies.

In 1976 the US Supreme Court established minimum water levels at Devils Hole to protect the fish. At first this was unpopular with local ranchers, as the water rules limited how much groundwater they could pump, but now that’s changed.

A company named Rover Critical Minerals wants to test Ash Meadows’ potential for lithium mining. But drilling for samples could contaminate the aquifer. Residents rely on groundwater wells for drinking water, and those wells are already coming up dry. For the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, the water sustains their sacred traditions. The laws defending the pupfish may offer the best chance of protecting people’s water, too. On 14 January, the outgoing secretary of the interior, Deb Haaland, issued a ‘mineral withdrawal’, suspending new mining activity across 309,000 acres of land around Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge. It remains to be seen if Trump – and Elon Musk – will honour it.

Elsewhere in Nevada, endangered plant species such as Tiehm’s buckwheat and Amargosa niterwort have been central to legal battles against lithium mines. Is a rare plant reason enough to prevent renewal energy development? Not only Republicans are sceptical. ‘We’ve got to meet the moment on climate change,’ Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the interior under Biden, told the New York Times, ‘and public lands have to play a foundational role.’ Seaver Wang of the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute argues that ‘our perspective needs to be holistic. Blocking a project might prevent impacts on a species … but it may cause a slower energy transition + push projects elsewhere with higher impacts on communities + ecosystems.’ Yet for many conservationists, every endangered species must be protected. As Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biodiversity puts it, ‘the integrity of the Endangered Species Act is at stake.’ If one species is allowed to ‘go extinct for lithium’, he says, ‘it puts all endangered species at risk.’

The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that the ESA explicitly forbade the completion of any infrastructure project that was likely to result in the elimination of a species: the Tellico Dam, a $53 million construction project on the Little Tennessee River, was put on hold to save another small fish, the snail darter – until Congress passed an exemption for the dam the following year. The darters were transplanted to other river systems and in 2022 removed from the endangered species list.

Last month, researchers at Yale announced that the snail darter is not a distinct species at all: it is genetically and physically identical to the stargazing darter, a fish plentiful in US waters. The species identification may have been driven by a desire to stop the dam, a temptation taxonomists recognise as the ‘conservation species concept’.

We ask a lot of some very small fish. Single species are relied on to save entire ecosystems. Might emerging ‘rights of nature’ legal models allow for more holistic environmental protection by allowing natural entities such as rivers to have legal protections, even legal personhood?

In the US, at least, the question may now be moot. Among the barrage of executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office was a declaration of a ‘national energy emergency’. It calls for ‘the integrity and expansion of our nation’s energy infrastructure’ and reanimates the rarely convened Endangered Species Committee, aka the ‘god squad’ of high-ranking federal officials able to grant ESA exemptions. On Sunday, 26 January, Trump signed a further executive order directing federal agencies to deliver more water through the Central Valley Project and ‘override existing activities that unduly burden efforts to maximise water deliveries’ – getting his revenge on the delta smelt.