The Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta, as seen from a ship in the Stockton Deep Water Ship Channel in 2013. Photo by Florence Lo, California Department of Water Resources

This is this first in an intermittent series of articles on the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

By Steven Culberson

Estuaries are hard places to understand and even harder to explain. Estuarine scientists, myself included, have struggled to learn how changes in the San Francisco Estuary led to declining fish populations and waning productivity, particularly in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

We keep searching for what is broken or missing so we can fix or replace it. The thinking is that if we can return or repair these parts of the ecosystem, native aquatic species will recover sufficiently to be resilient in the future.

The trouble is we can’t go back to the way things were more than 150 years ago, before…