Snapshots from an environmental and economic disaster:

Kenneth Brown, the owner of Bodega Tackle in Petaluma, reckons he has lost almost $450,000 in the last year.

“I haven’t taken a paycheck in seven or eight months,” he says. He has had to lay off all but one employee, leaving himself, his son and the one remaining worker to run the business.

James Stone, board president of the Nor-Cal Guides & Sportsmen’s Assn., says more than 120 guides who serve recreational fishing customers in and around the Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay have been all but put out of business, costing the economy as much as $3.5 million a year.

Sarah Bates, the owner of a commercial fishing boat in San Francisco, has seen 90% of her income washed away. She has watched a commercial fleet capacity of nearly 500 boats reduced nearly to zero.

The circumstance affecting all three is the shutdown of the crucial fall-run salmon fishing in California, which the Pacific Fishery Management Council, a governmental body, recently extended for 2024, the second year in a row.

The main reason is the decline of the salmon population in the Sacramento River to such an unsustainable level that there’s reason to fear that it may not recover for years, if ever — unless government policies are radically reconsidered.

Commercial fishers who relied on the fall-run salmon as their dominant source of income have struggled to find alternatives.

“Some people are bringing in black cod or rockfish or albacore,” Bates told me. Some land Dungeness crab. But prices for those products don’t match the value of Chinook salmon.

“That allows for some income, but doesn’t really make up the difference for what you lose,” Bates says. “There are members of the fleet who have taken land jobs, or are relying on household members to pay the bills.”

One can’t minimize the scale of the shutdown, which follows a long-term decline in the fishery and is the first such shutdown since 2008-2009, which was driven by a severe drought. In 2022, the last year of salmon fishing in California, the fleet consisted of 464 commercial vessels, down from 4,750 in 1980.

Private and chartered recreational trips in California, which reached 98,900 in 2022—down from 148,000 in 2012—have also been shut down.

The closing of both categories has rippled across the entire fishing economy, affecting hotels and restaurants that catered to recreational fishing customers as well as bait and tackle shops. For Brown’s Petaluma shop, there are no sales of bait or commercial gear — “no more boots, no more rain slickers, all that business is gone and there’s nothing to replace it.”

There’s more to the salmon crisis than the devastation of livelihoods of tens of thousands of Californians working in an industry valued at more than $1.4 billion annually.

The crisis underscores the utter failure of the state’s political leaders to balance the needs of stakeholders in its water supply. In this case, the conflict is between large-scale farms on one side and environmental and fishery interests on the other.

For decades, agribusiness has had the upper hand in this conflict. It’s not hard to discern why: The growers have more money and therefore more political influence. Westlands Water District, the vast irrigation district sprawled over Fresno and Kings counties in the Central Valley—the largest such district in the nation—spent more than $4.7 million on Sacramento lobbying over the last decade.

During the same period, Stewart Resnick, whose Roll International conglomerate owns the Central Valley almond orchards that are the largest growers of those nuts in the world and enormous consumers of water, donated $2.8 million to political campaigns in California, chiefly to Democratic candidates and in support of ballot box initiatives; among his contributions was $125,000 to oppose the 2021 recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Officially valued at $1.4 billion a year, the salmon fishery can’t hope to compete with agriculture on a dollar-for-dollar basis. The market value of all agricultural products in California was $59 billion in 2022, according to state figures; salmon weren’t counted. The 10 most lucrative farm crops, led by dairy products, brought in some $35 billion that year.

The salmon fisheries are bellwethers for ecological health generally. “Fishermen are directly dependent on a healthy ecosystem,” says Barry Nelson, an advisor to the Golden State Salmon Assn. Their fortunes reflect not merely adequacy of water flows in California rivers and bays, but water quality. Any factor that falls outside a given range can produce a crash in fish populations, endangering whole species while putting men and women out of work.

As my colleague Ian James has reported, a key factor in the survival of the salmon population is water temperature. The diversion of ever more water from the federal government’s Shasta Dam for farm irrigation has driven temperatures in the Sacramento River to murderous levels.

That river, Nelson points out, is “the most important salmon-producing system south of the Columbia River.” But California authorities haven’t required the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which owns and manages the dam, to meet temperature standards downstream of the dam, even though it has the power to do so. “The state just hasn’t done its job,” Nelson says.

Talk to stakeholders in the salmon fishery, and one term keeps cropping up: “water management.” Their point is that drought isn’t the most important factor in the survival of the species — policy is, specifically the management of water supplies so that they’re balanced among users and serving irrigation demand from farmers doesn’t wipe out competing interests, especially during dry years.

To better understand the threats to salmon, it helps to know about their life cycle. Salmon live and breed on a three-year timeline. Adult fish swim in the ocean, but migrate upstream to lay eggs in the gravel beds of inland rivers. After they hatch, the baby fry and juveniles, called smolt, begin migrating downstream, typically via San Francisco Bay, and out to sea. Then the cycle begins again.

The critical period for the fall-run salmon in the Sacramento is while the eggs are incubating in their gravel beds. At water temperatures of 54 degrees, they start being cooked to death. Irrigation releases from Shasta suck down the reservoir’s cold water, leaving surface water heated by the sun; that’s what ends up in the Sacramento River at spawning season.

In recent years, water in the spawning beds has been measured at 70 degrees or higher. In 2021, state biologists reported, 99% of winter-run Chinook salmon failed to reach the San Francisco-San Joaquin River delta and the bay.

“Salmon have survived droughts in California for millennia,” says Scott Artis, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Assn. “But when on top of that you have incredible water diversions and temperature pollution, that’s what’s killing these baby fish. And when you kill the baby fish, they don’t come back as adults.”

The need for painstaking water management is the result of human interventions in California’s natural environment. Over the last 100 years, rivers across the Central Valley were dammed to provide irrigation for farms, blocking salmon from their natural habitats. The federal government opened salmon hatcheries to compensate, but they have not produced enough fish to make up for the losses from poor water management.

Meanwhile, the water demands of California growers became less flexible. Crops that could be fallowed during dry spells, leaving more water for the environment, were supplanted by almond and pistachio orchards, which require water in wet years and dry. California almond acreage rose to 1.38 million last year from 418,000 in 1995. In the same period, pistachio acreage rose to more than 461,000 from 60,300.

The crisis that has unfolded in 2023 and this year has its roots in actions taken during the Trump administration. In 2019, Trump installed David Bernhardt, a lobbyist for agricultural water users, as Interior secretary.

As an attorney in private practice, Bernhardt had sued the government on behalf of the giant Westlands Water District to challenge its enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, which conflicted with Westlands’ interests. As Interior secretary, Bernhardt advocated for loosening enforcement of the act.

In 2020, Bernhardt and Trump implemented an increase in water deliveries to big farmers under conditions that spelled disaster for the salmon fishery, among other ecological issues. California objected, asserting that Interior’s official biological opinions, which concluded that the increases wouldn’t adversely affect salmon and other species, bore no “rational connection [with] the facts.” The Natural Resources Defense Council labeled the opinions “a plan for extinction” of salmon and other endangered species.

They went through anyway. The demands from agribusinesses in the Central Valley for more water had received a friendly hearing from the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress, who recognized that the valley was perhaps the only strongly Republican part of California. They decried the passage of water from inland reservoirs to rivers and out to sea as wasteful; as I wrote at the time, their single-minded service for the growers deprived the salmon fishery of its lifeblood.

The impact of the Trump policies was destined to be felt three years on. Indeed, last year only 6,160 adult salmon were estimated to have spawned in the Sacramento River, the worst level since the drought year of 2017 and obviously well below the annual average of 175,000 spawning from 1996 to 2005, the best period for the health of the salmon fishery over the last four decades.

In January, Newsom responded to the salmon crisis with an action plan encompassing restoring salmon habitats, modernizing hatcheries, and removing impediments to salmons’ upstream migrations. The fishery community supports many of those initiatives, but also recognizes that the package is largely aspirational, for money hasn’t been appropriated to fulfill all its elements.

The Newsom administration also outlined plans in March 2022 to reach a series of voluntary agreements with agricultural water users over water sharing. Environmental and fishing groups, which weren’t part of the negotiations, weren’t impressed — a coalition of those groups, including the Sierra Club and the Golden State Salmon Assn., panned the proposal as “incomplete, unenforceable, inequitable, inadequate, and [lacking] a scientific foundation.”

Nor were the proposed voluntary agreements favored by two key federal agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency wrote in January that the absence of strong mandates for higher water flows in the Sacramento River meant that the plan would have only a “insignificant impact” on water temperature in the river. The National Marine Fisheries Service questioned whether the $740 million in state and federal funding needed to implement the voluntary agreements was realistic, since none of it had been appropriated.

In other words, Newsom’s approach involves a heaping helping of hand-waving. From the standpoint of the salmon industry, his other water policies, including a 45-mile water tunnel under the delta and fast-tracking construction of the Sites Reservoir in the western Sacramento Valley, will make things worse. The tunnel would turn the delta into “a deathtrap for salmon,” Nelson says, and the Sites Reservoir would degrade downstream waters, possibly increasing temperatures.

In many respects, the policies on the table are antiques. Some were developed without regard for the effects of global warming, and others reflect thinking that emerged in an era when California authorities thought the water supply was abundant, even unlimited.

That won’t do anymore. The federal government already lists Sacramento River winter-run Chinook salmon as an endangered species and the spring run as a threatened species. The all-important fall run might not be far behind.

California’s water policies need to be subjected to a thorough rethinking, and money to fix all that’s broken needs to be appropriated, not just put on somebody’s wish list.

Fishermen and -women are a constitutionally optimistic class. “There’s always hope that things will get better,” Artis told me. But hope is waning. “We have to educate the Legislature and the public so we get those water flow and temperature protections, or we’ll be here again year after year with fishery closures.”

If it’s true that you are what you eat, then most beef-eating Americans consist of a smattering of poultry feathers, urine, feces, wood chips and chicken saliva, among other food items.

As epidemiologists scramble to figure out how dairy cows throughout the Midwest became infected with a strain of highly pathogenic avian flu — a disease that has decimated hundreds of millions of wild and farmed birds, as well as tens of thousands of mammals across the planet — they’re looking at a standard “recycling” practice employed by thousands of farmers across the country: The feeding of animal waste and parts to livestock raised for human consumption.

“It seems ghoulish, but it is a perfectly legal and common practice for chicken litter — the material that accumulates on the floor of chicken growing facilities — to be fed to cattle,” said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist with Consumers Union.

It is still unclear how the cows were infected — whether by contact with birds, or via feed made from litter waste — but litter has been associated with previous outbreaks of disease, including botulism.

Poultry litter causing the bovine cases of avian flu is considered “very unlikely, though not impossible” wrote Veronika Pfaeffle, in a joint statement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.

Poultry litter consists of manure, feathers, spilled feed and bedding material that accumulate on the floors of the buildings that house chickens and turkeys. It can contain disease-causing bacteria, viruses (including H5N1), antibiotics, toxic heavy metals, pesticides and even foreign objects such as dead rodents, birds, rocks, nails and glass.

It is typically mixed with hay or corn to make it palatable to livestock.

California bans the feeding of poultry litter to lactating dairy cows. However, it is legal to sell it as feed to beef and other cattle.

“It is a premium product used to help recycle waste into a sustainable product,” said Anja Raudabaugh, CEO of Western United Dairies. She said that although she could not make informed comments about its use outside of the state, “there is very little of it used here in California.”

California’s animal feed law — which applies to commercially sold feeds — requires that animal waste products sold for feed must contain no residues of pathogens, metals, pesticides or antibiotics.

The Department of Food and Agriculture’s Feed Program “inspects every California facility manufacturing dried poultry litter and reviews firms’ treatment verification records onsite,” said Steve Lyle, department spokesman.

However, it is unclear whether there are regulations addressing the private exchange or production of poultry litter or other animal waste for feed. Or how widespread the practice of feeding poultry waste to cattle is in the state or around the country.

It “was a common practice throughout the U.S. for many years,” said Lyle. “It is not a very common practice in California anymore.”

According to Michael Payne, a researcher and outreach coordinator at the Western Institute of Food Safety and Security at UC Davis, there was at least one commercial processor of poultry litter in the state — Imperial Western Products, based in Coachella. That company was bought in 2022 by Arkansas’ Denali Water Solutions — which has had recent legal run-ins with environmental authorities in Missouri and Alabama over its handling of animal waste. It is unclear whether Imperial still produces feed from litter. An operator at the company directed calls to “corporate,” or Denali Water Solutions, which is owned by TPG Growth, a private equity firm. Denali did not provide comments for this story before publication.

The federal government does not regulate poultry litter in animal feed, and in many states — including Missouri, Alabama and Arkansas — there are no requirements or regulations regarding contamination or processing.

“The FDA may take regulatory action if it becomes aware of food safety concerns with poultry litter products intended for use in animal food in interstate commerce,” Pfaeffle said in the statement from both the USDA and FDA.

An online guide from the University of Missouri notes there are “no federal or Missouri regulations governing the use of poultry litter as a feed.” However, the guide’s authors urge users to employ “common sense.”

“Poultry litter should not be fed to dairy cattle or beef cattle less than 21 days before slaughter,” the guide notes, citing concerns about “residues of certain pharmaceuticals.”

Most other developed nations — including Canada, the United Kingdom and the countries within the European Union — have banned the practice. The FDA considered doing so in the U.S. in the mid-2000s.

For cattle farmers, the waste — which includes calcium, zinc and other minerals and vitamins — provides a cheap form of protein feed. For poultry farmers, the exchange allows them to divert the litter away from a landfill or from being burned.

In the 1980s, concerns about bovine spongiform encephalopathy — or mad cow disease — took hold across Europe, when cases of the incurable and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle began to appear. The disease, which is caused by folded proteins known as prions, can transfer to people who eat the meat of infected cattle. In people, the disease is fatal and called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Just as cattle are fed poultry waste, chickens are often provided feeds that consist of cattle waste and renderings — creating a potential route for prions to re-enter the food supply. However, because the FDA mandates the removal of all tissues shown to carry the prions — such as brains and spinal cords — from poultry diets, the risk is reduced.

However, other more common pathogens are also found in poultry litter. In one 2019 study of litter used on farm fields as fertilizer, researchers found that every sample tested from U.S. broiler chickens carried E. coli strains resistant to more than seven antibiotics — including amoxicillin, ceftiofur, tetracycline, and sulfonamide.

It is unclear if the litter was heat treated before it was applied.

Raudabaugh said all poultry litter feed in California is kiln heated and exposed to temperatures that can kill bacteria, such as E. coli, and viruses, including H5N1.

“Firms are sampling and analyzing finished product for Salmonella regularly,” said Lyle, the state’s food and agriculture spokesman.

He noted that poultry is regularly tested for bird flu and that poultry waste from a flock infected with bird flu “cannot leave the premises until it has met CDFA requirements for ensuring the virus has been eliminated,” he said. “The premises is also tested and the quarantine is not released until the premises tests negative for highly pathogenic avian influenza.”

Lyle said cattle herds with “symptoms consistent” with bird flu infections “can be tested at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory in consultation with the CDFA Animal Health Branch.”

He added that no symptomatic herds have been identified, “although one herd that lost pregnancies was tested and was negative” for the virus.

Whenever I think of the perilous state of local news, I think of Delicious Pizza in West Adams.

Great pizza! Small space, cool atmosphere. In the fall of 2017, I found myself there along with other journalism castoffs cursing the news gods.

I had just resigned as editor of OC Weekly after I refused to lay off half the staff. Daniel Hernandez was out of a job at VICE News after nearly four years there. Julia Wick had led the original LAist until its owner shut down the website because he claimed it wasn’t economically successful. Former LA Weekly editor-in-chief Mara Shalhoup was axed alongside most of her writers and editors after a new owner acquired the venerable alt-weekly.

Over beers and slices, we laughed and shared stories and fretted about the eternal erosion that is American journalism. None of us were about to give up on our beloved profession, though. There was talk of creating our own publication, but nothing serious. Instead, we hugged and went on to the rest of our lives.

Today, Mara is ProPublica’s South editor. Daniel edits The Times’ food section. Julia is on The Times’ 2024 election team. I’m a Times columnista, of course, frequently using Southern California’s past as a prism to understand what’s happening now and what might occur in the future.

And boy, does it not look good for local journalism — again.

Last month, the nonprofit Long Beach Post, which expertly covered the port city while the Press-Telegram atrophied, laid off nearly everyone. The publication’s board of directors maintained the move was necessary to save it from financial ruin — but former staffers insist it was retribution for their attempt to form a union.

Reporters for Knock LA, which focuses on social justice issues and law enforcement corruption, accused the publication’s sponsors, the leftist group Ground Game LA, of exiling them after they asked to spin off Knock into its own standalone entity.

In the for-profit world, L.A. Taco, which centers food coverage while covering working class communities across Southern California, furloughed nearly everyone on its small team. Editor-in-chief Javier Cabral said they would be laid off if the publication isn’t able to hit 5,000 members by the end of April. (They were at 2,800 as of Monday). This follows the shuttering of one of California’s oldest continuously operating newspapers, the Santa Barbara News-Press, last year.

And, of course, there’s this paper. More than 100 of my colleagues were laid off last summer and earlier this year. Others took buyouts, and it seems recently that farewell emails from colleagues moving on to other jobs or retiring hit my mailbox daily.

It’s easy to portray what’s going on in local media as unprecedented and catastrophic, especially in the face of similar layoffs nationwide during an election year where accurate facts and nuanced coverage matter more than ever. But Southern California has always been an ossuary of failed publications done in by apathetic readership, clueless owners or a combination of both.

Every generation in L.A. seems to suffer a journalism mass extinction event. In addition to what’s happening right now and what happened in 2017, there was the shuttering of two alt-weeklies, Los Angeles CityBeat and the Long Beach-based The District Weekly, at the turn of the aughts. I remember the demise of La Banda Elastica and Al Borde, two Spanish-language publications that focused on rock en español through the late 1990s and 2000s. Older folks will remember the end of the L.A. Herald Examiner in 1989, whose grandiose downtown headquarters are now used as a satellite campus by Arizona State University.

L.A.’s heartbreak industry isn’t Hollywood; it’s journalism. To paraphrase what the late A. Bartlett Giamatti said about baseball, it’s designed to break the hearts of those who work it.

You join the profession knowing that long hours, low pay and no respect from the public is the norm, yet you jump in anyway. You revel in your colleagues, your shared sense of mission and the stories you do — but then the reality of economics sets in, and you realize the good times won’t last. You wonder why readers don’t subscribe, why editors and publishers don’t innovate. You see co-workers lose their jobs or leave the profession — and then it’s your turn, one way or another.

It’s easy to armchair quarterback why publications fail. Blame technology, fragmented audiences, a lack of trust in news — it’s all of that, and more. But these conditions existed before photos appeared in newspapers, and will persist long after whatever Elon Musk inserts in our brains so we can’t quit X.

What’s going on in Southern California journalism is sadly familiar — yet not hopeless. There is something new with this generation of journalism orphans. In the past, we downed shots and mourned as our publications died. Now, to paraphrase another literary luminary, Dylan Thomas, reporters are not going gentle into that good night.

Long Beach Post and Times staffers have publicly protested against their bosses. Knock L.A.’s banished writers and editors are shaming their former benefactors online. L.A. Taco is asking for money like an NPR host during a fund drive pounding nitro cold brew.

“We went public with our dire situation, because how can you expect help if you don’t ask for it?” said Cabral, 35, who I’ve known since he was a teenager with his own food blog. “Journalism for me has always been a fleeting career in flux that pulls the rug right under you when you start to get comfortable.”

I wish all of these folks well as they try to make it, including my colleagues at The Times, which has been unionized since 2018 and where we’ve worked for almost a year and a half without a contract. But even if we all fail, the dream to do good journalism in Los Angeles will never die. More publications are already rising.

The Los Angeles Public Press is barely a year old but is already making an impact with its coverage of the San Fernando Valley and Southeast L.A. County. Caló News, which focuses on Latino issues, will launch its own initiative to cover southeast L.A. County this summer. Newsletters run by individuals are filling in news holes and getting subscribers in the process. Hyperlocal publications like The Eastsider and This Side of Hoover are still informing readers about their communities.

Last month, I attended a forum at City Club LA hosted by the nonprofit Latino Media Collaborative, which sponsors Caló News, about what it deemed a “crisis” in Southern California journalism. Among the speakers were former La Opinión publisher Monica C. Lozano and California Community Foundation Chief Executive Miguel A. Santana. The conference room was packed with reporters young and old hoping to plug into the millions of dollars that local and national philanthropic organizations are planning to spend on L.A.-focused news operations in the coming years.

I wish them well, too — because someone has to succeed in this cursed industry, right? Right?