HuffPost Quotes Professor Börk on Trump ‘Misinformation’ about California Water
Professor Karrigan Börk spoke to Huffington Post for a Jan. 27 story about President Donald Trump blaming California water policies – and the protected Delta smelt – for the recent wildfires in Los Angeles.
Amid the fires in early January, then-President-Elect Trump lamented on Truth Social that Gov. Gavin Newsom kept water from Los Angeles to protect “an essentially worthless fish called a smelt.” Trump was alluding to the Delta smelt, a nearly extinct, small fish species found only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Protected by federal and state laws, the Delta smelt has been the subject of conservative criticism of California water policy for decades.
“What we’re hearing from the president is this complicated mix of him trying to deliver quickly on his campaign promises and all the things that seem to resonate well with some of his stakeholders in the Central Valley and these kind of wild half truths, or maybe misunderstandings of how California water works in the first place,” Börk, interim director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, told HuffPost.
“We’ve heard everything from California could be getting water from Canada — which just isn’t true — to efforts trying to tie the delta smelt in California’s use of water for ecosystem protection for the fires in LA — which just isn’t true,” Börk said. “So it’s been frankly exhausting trying to keep up with correcting all the misinformation.”
Professor Börk teaches and researches in the areas of environmental law, natural resources, and administrative law. He graduated with distinction and pro bono distinction from Stanford Law School in 2009 and completed his Ph.D. in Ecology at UC Davis in September 2011. He received the Shapiro Family Award in 2011 as the outstanding Ph.D. graduate in ecology at UC Davis. He clerked for Tenth Circuit Chief Judge Mary Beck Briscoe, U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson, and U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Kansas Judge Janice Karlin.