Restoration notes from Native lands — Issue #1: a Delta island goes back to wetland

Friends —

This Wednesday at 2 p.m., on a sinking island in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, the first seeds go in the ground. The Metropolitan Water District and the Delta Conservancy are starting a 2,800-acre wetland restoration on Webb Tract — land farmed so long that the peat soil has dropped, in places, 24 feet below sea level.

Here's the part that matters for our work: they're not just restoring it. They're measuring it. Two monitoring towers have tracked the site's greenhouse gas emissions for over a year. Wet the peat back down, emissions fall — and that measured drop gets independently verified and turned into carbon credits that help pay for the land's long-term care.

Restore. Measure. Verify. Fund. That's the Poly-Climate Credits idea, working at scale in California — not as a theory, but as a project with a groundbreaking this week.

An honest note: Webb Tract is an agency project, not a tribal-led one. But it was shaped with Indigenous guidance — a tribal ecocultural working group weighed in during design — and Austin Stevenot, a citizen of the California Valley Miwok Tribe and River Partners' director of tribal engagement, will be there Wednesday when the first Bay Miwok evening primrose goes into the ground. That plant has deep roots in Delta Indigenous communities. That detail matters.

The point isn't to celebrate someone else's project. It's this: the mechanism is proven, the credits are real, and the next wave of this work should be led by tribal nations — with the revenue staying in tribal communities.

That's what we're building at Siskowet. More next month.

— Christopher