Thought some of you on the Board would like to read the "real story" surrounding the Klamath Basin. This article was written by Ted Williams and printed in Audubon.


Salmon Stakes

Last fall's salmon die-off on the Klamath River was an ecological catastrophe born of gross watershed abuse. It was also predictable, avoidable, and utterly typical of White House priorities. by Ted Williams

In an effort to appease irate irrigators, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec) had dewatered the Klamath River, which drains a 9,691-square-mile watershed of high desert, woods, and wetlands in southern Oregon and northern California. By July the agency had cut the flow from its Iron Gate Dam from 1,000 cubic feet per second—previously deemed by the administration as the bare minimum necessary to prevent extinction of the system's coho salmon—to about 650 cfs. From July 12 to August 31 more water went down the main diversion canal to irrigators than down the river to salmon.Meanwhile, farmers were getting—and wasting—so much water that they were flooding highways and disrupting traffic.

Until October 31, 2002, when The Wall Street Journal ferreted it out, the Bush administration had been suppressing a peer-reviewed U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study that found that agriculture in the Klamath Basin generates $100 million a year compared with the $800 million generated by recreation, such as camping, boating, rafting, swimming, and fishing, and that restoring water to the river would boost this last figure to $3 billion. The study also determined that buying out the farms and protecting the land would create $36 billion in benefits at a cost of $5 billion. In an internal USGS memo obtained by the Journal, an agency scientist revealed that the regional director "wants to slow [release of the study] down because of high sensitivity in the Dept. right now resulting from the recent fish kill in the Klamath. Suffice it to say that this is not a good time to be handing out this document."

In the Klamath Basin the government gets farmed a lot more than the land. There is scant demand for most of the crops grown; sometimes they're even plowed back into the ground. Originally it cost farmers nothing to get a permanent irrigation hookup to BuRec's public-financed Klamath Project. Now, on top of this, they get electricity to operate irrigation pumps at one-sixteenth of fair market value, a lower rate than their ancestors paid in 1917. During the dry summer and fall of 2001, basin farmers—some irrigating normally with emergency wells drilled at public expense—harvested $48.6 million in state and federal relief. Many reported their most profitable year ever.

There is only one solution to the Klamath water crisis: End lease farming on the refuges and buy farms and water rights from willing sellers. Before the summer of 2002 the federal government was committed to just this. But it gave up when it ran into fierce resistance from business interests that profit from farming, such as pesticide and fertilizer distributors, and from farmers who lease land cheaply on the refuges and therefore profit from subsidies. In an October 23, 2001, letter to Representative Wally Herger, the Tulelake Growers Association tried to get Phil Norton, who was then manager of the Klamath refuges, disciplined for alleged violations of the Hatch Act, which proscribes lobbying by federal employees. As evidence the association cited comments attributed by the media to Phil Norton, such as: "We are trying to fix the system so that it works again, but there's a lot of land that, frankly, never should have been put into agriculture production."
The Klamath tragedy isn't an isolated event. On September 30, when the salmon die-off was at its peak, the administration was giving away federal water a thousand miles east, on the Gunnison River in Colorado, thereby desiccating the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and jeopardizing four endangered fish and a world-famous trout fishery. Earlier in the month Interior declined to appeal a bizarre court ruling that canceled the water right of Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge in Idaho, a refuge dedicated to waterfowl. Since 1973, when the Endangered Species Act outlawed these kinds of risks, no other administration has been willing to take them. Now they're a habit with the Bush team, and it isn't winning any pots.

RM