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| May 09, 2008 |
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By Daniel Jack Chasan A huge galvanized bucket stands in front of the government offices on the main street of Klamath Falls, Oregon, dwarfing passers-by and occupying a place of honor where one might expect to find a war memorial or a statue of some pioneer hero. It commemorates the “bucket brigade” that in May symbolically carried water from Upper Klamath Lake into an irrigation canal, bypassing the headgate through which the federal Bureau of Reclamation had refused to let water flow to its Klamath irrigation project. The Bureau was under court order to protect two endangered species of bottom-dwelling fish called suckers, which inhabit Upper Klamath Lake and several smaller local water bodies, as well as a threatened population of coho salmon that spawns in California tributaries of the Klamath River. The farmers who raise potatoes, alfalfa, and other crops on the 220,000 acres of the federal irrigation project had already borrowed money to plant this year’s crops. They were left high and dry. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton subsequently released 70,000 acre-feet of water, but except for greening up the alfalfa, it was too little, too late. The farmers and their sympathizers in the upper Klamath Basin of southern Oregon and northern California haven’t taken all this lying down. The bucket brigade drew an estimated 12,000 people to Klamath Falls. Protesters got national attention by chainsawing the locks off the headgates and letting water flow into the irrigation canals. They have laid pipe around the headgates. In August, a caravan of sympathizers from towns all over the west arrived in Klamath Falls bearing food for the local farmers. A group of die-hards set up an encampment beside the headgates. For weeks, people driving—or walking, jogging or cycling—along the lake passed the tents, the signs, the parked campers and pickups. Across the canal, armed federal agents in police windbreakers stood guard. After terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, facing off against the federal government took on a different connotation, and the protestors agreed to go home. But no one has forgotten their complaints. Businesses have stuck messages of support in their shop windows. Farmers have stuck protest signs in their fields. Some proclaim the basin a “federally created disaster area.” It is easy to appreciate the symbolism of a red-on-white sign standing in a tawny field of dry stubble demanding “give us back our water.” But it is equally easy to appreciate the irony of other protest signs standing near the gleaming green of a well-watered golf course, of a pasture north of Upper Klamath Lake, so thoroughly flooded that sunlight glistens on the standing water while cattle fatten on the damp grass. The press and the protesters have depicted the situation as a stark choice between saving farmers and saving two obscure, demeaningly named species of fish. Environmentalists, federal fish and wildlife officials, and representatives of the Indian tribes that also assert claims to Klamath Basin water say that’s a gross over-simplification—and one that makes it difficult to solve or even fully grasp the full extent of the problems. Both are right. From Mount Scott, Mount Garfield or any other high point in Crater Lake National Park, an hour’s drive from Klamath Falls, look south to the Klamath Basin. You see a vast inland sea with mountains seeming to rise straight out of it. The lake occupies only part of a vast, flat bowl among the mountains. The entire northern basin looks as if it should be wetlands. Originally, it was. Water from melting snow in mountains to the north, east and west flows into the upper basin through the Sprague, Williamson and Wood rivers, and smaller tributaries. It goes into Agency Lake, just north of Upper Klamath, then Upper Klamath Lake itself. The water then flows south, forming the Klamath River, which crosses the California border and sweeps west to the Pacific. This is still a very large system of lakes and wetlands—Upper Klamath Lake is Oregon’s largest—that includes six national wildlife refuges and stretches into northern California. An estimated three-quarters of the birds that migrate along the Pacific Flyway stop in the Klamath Basin to rest or breed. Pelicans, ibises, egrets and sandhill cranes all visit regularly, as do thousands of ducks and geese. The largest population of wintering bald eagles outside Alaska gathers there every year to dine on the waterfowl. All year around, one sees ospreys, northern harriers and other birds of prey soaring over the lakes and marshes. And yet, all this is a pathetic remnant of the natural system that non-Indian settlers found in the 19th century. An estimated three-quarters of the wetlands has disappeared. Thousands of suckers lived in the lake, and formed a staple food of the marsh-dwelling Klamath Indians. Virtually all other Northwestern tribal groups held some kind of first salmon ceremony. The Klamaths of the upper basin held a first sucker ceremony. Salmon were there, too, swimming up the river and through the lake to spawn in the tributary streams. No one counted the birds or fish, but when Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson’s Bay Company visited the basin at the end of December, 1826, he noted that, “[s]ix Indians paid us a visit[. F]rom their Blankets being made of the Feathers of Ducks and Geese[,] no doubt in the Fall and Spring there be vast quantities in this quarter[. I]t cannot be otherwise[,] there being so many Lakes and the Country low[,] although on both sides of us the mountains are very high.” At the turn of the 20th century, with Progressivism in the air and Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, Congress passed the Reclamation Act, which put the federal government into the business of moving water around the West. The Klamath project was near the top of the new federal Reclamation Service’s list. It was a natural. To create virgin farmland, all you had to do was drain the swamps. Starting in 1905, the government did just that, granting homesteads on the new land, and signing contracts with individual farmers and irrigation companies to provide water in perpetuity. The project took shape in stages. After World War Two, the government raffled off homestead rights for newly irrigated land in the Tulelake area to military veterans. Timber dominated the economy of the Klamath Basin--the city of Klamath Falls was above all a mill town—but agriculture dominated the landscape. And for a while, the basin seemed able to have its cake and eat it, too. Along the Sprague River, Indians harvested suckers with pitchforks and pickup trucks. At the narrow spillway of a wooden mill dam, they caught suckers by the thousands. They cleaned and split the fish and hung them on wooden racks to dry. The whole town of Chilloquin smelled of aging fish. Now, the tribe takes one ceremonial sucker a year. And now, as in once-thriving cities and towns all over the West, you see signs of decay: the vacant storefronts, the thrift shops on main street, the shabbiness. The Lonely Planet guidebook to Oregon describes Klamath Falls as “one of the state’s most economically-challenged cities.” The fact is that all over the West, old mill towns and small farming communities are struggling. You see vacant storefronts, cracked sidewalks, shuttered movie houses in agricultural and timber communities throughout rural Oregon and Washington. And you’ve seen them there for many years. The agricultural communities of the Klamath Basin might be struggling even without endangered suckers, but there’s no doubt that farmers in the federal irrigation project are being asked to atone for a lot of other people’s sins. They are the only people whose water has been cut off, but they are not the only people who take water out of the system. Other farmers divert water from the northern rivers before they reach Upper Klamath Lake. After nearly a century, the state of Oregon has finally adjudicated their water rights—that is, the state has decided who is entitled to how much—but no one even monitors, much less limits, their use of water. Other farmers in California get water from the Klamath’s lower tributaries, much too far downstream to affect the suckers but not to affect the coho and other salmon. Much of the water in the Shasta, Scott and Trinity rivers has long since been diverted southward to irrigate fields in California’s Central Valley. The upper Klamath Basin wouldn’t have to provide as much water if those tributary rivers still carried their full natural flows into the Klamath. And its residents might not resent providing as much if the salmon still swam up through Klamath Lake. Klamath River salmon would be in much better shape if a series of dams hadn’t cut them off from their historic habitat in the upper Klamath Basin. Starting in the 1920s, a power company built two dams on the Klamath, wiping out the salmon populations that had once spawned upstream. Then, in the 1960s, the taller Iron Gate dam prevented salmon from even reaching the old power dams. If one were seriously concerned about the fate of salmon in the Klamath River system, then—California power crisis or not--one would seriously consider removing or at least modifying those dams. Water quality in Upper Klamath Lake has deteriorated, too. This is a very shallow lake. It’s only about 8 feet deep. Logging in the surrounding mountains has increased erosion and therefore the amount of sediment that winds up in the lake. Agricultural runoff, much of it from farms outside the project, has contributed both sediment and nutrients. The nutrients feed large populations of algae, which die and then decay. The decay process takes dissolved oxygen out of the water, leaving less oxygen for the fish. The deeper the lake, the colder the water, and more dissolved oxygen it can hold. A relatively high lake level also provides water for emerging shoreline vegetation in June and July, when juvenile suckers prefer it as habitat. There is an obvious conflict between leaving water in the lake for suckers and releasing it downstream for salmon. And what’s good for the fish isn’t necessarily good for the birds that migrate into the national wildlife refuges. The refuges were all created in and around natural wetlands. The Lower Klamath refuge--the nation’s first refuge for waterfowl--was created in 1908, just three years after the irrigation project was authorized. As the project channeled natural water flows into canals, it and the other natural wetlands of northern California were cut off. But much of the water flowed through the irrigation project, after which it was channeled back into the refuges. The refuges have survived on the irrigation project’s leftovers. Agriculture had first claim on the water and the refuges, de facto, came second. Now, all that has changed. Endangered species get the water first. Indian tribes have moved up into second place. Agriculture has sunk to a distant and discontented third. The refuges now come fourth, at the very end of the line. To preserve enough habitat for enough waterfowl to feed the eagles, which are still listed as a threatened species, the refuges have gotten just 25 percent of their normal water flow. Where will the other birds go if the Klamath Basin refuges dry up? No one really knows. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Biologist David Mauser says, “we’re in uncharted territory.” He personally believes that “you’ll just reduce the capacity of the Pacific Flyway.” When the government and power companies built dams and channeled water onto the land, no one lost any sleep over the water rights of Klamath Basin Indian tribes. But treaties clearly preserve the tribes’ aboriginal rights to fish and hunt, and courts have ruled that this implies a right to enough water to support fishing and hunting. Those rights have never been quantified, but there is no reasonable doubt that they exist. Farmers and their supporters point to the solemn contracts, signed with homesteaders and irrigation districts as early as 1905, that grant water in perpetuity. They tend not to mention the solemn treaties, signed with Indian tribes in 1864, that implicitly guarantee them water in perpetuity, too. In western water law, older rights trump newer ones. The treaties reserved to the Indians rights that had existed, as federal courts have said, “since time immemorial.” Now, the Indians are asserting claims to water in Upper Klamath Lake, its tributaries, Klamath Marsh, and various springs and seeps, primarily to provide habitat for the suckers. Not everyone is convinced they mean what they say. One lifelong Basin resident says that a few years ago, he sat in a meeting at which Klamath Indians told farmers that if the farmers would help them get back some of their reservation land, they would supply the farmers with water. Actually, the water rights implied by the treaties probably don’t include a right to take water out of its natural courses. Courts have said explicitly that it is, rather, a right to keep others from taking water out. But such statements—and conjecture about such motives—make some people skeptical about the Klamaths’ desire to save the suckers. The struggle of Klamath Basin farmers and communities against the federal bureaucracy has taken on symbolic significance. Drawing explicit analogies to the Oklahoma City bombing, a guest columnist in the west coast agricultural paper, Capitol Press, wrote that [i]n the spring of 2001, the federal government through its assassin, Judge Aiken, with the stroke of a pen condemned the Klamath Basin.” Some people think the feds are trying to force out Klamath Basin farmers because the government wants their land. And some think the water cutoff symbolizes the cities’ hostility or at best indifference toward the rural West. After the city of Portland hostility or at best indifference toward the rural West. After the city of Portland announced it would give $35,000 in “sustainability” funds to the Oregon Natural Resources Council, the executive director of the Klamath County Chamber of Commerce wrote in the Klamath Falls Herald and News that “if the chasm between rural and urban America isn’t wide enough, we now have urban municipalities slapping the faces of rural cities by providing funding to allow the advancement of organizations clearly engaged in what we are aptly calling rural cleansing.” Before this drought hit, the American Land Conservancy was already talking quietly with basin farmers to see if they would commit themselves to selling land if the money were available to buy it at a fair price. By now, dozens of farmers have agreed to sell at least some of their land—if someone comes up with the money to buy them out. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has endorsed some form of this “willing seller” program, which offers one of the few conceivable ways out of the current dilemma. For some farmers, it also represents a way out of an untenable economic situation. Shelley Buckingham, who has been active in the willing seller program, explains that she and her husband farm land that his father homesteaded as a World War Two vet. They have added to the original homestead by buying additional land. But they are paying 2001 prices for equipment and supplies and getting 1971 prices for grain. They are deeply in debt. A few years ago, in an effort to shed some of their debt, they decided to sell a portion of their land. No one offered to buy. The willing seller program looked like a godsend to them—as it has to some other farmers, although not to anyone who farms on leased acreage. To call the willing seller program divisive is an understatement; some farmers interested in selling have received telephoned death threats. There is no question where local government stands. The city of Klamath Falls has given $100,000 to the farmers’ legal campaign against the federal government. The sheriff stood by and watched while local protesters chainsawed the locks off the headgates and released water into the canal. Earlier in the summer, a uniformed Klamath Falls police lieutenant addressing a crowd had reportedly warned that “it won’t take much from [environmentalists] Andy Kerr or Wendell Wood or their like to spark an extremely violent response.” Kerr and Wood have sued the city of Klamath Falls. Some people fear and others hope that the effort to save the suckers will provide ammunition for politicians who want to take another try at gutting or repealing the Endangered Species Act. But there is no reason to believe that the American public would support such a change. More Congressmen have urban environmentalists as constituents than have western farmers or loggers. This isn’t 1905 any more. After a century, the nation’s priorities have changed. Settling the dry country, making the desert bloom, creating homes for landless yeoman farmers were causes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Now, much of the nation wants to save what’s left of the West’s natural systems. The Klamath Basin farmers “were trying to do the right thing,” Mauser says. “They were doing what the nation said it wanted done. Now, they’re the bad guys.” If one’s only interest is finding water for development, any water that remains in natural systems is simply wasted. But drying up the streams and wetlands is no longer an acceptable option. Because it’s not, there is no longer enough water to go around. If you take into account the needs of fish and wildlife, the treaty rights of Indian tribes and the natural variations of rain- and snowfall, there never was. How does one reconcile 21st-century laws and values with regional economies that are based on 19th-century assumptions about resources, indigenous people, and the winning of the West? Clearly, government must be both scapegoat and partial savior. “What has been frustrating about this,” says Reed Benson, executive director of WaterWatch of Oregon, “is you could see the train coming down the tracks in the Klamath.” The state of Oregon has had nearly a century to adjudicate water rights in the basin, and it hasn’t gotten the job done. The federal government has promised water to everyone who came down the pike. It has done little before this year to protect the suckers, which were listed in 1988. It and private groups have started restoring some wetlands north of the lake. The wetlands will filter out some pollutants that would otherwise contaminate the lake water. But they won’t solve the problem. Even if the federal government continues working to restore wetlands and ultimately invests in reservoirs to store more water in the upper basin—which some people think must be part of any long-term solution--it can—and should—pay farmers for land and/or water that they can no longer use. The willing seller program may well be, in the words of Andy Kerr, who has been negotiating with willing sellers for the American Land Conservancy, “a very cost-effective way for the federal government to meet its treaty obligations to Native Americans, its legal obligations to endangered species, and its moral obligation to farmers.” However, paying farmers for their land or water rights will not save communities or the institution of the family farm. “”[T]he world market is choked full of potatoes,” World Resources Institute economist Jaime Echeverria recently told Environmental Review, “and maybe [potato] farmers would be better off just selling their water rights and stop producing potatoes. But then what about the culture? What about their way of life?” What will save that way of life in the Klamath Basin? Not a global trading system that permits and tacitly encourages the importation of cheap food. Not a system of agricultural subsidies that gives most of the federal money to the richest “farmers,” including an array of large corporations and wealthy celebrities who happen to own agricultural land. How do you save rural communities in the face of low commodity prices, cheap food imports, regional shopping malls, on-line retailers, and the historic lack of economic and social opportunity in small towns? No one seems to have a clue. Look from a distance at Upper Klamath Lake spreading into the misty background, lapping the bases of those distant mountains. Look at it up close, stretching farther than the eye can see between those steep, pine-studded slopes. You think there must be enough water to go around. But that is an illusion. It just happens to be an illusion on which we have built much of the American West. |
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