Rural Cleansing
Jeremy Mullman, SF Weekly
October 3, 2001

Large numbers of Northern Californians really, truly believe that the government, the environmentalists, and the U.N. have joined forces in a plot so obvious, yet so subtle, so seemingly benevolent and fundamentally evil, that it can only be called ...

Leo Bergeron struts into Yreka's Greenhorn Grange Hall like he owns the room: dark-blue jeans, large white cowboy hat, enormous silver "L" belt buckle, repeatedly firing off an index finger "pistol" to greet fellow Greenhorns. To an extent, he does own the place -- Bergeron is on the executive committee of the California State Grange, one of the nation's largest outdoors groups. Which makes him something of a player in this barnlike hall that looks like it could host a church service or gym class as easily as it will host tonight's community events.

Bergeron and the rest of the crowd of about 200 are here for a Grange-sponsored spaghetti dinner and charity auction meant to aid farmers in the drought-besieged Klamath Basin. Water shortages aren't unusual for the basin -- it's essentially a desert made farmable by a 1940s government irrigation project -- but this crisis is exacerbated by environmental restrictions on the federal government's ability to release water to farmers.

Normally the basin's farmers get about 500,000 acre-feet of water. This year, farmers got 70,000. Both environmentalists and many farmers acknowledge the basin's primary problem is that the government promised water to too many parties. It promised water rights to the fishermen in the area's Indian tribes during the 1860s, and then -- after the irrigation project was built during the 1900s -- it promised much of the same water to farmers. Later, as species protection became a government concern, more water was promised to the area's wildlife refuges.

In January, the National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service each issued opinions requiring minimum water levels in Klamath Lake and minimum flows in the adjoining Klamath River. Lower levels, the agencies concluded, could be fatal to two endangered species of fish, the suckerfish and the coho salmon, which were first listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1988 and 1997, respectively.

On April 6, a federal judge ordered that water be withheld to protect the fish, delivering a severe blow to the Klamath economy and a severe scare to communities such as the Scott Valley, which is near Yreka (pronounced wye-REEK-a, and not to be confused with coastal Eureka) and where similar restrictions on water use are expected next summer. For many of the region's family farmers, already struggling financially, a questionable water future will force them to abandon their farms, which sometimes means selling to land conservancies that may then transfer the property to the federal government.

To Bergeron, this circumstance is no accident.

"This is rural cleansing, plain and simple," he says assuredly, not at all hesitant to evoke the widespread rape and murder that defined "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia. "That's what they did here. They cleansed the rural areas. They did.

"Now, they didn't fire a shot or forcibly relocate a soul. But the result is the same."

The phrase "rural cleansing" had been thrown around for a year or two within the highly conservative circles of the so-called property rights movement before it appeared as the title of a July opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. Written by Kimberly Strassel, an assistant features editor at the Journal, the piece focused primarily on an environmental group, called the Oregon National Resources Council, that has played a prominent role in the Klamath Basin crisis by suing the government under the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws. The Oregon group was among the first to suggest government buyouts -- at above-market prices -- of the struggling farmers.

Strassel described a process in which some environmental groups have sought to "expunge humans from the countryside" by forcing the government into action through the Endangered Species Act and other laws. It was a strongly worded, highly conservative, unabashedly anti-environmentalist -- but straightforward -- essay.

In the counties in California's far north and Oregon's far south -- counties that have, for decades, longed to form a new state called "Jefferson" -- the essay's title has captured the imagination of a people predisposed to be wary of liberal-leaning politics in particular, and government in general. Indeed, anti-government and anti-U.N. fears have existed for a long time in the state of Jefferson. So long, in fact, that when a very real crisis comes along that looks a little like the conspiracy theories, folks tend to imagine the worst.

And they have very vivid imaginations.

"When I read that [in the Journal], it was really satisfying," says Holly Swanson, the Medford, Ore.-based author of Set Up & Sold Out, a 366-page argument that the Green movement contains the ideological heirs to Stalin and Hitler. "I'd been writing the same things but never used the term "rural cleansing' to describe it."

Swanson is sitting in a plush booth in the sterile but pleasant lobby restaurant at Medford's Red Lion Hotel, and she looks nothing like what her bombastic prose might suggest. Who would imagine, for instance, that the woman who wrote this sentence -- "The Nazi parades were similar to the Greens' Earth Day events" -- would look so much like Katie Couric?

Swanson's story, as she tells it, is simple enough. "I read about a Green gathering in the paper and decided to go," she says. "And I found out it was socialism." That was in 1988; Swanson spent the next six years digging through libraries, news clippings, and public records.

She remembers feeling horrified the day she learned that former General Secretary of the U.S.S.R.'s Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev was openly leading a U.S. environmental group called the Earth Charter, which is openly working toward environmental-conservation goals established by the U.N.'s 1993 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Then, and worse yet, she drove to Sacramento, where she found documents that revealed Gorbachev's relationship with the environmentally benevolent Ford Foundation. "When I went to Sacramento and got those papers, it was clear that we'd been scammed," she recalls. "I mean, you don't survive a coup with financing in place."

The coup to which Swanson refers is the 1991 attempt by communist hard-liners to remove Gorbachev from office by spiriting him away to his own vacation dacha and forcing him to announce that he was too ill to continue as head of state. Thanks largely to the efforts of then-Moscow Mayor Boris Yeltsin, the coup attempt collapsed in four days. Gorbachev's gentle landing -- he resumed office and went on to a life that frequently included travel to the U.S., where he was involved in a variety of nonprofit groups, including the aforementioned Earth Charter -- convinced Swanson that the Green movement, which also advocates increased environmental protection, is essentially a communist cover group that employs some tricks used by the Nazis. She then wrote her 366 pages on the Green-communist-Nazi linkage.

Today, Swanson is a prominent figure in property rights circles, not only because of her book, which she estimates has sold about 15,000 copies, but also as a public speaker. She gave the keynote address in front of 2,000 people at the Klamath Basin's Freedom Day festivities in July. Whether spoken or written, Swanson's findings carry a tone of revelation, and make connections that few others have seen.

Consider: "The Democratic-Socialists of America use the term "comrade' in their Red-Green literature." (Page 13)

Consider: "After Hitler and Lenin seized power, they made their ideas law. ... The Green movement is also based on ideas." (Page 24)

Not to mention: "America's support for environmental protection, including [sic] financial, may be advancing these political ideas: "Die Yuppie Scum'; "Question Authority'; "Go Reds, Smash State'; "Recycle or Die'; "Eat the Rich'; "No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth'; "Sure, I'm a Marxist'; "Stop Treating Our Soil Like Dirt'; "No Cows'; "Visualize Industrial Collapse'; "Born Again Pagan'; "Ban People for a Safe Future'; "Pregnancy: Just Another Deadly Sexually Transmitted Disease'; "Think Globally, Act Locally'; "Earth Police, One Planet, One Precinct'; "Alternative: The Greens'; "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm.'" (Page 61)

Walking through downtown Yreka feels like walking through a spaghetti western, mostly because the "old mining town" look has been maintained a little too well by a hyperactive, growth-wary Chamber of Commerce. It's one thing, after all, to take a left onto Miner Street and pass the Miner Street pub and all the restored Old West building facades that mark the strip; it's quite another when the exterior of Ming's Chinese Restaurant resembles the saloon Clint Eastwood shot up in the movie Unforgiven.

In any event, the Siskiyou County Courthouse -- a boxy, almost art deco building just a minute from Miner Street -- seems oddly out of place. This morning, it's supposed to be hosting the latest environmental showdown, a shootout over the proposed reintroduction of the locally extinct California wolf to the area. But, like every other public building in the country, the courthouse finds itself shut down. About five hours earlier, terrorists piloted large passenger jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. No one has any idea how many people died.

Nevertheless, a crowd -- of which many members spent yesterday lining Main Street with pink picket signs reminding passers-by that "Wolves Eat Babies" -- has assembled across the street. Two huddles are separated by about 15 yards: The first, staked out on the corner, is a decidedly anti-wolf gathering of more than a dozen people; the second consists of a small handful of environmentalists. Liz Bowen, ace reporter for the Fort Jones Pioneer Press, which proclaims itself "The State of Jefferson's Official Newspaper," is holding court with the anti-wolf crowd. As a reporter, Bowen quickly admits, she picks sides, and these folks are on hers. She says she's worried about what the New York and Washington terror-bombings mean for the area's farmers.

"I'm worried this is gonna steal our momentum with the media," she says, referring to recent stories on the Klamath water crisis in the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, and Portland Oregonian. "It could be just like Pearl Harbor was for Jefferson." Bowen is alluding to the most serious attempt to create the state of Jefferson, which occurred during the fall of 1941, when miners became fed up with the region's miserable roads and took substantial steps toward forming a new state. Among their slogans: "Our roads are not passable, hardly jackassable."

Under the direction of Port Orford, Ore., Mayor Gilbert Gable, they vowed, every Thursday, to "secede" from their respective states -- which basically meant gun-toting miners would block the roads in and out of the region -- either until they got their road upgrades or they had a new state that would build them. The effort was gaining momentum, too, garnering significant notice from the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, Life magazine, and newsreel photographers. But then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the government -- needing Jefferson's copper, mercury, and chrome for the war effort -- built the needed roads in a hurry.

There have been subsequent pushes for Jefferson, the state, but none ever came so close to succeeding again.

"Just look at Jefferson," Bowen says, her voice tinged with sadness. "They had two pretty good Thursdays and then that was it." The group goes silent for a moment, at first pondering Bowen's statement and then observing the approach of someone who, in their estimation, is only slightly more popular than the folks who just firebombed the East Coast: the village environmentalist.

Felice Pace looks harmless enough. He's a stubby, goateed man wearing black jeans and a dark green shirt that appears to be cut from the same cloth as a common bandanna. Carrying a manila folder under his arm, he has to cut through the anti-wolf folks -- and their pronounced stares of disdain -- to get to his fellow environmentalists. "Hello, young man," he offers to Brian Peterson, a trim 29-year-old who sports a state of Jefferson baseball cap and a "Black Helicopter Crowd" T-shirt.

"I ain't talkin' to you," Peterson sneers back, drawing the evident approval of the rest of his circle. Pace treks on; he's used to this by now. At least he ought to be. Over the years, he's suffered having carcasses of decomposed animals dropped down his home chimney; rotting salmon dropped in the smokestacks at the office; windows broken; tires slashed; sledgehammers pounded against his front door; newspaper reports questioning his Christianity; and even a radio report that he was the Unabomber.

At the moment, he adds, "Range magazine is doing a hit piece on me."

Once he gets talking about the problems agriculture faces in the region, however, it's not too hard to see why he's as popular as he is. "The biggest threat these people have is globalization. We're buying potatoes from Canada, beef from Mexico. They can't sell what they grow," he says. "Why give them more water? So we can plow [the crops] under again?" As for rural cleansing -- which, the locals are sure, he's an agent of -- Pace says they have it in reverse. Actually, he says, the dwindling fish populations caused by agricultural water use have nearly wiped out a salmon-fishing industry manned primarily by Native Americans. "We've had one-tenth of the salmon boats we used to -- for the sake of 1,000 farmers. That's the real rural cleansing, if you ask me. ... What's happening now, I think, is an example of the [Endangered Species Act] bringing about social justice.

"And, for what it's worth, I do prefer agriculture to subdivisions and shopping malls," he says. "We want there to be open space, we just want it to be a reformed open space." Reformed open space, in Pace's vision, would mean fewer farmers altogether, and for those farmers who remained, a switch to crops that require less water, among them seed garlic, alfalfa, malting barley, and hemp. The Klamath Irrigation Project, he explains, was essentially a desert strip before the government promised the farmers and fishermen adjacent to the Klamath Basin that they could have as much water as they needed for as long as they needed it. When the farmers were settling the region as part of the Homestead Act after World War II, it seemed like a good thing for the government to do. Now, though, there just isn't enough water to go around.

Pace is giving this lecture over coffee at Nature's Kitchen on Main Street, a diner that comes across as something of an old hippie refuge. The Kitchen's dining room is covered with vines, and the rest of the space is dedicated to the sale of candles, incense, wind chimes, and similar objects. Pace is midsentence when he's interrupted by a neighboring diner, who introduces himself as "an old steelhead fisherman."

"I just want to tell you that you're the first person I've heard make any sense about this at all," he says, before helping his wife -- who recently underwent a knee replacement -- away from the table. In Yreka, and around Jefferson, there aren't many like-minded folks, and today, with a bit of support, Pace summarizes the situation gracefully: "Look, the right needs new communists, and we're it, with our black helicopters and the Wildlands Project."

Early in the evening of Sept. 11, it's drizzling in downtown Yreka. Pace and company are supposed to appear at the Best Western Miners Inn convention center, located just off Miner Street, for a certain bloodbath -- a workshop on the wolf. But, barely 12 hours removed from the terrorist attacks, the organizers aren't up to it and cancel, leaving a note on the locked convention center doors.

Nita Sill, a resident of nearby Montague, and I arrive simultaneously. She's a cheerful, tiny older woman who wears a white sweater she probably knitted herself and giant glasses with purple frames. She's driving a massive Ford van, often used as transport for her wheelchair-bound son. It becomes clear, rather quickly, that we both have the day's terror-bombings on our minds, albeit in different contexts.

"The [Environmental Liberation Front], that's who I thought drove that plane in there," Sill says, referring to the radical environmental group that burned down an empty Vail, Colo., ski lodge during the summer of 1998. "They're conniving. Just like that Felix [sic] Pace. ... There are very few people here for Felix Pace. ... Why does he want to reintroduce wolves anyhow? They'll attack the cattle. It sounds like a conspiracy to me. ... And people don't believe in conspiracies. They look at you like you're crazy.

"There's a capitalist/communist conspiracy going on. They all sound like they're crazy to me, like Marx. And Freud, too. Uck! I can't stand him. ... Even our Congress is part of it. They don't know anything about what's going on in the country."

She goes on to talk about rural cleansing, and about the United Nations, which "has their finger in education, too. ... You know, the kids are running around like little robots. And rock 'n' roll, that's part of it, too. I call it discordant, inharmonious, jagged, pounding, and bonging rhythm."

"Come again?"

"Discordant, inharmonious, jagged, pounding, and bonging rhythm," Sill says, repeating slowly and surely enough that it's clear she's used the phrase often. "The bonging is that rap music stuff."

A few hours later, I'm in a hotel room, glued to ABC News, when my phone rings. It's Sill. "There's a book you need to read: It's called Set Up & Sold Out: What Green Really Means, and it explains how the Greens are the new commies."

If the collection of counties in California's far north and Oregon's far south ever went through with their long-expressed desire to form a new state, there's little question that its greatest asset would be its roadways.

The state of Jefferson has some of the most spectacular drives in the United States, the sort of swooping, darting, and curving boulevards usually reserved for high-performance car commercials. They wind over mountain ridges and around riverbanks; they knife through scenic stretches of spectacular expanses of farmland and high desert, and pierce seas of postcard-caliber conifers.

Despite all the soul-settling, relaxing cruises the region offers, the series of narrow roads and blind turns you have to negotiate to get from Yreka to Fort Jones -- dubbed "Deer Alley" by locals -- isn't one of them. Nevertheless, it's an essential trip if you want to chat up the staff at the Pioneer Press, which -- aside from being the self-proclaimed "Official Newspaper" of Jefferson -- is the second most widely read paper in northern Siskiyou County.

The Press is located in a modest storefront in Fort Jones' downtown, a strip that exists entirely alongside a short stretch of Route 3. And you can't so much as step through the paper's door without getting a bellowing "Hello sir!" from Daniel Webster, publisher, who is standing next to a small bookshelf with Les Misérables, The Prince, and Rush Limbaugh's See! I Told You So lying consecutively on its top shelf. And if you happen to be a reporter from out of town, you can't get two or three steps farther before Bowen -- ace reporter, property rights advocate, and, as of this story, contributing SF Weekly photographer -- starts expounding on the evils of NAFTA and explaining the dangers of having Third World countries feed America.

In an office to the left is the third and final member of the editorial staff, sports editor Jasha Reynolds. He's a former logger who came to sports writing after an on-the-job accident nearly cost him a leg. His quiet manner seems a little out of place in a newsroom dominated by yak-happy Webster and Bowen, who are trying to decide whether they can write that Felice Pace's latest antics in a public meeting -- he swatted an arm away during an argument -- constitute the crime of "battery." They seem to understand how absurd such a characterization would be, but are nonetheless enjoying the possibility of including it in the next edition.

There is, indeed, a sense of levity here uncommon for the region, and it emanates directly from the grinning, mildly pudgy Webster. He seems endlessly amused with the characters surrounding him. It's a perspective undoubtedly owed to having spent some time outside of Jefferson. Born in the Scott Valley to parents who thought they were naming him after the Bible's Daniel, rather than the legendary mid-19th-century senator from New Hampshire, he eventually wound up selling software in Orange County and going to law school in Fullerton, at Western State University. Once there, he became the first out-of-the-closet student body president.

After a pair of unsuccessful attempts at passing the bar exam, Webster returned to his parents' home in Scott Valley and got a job as an editor with the Siskiyou Daily News in Yreka. The move entailed an abrupt lifestyle change -- "There's no pink neon signs over our heads," he says of the county's "about 16 gay folks" -- but Webster has relished his newspaper work, especially after the 31-year-old Pioneer Press came up for sale in 1998. He knew from his time at the larger Siskiyou Daily News that he wanted to be in journalism, and Jefferson's paper had a special allure.

As a child, he was always enamored with the state of Jefferson, particularly the independence and freedom it embodied. Now he owned its official publication, albeit one with only 1,200 readers. The purchase was at first greeted with glee from the local left, but the cheers didn't last. "When I took over, the lefties were very grateful to have this gay boy in charge," Webster recalls. "But as soon as they figured out my politics, they thought I was a traitor." Indeed, Webster's Pioneer Press is an unflinchingly conservative publication, and it has been waging a jihad against area environmentalists, particularly against Pace, whom Webster has accused of trying to "annihilate life as we know it."

Today is deadline day, and we're driving to Ashland, Ore., because Webster needs to borrow a functional laser printer from the Daily Tidings. And, while driving, he is explaining just how newsy the summer has been in Jefferson: It's a minor miracle the whole state hasn't burst into flames; he suspects (but has no real evidence) that the local sheriff is up to something very funny in regard to marijuana cultivation; and, of course, Pace and the environmentalists are taking their best stab at cleansing the rural areas of people.

On the latter front, two storms are looming: One involves the reintroduction of the California wolf, the other the state's listing of the coho salmon as an endangered species. If the salmon gets listed, the Scott Valley's farmers won't be able to irrigate from the Scott River.

"Felice is just so fucking extreme that it would seem that his goals are to shut down this entire area," Webster says. "And the groups he's aligned himself with, well, their goal is to turn this whole area into a wildlife refuge. ... Almost nobody would be able to live here."

Well, that's not exactly true. There is one group of Jefferson residents that rural cleansing seems unlikely to touch: the myriad marijuana farmers who line the "State of Jefferson Scenic Byway," a stretch of highway that bends for 135 miles along the banks of the Klamath River.

The driveway for Steve Fisher's place runs right into the byway, and as you pull in, between a tattered barn and a house apparently in the midst of an amateur overhaul, it's clear that the pot business is better for some folks than others. Fisher -- who, Webster says, knows everything about the local cannabis industry -- drives a twentysomething-year-old, banged-up red pickup that has bungee cords keeping its doors closed. He uses it as more of a chairlift than anything else; it lurches us up a hill to the "Siskiyou County Cannabis Co-op" -- that is, Fisher's pot farm -- as three other miners-turned-pot-growers follow on foot.

Fisher is a 6-foot-1-inch-tall blond man with a hazy air about him, which is likely due to his being completely stoned. He is wearing black jean shorts, no shirt, and green "State of Jefferson" suspenders. And, he explains while staring at 254 cannabis plants, he is pissed off at local law enforcement, particularly Sheriff Charlie Byrd, for revoking his license to grow medical marijuana. He sees it as piling on. Especially considering that he's already on probation for being caught with a half-box of .22-caliber shells in his truck.

"The state of Jefferson," he says, "is all about being able to rule ourselves. Let's have our laws, lives, and rights back. Look at this plant right here. They wage war on this plant right here," Fisher turns toward a particularly bushy plant he's been admiring. "They wage war against this plant that's never done anything to them. When they should be waging war on terrorists.

"We wonder what flag to fly."

Fisher and his band of miners-turned-pot-growers are having a bad month. It's been barely a week since the Sheriff's Department, aided by helicopters, raided a series of pot plantations along the river. One of Fisher's partners here, Robert Grant, a miner with a near-toothless grin, was among the raided. Law enforcement clipped 23 of his plants -- each worth about $4,000, in his estimation -- because he lacked the proper permits. Another of Fisher's crew, Gene Cox, a rail-thin man in a floppy hat, was also busted. He'd been attempting to grow plants for friends who do have medical marijuana permits, but the authorities took 18 plants, along with the names and phone numbers of the friends.

Back on his porch, sucking on a red, white, and blue glazed bong and boasting about how he hasn't touched drugs since 1991, Fisher sees the pot busts and the Klamath Basin crisis as one and the same. "I don't know who's behind it," he says. "But I do know they want us where we're controllable, categorized, and percentiled.

"We're owned."

In her Wall Street Journal piece, Strassel never mentioned the United Nations, but it has nonetheless developed a prominent role in the philosophy of rural cleansing. "Look at what Clinton did with Executive Order 12852," says Anthony Intiso, a Yreka resident who's followed the plight of the Klamath farmers. "It turns the parks over to the U.N. Well, if they're making all these [farmers] sell out to the government, and the government is going to give the parks to the U.N. ...."

For what it's worth, nowhere in Executive Order 12852, which established the President's Council on Sustainable Development in 1993, is the phrase "United Nations" found. The order does not, of course, turn over control of U.S. national parks to the United Nations. But Intiso -- and many others in Jefferson -- are sure it does, through an organization called the Wildlands Project.

The path to the foremost local authority on the evils of the Wildlands Project starts about halfway between Yreka and Fort Jones and extends down nine miles of dirt road, up a large hill, and then into the woods. At the end of that path is a stout, hearty-looking fortysomething man standing barefoot, wearing a "State of Jefferson" T-shirt under his overalls, his callused hands as rough as sandpaper. Ric Costales is the local president of Frontiers for Freedom, the area's most prominent property rights group. But before he moved to Jefferson, he associated with a very different organization.

"When I was at UCLA, I used to hang around the fringes of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]," he recalls, downing a Coors and some chips and salsa in his cozy living room, a hodgepodge of well-worn furniture, animal heads, press clips, and an enormous stone fireplace; there's a computer workspace in the corner. "Shit, I was at the first Earth Day. And I was like most guys, you know, figurin' that if the environmentalists are doin' it, it must be good. You know, I was all for Felice and all of that." (Pace, for his part, remembers being friendly with Costales back then. "We saw things the same way for a while," he recalls. "And then he, uh, got religion.")

Costales says that he lost faith in environmentalists after the local logging industry was decimated in the early 1990s because of restrictions on cutting related to the spotted owl and the Endangered Species Act. He saw an industry -- his industry -- torn down because of an "indicator species." (Environmentalists believe owls indicate the health of a forest, and, therefore, shrinking numbers of them imply that an ecosystem is suffering.) The logging cutbacks convinced him that something about the environmental movement wasn't right.

So don't get him started on the Wildlands Project.

"This bombing that happened is completely a result of our dependence on foreign raw materials," he says, putting his beer down. "What the hell are we doing getting dependent on the Third World? Because once they've got you by the short hairs, where do you grow food? Wildlands wants to take 50 percent of our land, and all you can do is walk on it.

"It's all in the name of biodiversity in the name of ecological sustainability. The new global imperative is sustainability. It's part of [the United Nations'] Agenda 21."

Costales looks around the room and sees some blank stares, one from me, the other from a buddy of his who's sucking down a brew. He pulls out a color-coded map of the United States that allegedly combines the land-use plans of the "Convention on Biodiversity," the Wildlands Project, the "U.N. and U.S. Man in the Biosphere program," and "various U.N., U.S. Heritage programs and NAFTA." On this map, half the country is colored red -- that is, limited to "little to no human use."

His friend observes that the map is unbelievable. "That's the thing: These guys are nuts!" he continues, adjusting one of his overall straps. "Al Gore says that preservation means embracing an all-out program using every means necessary to halt the destruction of the Earth. I mean, these guys have a Machiavellian attitude."

Based primarily in Tucson, Ariz., the Wildlands Project has eight full-time employees and 18 directors, which is a small staff if the goal is to seize 50 percent of America's square footage and hand it over to communists. The project has no connection with the United Nations, other than that it incorporated the findings of the U.N.'s landmark "Man in the Biosphere" program into its own models.

In reality, the Wildlands Project wants only what many other environmental groups want -- corridors that connect wilderness areas into larger ecosystems, increasing the range and genetic diversity of threatened species. The group's view is more extreme than most environmental groups' in one regard: The Wildlands Project does not believe that the "islands" of conservation we have now are sufficient to preserve an optimum number of species. A great proliferation of interconnecting wild-land corridors is, therefore, essential to the health of the planet. Founder Dave Foreman has written: "We live for the day when grizzlies in Chihuahua have an unbroken connection to grizzlies in Alaska; when gray wolf populations are continuous from New Mexico to Greenland; when vast unbroken forests and flowing plains again thrive and support pre-Columbian populations of plants and animals."

It's quite a vision. And while Foreman writes that he'll "live for the day," the group's literature acknowledges that he probably won't. According to Reed Noss, who works with the Wildlands Project in Oregon, the group takes a long-term view toward preserving wildlife and wilderness. In the meantime, however, it wants to create what wildlife corridors it can. To do that, it needs land.

Usually, acquiring the needed acreage is not too big a sticking point, Noss says. The Wildlands Project -- and many of the environmental groups that have similar, if less dramatic, goals -- will either offer generous buyout prices to willing property sellers or purchase "easement" rights, which allows landowners to stay put so long as they use the land in a way that is consistent with environmental protection. Other times, ecology-sensitive landowners will offer to change their land usage without a buyout at all.

"And sometimes," Noss says, "you get land that's valuable from a biodiversity perspective that's owned by folks who are uninterested in preserving species. Then it becomes a question of using law. That's the case in Klamath."

To be sure, in the Klamath Basin, the government has promised water to farmers, Indian tribes, and a wildlife refuge, and in recent years it has become clear that the drawdowns were taking a toll on now-endangered fish populations. Before water was restricted in Klamath Basin, the farmland there was valued at around $3,500 per acre. After the restrictions, it was nearly worthless -- at least as farmland.

Some of the environmentalist groups in the basin have convinced the government to offer farmers $4,000 per acre to sell their property for environmental purposes. It's not a bad deal for waterless farmland.

But to the people of Jefferson, the Klamath situation involves a lot more than money.

In Jefferson, there are virulent objections to increased federal ownership of land -- any increase -- and the specter of the Wildlands Project doesn't do much to ease those objections. To these Jeffersonians, the most disturbing shadow is cast by Foreman himself, a pioneer of "monkey-wrenching" -- a brand of not-so-civil disobedience in which environmentalists would sabotage logging and mining machinery -- during his time at the radical environmental group Earth First! He left that group in 1990, citing a need for a new direction for environmental activists. Nevertheless, his 1991 book, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, has given anti-environmentalist Web sites decades of inflammatory quotations to post.

Rich McIntyre, who works with the American Land Conservancy in southern Oregon, says that the local objections to increased federal land ownership make the situation far more difficult than other endangered-species situations, in which landowners frequently make voluntary concessions. Because he works for an organization that is accumulating land for the government, he's received death threats. Worse yet, farmers who've attempted to sell out have also received threats from their neighbors.

Mention "rural cleansing," and McIntyre loses patience. He says the ALC's position is that a 10 to 15 percent decrease in agriculture -- not exactly a thorough cleansing -- will suffice to bring the area into reasonable balance in regard to water supply. The property rights folks want the Endangered Species Act amended so it won't apply to the fish in the basin.

"The state of Jefferson," he says, perhaps to himself, with evident disgust, and tells an anecdote about farmer protest near the head gates for the Klamath project. "You know, if I was a wealthy man, I'd buy a black helicopter, paint "U.N.' on the side of it, and buzz the [anti-government gathering at the Klamath Basin dam's] head gates over and over again."

If there's somebody out there who can convey, firsthand, the power and paranoia that the idea of rural cleansing has accumulated in the state of Jefferson, it's Dwight.

Dwight (whose real name is being withheld at his request) owns about 2,000 acres of farmland on the California side of the Klamath Basin. He is, in many ways, the prototypical Klamath farmer. He cannot be described as anything but the politically conservative son of a homesteader. But there's something a little different about Dwight. Three years ago, he had the foresight to see disaster coming. The suckerfish and coho salmon were already listed as endangered species by federal authorities, which threatened the water supply. He noticed that the region's ridiculously cheap deal for hydropower from the Klamath dam -- which ensures a 1956 rate for electricity -- expires in 2006. And he saw that foreign competitors were continuing to produce crops at prices Klamath farmers could not match.

Dwight decided to sell half of his property to the American Land Conservancy, which was offering a generous buyout rate. "And then one day this friend of mine at the power company who was working outside comes in and says, "There's guys out there said that they were gonna kill you.'"

What followed was an endless swell of gossip and intimidation. Eventually, Dwight gave up and decided to stick with his land in spite of all the very real problems he saw coming.

And, he says now, the threats had nothing to do with it.

"The ALC program is a bad program," he says. "I won't sell if it means increased federal ownership. In Russia, the government owns most of the land, so it becomes a socialistic state.

"I like my freedom."

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, and as defined under the provisions of "fair use", any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment for non-profit research and for educational use by our membership.