Troubled Waters
By H. Bruce Miller, The Bend Source
September 26, 2007

EUREKA, Calif. – In the gray light of late afternoon, Dave Bitts eases his fishing boat, the Elmarue, into the dock on Humboldt Bay and ties up. A winch lowers a big metal box from the dock to the boat deck.

Bitts opens a large ice chest and begins lifting out fresh-caught salmon, heaving the gleaming silver fish one by one into the box. In a couple of minutes the ice chest is empty. The box is winched back up to the dock, where it’s weighed to determine how much money Bitts earned from a 13-hour day on the water.

Bitts says he could have caught more salmon, but the fish are holding too far offshore and he had to spend too much time getting out to them.

“It was 10 hours a day of running to fish for three hours,” he says. “That’s a long run for day fishing. Normally you’d have a couple of tons of ice and just work those fish all day. With a concentration of fish like there was, guys like me would have a couple hundred.”

It’s a little after 6 pm on Tuesday, Sept. 11, and for Dave Bitts and the other fishermen who call Eureka their home port, the fall 2007 Klamath River salmon season is over. It lasted three days.

Things could have been worse – a lot worse. Last year there was no commercial salmon season at all.

The problems of Dave Bitts and other salmon fishermen in Eureka and other ports along the coast of southern Oregon and northern California didn’t start last year, and they didn’t start at the mouth of the Klamath River. They started 240 miles away and a hundred years ago. The Klamath Basin, covering more than 13,000 square miles, is an object lesson in what can go wrong when people start tinkering with natural ecosystems. And it’s a paradigm of what’s wrong with the way rivers have been managed in the West.

In September 2002, the worst die-off of adult salmon in the history of the West occurred in the Klamath River and one of its tributaries, the Trinity. Somewhere between 33,000 and 77,000 Chinook and Coho salmon and steelhead died, depending on whose guess you accept.

Fewer adult fish surviving to spawn meant fewer young salmon going downriver to the ocean next year, which meant fewer returning adults for Bitts and his fellow fishermen to catch in the following years. The number of salmon coming back in the fall of 2006 was so small that for the first time in history the federal government virtually prohibited commercial salmon fishing along 700 miles of the Pacific Coast, from Cape Falcon in Oregon to Point Sur in California, to protect those that were left, especially the endangered Coho.

Compared to 2006, this year’s salmon run was “better, but it’s still far from a normal year,” said Glen Spain, Northwest director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), which represents about 3,000 commercial fishing families.

“This was all predicted” in the aftermath of the 2002 kill, he added. “That affects the population three, four, five years into the future. 2005 was a miserable year, 2006 was a disastrous year, and we’re finally starting to come back a little bit.”

Fishermen’s organizations and conservation groups blame the 2002 kill on the Klamath Reclamation Project, a giant irrigation system started by the federal government way back in 1905 to supply water for agriculture in the Klamath Basin. Today the project delivers water to some 2,400 farms and ranches covering almost 600,000 acres.

According to its critics, the Bush administration made a politically motivated decision to let the farmers in the Klamath Project have irrigation water instead of following scientists’ recommendations to release the water downriver and help the fish. A Washington Post story last June reported that Vice President Dick Cheney – driven by a desire to help Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith’s re-election chances – had leaned on federal bureaucrats to reverse their position and give the farmers the water.

Cheney got the National Academy of Sciences to review an April 2001 ruling by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service and declare there was “no substantial scientific foundation” for their determination that holding back water for irrigation would pose a threat to endangered Coho salmon and two threatened species of sucker fish.

Klamath Basin farmers and irrigators, as well as the Bush administration, deny there was any improper political meddling. They also point out that a number of other factors, including high water temperatures and an unusually large number of returning fish, contributed to the disease epidemic that caused the die-off.

The fishermen and conservationists don’t deny other factors had a role, but they say low water flows in the Klamath were what tipped the scales.

The diseases that killed the salmon in 2002 are endemic in the Klamath, said Spain of the PCFFA, but “the fish normally are resistant if the water quality is healthy.”

“The biggest part of the problem was low flows that crowded fish into deeper pools of cooler water, and they got stuck there for week after week after week,” said Steve Pedery, conservation director for Oregon Wild, formerly the Oregon Natural Resources Council. “If nothing else, [releasing more water] would have raised the river higher so the fish could have dispersed. There were thousands of salmon crowded gill plate to gill plate. Literally half of the salmon run ended up dying.”

The 2004 final report on the fish kill by the California Department of Fish and Game appears to bear out Pedery’s argument.

“River flow and the volume of water in the fish kill area were atypically low” in September 2002, it said. “Combined with the above-average run of salmon, these low flows and river volumes resulted in high fish densities. … Presence of a high density of [fish] and warm temperatures caused rapid amplification of [disease organisms], which resulted in a fish kill of over 33,000 adult salmon and steelhead.”

The report also stated that the 2002 kill “was unprecedented in that it was the first major adult salmonid mortality event ever recorded in the Klamath River.”

If major changes aren’t made in the way the river is managed, fishermen and conservationists believe, it probably won’t be the last.

After the 2002 kill, the PCFFA and two conservation groups sued the National Marine Fisheries Service and the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which administers the Klamath Reclamation Project, and won a court order guaranteeing a minimum level of flows for fish in the lower river. That helps, Spain said, but it’s not a dependable or permanent solution.

“Because of our court action in 2002 we have fairly high flows, so we’re squeaking by,” he said. However, “It’s always a white-knuckle year in the Klamath because this is a dry region.”

Besides the recurring annual danger of another massive kill of returning adult salmon, fisherman say low water flows contribute to a chronic decline in Klamath salmon populations by fostering disease among juvenile fish.

The same diseases that caused the 2002 kill wipe out large numbers of salmon fry every year, Spain said, but those deaths go unnoticed: “The little guys die and get eaten. It’s not as sexy as having the big adult kill.”

And then, as if the salmon didn’t have enough other problems, there are the dams.

The Western utility giant PacifiCorp, which operates under the name of Pacific Power in Oregon, owns four aging hydropower dams – the oldest was built in 1908 – on the Lower Klamath. Fishermen and conservation groups say they reduce water flows, make the water downstream unhealthy and block access to spawning habitat. They want PacifiCorp to either provide fish passage around the dams or – better yet – remove them.

Removal of the dams “would be a tremendous step to restore the health of the river,” Spain said. “The dams themselves are an ongoing disaster. They seriously deteriorate water quality, they encourage parasites and algae, and they block somewhere between 400 and 500 miles of river that previously were spawning habitat.”

The dams are up for relicensing by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and their fate will be determined by negotiations in the ongoing Klamath River Basin Federal Working Group talks. They provide no irrigation water and relatively little power – less than 90 megawatts combined. But the farmers in the Klamath Basin like them because they provide cheap electricity to run their irrigation pumps, and PacifiCorp has taken the position that it wants to keep them.

In August the PCFFA, two Native American tribes and several other plaintiffs filed suit in federal court in Los Angeles to compel PacifiCorp to prevent discharges of what they claim are toxic algae from two of the dams.

Meanwhile, as talks and lawsuits drag on, Dave Bitts and his fellow Eureka fishermen wonder how long their way of life can survive.

There’s no debate that, whatever the causes, West Coast commercial salmon fishing is on a steep downward slope. At one time the Klamath River supported the third biggest salmon fishery in the United States, behind the Columbia and the Sacramento. As recently as 1979, according to the Institute for Fisheries Resources, there were more than 10,000 salmon boats working the coast of Oregon and Northern California. By 2006 there were barely 1,200.

A walk around the Woodley Island Marina, one of two in Eureka where the fishing boats tie up, tells the story in stark images instead of dry numbers. Derelict boats that haven’t seen a fresh coat of paint in years sit rotting at the docks, rusty gear lying on their decks. One of them displays a California permit for the 2006 salmon season – the season that never happened.

At the end of the day’s work a group of fishermen gather in a restaurant at the marina and talk about the past, present and future – if any – of their industry.

What’s really killing them, they say, is the uncertainty. Federal management policy requires that 35,000 salmon be left each fall to swim up the Klamath and spawn. Of the surplus, the four Native American tribes with fishing rights on the Klamath get half. Sport fishermen get 20%, and commercial fishermen get the other 30%.

From year to year, the fishermen never know how many salmon they’ll be allowed to catch. They have to buy their permits by the end of March and they don’t find out until mid-April how long the salmon season will be.

“You have an idea because they come out with estimates at the end of March,” Bitts says. “They say it’s going to be from this bad to not that bad. Or it’s all gonna be bad, but it’s three different shades of bad.”

Price instability is another headache. Currently, fresh-caught salmon are getting $5 to $7 per pound at the dock. At that price, Bitts says, “You don’t need a whole lot of fish to keep going. You might not get ahead or put anything away, but at least you can put fuel in the boat and pay the rent.”

But three or four years ago when salmon were more abundant, the price dropped to $1.25 a pound. Increasingly, Eureka fishermen are hanging on by catching other kinds of seafood such as halibut, eels and crabs.

Despite their own problems, the fishermen are not unsympathetic to the position of Klamath Basin farmers, who like them are at the mercy of unpredictable nature and unstable markets.

“I was at a meeting with some of the Klamath water users four or five months ago and it was illuminating, because their issues are very much the same as our issues,” says Dave Helliwell, another veteran fisherman. “Their lives are very similar to ours.”

Aaron Newman, the president of the Humboldt Bay Fishermen’s Marketing Association, is a comparative novice – he’s been fishing commercially for only about 10 years, compared to 30 for Bitts and Helliwell.

“You know, these potatoes they put on our table – what’s the price of a bag of potatoes nowadays?” he says. “They’re not making much money up there.”

“Some of them are doing okay and a lot of them are starving,” says Bitts. “Does that sound familiar at all?”

What the fishermen say they want is a sustainable fishery with an annual run of salmon dependable enough and big enough to keep them in business. But they’re not sure if that can ever happen, given the nature of the Klamath Basin ecosystem and all the competing demands on it.

Newman takes the position that the basin just doesn’t have enough water to supply the needs of both fish and farmers.

“There ain’t no way to compromise,” he says. “If you want a lot of fish you can’t have the farms, especially with the manipulation of the dams. You’ve got to have the available water when you need it. That water – there’s just not enough of it to go around.”

So does Newman believe there’s any future for the fishing industry in Eureka?

He thinks about it for a few seconds. “There is, but it’s gonna be based on finding a niche,” he says. “It’s not gonna be anything like it was, or like it is.”

“If it gets much less than it is,” Bitts adds dryly, “it’s not going to be at all.”

Troubled Waters, Part II: Klamath farmers see themselves in the crosshairs

KLAMATH FALLS – A strange-looking monument stands in front of City Hall on the main street of this Southern Oregon farming center. It’s a giant silver-painted bucket, standing at least 10 feet high.

The big bucket commemorates “the Bucket Brigade,” a highly publicized protest staged by farmers and their families in the spring of 2001.

In April, the federal government had ordered irrigation water cut off in the Klamath Basin to protect threatened salmon and sucker fish during one of the most severe droughts in the region’s history. On May 7, an estimated 10,000 people lined up shoulder to shoulder from Lake Ewauna in Klamath Falls to the A Canal of the Klamath Reclamation Project a mile away. In symbolic defiance of the federal order, for three hours they scooped water out of the lake one bucket at a time and passed the buckets down the line to the canal, where they emptied them.

Standing in the line helping to pass the buckets were Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith and Rep. Greg Walden, the state’s only Republican member of the House.

Ric Costales from Frontiers of Freedom, a right-wing group headquartered in Fairfax, VA, stood up in front of the crowd and made a ringing speech. “When the most ironclad agreements between a government and its people can be violated at the stroke of a judge's ruling or a bureaucrat's pen, how can this nation stand as a model to the principles of liberty and justice?” he demanded.

Almost six and a half years have passed, but Klamath farmers haven’t forgotten the Bucket Brigade, and they haven’t forgotten that the federal government made a promise over a hundred years ago when it started the mammoth Klamath Reclamation Project. It’s a promise they still expect the government to keep.

But in the 21st century the government has other responsibilities – to fishermen, to endangered species, to Native American tribes. And meeting all those responsibilities is turning out to be a tough job. It could even be an impossible one.

In June 2001, about a month after the Bucket Brigade, the U.S. Department of Interior announced there would be a review of the scientific findings that led to the irrigation cutoff. According to a Washington Post report, the review came about because Vice President Dick Cheney – aiming to boost Gordon Smith’s re-election chances in 2002 – had pushed for it.

In March 2002, a special committee of scientists reported to Congress that holding more water in Upper Klamath Lake wouldn’t do much good for threatened sucker fish, and releasing water downstream instead of using it for irrigation might actually be harmful to threatened Coho salmon. The irrigation gates were opened again.

Six months later, in September 2002, somewhere between 33,000 and 77,000 adult Chinook and Coho salmon and steelhead died while trying to make it up the Klamath and Trinity Rivers to spawn. It was the worst recorded adult salmon die-off in the history of the West.

Fishermen and conservation groups, as well as the Bush administration’s political critics, claim the decision to put water on farmers’ fields instead of in the river was a major – if not THE major – cause of the 2002 kill. It’s a claim that Klamath Basin farmers and irrigators energetically dispute.

Greg Addington is the executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association, based in Klamath Falls. Ask him about the impact that irrigation has on the Klamath River and he’ll show you a brightly colored bar graph.

Farmers and irrigators measure water in acre-feet. An acre-foot is the amount of water that will cover an acre of land one foot deep – nearly 326,000 gallons. Addington’s graph shows the amount of water diverted for the Klamath irrigation project as a tiny blue bar representing less than 300,000 acre-feet a year. The average annual flow of the Klamath River near the mouth is a big red bar – almost 12 million acre-feet.

“The question we like to ask is, okay, taking that little bit [of irrigation water] and putting it on top of the red line – is that going to make everything better?” Addington says.

But others say Addington is playing a bit of a shell game.

Comparing the volume of irrigation water with the total annual flow of the river is misleading, they say. The total flow includes the heavy runoff of the winter and spring wet season. And the irrigation water mostly gets taken out in the dry summer and fall season, which is precisely when salmon trying to ascend the river to spawn need it the most.

“I think it’s an interesting way to try to rationalize the problem,” said Steve Pedery, executive director of the conservation group Oregon Wild. “There’s this view that somehow what goes on in the Klamath Project isn’t connected to the lower river.”

“The vast majority of the flow at the mouth happens in the winter time, when [the farmers] don’t need it and fish don’t need it,” said Dave Bitts, a veteran salmon fisherman in Eureka, CA. “But when the water is scarce and everybody needs it is when they take it for irrigation.”

The Klamath farmers and irrigators also say – and the scientific findings back them up – that low water levels in the river weren’t the only culprit in the 2002 kill. It was brought on by an unusual combination of factors: a larger-than-usual number of fish returning to spawn, high water temperatures and low water levels, all of which led to a disastrous disease outbreak.

Just the same, the fishermen and conservationists maintain, the die-off might not have happened or might not have been as bad if more water had been left in the river instead of being sprayed on barley and alfalfa. Higher water levels could have allowed the fish to disperse, they say, as well as making the river a bit cooler.

“The water in the river [at the time of the fish kill] was 10 to 20 degrees higher than the water in Klamath Lake,” Pedery said. Also, “A shallow, slow-moving river tends to get warmer than a deeper, fast-flowing river.”

The farmers and irrigators also note – and again, the science supports their point – that salmon populations in the Klamath system have always fluctuated and are affected by factors beyond anybody’s control, and in some cases beyond anybody’s understanding, such as the supply of plankton in the ocean and weather phenomena like El Niño. And they point out that gill nets out at sea and predation by sea lions also take their toll, as well as overfishing and bad logging practices in the past that destroyed salmon spawning beds.

Some Klamath farmers even maintain that the irrigation project helps the ecosystem. After it’s applied to crops, they say, the irrigation water percolates down through the soil and is collected in a vast network of drains that return it to the marshes where millions of waterfowl and other wildlife live.

“If you look at the ratio of diverted water to supplied water, we are so efficient,” said Dave Solem, manager of the Klamath Irrigation District, one of 11 operating within the Klamath Project. “And it’s because of the geography. What we basically do is, all the return flows that come off the property come back into our system and we re-use it. We’re only diverting less than three acre-feet per acre [per year], which is pretty incredible when you think about it. It goes in and it comes back.”

The Klamath Project drained some 80,000 acres of marshland in Lower Klamath Lake and turned it into farmland, but farmers and irrigators will tell you that if that acreage was still marshland it would lose more water through evaporation than it takes to irrigate it today. They also say the project’s hundreds of miles of irrigation canals and ditches support a huge and diverse wildlife population of their own.

Bill Walker, a big man wearing wraparound sunglasses and carrying a cell phone that rings constantly (his ringtone is “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”) described how birds and animals were wiped out when the ditches went dry after the irrigation cutoff of 2001.

“I think hopefully the Audubon Society along with the duck guys and the pheasant guys have got a sense of how many birds they destroyed when they turned the water off in ’01,” he said. “I always wish that I’d had a camera with me and taken a picture of this mama duck – a big old beautiful mallard duck with a broken wing – and she had about two chicks left, and she was trying to walk down the canal bank. Not only did they take the water away from us guys that are trying to make a livelihood, but they destroyed all that wildlife.”

“The Endangered Species Act in this case only has prescriptions for two species,” said Bill Kennedy, a farmer and member of the board of the Klamath Basin Improvement District. “We’ve got the two sucker fish [the Lost River sucker and the short-nosed sucker] and we’ve got the [Coho salmon] on the main stem of the Klamath River. It completely ignores the needs of the wildlife that we support on our private lands here in the Klamath Basin. We have over 400 species of vertebrates that depend upon irrigation for their habitat, for their food and forage. Those went by the wayside in 2001. … [The present policy] completely ignores the whole concept of holistic resource management. It’s management by injunction by a court, and it’s wrong.”

The farmers also say agriculture benefits wildlife because ducks, geese and other migratory birds visit the fields and feast on the leavings after they’ve harvested their crops. It’s a claim that Steve Pedery of Oregon Wild, who would like to see the wetlands remain wetlands, finds amusing: “That may work for geese, but it doesn’t work so well for a salamander.”

When you talk with Klamath farmers, a theme that comes across again and again is that they feel they’re being singled out as a political target because the Klamath Reclamation Project was created and is regulated by the federal government. Instead of making the farmers and the irrigation project out to be the bad guys, they say, the government and all the stakeholders – the commercial fishermen, the Native American tribes, the conservation groups, the sport fishing groups – need to develop a comprehensive approach to managing the entire Klamath Basin ecosystem.

“It’s a 10 million [acre] watershed – there’s a lot of things going on,” said Addington. “We’re 200,000 acres of that, plus or minus. We’re not trying to tell you that we don’t play a role. We’re in the watershed, we use water, we divert it, we return what we don’t use. But politically we’re a federal irrigation project, so we’re an easy entity for somebody to get their hands on. And that’s what happened.”

“We’re in the crosshairs,” agreed Kennedy. “We’re the focus. And it’s not necessarily justified. An issue that never seems to be brought to the table is the condition of our watershed. There’s absolutely no management of federal forestlands in the watershed in the Klamath River Basin, and the result has been less percolation of water, less recharge of groundwater.”

The farmers and ranchers say they’re hoping for a reasonable agreement to emerge from the ongoing Klamath Settlement Group talks. The negotiations are confidential, but Addington – who’s taking part in them on behalf of the Klamath Water Users Association, one of the 27 parties involved – said the water users are insisting on three general points:

“One, this project was built on the ability to move water around. So being able to … manage the energy costs, that has been one of our main things. But that doesn’t mean anything if we don’t know if we’re going to have water. So a reliable supply of water was our second point. We’re month to month every year, and for planning purposes, when you’re trying to raise a crop or manage a system, that’s a terrible place to be. We want some security on the water situation.

“And then the third thing is, we’ve used the generic term ‘safe harbor.’ And what that means is, if there’s an effort to reintroduce or to introduce salmon here in the upper basin … we want to be in a position to welcome the fish back, not to worry about our continued existence because they’re here.”

Addington believes the parties are willing to compromise and is hoping a satisfactory solution will come out of the talks. But not all the farmers in the basin put much trust in the good faith of those on the other side.

“Other people involved in this thing tend to blame, blame, blame, and their solutions are not reasonable or implementable,” said Kennedy. “They’re about to shut off irrigation water to some of the most prosperous farmland in the world.”

Then he lifted his hands in a gesture of mixed disgust and resignation. “But maybe it’s not that important anymore,” he said.

One thing seems certain: The farmers and ranchers of the Klamath Basin aren’t going to easily give up the land that they – and in many cases their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents – have lived and worked on for decades.

Bill Walker’s grandparents came to the basin and started dairy farming before the 1920s. He himself has been farming there since 1972.

“The government came in and said to the veterans [after World War I], ‘We’re gonna give you water,’” he said. “We’ve kept our word, and now I think the U.S. government should keep its word.”

Troubled Waters, Part III: The settlement talks -- path to a solution or political fix?

Drive around the back roads near Klamath Falls and you’ll still come across a few hand-lettered signs left over from the spring of 2002, when federal officials shut off irrigation water to help threatened salmon and sucker fish. The signs bear some variation of the message: “Farmers – The New Endangered Species.”

Drive through the coastal fishing communities of Northern California and you’ll see the same type of homemade protest signs, with the word “fishermen” substituted for “farmers.” The signs have been there since 2006, when the government shut down the fishing season along 700 miles of the Pacific Coast to protect dwindling stocks of Klamath River salmon.

The signs are emblems of the conflict that has raged over the Klamath River for decades. But that conflict isn’t a simple one of fish vs. people or farmers vs. fishermen. It’s a many-headed monster that was created by trying to make a finite resource meet too many different, and often conflicting, demands.

Farmers have wanted the Klamath’s water for their fields. Power companies have wanted it to turn their turbines. Fishermen and Native American tribes have wanted it for fish. Conservationists have wanted it for fish too, and also for the myriad other forms of life that inhabit its wetlands.

And politicians have wanted it to help them win elections.

The most concerted effort ever made to resolve the Klamath mess is now underway. The Klamath Resources Settlement Group has been meeting since 2005. Its 26 participating parties include four Native American tribes, three county governments, two state governments, six federal agencies, fishermen’s groups, farmers’ groups, conservationist groups.

The settlement group’s closed-door negotiations are supposed to produce an agreement sometime in November, and some participants are optimistic they’ll hit that target. But critics claim the process already has been poisoned by politics – and there’s a good chance that any agreement that comes out of it will only lead to more court battles.

One critical point of contention in the talks is the fate of four aging hydro power dams – the oldest was built in 1908, the newest in 1962 – owned by the utility giant PacifiCorp. Those dams, along with three others PacifiCorp owns on the Klamath, are up for relicensing by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The fishermen’s groups, the conservationists and the Native American tribes say the four old dams – which were built without any provision for fish passage – block access to hundreds of miles of salmon spawning habitat, as well as polluting water downstream and endangering salmon on their spawning run by making water temperatures higher. Their goal is to get the dams out.

The dams “provide very little benefit to the public, no irrigation at all, no flood control benefits to speak of,” said Glen Spain, Northwest regional director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA). “All they do is produce a little bit of power and destroy what was historically the third most productive salmon fishery in the country.”

Publicly, PacifiCorp is taking the position that the dams are still valuable and it wants to keep them in operation. “PacifiCorp considers Klamath dam removal to be an extreme outcome that does not balance environmental issues,” the company’s website states.

“They’re valuable to us because they’re valuable to our customers,” said PacifiCorp spokesperson Jan Mitchell. “They generate enough power to supply about 72,000 customers a year. If we didn’t have these projects we would have to replace that power,” probably with an environmentally unfriendly fossil fuel generating plant.

The PCFFA and other opponents of the dams say the relatively small amount of electricity they generate could be replaced with wind and solar power and conservation. They cite findings by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife that it would cost much more to provide fish passage around the dams, as the National Marine Fisheries Service has demanded, than to simply take them out. And they say PacifiCorp is just holding out for the highest price it can get.

“They want to be bought out, and it’s only a matter of fixing the right price,” Spain said. “But these are very old klunker cars in the junkyard, and they’re asking a premium price.”

Even if the issue of the dams can be resolved, other serious obstacles to a settlement would remain. The biggest is what to do about the Klamath Reclamation Project and the approximately 2,400 farms and ranches it provides water to.

The massive federal irrigation project was authorized by Congress in 1905, and construction of its first main canal began two years later. In the early 1920s the government encouraged World War I veterans to homestead on irrigated land in the Klamath Basin. Some descendants of those homesteaders are still farming there today.

The project drained roughly 80,000 acres of wetlands and turned them into farmland. In 1908, to protect some of what remained, President Theodore Roosevelt established the 49,600-acre Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge – the nation’s first waterfowl refuge. In 1928 the Tule Lake and Upper Klamath refuges were created, adding another 32,000 acres.

But tens of thousands of acres in the refuges have remained open to farming and ranching, and that’s a sore point with conservationist organizations.

In the Tule Lake Refuge, “you’ve got two polluted farm ponds and the rest is commercial farming,” said Bob Hunter, staff attorney for Water Watch. “You could drive through those farms and you would never know it’s a wildlife refuge.”

Besides eliminating or reducing farming in the refuges, the conservation groups – as well as the fishermen’s groups – want to see the Klamath Reclamation Project leave more water in the river, especially during the critical late summer / early fall period when Chinook and Coho salmon are trying to swim upstream to spawn. They maintain that a politically motivated decision by the Bush administration to let the farmers have the water instead of keeping it in the river led to a die-off of between 33,000 and 77,000 salmon and steelhead in September 2002 – the worst adult salmon kill in the history of the West.

“The problem is it’s an over-promised river – there are too many demands on it,” said Sean Stevens, a spokesman for the conservation group Oregon Wild. “The government 95 years ago gave all these rights to farmers, and it’s not realistic to believe there could be that much farming and still enough water for the wildlife and for the fishery downstream.”

“We’re not trying to eliminate agriculture in the basin,” said Hunter of Water Watch. “People make that statement to try to paint us as radical. We believe there can be a great deal of agricultural activity in the basin; we just need to make it a manageable size.”

“There is a need to reduce the total irrigation demand in the basin, and [the farmers] know it and we know it, and we are working to try to do that in a way that keeps agricultural communities viable,” said Glen Spain of the PCFFA. “Is it easy? No. If it were easy it would have been done 90 years ago.”

The solution conservation groups have been pushing for years is a voluntary government buyout of farmers in the Klamath Basin, but farmers are wary of that idea. They worry that if too many of them leave, a tipping point will come and the region will cease to be agricultural. The support businesses – the tractor dealers, the fertilizer dealers, the irrigation pipe suppliers – will go away, the farms and ranches will be carved up into hobby farms and “ranchettes,” and a way of life that has existed for over a century will die.

If the farmers and ranchers go out of business, “what are you going to do with all the land?” asked Greg Addington, executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association. “Is it going to just sit there? What’s going to support the communities that depend on agriculture? It doesn’t take very much, and pretty soon the whole thing collapses.

“People here – no offense – are very scared of this looking like Central Oregon, with the development, with the parceling,” he added.

As if the Klamath Basin settlement talks weren’t complex and difficult enough in themselves, conservation groups say the Bush administration is trying to manipulate them to serve its own political agenda.

Water Watch and Oregon Wild originally were participants in the negotiations, but they dropped out – or were forced out, depending on how you look at it – after the administration imposed conditions they couldn’t accept.

“We and Water Watch were evicted forcibly from the talks because we could not sign on to some of the demands the Bush administration was making,” said Steve Pedery, conservation director of Oregon Wild. “We were presented [in January] with a settlement framework and told that we had to sign a statement of support and agree we wouldn’t try to change it.”

The settlement framework, Pedery said, amounted to a “blanket statement of support” for agricultural development on wildlife refuges, weakening endangered species protections and guaranteeing irrigation water to the basin’s farmers. “The spin that’s been put on it is that, ‘Well, they excluded themselves,’ but they essentially tried to hold the river hostage.”

Bob Hunter of Water Watch confirmed Pedery’s account. “We didn’t quit – we were excluded involuntarily,” he said. “Basically there was an attempt to ram something down our throats and we objected, and that’s why we were excluded.”

According to Hunter and Pedery, the administration is using the PacifiCorp dams as leverage to try to force an agreement that’s favorable to Klamath Basin irrigators and also will set the precedent of allowing farming and ranching in wildlife refuges nationwide.

“I think the Bush administration has shown over and over again that it’s not really looking for a scientifically based solution, but a political fix that favors irrigation interests over other interests in the basin,” Hunter said. “And of course that is just going to keep the basin in crisis. The irrigators see the dam settlement talks as a new opportunity to get their agenda, basically using the prospect of dam removal as a lure.”

It’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on in the settlement talks because they’re taking place behind closed doors and the participants are not allowed to discuss any details. And it may be impossible to ever know what went on, because no formal minutes are being kept.

“We haven’t been keeping minutes per se,” said Ed Sheets, the facilitator for the talks. “We’ve been keeping a summary of all the follow-up actions. I think the settlement agreement will be detailed enough that you will see the reasoning and the thinking behind it.”

But Hunter and Pedery warn that if the settlement talks yield an agreement that they see as violating the Endangered Species Act or other federal or state laws, their groups likely will challenge it in court.

“If this does wind up producing a settlement that violates the ESA it will all end up in court, and there will be a lot of heartburn and agitation for everybody without anything really being done,” Pedery said.

“Certainly we will continue to advocate for and protect the public interest,” Hunter said. “If there is an agreement that we feel violates the ESA or any other federal or state laws, we would certainly consider litigation if appropriate.”

In the meantime, Pedery thinks the best course for conservation groups would be to wait for the Bush administration to leave office in January 2009 and try to work with a new, and hopefully more environmentally friendly, administration.

“The Bush administration has tried again and again to exploit the crisis in the Klamath Basin,” he said. “We’ve just been at an impasse since 2001, where the Bush administration has refused to allow any reduction in water demand to go forward unless they’re forced to by a court. There’s no reason to rush this.”

But others, including Glen Spain of the PCFFA, feel a greater sense of urgency. They know that every year that goes by without a resolution of the Klamath crisis holds the possibility for another fish kill like the one that happened in 2002.

The negotiating framework that Oregon Wild and Water Watch balked at “was nothing more than a draft, and it was clear we would have to spend months working on parallel guarantees for water for fish,” Spain said. “There were some unfortunate hard feelings, and I think it was very unfortunate that those happened, but ultimately there is no choice but to go forward and try to reach a solution. … We are very much in favor of a negotiated settlement if it is possible. We remain optimistic. We are working hard to craft a settlement that all stakeholders can agree to.”

The Klamath crisis, Spain added, isn’t the result of one group or another acting out of evil motives, but of misguided public policies going clear back to the beginning of the last century.

“It’s a story of good people caught in a bad situation,” he said. “There are no bad people in this story, but there are a lot of bad policies.”

In fact, the story of the Klamath River is a classic example of Murphy’s Law in action: Everything that could go wrong did, including things that everybody thought couldn’t go wrong. It’s also an object lesson in how people have misused, overused and abused the rivers of the West, from the Colorado to the Columbia, “managing” them to serve short-term needs with little or no thought for long-term consequences.

“Within the Klamath Basin you probably have represented about every water issue that you have in the West,” said Hunter of Water Watch. “You have state and federal policies, you have tribal rights, then you have an endangered species situation, you have the whole issue of how water is managed. All these things are finally coming to a head. …

“It’s indicative of society as a whole. We’re in denial of the fact that there are limits to resource development, that there are going to be repercussions from over-development.”

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