Calamity in Klamath
By Blake Hurst

Paul Christy flew fighter planes in World War II, enlisting within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart, and is extremely proud to have served his country. But today, when he talks about how he and his neighbors have been treated, tears come to his eyes. "Sixty years ago, I was behind Rommel's lines in North Africa. Today, I'm still fighting, although this time, it's against my own government."

Christy is a retired farmer in the Klamath basin of Northern California and Southern Oregon. In the spring of 2001, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced abruptly that no water would be available for irrigation in his valley during the 2001 growing season. None whatever. Instead, bureaucrats with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service decided that the water that had been used for agriculture for the last half-century should be retained in Upper Klamath Lake. Without water, the 1,200 local farmers were unable to raise their crops, an economic death sentence for the entire district. 

The officials closing off the taps cited the Endangered Species Act, opining that the usual withdrawal of irrigation water from Upper Klamath Lake would harm the shortnose sucker, the Lost River sucker, and the coho salmon. "The decision was announced the day before President Clinton left office," notes basin farmer John Crawford--just another parting shot from a President who was extremely busy doing favors for his pet interests in the last weeks of his tenure. 

The irrigation cutoff destroyed well over $100 million in immediate economic activity. As farmers and laborers attempted to deal with the loss of jobs, a year's income, and in some cases the land itself, referrals for mental health counseling increased dramatically. Sharon Molder, the principal of the local high school, reports that the district lost around 50 students after farm families sold their land and moved on. Students were under stress, understandably confused as to why three species of fish were more important than their lifelong homes. In perhaps the saddest story, Molder told of a Hispanic family who had started out as field workers, and after a lifetime of piecework under the relentless Western sun had saved enough to buy their own farm. They lost everything as a direct result of the irrigation cutoff. 

Paul Christy's tears for his farm are particularly poignant because of the way the basin was settled. Christy and his neighbors are latter-day homesteaders who actually received their land from a grateful nation in 1947 as a thank you for service in World War II. Over 4,000 veterans entered a lottery for land in the Klamath Project, gathering to watch the names drawn from a pickle jar. Each winner received a small plot of land, in Christy's case 70 acres, and brought his hopes and young family to the empty basin just as the irrigation project was being launched. There were no roads, no electricity, no schools, no churches, no homes. Just the stark beauty of the valley, surrounded by foothills and mountains in the distance. The government provided tarpaper-covered barracks recycled from a nearby Japanese internment camp, sawn into 50-foot-long sections and moved out to the farms. A handy pamphlet provided room plans and diagrams for turning half a barracks into one's dream home. Christy still lives in one of the barracks.

The settlers formed organizations, elected a school board, and went about creating a society. As resident Marty Macy describes it, "A promise was made to these folks. They had to uphold their end of the bargain, and the job they did was incredible. They were on a mission here to develop communities from the ground up. When they came there was no infrastructure of any kind. They were asked to feed a real hungry world after the war, and they have done that."

Eleanor Bolesta, a machinist mate in the Navy during the war, settled in the Klamath Basin with her husband, a veteran who had been wounded fighting on Guam. She describes their farming initiation as "the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. At least in my generation, to have land is to have security. I never dreamed that I'd have my own farm. It was a very wonderful thing."

Their first summer on their spread, the Bolestas raised seed clover, earning enough money, Eleanor proudly reports, to buy a stove, a refrigerator, and a Chevy. Still ramrod straight in posture in her late 70s, Bolesta is appalled and angered at what has happened to her. In a recent interview, she brought along a copy of the deed that she received from the government after the 1947 land drawing. The patent grants rights to water from the project "to the said Eleanor J. Bolesta, and to her heirs and assigns, forever." When Bolesta enlisted in the Navy, she made a commitment. She kept her promise. Sadly, the same can't be said for the federal authorities.

Bolesta is only one of many homesteaders who feels betrayed by her government. Bob Lilliard landed on Utah Beach during the D-day invasion. Francis Webb was wounded on Okinawa. Carl Voorhees was a pilot, flying over enemy territory in a heavily loaded glider. Phil Krizo participated in 23 missions with a night fighter squadron in Italy, and fought in the China/Burma/India theater. These men and their progeny are fiercely proud of their membership in the "greatest generation," and they simply cannot fathom why the rug was pulled out from under their lives in the summer of 2001.

The Klamath Basin Project was begun in 1905 as the second undertaking of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The basin receives around 12 inches of rain a year, making most agriculture impossible without irrigation. Before the cutoff, local farmers grew potatoes, onions, small grains, and horseradish. They also hosted hundreds of thousands of breeding migratory birds, and as many as 1,000 bald eagles at a time, making the area one of the West's most important refuges for wildlife. Farmers are proud of their role in supporting the wildlife populations, and have long left a portion of their grain in the field for the birds--grain that wasn't available after the irrigation cutoff. Ecologists, notes John Crawford, have long preached the evils of "single species management," yet last year over 400 species of creatures living in the basin suffered along with the farmers, all for the supposed benefit of only three species.

When you think of Western water projects, the majestic lines of the Hoover Dam immediately come to mind, but the main dam on the Upper Klamath Lake is a lot humbler. There has always been a natural reef at the end of the lake--a long, narrow, and extremely shallow body of water--and all that was needed in the man-made dam was a few feet of extra height to store water for use in the summer. An engineering marvel, the project moves water to where it is needed, when it is needed, supplies two wildlife refuges, collects and reuses runoff, and is a finely tuned mechanism that has, in the past, carefully served many competing interests. The project is unique in the West because of its efficiency; most of the water is used several times for diverse purposes. And the water used for irrigation hasn't been diverted from elsewhere but has always been present in the basin; the complex series of dams and canals just changes the timing of the local water flows.

"Making the desert bloom like a rose" is an ethic no longer much respected, but the designers of this project took it to heart. Locals are astonished that decades of effort are now being discarded like yesterday's newspaper, without appreciation for the noble way the wasted natural resources of the basin have been put to use. Two large seasonal lakes originally covered the basin, so it was never desert, but has always been mucky and rich in organic matter. Tracey Liskey, a farmer in the basin, splutters that when he dug a well he bored through 900 feet of duck guano. (That's not really what he said, but this is a family magazine.) Dave Krizo raises crops organically without fertilizer, and produces yields that would be the envy of Midwestern farmers. This is some of the most fertile land in the country, and is ideally suited to agriculture. The farmers raise crops that are not in surplus or generally subsidized. Unlike some western water projects, this one made good economic sense.

Perhaps the basin was chosen as an environmentalist target because the residents were perceived as unsophisticated. This may once have been true, but no longer. The farmers in the basin received national media coverage last summer when they organized a "bucket brigade" to dramatize their plight, drawing 20,000 sympathizers to the headgates of the main irrigation canal. A Web site and cell phone calling tree have been set up, and when my wife and I journeyed to the basin we were the beneficiaries of an extremely savvy media operation, with scheduled visits to numerous homesteaders, farmers, scientists, and government officials, all organized by local activist Bob Gasser. We met Gasser in a parking lot, next to his pickup festooned with dozens of bumper stickers expressing colorful displeasure with the recent governance in his community.

Local farmers have produced a series of videos outlining their predicament, and have actively lobbied government officials. Principal Molder reports that when students organized to lobby for a reversal of the irrigation cutoff, discipline problems at the high school decreased from their initial spike. The farmers have all become fairly competent hydrologists and limnologists, telling visitors more about the spawning cycle of the shortnose sucker than anybody but a lovelorn sucker would ever want to know. These folks responded to a mortal threat to their livelihood and way of life in the best traditions of American democracy. If only their opponents had acted as honorably.

Whatever the reason that Clinton administration environmentalists chose the Klamath Basin for the biggest water rights confrontation in the nation, we can be sure that it wasn't good environmental science. The groundwork was laid in the 1988 decision to list the two sucker species as endangered, based on a combined estimated population of 15,000. The Endangered Species Act as currently written is a draconian law that allows almost no room for compromise or common sense in its implementation. Once any creature is listed as "endangered," all other interests must defer utterly and immediately to whatever the biological regulators prescribe.

Since the "endangered" listing of the suckers, an ever-increasing contingent of government scientists (soon to outnumber the fish, if the direst reports are to be believed) has been tagging and counting suckers. From 1995 to 1997, 3,439 suckers were tagged by graduate students enjoying the delightful summer weather in the area. Yet large fish kills from near-toxic levels of ammonia during the same period resulted in only 23 tags being recovered from the over 5,000 sucker carcasses examined. The farmers and  extension scientists in the area immediately asked: If less than half of 1 percent of all dead fish recovered were tagged, even after 3,400 had been marked, doesn't that suggest the true population is much larger than 15,000? The regulators were not amused by this commonsense reaction which suggests their numbers don't make sense.

The official opinion was that the sucker die-offs, whatever portion of the total population they represented, were being caused by lake levels that had fallen too low. But old-timers in the area can remember hay being cut along the lake below water levels that the complicated computer models of government biologists now deem essential. During a dry spell in the early '90s, the lake got so low that local residents were picking up artifacts from Indian camps in areas that regulators insist have always been under water.

If high lake levels are better, locals ask, why do suckers often die when the lake is up, while in the 13 years of lowest lake level over the past century, no major fish kills have occurred? None.

Dr. Ken Rykbost heads the Klamath Experiment Station, which is part of Oregon State University. No slave to sartorial dictates, he wears the kind of Western shirts that involve lots of steel snaps, plus cowboy boots to go with his crew cut. He's no slave to scientific fashion either, staking out a position on water quality and fish survival that has environmentalists hollering. Although uncomfortable with the criticism, he continues to point out the correlation between high water levels and fish kills, and he doesn't stop there. Everybody involved with the issue admits that the water quality in Upper Klamath Lake is awful. Too high in phosphorous, the lake experiences regular algae blooms that threaten fish. The real controversy revolves around when the water quality is worst, and what causes the high nutrient loading in the first place.

Environmentalists blame the problem on agricultural activity in the watershed above the lake. But the water quality seems to have been poor before agriculture ever reached the area. The famed America explorer John Frémont, who traveled through the area in the 1840s, reported that the water was "putrid," and refused to let his horses drink. The land above the lake is volcanic (Crater Lake National Park is not far away), and naturally rich in phosphorous. Fully 40 years ago, the National Geological Survey reported that there was already enough phosphorous in the sediment at the bottom of the lake to guarantee undesirable levels of nutrient loading for most of the century, even if no further drop of phosphorous entered the lake. In truth, the only agriculture above the lake is ranching, and no commercial fertilizers are applied to the pastureland because the soil is so high in phosphorous that none is needed. Naturally occurring springs in the watershed add groundwater that is extremely high in nutrients.

Models developed by scientists for other bodies of water in the West postulate that water quality should be worst when lake levels are low. But empirical data collected by Rykbost and others show just the opposite. Ammonia levels reach near toxic levels when the lake level is high, and fall much lower when the water retreats. Phosphorous levels too are higher in years when the lake is full. "Only certain information was used by the USFWS," admits former Fish and Wildlife Service employee and environmental consultant David Vogel. "Additional relevant science-based information was either overlooked or ignored," he says. "The agencies gave greater weight to theoretical information to support an assumption for high lake levels and high reservoir releases without acknowledging empirical data that did not support their premise."

The third fish invoked by opponents of irrigation is the coho salmon, which is found, among many other places, in the Klamath River below the lake. Coho salmon are commonly raised in hatcheries, and these fish are genetically identical to those that breed naturally. But environmentalists do not want fishery-raised salmon to be counted in the census that determines whether a species is endangered. In fact, they have gone so far as to kill "introduced" fish by whacking them with baseball bats, and, most recently, Fish and Wildlife Service employees destroyed 170,000 mature stocked coho before they could spawn. 

A recent court decision put a halt to artificial distinctions between salmon runs according to their origins, and the question of whether hatchery-raised fish in the Klamath River are really fish now rests before the Ninth Circuit Federal Court. (No doubt environmentalists would prefer a decision rendered by judges raised among wolves rather than those born in hospitals.) Residents of the basin see irony in the fact that the cohos destroyed by the Fish and Wildlife Service appeared on the menus of local food banks. Communities have been strangled in order to help a fish so plentiful it's available to be served to hungry homeless people. 

At the request of the incoming Bush administration, the National Academy of Sciences convened a panel late in 2001 to examine the biological opinions used to shut off the water at Klamath. The panel accepted much written testimony, and spent a day hearing verbal arguments from various parties to the controversy --mostly Indian tribes claiming ancestral water rights, various environmental groups, and the government agencies that have their oars in this lake. At the end of the day, the farmers and their representatives were granted 24 minutes to talk.

But when the draft of the National Academy report appeared early this year, a strange thing happened. The panel members actually looked at the empirical evidence, and decided that the data did not justify the regulatory action taken in the spring of 2001. "The committee concludes that there is no substantial scientific foundation at this time for changing the operation of the Klamath Project to maintain higher water levels in Upper Klamath Lake for the endangered sucker populations or higher minimum flows in the Klamath River main stem for the threatened coho population." The unanimous decision goes on to state that increased releases from the lake into the river in the summer months might actually be harmful to the salmon, as water temperatures in the lake are near lethal levels for the coho during the summer.

It was a breathtaking rebuke to the government agencies. The farmers rejoiced. Environmentalists wailed. The New York Times weighed in with a particularly tendentious editorial, essentially admitting: science be damned, everybody knows those farmers should never have been there in the first place. The Times argument encapsulated much that is disturbing to those who live and work in rural areas of the American West. Its screed roundly criticized the Academy report, and castigated Westerners for overreacting to the "annoying" steps taken to protect three fish. "Annoying" was a nice touch: over $100 million in economic losses, thousands of people without income, farm workers going hungry because no work was available, and a cloud over the very existence of numerous towns and communities--were this any other than a fight for environmentalist holy scripture, the media title for the situation would surely have been "catastrophe."

Any human activity, including the printing of the New York Times, disrupts what went before. For all we know, the Times building may be located in the long-lost habitat of any number of animal species. The grave problem with the Endangered Species Act is that it makes no allowances whatever for the social, economic, cultural, or even other environmental costs of sheltering its favored creatures. Rural Americans are learning that the really important calculus in species-protection fights and other environmental ruckuses is not over costs, but over votes. Exotic species are priceless only when they reside where powerful voters don't.

Proof can be found just a few miles from the nation's capital. Each and every day, fifteen truckloads of sludge are dumped into the Potomac River. Soon a new bridge will be constructed across the waterway. All this happens in willful disobedience to the dictates of the Endangered Species Act. You see, the sludge disrupts the spawning grounds of the shortnose sturgeon--which for some reason seems not to be as important to Beltway bureaucrats, environmentalists, and politicians as its kissing cousin the shortnose sucker (conveniently located in farm country).

Nor does the shortnose sturgeon seem to be as vital as the pallid sturgeon, which has the good fortune of living in the Missouri River instead of the Potomac. Washington, D.C.'s Fish and Wildlife Service has recommended that large parts of the Midwest be flooded each spring in order to ensure the prosperity of the pallid sturgeon. Does it simply have a cuter nose? Or could this decision have something to do with the fact that the people living in Hamburg, Iowa and Rock Port, Missouri are easier to push around than the residents of Georgetown and other tony precincts where our nation's order-giving class congregates?

Bills have been introduced in Congress that would require scientific peer review of all current Endangered Species listings and habitat designations. When the railroading of Klamath residents is coupled with many dubious new "endangered" listings over the last decade, not to mention scandals like the recent attempt by biologists to plant domesticated lynx hair in the wild as a way of forcing land to be set aside as protected lynx territory, it seems only sensible that we question the validity of what passes for science in the enforcement of today's Endangered Species Act.

The Act has long been plagued by faulty data. Almost as many species have been removed from the list because they never should have been on it, as have been recovered" through restoration efforts. One bill introduced by Oregon Representative Greg Walden would require all data used in Endangered Species enforcement to be reviewed by outside specialists, a suggestion which enraged environmentalists who testified at a recent hearing on the proposal. Andrew Dobson, a scientist from Princeton, opposed the bill because it would be cumbersome, expensive, and time consuming to review the work done by regulators. Imagine consuming time and money in the cause of better environmental decision-making!

Of course the truth is that the cost of convening a panel of the National Academy of Sciences would be vastly less than the losses suffered by the farmers in the Klamath Project. In fact, the losses of the citizens of the Klamath area would pay for hundreds of scientific panels, and the money would be well spent. It seems evident that environmentalists and the regulators they have long manipulated can no longer be entrusted with important rulings without reviewing all of their work, including the collection of data.

In March of this year, in response to the NAS report and heavy snowfall above Upper Klamath Lake, which increased the water available, the Bush administration finally took steps to restore water to the basin. Farmers were able to irrigate again this year. But until all of the suits filed in response to the administration's decision are settled, they won't know whether their farms will continue to receive water in the future, or how much. The battle will have to be fought again each and every spring, with the outcome depending on the political whims of the administration in power, the snowfall of the preceding winter, and the fancy of the judges involved in the endless litigation. Meanwhile, local residents have no peace of mind, their land values have collapsed, their futures are foggy. No resident can feel secure in his property. Nothing will ever be as it had been in Klamath.

The residents of Klamath are admirable people; many qualify as true heroes. But can 1,200 or so farm families with modest resources sustain the fight, raising the funds needed for constant litigation while keeping their businesses running? The determination that won a World War and settled the West is still there, and the homesteading veterans and their successors vow to continue as implacable foes of those who detest their very existence in this beautiful place. But the Klamath Basin was chosen by the Clintonites as the locale of the biggest water fight in the West and a test case for the Endangered Species Act specifically because nobody there is rich or powerful. There are no new homes on the farms, no shiny equipment, and the living afforded by the basin is modest. While interest groups and politicians pay homage to the concept of the small family farm, the under-100-acre spreads that dot the Klamath valley are much easier targets than the urban populations and powerhouse corporations that depend on larger water projects.

At a recent hearing of the House Resources Committee on bills to amend some flexibility into the Endangered Species Act, the press director for the Environmental Defense Fund approached me and struck up a conversation. I explained why I was there, and that I had just returned from a trip to the Klamath Basin. He asked me quizzically if the folks there were "still upset."

"Still upset?" Eleanor Bolesta is more than upset. She's been betrayed by a government that she trusted. She's lost all that she ever worked for, because there is no longer a market for any land in Klamath.

Paul Christy is more than "upset." He's profoundly angry, and his feelings won't fade with time. Sixty years ago, he risked his life so that today's 20-somethings from the Environmental Defense Fund can testify before Congress, and his sacrifice was rewarded with a promise--a promise now broken in large part because of the efforts of the Environmental Defense Fund.

That careless question from a pleasant yuppie environmentalist exhibits either a willful ignorance of the actual results of today's Endangered Species Act, or a heartless disregard for the effort, love, sweat, tears, and dedication that goes into building any farm, community, business, or productive individual life tied to the land. Environmental groups have a vision of the West which places no value on human presence and output, a vision which would replace the rural West with their unpeopled version of Eden. At times it seems that the cultural divide between those who actually live on the land and those who would sacrifice any residents to suckerfish, moths, and beetles may just be too great a gulf to bridge. 

The Klamath settlers have another vision--one which values all of creation, and finds a place for strong and productive human communities. The Krizos, the Christys, the Macys, and their neighbors are true American heroes. After winning a war, they followed in the footsteps of the pioneers of previous centuries and pulled up their stakes to move West. Settling an empty land, they built families and neighborly institutions, extending the fabric of American life.

These Americans love their country, and have lived lives that embody the ideals on which it was founded. As they reach the end of their days, we should be celebrating their achievements. Instead, we--in the person of our collective government--are threatening their livelihoods. For shame.

—Blake Hurst is a TAE contributing writer, and a third-generation Missouri farmer.