Salmon Stakes

Those who did best didn't own land; they leased it from the Fish and Wildlife Service at $1 per acre while reaping a minimum of $129 per acre in farm subsidies. They farmed the Lower Klamath and Tule Lake refuges, supposedly devoted to waterfowl and (in the case of the latter) bald eagles, which depend on waterfowl. These two refuges, once the flagships of the refuge system, are now national embarrassments. Of America's 540 national wildlife refuges, they are the only two that permit commercial agriculture. The farming program, administered on 25,600 acres, requires about 60,000 acre-feet of Klamath River water per year; pollutes river and wetlands with phosphates and nitrates; and loads land and water with pesticides, including 2 neurotoxins, 14 endocrine disrupters, and 11 carcinogens. When water is scarce, as it usually is in the basin, marshes go dry so farmers can get water. Waterfowl have plummeted from 6 million or 7 million in the 1960s to about 1 million today.

On both refuges the Fish and Wildlife Service is in gross violation of the National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act of 1997, which stipulates that permitted activities be "compatible with the major purposes for which such areas were established." The service attempts to justify its farming-first policy with the Kuchel Act of 1964, which permits agriculture in national wildlife refuges. But the statute requires that such agriculture be consistent with fish and wildlife management. After dewatering, polluting, and poisoning marshes and river, farmers produce potatoes and onions and grain - far less nutritious to waterfowl than wetland plants.

For anyone still in doubt, the summer of 2001 proved that there isn't enough water in the Klamath River for fish, waterfowl, and agriculture. Something had to give; that was agriculture and refuges. The river's endangered mullet and threatened coho salmon had first dibs on water. Then came tribal-trust resources - mainly chinook salmon. If there was any water to spare, it could go to agriculture and refuges. That's what state water law and the Endangered Species Act said.

But politics said otherwise. Incited and assisted by property-rights groups, irrigators organized a "bucket brigade." (This was modeled after the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade of Elko County, Nevada, which fantasized that it had "sovereignty" over federal lands and, on July 4, 2000, hacked an illegal road through the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest and habitat of the threatened bull trout.) On May 7, 2001, some 15,000 farmers, politicians, and property-rights activists (many bused in by the Farm Bureau) scooped buckets of water from a lake that feeds the Klamath River and passed them hand to hand through downtown Klamath Falls and into an irrigation ditch. The media circus attracted politicians, who puffed and blew about the evils of the Endangered Species Act. Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) vowed to introduce a bill that would "reform" the act. "We must never feel it's okay to say that sucker fish are more valuable than the farm family," he proclaimed. Representative Wally Herger (R-CA) called the situation a "poster child" for Endangered Species Act reform. And Representative Greg Walden (R-OR) lamented that surgery on the act had to start with another "dust bowl." Later, an organizer of the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade arrived with a 10-foot-tall bucket. The Pioneer Press, a local weekly, started a "virtual bucket brigade" by e-mail, in which 70,000 people expressed support for the irrigators.

On June 29 an irrigation-canal headgate was illegally opened and water released from Upper Klamath Lake. BuRec shut it. Twice more an angry mob, now encamped, opened the gate, and twice more BuRec shut it. On July 4 about 150 demonstrators formed a human chain, shielding vandals who cut off the headgate's new lock with a diamond-bladed chainsaw and a cutting torch. The sheriff announced that he wouldn't bust anyone, because they were only "trying to save their lives." A deputy drove up in his cruiser, lights flashing, removed his hat, and replaced it with a farmer's. With that, he opined that Oregon environmentalists were likely to elicit such violence as "homicides." He even suggested two potential victims: Andy Kerr and Wendell Wood of the Oregon Natural Resources Council. Finally, BuRec called in U.S. marshals.

Two weeks later Senator Smith's amendment to the Interior appropriations bill - it would have required federal agencies operating in the Klamath Basin to ignore the Endangered Species Act, legal obligations to Indian tribes, and the Clean Water Act - failed by a vote of 52 to 48.

On July 24 Interior Secretary Gale Norton divined that there was water to spare in Upper Klamath Lake and ordered 75,000 acre-feet released to farmers. "Unfortunately," she declared, "none of this water will reach the national wildlife refuges because there simply is not enough water to do more than provide a little relief to some desperate farm families during the remainder of this season." She went on to suggest that wintering bald eagles could be artificially fed.

The drought was much less severe in 2002. Still, with great fanfare, the Bush administration cut off minimum flows to fish, tribes, and refuges in order to provide irrigators with full deliveries. On March 29 the headgate at Klamath Falls was again opened - this time by Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who were on hand to emcee the ceremony. Veneman spoke of the administration's "commitment to help farmers and ranchers recover from losses suffered last year." Norton gushed about how nice it was to be "providing water to farmers."

Diverting so much of the Klamath for irrigation required brand-new science. Under the mandate of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the NMFS had issued a biological opinion that such dewatering would jeopardize coho salmon, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had issued a biological opinion that it would jeopardize the mullet. So Norton asked the National Research Council (an offshoot of the National Academy of Sciences) to review the two documents. In February 2002, after just three months, the NRC panel hatched an interim draft report, alleging that the biological opinions weren't supported by enough science. Armed with this opinion, the president's Klamath advisory team (consisting of the secretaries of Interior, Commerce, and Agriculture, and the chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality) ordered new findings from the NMFS and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

On October 28, 2002, Michael Kelly, the NMFS biologist assigned to write the biological opinion, filed a federal whistle-blower disclosure with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, charging that the team's recommendations for minimum flows were twice rejected under "political pressure." His main complaint was that the required analysis for the Reasonable and Prudent Alternative - the part of a biological opinion that tells an agency (in this case, BuRec) what it should do to avoid jeopardizing a listed species and which, in this case, had been suggested by BuRec - was intentionally not carried out, and that a specific risk to coho salmon that he and his colleagues had identified had been intentionally ignored.