Salmon Stakes

The only people to express surprise at the fish kill worked for the Interior Department. Steve Williams, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, showed up at the press conference to lament the plaintiffs' "premature rush to judgment" and proclaim that it was "too soon to draw conclusions" about what might have killed the salmon - roughly the equivalent of a parachute manufacturer suggesting that sky divers scraped from asphalt might have died on the way down from food poisoning.

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, Gale Norton's deputy chief of staff, asserted that the government can't release much water from Upper Klamath Lake because of the endangered mullet, failing to mention that if it hadn't diverted the river for full deliveries to irrigators in violation of the Endangered Species Act, there would have been more than enough water for mullet, salmon, and refuges.

Finally, James Connaughton, chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality, offered this explanation: "There will always be setbacks because we don't have an ultimate authority on how natural systems work. The trick is to manage risk in a way that minimizes and localizes and creates limited opportunities of time for those setbacks to occur."

In other words, the president's top environmental adviser expects the public to dismiss what's apparently the biggest salmon kill in history as just another bum hand in a game of five-card draw, played with the public's fish and wildlife as the ante. The Klamath tragedy isn't an isolated event. On September 30, when the salmon die-off was at its peak, the administration was giving away federal water a thousand miles east, on the Gunnison River in Colorado, thereby desiccating the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and jeopardizing four endangered fish and a world-famous trout fishery. Earlier in the month Interior declined to appeal a bizarre court ruling that canceled the water right of Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge in Idaho, a refuge dedicated to waterfowl. Since 1973, when the Endangered Species Act outlawed these kinds of risks, no other administration has been willing to take them. Now they're a habit with the Bush team, and it isn't winning any pots.