Tag Archive for: Klamath River

Drain the Reservoirs, Return California’s Stolen Land

The destruction of dams on the Klamath River provides an encouraging precedent for progressives throughout California. As was breathlessly reported in the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere, indigenous tribes are now able to recover their sacred land and revive their ancestral villages and way of life. It is time for California’s progressive supermajority to do the right thing and return all stolen land to the first peoples. They can start by draining the rest of California’s reservoirs.

Not only is demolishing California’s dams, draining all of its reservoirs, and returning the restored riverfront property to their rightful claimants an appropriate reparatory gesture, but it will also set the rivers themselves free. Unshackled, they will again be welcoming habitats for salmon and other aquatic life, able to send torrents of nurturing fresh water into California’s Central Valley and ultimately into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The first target in this noble effort should be to blow up the O’Shaughnessy Dam and drain the Hetch Hetch Reservoir, which supplies water to the City of San Francisco. Surely the enlightened voters and elected officials in San Francisco will eagerly support this long overdue demolition. Once Hetch Hetchy Reservoir is empty, a beautiful valley, twin to Yosemite, will be exposed in all its granite grandeur once again, and the valley can be reoccupied by the Miwok, Yokuts, Washoe, Mono, and Paiute tribes, where they can recreate their ancient villages and recover their ancient ways. And why stop there?

Draining Lake Shasta will enable the Winnemem Wintu tribe to restore their villages that, for nearly a century, have been inundated, and they can again live peacefully in the upstream canyons of the Sacramento River headwaters. Similarly, blasting down the Oroville Dam will set the Feather River free again at last and empower the Maidu, Paiute, and Washoe tribes to repopulate the liberated riverbanks. Blowing up the Trinity Dam will allow the Yurok and Hoopa nations to return to their sacred river. Similarly, blasting the New Melones Dam to smithereens will set free the Stanislaus River, and the reclaimed land can be returned to the Yokuts people.

Just the removal of these five dams will free over 12 million acre feet of water to journey “unimpaired” from California’s alpine heights to its ocean estuaries. But to be true to the principles they so self-righteously seek to impose on everyone, they must not stop there. All of these dams, these arrogant monuments to European hubris, must be demolished. California has over 1,500 reservoirs on its water grid. Together, they imprison over 41 million acre feet of water each year. Destroy them all! Return the land to its proper owners, California’s first peoples, along with the fish and the waterfowl.

As California proceeds to correct the errors of previous generations of colonial usurpers, it might also reintroduce the magnificent species that were so cruelly diminished in earlier times. Wolves and grizzly bears must be reintroduced to their original habitats, starting with the Santa Cruz Mountains, overlooking one of California’s many urban abominations, the Silicon Valley. They may range freely from the peaks down to the foothills, along the verdant reclaimed creeks, and into the illegitimate suburbs, because it is their land.

In further pursuit of environmental and social justice and to ensure the restored ecosystems of California regain their rightful stewardship, Californians must abandon all of their plush and unsustainable suburbs and allow nature to reclaim these violated lands. As California’s settler colonials vacate their stolen strongholds in the Silicon Valley, from the Apple Torus to the mansions of Atherton, the Ohlone family of tribes shall take their place, to live in harmony with free-ranging wolves and grizzlies.

For the last several decades, California’s entire political leadership has been committed to dismantling the state’s economy in slow motion, but why go slow? With respect to liberating California’s rivers, why limit this magnificent display of virtue to a handful of small dams on the Klamath River? And why limit the displacement of white usurpers to the occupiers that presumptuously engage in farming and ranching on the Klamath watershed? If they must be expelled to make way for tribes and fish up there, why not everywhere? Why not expel all of California’s invading multitudes?

This is the example that California surely ought to be offering to the world. Give it all back to the First Peoples and eliminate all traces of abusive infrastructure. Why merely demolish the Copco Dam up north and drain its tiny lake when Hetch Hetchy beckons in all of its abominable infamy? Break the dams! Release the rivers!

If all of this sounds crazy, that’s because it is crazy. But it is consistent with the ideology being taught in California’s schools, the ideology informing the state legislature and state agencies, and the ideology used to justify litigation and agency harassment of productive farmers and ranchers throughout the state. The logical extension of California’s environmentalist policies is to end civilization as we know it. But California’s progressive elites are not crazy, nor are they idiots. So what is their actual motivation?

The nihilistic solutions these extreme green and extreme equity policies embrace are driven by special interests whose actual goal is to centralize power, wealth, and land ownership, putting it under the control of billionaires, mega corporations, managed wealth funds, NGOs, and compliant puppet governments, which would include these tribal nations but would also include America’s federal and state governments and all of the surrounding institutions. The tribes participating in these policies should take note: you are being played, and whatever sovereignty you still have is going to slip away before this is over.

Also being played, on a much more massive scale, are California’s tens of millions of progressive voters who still believe the narrative instead of recognizing the reality rapidly descending on them. Concerns about climate and equity are a ruse. The reality is that ordinary citizens are being deprived of any hope for financial independence and instead are becoming increasingly dependent on charity and government “entitlements.” Where will it end? Shall we submit to being reduced to the status of livestock, wearing VR goggles, living in pods, eating bugs, obediently living for curated hits of dopamine from an AI-driven Panopticon until an AI-driven death panel determines it’s time to die? Expressing this dark scenario would be nothing but paranoid drivel, except for the inconvenient fact that it’s perilously close to the path we’re on.

It’s easy enough to dismiss the systematic destruction of the Klamath River agricultural economy as something happening to a small population in a remote area. The entire population of California’s upper Klamath River region—Siskiyou and Modoc counties—is barely 50,000 people. But although the Klamath watershed is remote, it is vast, and across America, these underpopulated but sprawling rural landscapes are being picked off, one after another.

The destruction of the Klamath River farming and ranching economy is part of a broader assault, coming from a technology-driven elite that masquerades as virtuous proponents of environmentalism and racial equity. They are confident they shall suppress the protestations of those who recognize how these virtues have devolved into nihilism, and confident they shall sustain the masquerade until they dominate the world.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Klamath Basin “restoration” is at what cost?

If you scan news reports and search results for Klamath Dams removal, the news is universally upbeat. “The river will run free again.” “A step towards justice.” “Largest river restoration project in American history!” But as waters now drain out of the reservoirs behind these half-demolished dams for the last time, unanswered questions persist.

How this project will impact the region’s agricultural economy, and whether or not it’s even the most environmentally worthwhile use of mitigation funds on the Klamath watershed is not beyond debate. In fact, if you speak with nearly everyone actually living along the middle and upper Klamath, you’ll get informed opinions and testimonials that are completely different from what you’ll find in the downstate press, or from press releases from the many NGOs, agencies, and government contractors partaking of this half-a-billion dollar taxpayer-funded bonanza, or via any mainstream social media or search engines.

It isn’t hard to figure out why opponents of dam removal have been drowned out. The population of Siskiyou County is 44,118. The population of neighboring Modoc County is 8,661. To save their farms and ranches, these people hold bake sales. The special interests chasing that half-billion in mitigation funds (likely just the first tranche) bring with them the combined weight of countless state and federal agencies, powerful environmentalist organizations, and assorted civil engineering and environmental vendors hungry for a huge contract. It’s no contest.

It would take volumes to adequately describe the sequence of events that has led to the removal of dams on the Klamath, or the observations and theories and events leading up to the decision. But voices that contradict the prevailing narrative and policies haven’t been heard. They would include the Siskiyou County Water UsersKlamath Basin Crisis (a Facebook group), and “Shut Down & Fed Up,” representing upriver agricultural communities. From talking with members of these organizations and others, a story emerges of deception, distortion, misrepresentation, harassment, betrayal, and ultimately, abandonment.

Here are questions that have not been answered to the satisfaction of the people most affected by the removal of the dams. It is in everyone’s interests, including the Native Americans who have been told that dam removal will restore salmon populations, to revisit these questions with honest debate between experts holding differing opinions. What if after all this work is done, the salmon still don’t recover? That is a distinct possibility, yet in the following questions there might, just might, lie more restorative alternatives.

1 – Where is evidence that salmon ever swam upstream into the upper Klamath River? Aren’t the canyons where the dams are built crossed by lava flows that prevent salmon from continuing upriver? Won’t the red band trout upriver just eat any introduced salmon, just like the bass do in the Sacramento-San Joaquin rivers?

2 – Is it true that once the dams are gone, it will be found necessary to blast “volitional passages” through natural rock formations that would otherwise prevent salmon from swimming further upstream? How is this consistent with restoring the river to its original natural state?

3 – Since increasing the flow of the lower Klamath to wash away the parasite Ceratomyxa shasta that kills salmon has not helped, why, just once, hasn’t the opposite tactic been tried? Why not reduce summer flows so the parasite, which lives on the banks of the river, will dry out and die?

4 – Isn’t it true that before dams and diversions were altering the natural flow of the Klamath, the flow from the upper Klamath downriver would nearly dry up most summers, with most of whatever summertime flow there was coming from springs and tributaries? Why then is there such an emphasis on summertime flows?

5 – Isn’t it also true that historically, most of the flow from the upper Klamath went into Tule Lake, and water would only flow naturally downstream in high volumes during floods?

6 –  Won’t maintaining healthy summertime flows on the lower river artificially be harder if these mid-river dams are removed? Won’t the water released from the bottom of those reservoirs be cooler than water that has to flow all the way across the high desert from the Upper Klamath Lake in Southern Oregon?

7 – When the four mid-river dams are removed, will water in Upper Klamath Lake behind the Link River Dam that normally is allocated to maintain the Tule Lake and irrigate the upriver farms be used instead to be sent downstream? And will that even be helpful (see #4, #5 and #6)?

8 – The sucker fish in the Klamath Lake are also threatened by parasites. Why has policy been to keep more water in Klamath Lake in an attempt to save the sucker fish, when historically the lake has been shallow and would recede in the summer? Don’t the parasites and predators that attack sucker fish spawn in the shallows on the edge of the lake and would die if they dried out?

9 – People owning property along the Klamath and its tributaries used to keep “hatchery boxes” along the banks, where they would keep salmon fry until they were big enough to release. This practice is now prohibited, allegedly to prevent disease. But might not the benefit of reviving private hatchery boxes outweigh the risks?

10 – Why hasn’t more attention been given to the harvesting of salmon by international fishing vessels, along with the rising population of killer whales and seals that eat salmon? Why aren’t there steps taken to remove seals that crowd the estuaries during salmon runs?

11 – Won’t increasing flows down from the volcanic river bed in the upper river result in introducing more phosphate into the water, which will stimulate the growth of algae?

12 – For the amount of money being spent to remove dams that might actually benefit salmon by retaining the capacity to release cold water into the lower Klamath River, why not remediate major tributaries on the river instead? Why not invest in restoring narrow channels in the Salmon River? Didn’t floods in 1964 alter the hydrology of that river, rendering the channel wider and shallower, destroying what had until then been ideal habitat for salmon spawning? Why not fix the Salmon River and other tributaries? It would cost a lot less.

And then there’s the 20 million tons of silt behind these dams, silt that will clog downstream gravel spawning beds for who knows how long.

All but forgotten, there are the farmers and ranchers who have given their lives to producing food for us to eat. Better to import beef from Brazil and barley from Canada. Is that it?

Everything we see and hear about the Klamath River dam removal project is positive. But nobody in any position to slow the momentum of this project wanted to consider the possibility that the Klamath River ecosystem and the species therein could have been restored faster, and for far less money, even while leaving those dams intact.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

The Fate of the Klamath Basin is the Fate of Rural America

The Klamath River is the biggest river in America that nobody’s ever heard of. Easily the largest river between the mighty Columbia on the Oregon–Washington border and the Sacramento–San Joaquin River, which drains California’s Central Valley, the Klamath watershed covers a whopping 12,000 square miles.

From its headwaters in southern Oregon, the Klamath runs south through high desert before bending west to traverse deep canyons in California’s coast ranges, eventually finding the ocean just south of Eureka. Historically, millions of salmon ran up the Klamath each year to spawn in the cool gravel beds of its upstream tributaries. Today these salmon populations are reduced to a small fraction of their historical numbers, and attempts to revive salmon populations on the Klamath have triggered a war for the watershed’s future.

On one side are environmentalists and state bureaucrats, who have brought to the battle unlimited funds for lawfare and punitive regulations. On the other side are farmers and ranchers who have operated for over a century in the region, attempting to survive on thin profit margins in an era of increased costs and the relentless regulatory assault on their ability to subsist.

To begin to understand the war for the future of the Klamath, one must recognize the differences between the upper and lower watersheds. They are distinct ecosystems with differing topography, geology, climate, water quality, and species. Historically, much of the water running down from headwaters in Oregon into the upper Klamath River never made it into the lower river and hence to the ocean. Instead, year after year during floods, runoff overflows the riverbanks and pours south into the Tule Basin, a vast wetland that straddles the border between southern Oregon and northeast California.

This all changed with the Klamath Project, a series of dams, canals, and levees constructed just over 100 years ago to reclaim rangeland and wetland for farming. In all, the project created over 200,000 acres of farmland. The rich soil and mild, high-altitude climate yield some of the finest-quality barley, alfalfa, oats, wheat, potatoes, onions, and garlic in the world. The centerpiece of the Klamath Project is the Link River Dam, which regulates the volume and downstream flow of the Upper Klamath Lake. And herein the conflicts begin, with farmers prioritizing diversions into the upper basin to irrigate their crops and maintain wildlife refuges, while also recharging aquifers, and environmentalists demanding that more water be allowed to flow downstream in hopes of a healthier aquatic ecosystem for salmon.

The farmers, lacking the financial resources of powerful environmentalist NGOs and state bureaucracies, have not been able to fund the army of consultants, academic experts, and litigators that would be necessary to effectively resist the state and federal edicts that redirect upper Klamath runoff downstream. But they nonetheless make a compelling case for themselves. It begins with the volume and quality of water they’re fighting over.

The topography of the upper Klamath was defined over the past half-million years, as volcanic eruptions generated lava flows that intersected the river, depositing phosphate-rich ash that leeches contaminants into the river to this day. This water has historically stayed mostly in the upper basin, where it is adequate for farm irrigation and the native fish species that are adapted to it. By channelizing the upper Klamath and sending most of the water downstream, the phosphate-rich water nourishes algae blooms that deplete the oxygen and harbor parasites, both of which are harmful to salmon.

Which brings us to the plans to remove four mid-river dams. Situated along a stretch of rapid drops in elevation, crisscrossed by lava flows, the J.C. Boyle, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and Iron Gate Dams are positioned where the Klamath transitions from its upper to its lower watershed. After the Iron Gate Dam, the river runs unobstructed 193 miles to the Pacific Ocean.

If the dispute over water allocations in the upper Klamath is a slow and one-sided war of attrition, demolishing these dams — resulting in a radically transformed, free-flowing river — is the culmination of a bitter fight that has raged for over 20 years, and even now the outcome is not certain.

In November, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted a license to Klamath River Restoration Corporation (KRRC) to demolish the dams. Their original operator, PacifiCorp, had been looking for a way to get rid of them ever since being ordered by FERC in 2007 to install fish ladders on the “fish-killing” dams. Facing a cost to install fish ladders that would exceed the cost of removing the dams, PacifiCorp managed to avoid both by ceding control of the dams to KRRC, in a deal that shifted the estimated $450 million cost of dam removal to the taxpayers of California and Oregon.

Will Removing Four Dams Do More Harm Than Good?

Removing the four dams has some obvious attendant harms. Over 70,000 households purchasing cheap hydroelectric power from these dams will face much higher utility rates, as their power will now have to be imported from wind farms and coal-fueled power plants in Wyoming. The water stored behind these dams was used to maintain stable summer flows in the lower Klamath, and once they’re gone, environmentalists will call for more restrictions on water allocations for farmers upstream in order to reserve water in the Upper Klamath Reservoir for summer releases into the lower river.

But is using upstream water to maintain summer flows in the lower Klamath helpful? Environmentalists claim more water in the river is necessary to disrupt the parasites that live on the riverbanks and attack salmon. But farmers claim that less flow in the summer dries out the riverbanks and kills the parasites.

Anthony Intiso, a local businessman who filed a lawsuit in December 2022 to halt demolition of the dams, believes that removal will cause not only economic harm but environmental havoc. One of the primary arguments in Intiso’s case is that the State of California, by making use of Proposition 1 (2014) funds to help pay the demolition costs, is violating the terms of that measure, specifically that “no monies and no actions shall be used to adversely affect the values of a wild and scenic river.”

Intiso told me that in the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the dam removal — an 823-page monstrosity — “adverse effects are listed over 280 times.” There clearly are serious environmental impacts to removing dams this big. Congressman Doug LaMalfa, whose district encompasses the dams, said in a press release that, “at a minimum, there is 20 million cubic yards of sediment behind the four Klamath hydroelectric dams, some of it toxic. To put this in perspective, that is one dump truck load, every minute of every day for six years without stopping. If the federal government is wrong, as they were by 3 fold with the Condit Dam removal project, there could be triple on Klamath, more like 60 million cubic yards.”

The problem with this amount of fine sediment is not only that much of it may be contaminated with accumulated and naturally occurring phosphorus and nitrogen from the upper Klamath, but that as the dams come down and it is released into the river it will smother the gravel beds where salmon typically lay their eggs. It will take years if not decades to completely disperse this sediment, and meanwhile it will be incredibly destructive to all aquatic species in the river.

There are serious questions that have never been answered to the satisfaction of farmers, ranchers, other long-time residents, and wildlife biologists concerned about the entire Klamath watershed’s ecosystems. An anadromous species, salmon live in the ocean but must return to freshwater rivers to deposit their eggs in gravel streambeds. There isn’t strong evidence that salmon ever spawned further upstream than the Iron Gate Dam, because it is already nearly 200 miles upstream from the ocean, and because it is at the beginning of a series of sharp increases in elevation that salmon would most likely avoid. In fact, in what is clearly a denial of geologic history, part of the remediation project requires blasting a so-called voluntary passageway through natural volcanic barriers upstream from Iron Gate and created by prehistoric lava flows, just to enable salmon to swim further upstream.

Additional evidence that salmon have not spawned in the upper Klamath watershed is found in the presence of the redband trout, a species considered “outside the range of anadromy” (meaning it lives too far from the ocean to migrate downstream and back). This species may have evolved in the upper Klamath watershed after lava flows changed the hydrology of the river and made downstream migration impossible.

Another unanswered question is how the river may have functioned historically before the blocking levees were constructed early in the past century to prevent winter flood runoff from watering the Tule Basin. How much water from the upper Klamath was ever supposed to naturally reach the lower Klamath? And with so much emphasis on more water for the salmon downstream, how will the Tule Basin wetlands and aquifers avoid destruction, along with the farming economy?

Alternatives to Dam Removal on the Klamath River

From a topographic point of view, the dams on the Klamath River are just extensions of volcanic barriers and elevation shifts that already prevented salmon migration. The fact that “voluntary passageways” must be blasted through lava barriers on the river after the dams are removed ought to be a giveaway. The likely scenarios if the project proceeds — downstream, millions of tons of toxic sediment, and upstream, the destruction of farming but also wildlife refuges as more water is directed into the lower river to try to wash out that sediment — are hardly better environmental outcomes.

Instead of removing these dams, imagine what might be done with nearly $500 million (aside from simply saving it). There are more cost-effective mitigation projects that might help the salmon.

For example, on the aptly named Salmon River, a major tributary of the lower Klamath, banks could be regraded to restore the narrow channel that was lost in the devastating flooding of 1964. Some of the salmon decline can be traced to that event, which altered the tributary’s hydrology, making it wider and slower and hence warmer and less hospitable to salmon migrating to their spawning grounds.

Another approach would be to periodically restrict fishing and disperse the populations of seals and otters that prey on migrating salmon at the river’s mouth.

In general, focusing on the lower tributaries, which have always been the primary sites of salmon spawning, would be a far more productive use of resources. If the naturally occurring, nutrient-rich flow coming downstream from the upper Klamath is damaging the aquatic ecosystems, the solution isn’t to flush the river with even more flow from the upper Klamath. The solution is to limit the flow from the upper Klamath, using that water instead to recharge the aquifers, restore the wetlands, and in so doing preserve the farming economy in the Tule Basin. After all, historically, water was never reserved from the upper Klamath to send downstream to the lower Klamath. In fact when the upper Klamath reached even moderate flood stage, all the excess water flowed into the Tule Basin. That’s where it used to go, and that’s where it should stay.

Why Are Special Interests Determined to Demolish Dams on the Klamath?

This is perhaps the most difficult question of all. No reasonable observer would deny that sometimes it is appropriate to remove an old dam. But even if removing these dams on the Klamath does yield environmental benefits, it will take several decades and cost a staggering amount of money. So what’s really going on?

Richard Marshall, president of the Siskiyou County Water Users Association, expressed a sentiment I heard often when researching the matter. “The long-range liberal concept is people should be living in cities, where it is easier to service people,” he said. The goal is to “depopulate rural areas. We have a rural lifestyle, and there are people running our government today who think rural communities are outliers and everyone should be in cities where you can have central sewer and central water systems.”

When I spoke with him, Congressman LaMalfa echoed Marshall’s comments, lamenting the impact that extreme environmentalism is having on his district. “Farming, ranching, and hydroelectric are all industries being killed in Siskiyou, and environmental groups fundraise off this,” he said. “The leaders draw six-, seven-digit salaries to run these groups. People send $25 to some organization, then they have the stickers with the pandas on their cars, and they feel good.”

But they don’t always get it right, these environmentalist stewards. The misguided focus on saving salmon while disregarding other species within the Klamath watershed and inviting a cataclysmic disruption to the river that will likely wipe salmon out for years to come, the failure to recognize that in history the excess water in the upper Klamath never made it downstream but instead flooded the Tule Basin or that salmon never spawned in the upper watershed, the indifference to more effective solutions to help the salmon on the lower-basin tributaries, the disregard for the fact that responsibly managed cattle actually help ecosystem health: All this and more bespeaks a madness, a thoughtless momentum, a movement that has lost its balance and its integrity.

What’s happening in the Klamath Basin is far from unique. The fact that it is happening in a place where not only are the economic costs devastating, but the environmental benefits are dubious at best, should concern not just rural America but all of us.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.

The Destruction of the Upper Klamath River Economy

Ever since the heinous killing of an unarmed black man by four rogue police on May 25, protests and riots have consumed America’s cities. These mass protests have mobilized millions of so-called progressives, incited to destructive fury by well organized provocateurs. The groups behind this extremism are well known, as are the leftist and anarchist ideologies that propel them. But there is another movement growing in the United States.

Either neglected or misrepresented by the media as right-wing extremism, this movement has its heart across rural America, but increasingly makes common cause with every beleaguered business owner or overtaxed household in America’s cities. There is nothing extremist about this movement. It is founded in common sense, a desire for justice and equal treatment. As millions of productive Americans find it harder than ever to survive the onslaught of progressive government policies, the movement grows.

The biggest political wild card in American politics today is which of these groups, productive citizens of rural areas and their urban counterparts, or urban progressives, will claim the ultimate allegiance of undecided voters. It is convenient that climate activists wish to depopulate rural areas and concentrate Americans into dense urban cores. Because the more predominant the urban vote becomes in elections, the less likely the average voter will understand what’s happening in rural America.

Using regulations pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and countless other laws and regulations including an exploding body of new regulations designed to prevent “climate change,” government bureaucrats and environmentalist litigators are waging an existential battle against America’s farmers, miners, loggers, and, increasingly, the residents themselves.

Just to live outside established urban centers is becoming endangered. Poor forest management has led to cataclysmic wildfires which are being used as the pretext to deny insurance coverage and drive residents out of any fire prone rural landscapes. Punitive laws governing logging operations have destroyed entire regional economies as logging companies are driven overseas. Mining operations are now shut down far more often than they are ever started in America, despite, for example, a growing national appetite for rare earth commodities to build electric vehicle batteries.

Hit as hard as any by this avalanche of regulations are the nation’s farmers. But some are fighting back.

On May 29, in Klamath County, Oregon, thousands of farmers and community supporters showed up to protest reduced water allocations, announced earlier this year, which threatened to destroy the region’s agricultural economy. The protesters formed a convoy of over 2,000 vehicles that passed through downtown Klamath Falls and ended up at a rally site in Midland, Oregon. This convoy, with a majority of the vehicles either farm tractors or semi rigs, was over thirty miles long.

Overshadowed by reporting on the mayhem that has descended on the rest of America, this protest didn’t make the national news. Even local news was focused overwhelmingly on the tense standoff that weekend between residents and business owners of Klamath Falls, and out-of-town activists who were trying to import the mayhem that gripped cities from Portland to Sacramento.

But how much coverage would this ever get? Rural America, along with the urban middle class, is being quietly wiped out, and the media writes off the entire phenomenon as “privileged” people getting their long overdue comeuppance.

Nonetheless, the story of the destruction of the Upper Klamath River economy needs to be told, because it is representative of this wider assault. Environmentalists and bureaucrats, backed by billionaire philanthropists and commercial opportunists, have been waging a one-sided war on small farmers, small businesspeople, energy and mining interests, and pretty much everyone else who does more than write code, tap a keyboard, or in some manner restrict their productivity to intangibles.

The Klamath River Basin

One of the biggest rivers in the Western United States that nobody’s ever heard of is the mighty Klamath, encompassing a massive 16,000 square mile watershed that straddles Southern Oregon and California’s far north. With headwaters in Oregon’s high desert country, the Klamath bends its way west into California through deep canyons, finding the ocean in an estuary roughly 30 miles south of the Oregon border.

The Klamath is distinguished not only by vast extent and its unique topography, but by its importance to salmon populations. Until you reach the Columbia River over 400 miles to the north, the Klamath and its tributaries offer the largest spawning habitat for salmon in North America.

Today, not one, but two serious controversies have erupted over how to best restore salmon populations. The first involves the proposed removal of four hydroelectric dams that are located in the upper Klamath basin.

These dams, three of which are in California and one located a bit further upriver in Oregon, are not used for irrigation, but do supply hydroelectric power and offer recreational amenities to tourists and local residents. At a cost of over $400 million, they are likely to be removed by 2022. While the precedent-setting planned removal of these dams has been the subject of decades of debate, the most serious controversy is further upstream, and concerns water allocations this year for agriculture.

When the Link River Dam was built at the southern end of Upper Klamath Lake in 1921, the intention was to provide water storage for irrigation to what is some of the richest farmland on earth. By the 1990s over 200,000 acres were planted with alfalfa, barley, garlic, horseradish, onions, potatoes, sugar beets and wheat. And then came the water wars.

One of the spokespersons for the farmers is Bob Gasser, who is one of the organizers of the “Shut Down & Fed Up” movement, formed earlier this year to protest the reduced water allocations in the Klamath Basin.

According to Gasser, until the water wars began, farmers who were part of the Klamath River Project received irrigation allocations of around 350,000 acre feet per year. This March, after a dry winter, that allocation was lowered to 140,000 acre feet. Then in April, in meetings with officials at the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, the farmers were told it would be lowered to 80,000 acre feet, and then in May, to 50,000 acre feet. Not only is 50,000 acre feet far less than the farming economy in the region requires to be sustainable, but many farmers had relied on the first allocation, 140,000 acre feet, and invested in planting crops that will die if the allocation stayed as low as 50,000 acre feet.

When trying to understand how the fish populations of the Klamath Watershed can be restored, the number of differing answers is equal to the number of experts you ask. But the general consensus among radical environmentalists is that there should not be any agricultural economy in the Klamath Basin. This would be consistent with a growing consensus among environmentalists, which comes closer every year to brazenly declaring that rural and exurban communities should not exist, period. For the sake of the planet and its ecosystems and wildlife, people should migrate into existing urban centers. Only the very wealthy and, of course, the genetically indigenous “first peoples,” shall continue to reside in natural settings.

Practical Solutions to Restoring Fish Populations

More reasonable environmentalists, according to the farmers, have nonetheless not paid sufficient attention to evidence that more water does not always equal more fish. There are two fish populations at risk in the Klamath watershed. There are the salmon that spawn in the river, and then upstream there are the suckerfish that inhabit the Upper Klamath Lake – the Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker.

With respect to the four dams that span mountainous canyons straddling the Oregon/California border, it is likely their removal will have some benefit to salmon populations. The warm water that pools above and below these dams offers a more favorable environment for the spores of parasites that attack salmon populations, so removing the dams will reduce their concentrations. This is scant comfort to the people who have lived on the shores of these reservoirs or the tourists who enjoy the boating and fishing they offer, but removal of these dams is all but certain.

Upstream, there has not been any serious discussion of demolishing the Link River dam, built in 1921 to facilitate the Klamath River Project, with a reservoir that is now the lifeblood of the farm economy. There is an irony to the environmentalist solutions, because they want to withhold from the farmers the water in the Upper Klamath Lake in order to use that water to flush out the parasitic spores downstream, but this dam is only 99 years old. How did the salmon manage before the dam came along?

This question, does saving water help the salmon, is what Mark Johnson, a staff biologist with the Klamath Water Users Association, attempted to answer. As he put it, “right now the flow event in the spring is intended to disrupt the hosts and reduce spore concentrations for the disease, so they took water off the farm allocation and put it onto the environmental management account which allows the agency to send it downstream at their discretion.” But is increased flow the answer? Does more water equal more and healthier fish?

According to the farmers, the answer is no. They argue that historical data shows that periodic droughts reduce populations of the parasites that attack the fish both in the Klamath River and also in the Upper Klamath Lake. During droughts the lowered flow in the Klamath River dries out the banks where parasites thrive, and similarly, during droughts, the wetlands surrounding the Upper Klamath Lake also dry out temporarily, causing the parasites that concentrate in those wetlands to also die.

As with any complicated controversy over ecosystem management, it’s hard to know who to believe. The farmers point to the fact that over twenty years of maintaining higher water levels in Upper Klamath Lake and maintaining increased, year-round flow in the Klamath River, fish populations have not rebounded. The farmers contend that lower water levels in Upper Klamath Lake would result in healthier populations of suckerfish. The scientists contend that many other variables come into play and it is misleading to attempt to oversimplify the issues.

Certainly the farmers have tried to cooperate over the years. They agreed to convert 43,000 acres of prime farmland into wetlands in the Upper Klamath Basin. They have consented to reduced water allocations to raise the level of the Upper Klamath Lake, despite the fact that the water level in the Upper Klamath Lake is unnaturally high because of the irrigation dam. They have drought proofed their operations to use and reuse irrigation water, then returning it to the river with a lower phosphate content than the amount that occurs naturally in the lake.

The Farmers Were Heard – This Time

Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District sprawls across the entirety of Eastern and Central Oregon, and yet avoids encompassing a critical mass of cities and college towns that might turn it Blue. Instead, Republican Congressman Greg Walden, who was reelected comfortably by 56 percent in 2018, represents rural Oregonians. When a 30 mile long convoy of rural dissidents packed the roads from Klamath Falls to Midlands on May 29, Walden took note.

Hopping a ride on Air Force One to Washington DC a few days later, Walden spent much of the flight discussing the situation in the Klamath Basin with another passenger, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt. Then on June 9, the US Bureau of Reclamation restored the original water allocation. The press release from the Bureau makes for interesting reading; it makes no mention of the protests or the likely intervention from Washington DC. It reads:

“On June 2, the Natural Resource Conservation Service forecast for Upper Klamath Lake inflows increased from the May 1 forecast. Based on the updated forecast and ongoing stakeholder input, Reclamation will deliver approximately 140,000 acre-feet to the Klamath Project from Upper Klamath Lake in 2020.”

The question, of course, is what was it? An increase in the forecast amount of available water, or “ongoing stakeholder input”? Even with the Bureau restoring the water allocation to their original commitment, this 140,000 acre feet is only 40 percent of what the farmers get in a normal year. Many farmers will still have to apply for disaster relief assistance. But what could have happened, if the 40 percent allocation were not restored, would have been a catastrophe.

The “Science” vs. the People

The people settled in the Upper Klamath Basin have had to live with this economic uncertainty for over 20 years. Their knowledge of the basin habitat, the mechanics of the ecosystem both historically and in recent years, seems to have been dismissed as folklore by the experts charged with restoring fish populations. But the observations by the locals are evidence based. Increased river flow and higher lake levels have not resulted in more fish.

No reasonable person would deny that solutions to restoring the salmon population in the Klamath River do not reduce to soundbites and simple answers. But the fact remains that obviously uncertain scientific theories were sufficient to empower regulators to come within an eyelash of killing an entire regional economy. As Bob Gasser stated, looking ahead, “there needs to be a restart on the science, and we have a commitment from the secretary of the interior to look into that.”

The difficulties facing farmers in the Klamath Basin are representative of a nationwide problem. The Department of the Interior is staffed with employees and high ranking career bureaucrats who, since 1992, operated for 16 years under Democratic administrations, including 8 out of the last 11 years. As anyone who has dealt with regulators in Blue states will attest, the undeniable professionalism of many of the individuals staffing these agencies is in perpetual conflict with the culture, which is invariably hostile to business.

Bureaucratic inertia alone is enough to make most federal agencies biased against the people in favor of the environment, always citing “science” as the ultimate arbiter. But on a question as complex as how to manage a watershed that occupies 16,000 square miles, “science” is rarely settled. And that fact, that “science” has become an overused, politicized shibboleth, extends to every area of policy, certainly including the treatment of rural Americans. These would include all those millions of people living on acreage, who, when wishing to dig, cut, burn, harvest, hunt, build, bulldoze or grade, are continuously forced to choose between engaging in stealthy criminality or enduring an expensive and prolonged regulatory process with crippling intent and capricious outcomes.

At what point might a critical mass of Americans realize that environmentalist overreach is the reason that homes are unaffordable, that freeways are congested, that energy costs too much, that water is rationed, that jobs move overseas, and that the businesses that remain can barely survive?

When will a critical mass of Americans realize that while reasonable environmental precautions are in everyone’s interest, excessive restrictions only serve the agenda of multinational corporations that make more profit when small but rising competitors who can’t afford to follow all the rules are wiped out?

When will a critical mass of Americans realize that what happened in Klamath Falls is happening in slow motion everywhere?

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *