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CounterPunch
October
2, 2002
Bush Adm.: "Fish
Don't Need Water"
Something Rotten in Klamath
by
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
More than 35,000 fish lay dead in the bed of the
Klamath River and the death count continues to rise. These are
not just any fish. They are wild salmon, both coho and chinook,
the very totems of the Northwest. They suffocated from lack of
cool water.
As the death toll mounted, Gale Norton,
the grim boss of the Interior Department, acted befuddled and
suggested that the die-off in these foul waters was a strange
natural mystery.
But there's no need to call in a fish
coroner. The slaughter in the Klamath River was a deliberate
act, connived at by the White House, the Interior Department
and the gang of Klamath River basin irrigators who have run riot
down in southern Oregon for these many years.
"There are fish floating in every
eddy," says Mike Belchick, a biologist with the Yurok Tribe.
"Eyes popping out. Guts coming out. Scores of dead fish
with moss on them. It makes me want to cry."
Now water is being released from the
dams upstream near Klamath Lake. But it's far too late and will
do little more than flush the stinking corpses downstream, along
with the daily brew of pesticides, cowshit, and fertilizer that
accounts for the normal effluent from the fields of the Klamath
Basin.
Off course, it's the big fish kills that
grab the headlines. And this was an unprecedented one: more than
30 percent of the entire salmon population of the Klamath wiped
out in a single blow. Tribal leaders say there's no precedent
for the death toll in history or myth.
But the salmon of the Klamath River,
once one of the mightiest runs on earth, have been dying out
for decades in a slow, steady slide toward extinction.
The gory frontpage photos of mass death
send the wrong message, shocking, but oddly comforting to those
responsible. They suggest a sudden catastrophic event, a singular
tragic mistake. In fact, the salmon of the Klamath River, which
flows some 200 miles from southern Oregon to the northern California
coast, are the victim of a system that has conspired against
them since the 1940s, at least.
It is a system of industrial agriculture,
backed by the federal government, that has been given free reign
to dewater the Klamath River to irrigate cheap croplands of alfalfa,
potatoes and onions. More than half the annual income from these
farms and ranches come from federal crop supports, but apparently
that doesn't obligate them to save the fish.
The fact that the Yurok, Hoopa and Klamath
tribes enjoy treaty rights to the river's salmon and depend on
those fish for food, income and ceremonial rites has meant nothing
to the masters of the river.
This is story of a death foretold. Biologists
have warned since the 1970s that big changes in river flows were
needed to avert extinction of coho and chinook salmon and the
Klamath River suckerfish.
For eight years, Clinton and Babbitt
did little for the salmon. Every proposal was a half-measure,
which denounced by the Klamath irrigators, and followed by a
quick retreat. The salmon stocks declined, the delicate coho,
which thrives in cold, clear water, tottered toward extinction.
By the time the Bush crowd took office
there was no margin for error. A nasty drought in the summer
of 2001 exacerbated the problem. When federal biologists called
for the Bureau of Reclamation to dribble out more water for the
fish, the Klamath farmers threw a fit. They organized a so-called
"bucket brigade," a raid on the dams and pumps that
diverted water into their parched fields. Threats were leveled
against federal biologists, environmentalists and Indians.
The sheriff of Klamath Falls joined in
the fun, saying he wouldn't arrest any of the irrigators for
monkeywrenching the water diversions. One of his deputies, Lt.
Jack Redfield, even said at a rally of ranchers and farmers that
he might tolerate some violence against Oregon environmentalists.
Then he named two potential targets: Andy Kerr and Wendell Wood.
"It won't take much from Andy Kerr or Wendell Wood or their
like to spark an extremely violent response," said Redfield.
"I am talking about rioting, homicides, destruction of property.
Environmentalist who engage in tree sits
and roadblocks to stop timber sale are now treated by like terrorists
in several states, including Oregon and Idaho. Only last week,
three Oregon forest activists were arrested on charges of torching
logging equipment. They now face the possibility of 20 years
in jail and $500,000 in fines.
But the Klamath water bullies are accustomed
to having their way. They convinced the federal government to
turn over almost half of the Klamath National Wildlife Refuge
to them, which is now farmed at the expense of native wildlife.
They've gotten away with destroying federal property, killing
endangered species and threatening federal officials. Instead
of rebukes and arrests, Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, the Republican
frozen food magnate, called them heroes. They even got reimbursed
for their trouble to the tune of $4 million.
The national press corps viewed this
summer-long riot as a kind of quaint rural dust up, not much
different than a fractious rodeo. At the time, the irrigators
had conned the press into reporting that the water releases were
all about saving the endangered suckerfish, a decidedly unsexy
species also faced with extinction. The word salmon rarely made
an appearance. In fact, the entire river system is a mess, on
the brink of ecological collapse.
Last spring, the Bush crowd decided that
the Klamath farmers could have all the water they wanted, regardless
of the consequences for salmon. In a March ceremony, Gale Norton
presided over the diversion of water to the irrigators. The tribes
and environmentalists showed up to protest. But it was to no
avail.
This summer was one of the driest and
hottest on record. Biologists and tribes pleaded with Norton
to release more water for the salmon. She refused. The Bush administration
took the surrealistic position that fish don't need water. It's
a position they still cling to. "If there is some evidence
it's a problem, we'll take a hard look at it," said John
Keys, director of the Bureau of Reclamation, only last week.
"We've been saying since last year that we're not sure more
water would do the fish any good."
By August the temperature of the depleted
waters of the Klamath River exceeded 70 degrees, a number considered
lethal for migratory salmon. As the chinook and coho ascended
the broiling river, they became disoriented, lethargic and began
to perish from a host of diseases. Federal fisheries biologist
Tom Shaw told his superiors that river conditions were "extremely
lethal." His warnings were ignored.
"They played Russian roulette with
our fish and our fish lost," says Troy Fletcher of the Yurok
Tribe.
It wasn't so much a game, as a gameplan.
All along the irrigators had plotted the final doom of the salmon,
which were a looming impediment to their increasingly frail economic
condition. With the troublesome fish out of the way, they believe
that their precious system of dams, pumps and irrigation ditches
will be safe from the lawsuits of the environmentalists and the
tribes.
Now the dead fish are being scooped up
with bulldozers and trucked to a plant in Eureka, California
where they will be rendered into fertilizer and no doubt end
up back on some of the very fields that lead to their demise.
Somebody should swipe a few of those
carcasses from the banks of the Klamath, ship them to Washington
and stuff them under Gale Norton's front porch, so that the unique
odor of rotting salmon will haunt her the rest of her days.
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October 2,
2002
Uri Avnery
Manufacturing
Anti-Semites
October 1,
2002
Benjamin Shepard
On the
Road Again:
IMF/World Bank Protest
Reveal a Revived
Movement for Global Justice
Dr. Susan
Block
Cockfight
at the
Baghdad Corral
Krystal Kyer
Growing Union Opposition
to War
Ron Jacobs
Born Without a Spine
Scott Loughrey
Mysteries
of 9/11
Jeremy Brecher
Collective
Security is Working
Brenda Norrell
Troy
Black Feather on
the American Flag
Sam Bahour
Wake Up
and Smell
the Occupation
Richard Harth
Contrary
to Reason:
Adieu, Hitchens, Adieu
Carol Norris
Rumsfeld
the Surrealist:
Things Related and Not
Ben Tripp
Lists Upon
Lists
September
30, 2002
Rep. Barbara
Lee
Alternatives
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Iraq: The
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Zeynep Toufe
"We
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Bush's
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Naming Genocide
James T. Philips
Riding to Maine
Anis Shivani
Life of a Bum
David Vest
Too True North
Jacob Levich
Case of the Missing Terrorist
William MacDougall
British Immigration Tests
Edward Hammond
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Molly Secours
Bush's "I" Words:
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Lee Sustar
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Ledeen's Mad World
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