No Peace in the Refuges : Farmers Are Caught in Middle as Environmentalists Challenge Right to Use of Wetlands

All his life, Luke Robison assumed it was his birthright to farm the fertile fields in this northeast corner of the state where two generations before him raised potatoes, sugar beets and barley.

Now 17 and preparing to graduate from high school, he is wondering how much longer farming will continue as a way of life in Tule Lake Basin.

To Robison’s dismay, this remote, deeply conservative community of mostly farming families has become the latest target in a battle by environmental groups to save California’s dwindling wetlands.

“I guess you could say I’m right in the middle of it,” Robison says.

Robison’s family has worked hard over the years to expand its holdings from the 80-acre homestead his great-grandfather won in a government lottery to the 500 acres it owns today. Still, the farm is profitable, Robison says, only because the family supplements the land it owns by leasing 500 acres of federal land on Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, one of two national refuges in the basin.

But environmentalists and others are challenging the right of farmers to lease land on the wildlife refuges, charging that farming practices are causing extensive habitat damage and endangering migrating waterfowl.

Without the leased lands, Robison says, his family farm and many others would not survive.

“If those leases are taken away, it will put three-quarters of the farmers out of business in this basin,” he said.

Fully one-quarter of the basin’s farmland is owned by the federal government on Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge and neighboring Lower Klamath Lake National Wildlife Refuge. On Lower Klamath, only grain is grown commercially, which requires little water. But on Tule Lake, 3,500 acres are used to grow sugar beets, onions and potatoes, crops that require intensive irrigation and the extensive use of pesticides.

What has been good for the farmers, lease critics say, has been devastating for wildlife.

In a January letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, a coalition of 14 groups charged that a combination of commercial farming at the refuge and the diversion of water from the Klamath River to irrigate crops is shrinking Tule Lake and its wetlands, and drastically reducing the numbers of ducks, egrets, geese and other birds.

“Historically, Tule Lake is one of the most remarkable locations for migratory birds in this entire country,” said Evan Hirsche, head of the Wildlife Refuge Project for the National Audubon Society.

“We are facing in California an incredible loss of habitat for birds and other critters. We ought to be looking for opportunities to maximize what we’ve got,” said Hirsche. The basin, “in spite of its agricultural history, doesn’t warrant an exception,” he said.

But Robison and other farmers, many descendants of homesteaders, say they will fight to keep the leasing arrangement, enshrined by a 1964 Act of Congress.

The struggle over leasing, they say, is part of a larger struggle with environmentalists over water rights in Klamath Basin, an area that stretches from southern Oregon south to include Tule Lake Basin. Klamath Basin is the site of one of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s earliest reclamation and irrigation projects. It also is home to a chain of six wildlife refuges, three in California and three in southern Oregon.

The way Sam Henzel sees it, environmentalists have declared war on farmers.

“They’ve targeted this area because there are a small number of irrigators and a small population here,” said Henzel, a third-generation Tule Lake-area farmer. Henzel’s fair skin reddens with anger as he talks about what he insists is the true agenda of environmentalists.

“They figure, if they can throw the people out of this area, it is easily preserved for the birds,” he said.

Tulelake, with its 1,500 residents, is the basin’s only town. Farming is the only economic activity here, and it is done the old-fashioned way, by extended, multi-generational families farming hundreds of acres.

Nearly half of Tule Lake refuge is farmland. It splits in two the surviving remnant of once-vast Tule Lake, drained to just one-tenth the size it was 100 years ago.

Just 30 years ago, as many as 2 million birds landed annually on Tule Lake and as many as 8 million landed in the Klamath Basin as a whole. Today, biologists say only about 250,000 birds spend time at Tule Lake each year, a fraction of the 2 million that each year land somewhere in Klamath Basin.

But even in its diminished state, Tule Lake remains a magnet for migrating birds. In spring, it is still possible to see white clouds of snow geese--as many as 25,000 at a time--take off from Tule Lake’s shallow, still waters when bald eagles fly overhead, looking for prey.

Conspicuously absent are ducks, who used to nest on Tule Lake by the hundreds of thousands. Now they go to Lower Klamath Lake, where the water is deeper and less alkaline. Tule Lake’s water quality is so poor that its fish population, including the endangered sucker fish, is down from tens of thousands to a few hundred, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Mauser.

Mauser agrees with environmentalists that all the Klamath Basin refuges suffer from a lack of water and poor water quality. He agrees that Tule Lake refuge has suffered the greatest degree of silt build-up and the sharpest decline in habitat and in the number of migrating birds it hosts.

But he does not agree on who is to blame. The refuge’s biggest problem, Mauser said, is not farming but the sediment that pours into it from the Klamath and Lost Rivers. That sediment is produced by too much logging and development upstream, as well as by agricultural run-off, he said. Each year, more silt builds up in Tule Lake, reducing its wetlands and making it harder for animals to live there.

It is possible, Mauser says, to reach a solution that benefits farmers and the refuges.

The answer lies in draining parts of the refuge and flooding others, in a rotating cycle designed to give farmers fertile land to work that will require less pesticides and give wildlife newly emergent wetlands to nest on.

It is a plan that the Fish and Wildlife Service has tried on an experimental basis on Lower Klamath, where less land is leased for farmers and no row crops are grown.

Mauser says that on Lower Klamath, bird populations have increased significantly since rotation began.

Both environmentalists and farmers, however, have reservations. Farmers fear that once leased lands are flooded, the government will be pressured by environmentalists to renege on its promise to drain them. And they point out that it will be expensive to install equipment necessary to convert drained lake bed for farming irrigated row crops.

Environmentalists complain that the plan would produce no net increase of wetlands.

Farmers, Mauser said, must come to grips with what they can do to restore the environment that has been so good to them for so long. “And environmentalists have got to understand that we do have human beings on this planet, and we have got to find ways for animals and people to use the land together.”

Led by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, 14 groups are threatening to sue the federal government for what they say has been mismanagement of the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuges by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation.

Instead of managing the refuges for wildlife, environmentalists say, the federal government has operated them as incidental to the Klamath Basin Reclamation Project.

The refuges’ problems “stem from a distorted emphasis on commercial irrigated agriculture in the Klamath Project area, including on the refuges themselves, at the expense of refuge wildlife,” Sierra Club attorney Michael Sherwood wrote in the letter to Babbitt.

Most offensive to environmentalists is the use of 3,500 acres of the Tule Lake refuge for growing row crops, including sugar beets and onions. If farming has to be allowed on refuge land, they argue, it should be restricted to grains that attract and fatten up birds for their migrations.

Babbitt’s office has not yet responded. Paul Bledsoe, a Department of the Interior spokesman, said the letter is under review.

Henzel and other farmers say they fear the basin’s fate will be decided by courts and a Congress that will focus on the numbers--of water amounts used for irrigation, of lake depth, of birds using the refuge, of acres farmed--and lose sight of the farmers.