Klamath Conundrum

When there’s a drought along the Klamath River in Northern California and Oregon, who’s going to get the water--the farmers who have worked the land for generations or two trash fish known as the Lost River sucker and the short-nosed sucker?

Well, it used to be the farmers. But now the fish, protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, get it. Chagrined federal employees were forced last month to chain and lock the headgate that diverts water to irrigation project serving most of the 1,200 farms scattered along the California-Oregon border.

It’s the sort of classic confrontation the network TV cameras love, with grim-faced farmers walking the dusty, parched farmland and talking about how they face bankruptcy because of some ugly fish. The message is how heartless the federal government and its environmental laws can be.

Were it so simple. The Klamath River story is a tangled mess of bad decisions and unexpected consequences going back nearly a century. It’s not just people versus suckerfish. This dispute also involves the endangered coho salmon, the traditional subsistence of Yurok Indians living along the Klamath and the livelihood of commercial fishermen, whose ranks have declined sharply in recent years because the courts repeatedly sided with farmers when the Yurok, the fishermen and others sought to get a share of the river. But this summer the courts ruled the other way, and suddenly farmers became media-darling victims in ways the Yurok and the fishermen never were.

This disaster started with creation of the 200,000-acre Klamath project not long after the federal Reclamation Act of 1902 was passed. The project not only channeled water to arid lands but drained many of the region’s lakes and marshes to create more farmland. Ultimately, some water had to be turned back to some of the six wildlife refuges in the area. One refuge, patched this year, is the winter home of 1,000 bald eagles.

Secretary of the Interior Gale A. Norton released a gush of water for the farmers July 25, too late to save many crops. The drought presents a no-win situation. Many farmers face bankruptcy if they lose all their crops in a single season. If the streams dry up, the fish could be lost forever. There is no solution to this crisis, only unsatisfying mitigation. One possibility is to buy out farmers with public money. More productive perhaps is to pay farmers to fallow their land during drought.

The larger lesson is that the next severe drought in California could make the Klamath dispute look like peanuts. An overall blueprint on California water rights, agreed to by federal and state governments, is tantalizingly close but stalled in Congress by special-interest pleading. Let Klamath be the lever that pries it free.