Salmon’s comeback pits nature against Trump administration

For the first time in more than a century, migrating salmon have climbed close to the headwaters of the Klamath River’s most far-flung tributaries, as much as 360 miles⁠ from the Pacific Ocean in south-central Oregon. The achievement is the clearest indication yet that the world’s largest dam removal project, completed on the river a year ago, will yield major benefits for salmon, the river ecosystem, and the tribes and commercial fishers whose lives revolve around the fish.

“I’m thrilled,” said Jeff Mitchell⁠, a former chairman of the Klamath Tribes and a key participant in the long-running protests and negotiations that culminated in the dam removal project. “It’s been gratifying — 25 years of my life and all the thousands of thousands of miles and thousands of hours of sitting in meetings and protesting and doing whatever we had to do to move this forward. Now that’s in the past and I’m watching history unfold in front of my eyes. It’s amazing to know that these fish have finally made it home.”

Unfortunately, every positive development in the embattled Klamath basin seems to come with a catch, and the catch this time is ominous: The Trump administration has shown disregard for the salmons’ well-being, cutting already allocated funding for needed ongoing river restoration, fish-monitoring and fire-prevention projects⁠, and firing the federal officials who helped facilitate them. Even worse, in the event of drought — which has plagued the basin for most of this century — the administration has signaled that it intends to drastically reduce the river flows that salmon need so that upper-basin farmers get full water allocations. If that happens, the fish would be more vulnerable to disease, such as the one in 2002 that left tens of thousands of salmon carcasses on the shores on the lower Klamath River in the biggest fish die-off in the history of the American West.

Perhaps tellingly, most of the farmers would seem to be Trump supporters; many of the tribal members are not.

Coming only a year after the completion of dam demolition, the discovery of salmon in the upper basin’s three major tributaries, including as far as 90 miles⁠ up the Sprague River, hugely exceeds biologists’ expectations. The accomplishment builds on another unexpected success a year ago, when over a 12-day period more than 7,700 migrating salmon⁠ were counted by a sonar device⁠ as they swam upstream past the four demolished dam sites, only a few weeks after the last dam materials were removed.

The arrival of salmon in upper basin tributaries confirms what is obvious to all but a stalwart cluster of pro-dam advocates who maintain despite abundant documentary and scientific evidence of salmons’ historic presence in the tributaries that no salmon ever inhabited the upper basin. They claim that the salmon found there in recent weeks were trucked in⁠ by pro-salmon activists.

Asked about this assertion, William Ray, chairman of the Klamath Tribes, whose members live in the region that the salmon have reached, responded wryly⁠, “That’d be an awful big truck.”

Indeed. As of Tuesday, between 150 and 200 Chinook salmon had been observed in tributaries above Upper Klamath Lake, and their number is increasing daily, according to Klamath Tribes fish biologist Jordan Ortega. An additional 114 have been counted in Upper Klamath Lake. Hundreds of other salmon have been spotted throughout the basin, even in farmers’ irrigation canals. Their return has immediately invigorated river ecosystems, as eagles, river otters and rainbow trou⁠t have been seen feeding on salmon carcasses and eggs.

To reach the upper basin tributaries, the fish overcame a gauntlet of obstacles. They avoided harbor seals and sea lions at the river’s mouth, climbed steep rapids, negotiated two dams’ fish ladders including one that wasn’t designed for salmon, swam through two lakes with notoriously poor water quality, and found the mouth of the Williamson River 20 miles across Upper Klamath Lake. When they found suitable spawning grounds, they laid and fertilized their eggs. Then, with their Odyssean journey completed, they died and left behind their carcasses with the nutrients they brought from the ocean for other animals to feed on.

Now that dam removal has opened a path to the recovery of severely depleted salmon stocks, counting them is crucial so that fish managers can set sustainable fishing limits and assess current river restoration projects and plan new ones. But the Trump administration has decimated the regional staffs of the federal agencies that used to do the counting and has cut funding for basin tribes, threatening their fishery departments.

More disturbing still, in May the Trump administration issued a memo⁠ stating that it doesn’t intend to follow provisions of the 1973 Endangered Species Act that require it to provide enough water for Klamath salmon stocks to survive.

The administration’s interpretation of the law is widely regarded as specious, and at least two courts ⁠have dismissed it in earlier cases. But that is not likely to stop the administration from carrying out its plan during future droughts, even if it undermines salmon recovery. The Klamath Tribes, holder of interim senior water rights in the upper basin, could then respond ⁠by moving to cut off water deliveries to the farmers, plunging the basin back into the sort of bitter water crisis that enveloped it back in 2001.

This would be an archetypal conflict, salmon versus Trump, pitting resilient animals whose ancestors have survived ice ages, volcanic explosions, tectonic shifts and droughts over millions of years against a lawless regime that is scheduled to vanish in a little more than three years. Determination of the winner would provide a potent indication of where the basin, the nation and the planet are headed.

Jacques Leslie is the author of “Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment.”