Gag the Messenger, Kill the Fish
by Jeffrey St.
Clair
Dissident Voice
November 2, 2002
Last
month more than 35,000 salmon died in the lower Klamath River, smothered by low
flows, tepid waters and political indifference. At the time, Bush officials
attributed the salmon die-off to a freak of nature. "More water wouldn't
have done those fish any good," offered John Keys, head of the US Bureau
of Reclamation.
This
remarkable observation was entirely self-serving. After all, Keys is the one
who had ordered Klamath water diverted from the river and into irrigation
ditches for farmers in southern Oregon.
Now
comes proof that Keys was lying. Not only did the Bush crowd know that
increased flows were vital to the survival of Klamath salmon and steelhead, but
they were told so by their own biologists. Twice.
Michael
Kelly is a top biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, the
federal agency charged with protecting sea-going fish, such as salmon and
stealhead trout. Kelly led the team that reviewed the situation on the Klamath
River, which flows from southern Oregon through northern California. For the
past couple of years, irrigators and salmon defenders have been locked in a
pitched battle over how the river's water should be divided between the potato
and alfalfa fields and the fish.
None of
the native fish in the Klamath River system are doing very good. But the
suckerfish and the coho salmon, both once staples in the diet of the Klamath
River tribes, are teetering on the brink of extinction and both are afforded
protection under the Endangered Species Act. Kelly's task was to develop a plan
that provided enough water to ensure the survival of the coho.
In
April, Kelly's team also reviewed the Bureau of Reclamation's 10-year plan for
allocating the river's water and concluded that it would place the coho in
jeopardy. Kelly's report soon ended up at the Justice Department, where
Ashcroft's lawyers sent back a stinging rebuke ordering Kelly to rewrite his
biological opinion.
Kelly
issued a new opinion two weeks later, reaching the same conclusion and backing
it up with more science and detailed legal analysis. This too was rejected.
Instead,
the Bush administration adopted the irrigators' plan, hastily developed by the
National Academy of Sciences, which slashed by more than 43 percent the river
flows recommended by the biologists, a clear violation of the Endangered
Species Act.
"Obviously
someone at a higher level order the service to accept this new plan,"
Kelly says.
When
Kelly objected, he was told by his superiors to shut up and sign off on the
irrigator's plan. He refused. Now Kelly is seeking protection as a
whistleblower from a federal court.
He's
wise to seek such protection. Other federal scientists who have spoken out
about the Bush administration's environmentally hostile maneuvers have not
fared well.
Recall
Ian Thomas, the former cartographer at the US Geological Survey who was fired
in March of 2001 after he posted to a website maps showing how caribou calving
areas would be despoiled by Bush's plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge to oil drilling.
In March
of 2002, Eric Shaeffer, head of regulatory enforcement at the EPA, resigned in
disgust after the White House kept him from pursuing legal actions against
power plants violating the Clean Air Act and then slashed his enforcement
division's staff by 200 positions, effectively gutting the agency.
Then
there is Jim Martin, the former Ombudsman at the Environmental Protection
Agency, who resigned in protest after EPA director, Christie Todd Whitman,
ordered his office disbanded and sent FBI agents to seize his files and
equipment. At the time, Martin was investigating the EPA's mishandling of
Superfund sites in New Jersey, a probe that had uncovered unflattering
information about Whitman's (and her husband's) deals with polluters during her
tenure as governor.
The
suppression of Kelly's report echoes similar attacks on federal scientists
during the first Bush administration, when White House chief of staff John
Sununu quashed reports from biologists linking logging in the forests of the
Pacific Northwest to the drastic decline of the northern spotted owl.
Kelly
says that in addition to ditching his report, the Bush administration also
prohibited him from analyzing the risks to coho salmon posed by diverting
Klamath River waters to Oregon farmers, another trouncing of the Endangered
Species Act.
Would
more water have saved those salmon? Sure. The big question is where the water
should have come from. On that point, there's plenty of room for debate and for
blame.
The
upper Klamath basin irrigators in Oregon are greedy bullies, on that there's no
doubt. But they've got a point when they say they're not the only drain on the
Klamath River. Indeed, their share of Klamath River water pales when compared
to the amount sucked up by California agribusiness and the chipmakers of
Silicon Valley.
The
Trinity River, which slices through steep canyons in northern California, is
the Klamath River's biggest tributary.
The
Oregon irrigators rightly contend that the water from Klamath Lake is warmer
and thus less useful for salmon than the frigid waters of the Trinity.
Yet,
more than 90 percent of the Trinity's annual flow never reaches the Klamath, at
the confluence of the two rivers thirty miles from the Pacific Ocean. Instead,
it is captured behind 540-foot tall Trinity Dam and redirected southward
through the Clear Creek tunnel under the Trinity Alps Mountains into the
Sacramento River. This is just the beginning of the Trinity's torturous
400-mile route to the Southland, through the Delta-Mendota Canal, the
California Aqueduct and finally onto the fields of the Westlands Water District
in the Central Valley. The whole scheme represents an evil masterpiece of
geo-political plumbing.
At
605,000 acres, the Westlands District is bigger than the state of Rhode Island
and perhaps even more powerful politically. It is the largest irrigation
district in the nation, the most profitable and the most lavishly subsidized.
It is also one of the most polluted. When the Trinity's water finally filters
out of the cotton, lettuce and tomato fields of the Westlands, it emerges laden
with pesticides and highly poisonous selenium into San Joaquin River, then into
the marshes of the San Francisco Bay delta.
The
giant farms of the Westlands Water District have laid claims to more than 1.15
million-acre feet of water Trinity/Klamath river system. That's nearly twice as
much as the Oregon farmers. These California farms generate about $3 billion in
sales. But they also enjoy at least a billion dollars in direct federal
subsidies.
Of
course, the Westlands is not by nature farming country. It's essentially desert
and savanna-parched, dusty and hot-and depends entirely upon imported water,
which the district guards ruthlessly through an army of lawyers, lobbyists and
politicians.
In
2000, Clinton's Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who now lobbies for the
California water company Cadiz Inc., made a timid attempt to increase flows
down in the Trinity by a meager 20 percent. Even this approach was met with
fierce resistance from the Westlands farmers, who persuaded a federal judge to
slap an injunction on the plan. Babbitt backed down. And the Bush
administration says they're hands are tied by the courts, even if they wanted
to do something-- which, of course, they don't.
And the
so fish have paid the price. In the entire Klamath/Trinity basin, less than 20
percent of the original salmon spawning habitat remains in anything approaching
a viable condition. The coho population is has been decimated. In fact,
decimated is an understatement: the coho population has plummeted by more than
90 percent since the 1950s.
An
initial tally of the dead salmon from September's die-off shows that more than
half of the fish were headed for the Trinity River to spawn. The death toll of
35,000 (which federal biologists now admit is "conservative") amounts
to about a third of the river's annual run.
With so
much at stake, it's distressing to see how little of a fight the environmental
movement has put up, not only to save the Klamath salmon but also to defend
what remains of the Endangered Species Act, as the Bush crowd rips its teeth
out one by one. Yes, the Sierra Club and others flailed away at the Oregon
farmers. But they are easy targets. There aren't many of them and they live in
a rural, Republican district with little political muscle. But they've said
precious little about the grave situation on the Trinity. The enviros have no
doubt gagged themselves in order not to irritate Democratic politicians in
California who are in bed with Big Ag.
In the
end, if the salmon have any kind of chance it resides with people like Michael
Kelly, who put their careers on the line to save the river, and the tribes of
the Klamath basin, who haven't stopped fighting for their treaty rights in the
last 100 years.
"We
are the people behind the fish," says Troy Fletcher of the Yurok Tribe.
At
least the salmon don't stand alone.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the
co-author of Five Days that Shook The World: The Battle For Seattle and
Beyond with Alexander Cockburn, and is a co-editor of Counterpunch, the nation’s best muckraking newsletter. Email: counterpunch@counterpunch.org