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Environment Reporting
videotapes describing the decline of
family farms and the government’s intentional
killing of hatchery salmon.
They also played the song ‘God Bless
the U.S.A.’ repeatedly over large loudspeakers.
“When officers turned floodlights
on the crowd Saturday night, farmers
drove pickup trucks up to the fences so
their headlights and spotlights would
shine on the officers.
“An ice cream truck, its music jingling,
occasionally circled through the
crowd that had gathered to watch.”
Missing the Story
From across the nation and the world,
reporters descended into this circuslike
southern Oregon setting more than
a year ago to cover an environmental
furor nearly a century in the making.
It’s one that includes many victims and
involves complicated science with no
clear solutions, enigmatic species and
racial tensions, not to mention contorted
interstate politics and millions
in taxpayer dollars.
Most of the reporters, unfortunately,
missed most of that. Instead, they (including
me, as you just read) all too
often covered the show.
Farmers were the most obvious victims
when federal agencies cut off their
irrigation water in the summer of 2001.
They quickly learned how to use a
press that gravitated toward the obvious.
They staged protests and, in a
flamboyant but largely fruitless exercise,
dramatized their plight by illegally
cracking open head gates that
control water to their windswept farms.
Federal marshals swooped in and
closed the gates. When it looked like
the TV crews were tuckered out and
packing up their satellite trucks, the
farmers pieced together a makeshift
pipeline to suck up water they weren’t
supposed to have.
The TV crews stayed, of course,
watching another round in the pitched
battle the press almost universally
boiled down to three words: fish versus
farmers. This was convenient for
the most vocal farmers and politicians,
who then could advance the alluring
but simplistic argument that farmers
are, of course, more important than
fish—especially the bottom-feeding
sucker, a long-lived monster of a fish
that is something of a living fossil and
subject to as much speculation as the
dinosaurs.
Fox News reporters were hailed
during the local Fourth of July parade
for telling the story almost exclusively
from the farmers’ point of view.
But, in all reality, it was far more
than fish vs. farmers. There’s no doubt
that farmers suffered in 2001, but there
had long been plenty of environmental
and economic pain to go around. It
was more accurately fish vs. farmers vs.
tribes vs. other fish vs. million-dollar
farms in California vs. fishermen vs.
wildlife refuges vs. environmentalists
vs. drought vs. other farmers. In some
parts of the basin, there are 5,600 competing
claims for the same water. Wildlife,
tribal, farm and other needs all
overlap. Even in the wettest year, there
would never be enough water to satisfy
them all.
This area was, and still is, a massive
ecosystem so squeezed of water over
the last century it cannot meet all the
demands people and wildlife place
upon it. That’s the fundamental story,
but also the forgotten one.
Untangling Its Threads
The Klamath Basin, in an unfortunate
way, is a victim of its own success. It’s
an arid high desert, but the surrounding
mountains provided plenty of water
that once filled vast wetlands and
drew thick clouds of migratory birds.
Soon the government moved Indians
onto a reservation (later liquidated into
logging land), drained the “swamps,”
and lured ambitious farmers with cheap
water from a federal reclamation
project. Nobody, other than local tribes,
perhaps, much cared about the suckers
that flowed into fields with irrigation
water and rotted into fertilizer.
Nobody worried much about coho
salmon blocked by hydroelectric dams.
Farming boomed. But as natural
resources like the suckers eroded, the
Klamath Tribes began a downward spiral
into one of the state’s poorest populations.
Fishing fleets off the coast of
California and Oregon collapsed as
salmon runs on the Klamath and other
rivers collapsed. Finally the Endangered
Species Act led federal agencies to hold
enough water for the sucker in the
same shallow lake where farmers get
their irrigation water. And it required
dispensing more water for salmon,
which also struggle against massive,
but curiously unquestioned, diversions
to wealthy farms in California’s Central
Valley.
When one of the toughest droughts
of the century struck, biologists said
the suckers and salmon needed all the
water. And the farmers, themselves
suckered by old government promises
of all the water they could want, got
caught in the middle—the latest of all
too many victims.
My editors and I saw during the
initial water allocations that Klamath
was boiling into our biggest environmental
story of the year and launched
a crash series explaining why. But it
was hard to stay on track as the drama
morphed into a bitter circus. Editors
were focused on whether emboldened
farmers were getting busted (one
wanted to get arrested so badly he
chained himself to the head gates only
to woefully unlock himself when no
cops dragged him away) or whether
the National Guard might be called out
to control angry crowds. Environmentalists
were warned (by the sheriff) to
stay out of town for their own safety.
Articles offering alternate points of view
got reporters branded enemies of family
farms. Farmers who broke ranks to
discuss retiring some cropland faced
bitter hostility.
All sides had scientists who poked
so many holes in each other’s work
reporters rightfully wondered whom
to believe. And it seemed insane to try
to explain to readers that scientists do
not know precisely how much water
suckers need when farmers who
needed the same water were seeing
their John Deeres repossessed.
Often, reporting the story in full
made it murkier and more confusing,
which consequently made it all the
more tempting to not do so.
The story is far from over. Scientists
convened by Secretary of the Interior
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 55