02/11/02
The Oregonian
Klamath coho aren't endangered -- The farmers are
Russ Brooks and Harold Johnson
The Bush administration has released a draft plan for water distribution in the Klamath Basin, the vast agricultural area straddling the California-Oregon border. This is the region where the feds left 1,500 farms starving for water last year by turning off irrigation in order to help protected fish.
The new draft "biological assessment" from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is being portrayed as a blueprint for better days for the area's farmers. Indeed, it drew groans from some environmentalists who insist that the interests of coho salmon and sucker fish must come first. By ostensibly promising a nearly full water allotment to farms for the foreseeable future, the plan "does not meet the needs of fish," Reed Benson, executive director of WaterWatch of Oregon told The Oregonian.
A closer look might make Mr. Benson feel better -- and farmers feel worse. Truth is, the Bureau of Reclamation's document offers no assurances that last year's brown fields and bankruptcies won't return. The report doesn't seem to depart from the scientific theory that triggered last year's irrigation halt -- the highly debatable proposition that endangered fish need high water levels in lakes and rivers to prosper.
As long as that assumption reigns, farmers will again be pushed to the back of the line when water runs low, no matter what sunny assurances they're getting today.
Regulators can't credibly ensure a full flow of water -- at least not as long as they continue to buy into "high water" assumptions about the needs of fish -- because the federal Endangered Species Act will force them to act on those assumptions. It will force them to divert water to sucker and salmon habitat if water levels get "too low."
They can't try to accommodate competing interests, because compromise isn't allowed by the ESA. It is so rigid that it forbids government officials from considering the human cost of policies to help endangered species. Even the effect on non-endangered animals must be ignored -- witness how last year's water cutoff starved not just farms, but also ducks, geese and deer in Klamath-area wildlife refuges.
This is why the best hope for a balanced resolution of the Klamath Basin crisis may lie with the court action that Pacific Legal Foundation is launching this week. Last week, PLF asked the Federal District Court in Eugene to remove coho salmon in the Klamath River from the federal endangered list, so that the ESA no longer applies to it.
If the salmon aren't classified as imperiled, there won't be need for extraordinary measures -- such as irrigation cutoffs -- simply to divert more water their way.
And the truth is, coho in the Klamath Basin aren't endangered. Not when you throw hatchery-born coho into the equation. As long as federal officials arbitrarily refuse to count hatchery coho along with stream-born coho as a unified population, the commodity most in peril is common sense.
Hatchery coho are genetically identical to so-called "wild" coho. More than that: once born, they follow the same cycle of life. Hatchery and non-hatchery coho swim side-by-side to the ocean. They're programmed to avoid predators and other stream hazards along the way. After they find food at the sea, their genes impel them back to their native streams. On their way back to spawn, they again follow instincts to skirt predators and fishermen -- and they've been returning in record numbers.
Where is common sense as long as bureaucrats declare that some coho must be protected by the ESA -- while other, identical coho (which often interbreed with wild coho) can be sold at a grocery near you at $4.99 a pound?
The ESA is an unbending and ultimately inhumane law that cries out for reform. Until that day, the best we can do is make sure that it is not extended to species that aren't truly endangered. This is especially important when the alternative is to endanger human hopes, dreams and futures by the thousands in the Klamath Basin.
(Russ Brooks and Harold Johnson are attorneys with Pacific Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm that litigates for property rights and limited government. PLF's Web address is <www.pacificlegal.org>.)
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