Discuss: Fluid Values: Battles Over Water Rights

I am only a concerned citizen, and not an expert. As such, I cannot rise to the level of this conversation. Neither am I an activist, in any sense. In fact, I’ll admit here in print that I’m the despairing, denying, apathetic cause-of-the-problem. However, I felt a subtle anger reading the original article, and after examining it, I felt compelled to offer one layman’s perspective.

As a regular person, I have a harsh and unpopular word for these displaced farmers, with whom everyone is so smarmily sympathetic. I’m sure I fail to comprehend the complexities of your plight, and I acknowledge that I have never had to face losing a way of life. But I do know that being adversely affected by something and being its victim are not the same. Suddenly you are poor and have no direction. Welcome to my world. I’m right there with you. It’s frightening, isn’t it? I was sold a lie, too (and it wasn’t 90 yeas ago in a different generation), in the form of a federal student loan (for which I’m still, at 41, deep in debt). I thought it was the right thing to do (the government said so, and so did my parents), and all I got in the end was a couple of degrees, an overpriced apartment in the city, and servitude to a shitty $10.00/hr job that I hate. I was 18, and I didn’t know any better, and I got the life you’re afraid of being relegated to. So stop crying. It’s up to us to change our own lives and circumstances now.

When it comes to our use and abuse of natural resources, particularly in developed countries like ours human beings are the actORs in the saga. The only victims are the land, the sea, the river, and the creatures who must live or die at our mercy. Farmers, fishers, government, and citizens are all responsible to change our *thinking*, to stop believing we have a moral imperative to farm deserts, build cities in floodplains, and yes, live our daily lives in blissful ignorance of where our water, our food, and our energy come from.

We have believed ourselves the masters of the world, and we have made it so, but this belief is killing both it and us. Endless bickering over who is most vicitmized and who is most entitled serves us nothing. We ALL must take our losses and be willing to CHANGE together. We must cease to be masters and begin to be fellow-denizens. We must contemplate, however strange and difficult it may seem, the possibility that the owner of the water is the one who lives in it. We did not know that in the past, when we thought our might made us right. We can think about it now. And it is direly important that we do. This is our new imperative.

Thank you for reading this.
Camilla

Go, Camilla!
“The western mindset of being able to have expectations fully met is unrealistic….” is one of the keys to finding a solution to the argument. The earth that we live on is constantly changing and adaptation is fundemental to survival.
We are guests here and no more and we should cherish and care for this planet as she alone sustains us.

Leading this article with a personal story about the plight of a farmer cheapens the discussion. It’s like talking about whether we should close the Abilene plant to build nuclear warheads through the eyes of a factory worker. The bigger picture is what counts: irrigation is not viable in an area suffering increasing drought, declining fish migrations, and sensitive migratory bird habitat. Tell the farmers to relocate, and don’t make it a tearjerker story.

Relevant news from the Klamath today:

Levee blasts signal a truce in water wars

Klamath - Four half-mile sections are pulverized in an effort to restore fish habitat

Wednesday, October 31, 2007
GAIL KINSEY HILL
The Oregonian

“The flooding of 2,500 acres of the Williamson River delta is designed to aid the recovery of two species of fish found only in the Klamath Basin. In 1988, the Lost River and shortnose suckers were declared endangered under federal law. Ever since, sparring interests have been trying to put together an acceptable recovery plan.”

“This is a river that’s seen a lot of controversy,” Staunton said. “We hope that with projects like this we can continue to share the water and improve the situation for everyone.”

Hope this link works:

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1193801124304310.xml&coll;=7

Erik
Orion Grassroots Network

Matt, thanks for the great article.  You acknowledge in the discussion that communities in the Southeast are confronting these questions about water.  I am opposing a coal plant in NC that will not only emit over 6 million tons of CO2 annually but also evaporate 21 million gallons of water every day.  And two new nuclear plants—even bigger water hogs—are planned just downstream. We are in an “exceptional” drought.  And 81% of the water withdrawn from NC’s reservoirs, lakes, and rivers every day goes to produce electricity.

We could make our electricity without using so much water (and without destroying the climate), but here the utilities are so powerful that the alternatives can’t get off the ground. Do you know any journalists who are working on the water/energy connection?  I badly want to draw attention to this important story.
Thanks so much.

Beth Henry
Charlotte, NC

Yesterday, I had a long drive back down from the Klamath Basin, where I’d watched the levees get blown sky-high. The drive gave me 350-some-odd miles to think about this a little more, and I realized that I think it’s unrealistic to simply wish away irrigated agriculture from those watersheds where it harms fish and birds.

When I got home, I cooked up a bunch of my standard near-winter fare — green chile stew, with a little lamb. I’ve been in a running-tallies-in-my-head sort of mood lately, and as I made the stew, I kept track of where the ingredients most likely came from, and which fish they’re affecting. The pinto beans came from western Colorado, from an irrigation project that has reduced river flows for Colorado River cutthroat trout. The roma tomatoes, which were organic, came from either Baja California or Sonora, Mexico — which means they were grown with water that otherwise would have gone to the Sea of Cortez to nurture fish like the totoaba, a relative of the sea bass, and a porpoise called the vaquita. Green chiles from New Mexico use water for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. The water I boiled the beans in is water that otherwise would have flowed into the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta to support a fish called the Delta smelt, whose populations have been devastated. I drank a beer while I was making the stew, and the hops almost certainly came from the Yakima Valley, in Washington, which is prime salmon-spawning habitat. (I was a little incredulous to realize that the lamb may, in fact, be the most endangered-fish-neutral ingredient in the entire meal.)

On its face, green chile stew does not seem like a thing that would imperil fish. Yet my meal last night affected fish in at least five separate watersheds — each of which is, in its own way, facing problems similar to the Klamath. This isn’t just a western thing, either: If you live in New York, your roma tomatoes and the hops in your beer, and much of your lettuce and carrots and rice (and your potato chips) have been grown by farmers in irrigation projects. 

So here’s my point: Even if you don’t like folks like Dave Cacka and Mike Byrne, and even if you don’t eat food that the Klamath farmers themselves have grown, we all are pretty intimately connected, in one way or another, to the same kinds of problems that are bedeviling the Klamath Basin. We, as a human species, are too dependent on irrigated agriculture — and a lot of other not-environmentally-benign practices like logging and fishing — to let go.

So as for this question of what we do about the human and community costs incurred as we try to reduce the environmental impacts of practices like irrigation in the Klamath Basin? I think we all already have a piece of this sitting in our bellies. 

—Matt

Matt,

I thought the article was petty balanced. I will start by saying I have a bias.  I live and work in the Klamath Basin.

What’s discouraging to me are the reader comments. Beth for example, has clearly read a lot and indicated she has studied the Klamath issues.  Unfortunately for anyone who has taken the time to learn the facts they would see immediately that Beth has been studying works of fiction.

Most of her facts are wrong or contain only half the truth. The issues in Klamath are complicated and don’t lend themselves well to sound-bites. I don’t have the time or energy to go through everything she got wrong (part of our problem in the Klamath is we don’t spend enough time doing that).

I would like to know from Beth how many times she has actually been to the Klamath Project?  And who is the farmer that she has quoted?

Farmers in the Klamath Basin take great pride in the over 430 species of wildlife that call the area home. They provide food and habitat for many species. Many of these species were devastated when water was shut off in 2001 to benefit 3 species of fish.  The irrigation infrastructure has developed its own ecosystem.  Pond turtles died by the thousands, the migratory waterfall were severely disrupted, if not devastated.  The action to shut-off water to 180,000 acres was for the benefit of 3 species and to the detriment of others.  Our wildlife refuge neighbors suffered as well. They depend on farmers and the irrigation project to deliver water (99% of the farming occurs on private land, not on the refuge).

Klamath farmers could just go away… relocate.  But, why be hypocritical?  The California Bay area used to be home to tremendous wildlife (bears) and home to Native people.  It’s outrageous that man has invaded this area and destroyed the resources there.  Relocate San Francisco and quit being so sympathetic!

We can have farmers working with and in the ecosystem and providing food and habitat for wildlife, or we can have destination resorts and Wal-Marts…your choice.

The next time any of you eat a potato chip, drink organic milk, have a stick of Wrigley’s chewing gum, brush your teeth with mint toothpaste, eat a French fry, have a steak, eat bread made from organic wheat, open a can of Campbell’s soup, or put a little horseradish on your prime rib….. think about Klamath.  Although, I suppose we could get most of these things from China if you prefer.

One important distinction between, say, the student-loan example and that of the Klamath is that water in farming communities is a resource upon which the entire local economy is founded. When laws change and reach straight to that common economic base, they force a particularly profound sort of transformation and call into question the fate of entire communities — which, in rural areas, don’t often have a diversified economic base.

So we return to the two bleak options that bracket all of this: Either the government is forced to pay out huge amounts of money to ransom back the resource, or it commandeers the resource by sheer regulatory fiat. But between those two poles lies a whole spectrum of equitable possibilities — one of which seems to start with the government (and the public) acknowledging that, in changing the rules, we have a responsibility to provide some sort of alternative.

As it happens, the government took exactly that tack in logging communities in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s — and the episode is often cited as a model of how the public can help shepherd communities through environmental and economic transitions. The thumbnail-sketch version of the story is this: In 1993, after a series of court injunctions shut down federal-lands logging in the Pacific Northwest to protect the spotted owl, President Clinton created the Northwest Forest Plan. The plan allowed logging to continue, but greatly reduced levels. The Clinton administration was quite explicit that, in protecting the forests and trying to create a sustainable timber industry, it was also determined to “support the region’s people and communities during the transition.”

The federal government estimated that 11,000 to 16,000 workers could lose their jobs because of timber reductions. In response, it created a $1.2 billion economic-adjustment program to provide job retraining for “dislocated” loggers and mill workers, create a “Jobs in the Woods” program that put loggers to work restoring forests and streams, and provide loans and loan guarantees to help local businesses diversify. The government also created a new system of federal payments to rural counties to replace the share of receipts that they lost with reduced logging levels.

There has not been much empirical evaluation of how well the program worked, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the promise of the Northwest Forest Plan’s economic-adjustment programs may have been oversold as a model for communities facing similar straitened circumstances. To be fair, presidential and congressional support for the program has, essentially, fizzled out. The retraining and Jobs in the Woods programs have quietly disappeared, and last year, Congress voted to not renew the timber-payment-substitution program. As a result — to give just one example — Jackson County, Oregon, was forced to shutter its public libraries for several months. (Now, candidates hoping to unseat U.S. Senator Gordon Smith, R-Ore., have seized on the timber-payments program as a major issues in next year’s election).

The mixed successes of such adjustment programs — and particularly, the fact that they’re subject to the caprices of Congress and presidential administrations — suggests that communities may fare better by trying to stay ahead of the curve and adapt to changing circumstances, rather than waiting for a crisis to happen and then clamoring for public help.

Stay tuned for more.

—Matt