Tightening the screws
Saturday, May 5, 2001
By Henry Lamb
More than 1,400 farm families in the Klamath Basin have been targeted for economic extinction by environmental extremists. Nearly 90 percent of the 210,000 acres of farmland will get no water from Upper Klamath Lake because Steve Lewis, a biologist, rendered an opinion for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which said a sucker fish in the Upper Klamath Lake, and Coho salmon in the Klamath river need the water more than the farmers. In an appeal, U.S. District Judge Ann L. Aiken agreed, saying, "... while it is clear that the farmers face severe economic hardship, the threat to the survival of the fish is greater."
A "Bucket Brigade" is scheduled for May 7, where thousands of supporters will physically lift buckets of water from Klamath lake and hand them, person-to-person, down the brigade, all the way to an irrigation canal. The demonstration may draw attention to the farmer's plight, but it is not likely to change anything in the long run. The Klamath Basin is in the path of a coveted Bio-region -- the fish problem is simply a tool being used to achieve a much bigger objective.
The underlying legal authority is the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which has been used excessively by environmental extremists to drive people off their land and into economic oblivion.
Ironically, the ESA was enacted in response to a very emotional appeal to protect the American Bald Eagle. The decision to protect the Klamath sucker fish will deprive the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge the runoff from area farms, which will jeopardize as many as 1,000 eagles that feed there.
Attorneys for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund (formerly Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) are fighting for the sucker fish. This same extremist outfit sued the federal government on behalf of the Coho salmon, then submitted a bill to the Justice Department for $439,053. Most of the bill represented 931 hours by a single attorney -- at $350 per hour.
This fight, though, is not about attorney's fees, as obnoxious as they may be. This fight is not about the sucker fish, as repulsive as they may be. This fight is about the land.
It would be a mistake to laugh off the vision held by some, to convert as much as half the land in North America to core wilderness reserves, devoid of humans, connected by corridors of wilderness, all surrounded by buffer zones. This vision was advanced initially in the United States by Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!, founder of the Cenozoic Society, the Wildlands Project and, recently, a member of the board of the Sierra Club.
Foreman's vision was elevated into a legitimate plan when The Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society funded the efforts of Dr. Reed Noss, who actually drafted the Wildlands Project plan. The United Nations Environment Program legitimized the vision when it published the Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA), a massive 1,140-page instruction book for implementing the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. Section 13 of the GBA is a detailed description of how biodiversity should be preserved under the Convention (treaty) and, on page 993 (Section 13.4.2.2.3), the Wildlands Project is named explicitly as being "central" to successful implementation.
When the plan first appeared in 1992, it drew rave reviews from deep ecologists and environmental extremists -- and rounds of robust laughter from everyone else.
Al Gore did not laugh. Bruce Babbitt did not laugh. Carol Browner did not laugh.
Immediately upon taking office in 1993, the Clinton-Gore administration began restructuring the resource agencies of government around an "Ecosystem Management Policy" that elevated the protection of ecosystems to the same level as human health and considered humans to be a "biological resource." When the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate failed to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1994, the shocked and bewildered administration decided to implement the Ecosystem Management Policy anyway.
From day one, Gore, Babbitt, and Browner set out to impose and enforce every rule possible to keep people from using federal land -- even private lands. A lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund to "save" the spotted owl, took out the loggers in the northwest and eventually, in the southwest as well. A red-legged frog froze commercial activity on vast stretches of land in California. Monument designation removed ranchers and prohibited mineral production on nearly two million acres of the Escalante Staircase, and millions more acres in and around Clinton's rash of additional National Monuments.
On and on it goes. Following the Clinton-Gore administration around the United States is a trip through tragedy for people who love the land and depend upon its natural resources.
Now, it is the farmers in the Klamath Basin who must pay. They must pay with their land. Had the federal government just ordered the farmers to move, there would have been a rebellion.
No, no. No one would be so brazen. A more subtle, indirect approach was contrived. In Ohio, The Nature Conservancy, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would never "force" people off their land -- they would, instead, proclaim the virtue of a new wildlife preserve and insist that the farmland owned by nearly 200 families must be protected for future generations -- and, therefore, the taxpayers should buy the land from the residents of the Darby and return the land to its pre-settlement condition.
In Maine, environmental extremists want to convert most of the state into wilderness. In the northwest, there are several simultaneous, indirect tactics underway, all of which have the effect of forcing people off the land -- or severely limiting what people may do -- who are allowed to stay on the land. The Columbia River Basin has been a burning-barrel for tax dollars, wasted in plan after plan to remove or control the people. The Columbia River Gorge Commission is a classic example of government controlling people's activity on their own private property.
The Y2Y project envisions wilderness from Yellowstone to the Yukon, and the Cascadia Bioregion vision adds the forests and river bottoms from Washington to northern California -- including the Klamath Basin. All across the land, policies and programs are being implemented that have the effect of forcing people off their rural land to achieve some imagined environmental benefit.
If the Klamath farmers get no water, they can't farm. If they can't farm, they will have to move somewhere and find work. It's as simple as that. Sympathy will be dispensed and tax dollars offered but, in the end, if farmers can't get water, they can't farm. If they can't farm, they must move off the land.
Ask any congressman or federal officer what the Klamath water decision has to do with the Wildlands Project and the reply will be an indignant "nothing!" Sadly, most of them will think they speak the truth. The field officers of the federal agencies are just following orders. Their bosses, however, were selected by the Clinton-Gore team directly from the very environmental organizations that dreamed up and promoted the Wildlands Project. Many of the second- and third-tier officials remain in the Bush administration.
The elected officials have little time to be bothered with wild, scatter-brained "conspiracy theories" about U.N. land grabs. "Hogwash," they say. Anytime the U.N. is mentioned in less than glowing terms, elected officials tend to throw up the "black helicopter" defense and listen no more.
Nevertheless, look around. If the Klamath farmers get no water, they must move. The loggers in the northwest found that owls and salmon are valued higher than the needs of loggers and they were forced to close the mills and move off the land. The ranchers throughout the west are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their herds at profitable levels because of ever tightening rules and regulations.
Miners are now a distinct endangered species, but they are not on the EPA list for help. Private land owners from Maine to Ohio to Florida are finding "growth limits" blocking economic expansion and forcing land into open space instead of productive usage. Slowly, project by project, law by law, rule by rule, the United States is being transformed into the bizarre vision advanced by Dave Foreman more than a decade ago, which, incidentally, is precisely the objective of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity.
The screws are tightening now on the Klamath farmers. It is a sad day in the United States when the government officially places the value of a sucker fish above the needs of its citizens. The Endangered Species Act, as onerous as it is, does provide a mechanism for a so-called "God Squad" to overrule the federal agency and the sucker fish.
It is worth noting that when the snail darter stopped construction of a major dam in Tennessee, it was none other than Al Gore who demanded that the God Squad step in and overrule the ESA. Of course, this was before Al's green baptism, when he really was concerned about the people who elected him.
The Convention on Biological Diversity was not ratified by the United States. Clinton and Gore are no longer in charge. But the drive to push people off the land continues, powered by foundation and corporate-funded environmental extremist organizations and their former officers who remain entrenched in government.
This foolishness must stop. Perhaps the new administration will listen to the people. The last one certainly didn't.
Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International.
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
Farmers vs. Fish in Fight for Water Rights
Monday, May 07, 2001
When the rains dry up and drought sets in, who has first rights to water reserves — farmers who need to irrigate their crops, fishermen who depend on healthy rivers or endangered fish species who need full rivers to survive?
That's the question that now has farmers, fishermen, environmentalists, local Native-American tribes, and the federal government locked in what is shaping up to be an epic battle in northern California and Oregon. It's a controversy that brought thousands of farmers and their supporters out to a dramatic protest in Klamath Falls, Ore., on Monday.
Fifty farmers — each representing one of the 50 states — lined up along Main Street in a ceremonial "bucket brigade" to protest the federal government's decision to cut off an irrigation project that is the primary source of water for 250,000 acres of mostly family-owned farmland in the Klamath River Basin.
The farmers, who have been tilling the region's soil for generations, claim they're being pushed to the back of the line behind an effort to save endangered salmon and sucker fish — while facing extinction themselves.
Before a crowd of 12,000 supporters, 86-year-old homesteader Jeff Prosser, a World War II veteran who won his land in a government homestead lottery — dipped a bucket into a lake fed by the Upper Klamath Lake, and passed the symbolic water to his son John.
John Prosser then passed the bucket to his daughter Katie, 11, who handed the bucket to her six-year-old brother, James. From James the bucket passed down a chain of farmers almost a mile, where it was poured into the irrigation system's empty main canal.
"We must never feel that it is OK to say that a sucker fish is of more value under law than a farm family," said Oregon Sen. Gordon Smith, one of about 20 politicians who had arrived in Klamath Falls to support the rally.
In the Klamath Basin, a fertile farming region on the California-Oregon border, about 1,500 family-run farms and ranches depend on a federal irrigation project that has pumped water into their fields from the Klamath River for more than a century. But in the face of severe drought conditions and a lawsuit brought by a coalition of environmentalists and commercial fishing interests, the Bureau of Reclamation was forced by court order to shut down the pipes.
It marked only the first time in generations of drought battles that the Klamath Basin farmers have been denied water. It was also the first time, according to the Reclamation Bureau, that a farming community anywhere in the area has been forced to stop farming.
According to the court ruling, the Reclamation Bureau violated the Endnagered Species Act by continuing to supply farming irrigation without first studying the needs of the fish, and cannot deliver water to the irrigation system until they come up with a plan to protect the fish. Farmers say the ruling will destroy a 100-year-old agricultural community and way of life.
On Friday, California Gov. Gray Davis declared a state of emergency in the region.
Farmers vs. Fish
Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon, and the Klamath River that plunges from Oregon down through California to the ocean, are home to two endangered species of fish — sucker fish and coho salmon. The suckor fish play a vital role in the heritage of the areas' three indigenous Indian tribes, who have fought ardently since 1986 to protect the Upper Klamath, while the region's commercial fisherman depend on the salmon in the river for their livelihood.
Both fish species have been dwindling in recent years, and last Monday a federal judge ruled the plight of the fish was a higher priority than the plight of the farmers.
"We need that water for our fisheries, just as much or more than the farmers," Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations told the Los Angeles Times. "Our communities have been systematically strangled."
Spain told the Times that the salmon deplation has cost the fishing industry 3,700 jobs. Farmers, he said, can get by during rough times on federal assistance, but the fish "only have one river."
The fight for the Klamath water has been brewing between the farmers and those that want the fish protected for some time, staved off by several seasons of heavy rains. But environmentalists believe agriculture has taken too much for too long. Scientists have cautioned the salmon would be wiped out if the Klamath River's water volume didn't double, and said the suckers in Upper Klamath Lake also need increased water levels.
However, the Klamath Basin farmland was created 100 years ago by damming and dyking marshlands and lakes, and some suggest that environmentalists are less interested in protecting the fish than they are in buying up the land to return it to its natural, wetland state.
Addressing Monday's rally, California Rep. Wally Herger said he suspects that the true agenda of environmental groups is to drive down the price of the farmland.
"It's really bankrupting the farmers in order to buy this land at bargain rates," Herger said.
In April, a suit brought by fishermen and environmentalists resulted in a court order against the Bureau of Reclamation that oversees the region's hundreds of miles of irrigation. The farmers were completely cut off.
Farmers claim they are being forced into bankruptcy and complete ruin, and that their withering, dusty fields have forced about 3,000 farm laborers to seek work elsewhere. The businesses that support farming — equipment stores, seed retailers — are also seriously threatened. Schools could even be in danger of closing if farming families are driven from the area to make a living elsewhere.
In California, Gov. Davis has released $5 million to increase ground-water access, while Oregon has been issuing permits to dig new wells. The federal government has issued $1.5 billion to plant cover crops and erect wind barriers to keep the now dry, dusty soil from literally blowing away. But the locals are not much interested in government assistance. Farmers without income are not helped by low-interest federal loans.
In fact, some farmers have already faced defeat. More than 50 farmers have signed with land trusts to sell 20,000 acres of their land.
The region's vast network of bird estuaries have also been cut off from the water. The wetlands, which are the remnants of other rivers and lakes that have been drained and diked to create farmland, are a major stop for migrating birds and are home to the largest bald eagle population in the lower 48 states.
— Fox News' Marni Zambri contributed to this report