Tensions flare over water rights
The farms in the basin are losing out to the needs of endangered fish and the promise of too much to too many
Sunday, May 6, 2001
KLAMATH FALLS -- This time of year, Rod Blackman should be irrigating the farm and cattle ranch his great-grandfather staked out in Southern Oregon, south of Klamath Falls, in 1918.
Today he is watching it blow away: in swirling clouds of dust, with not a drop of water to keep it down.
Water isn't coming his way this year. Neither will it flow to more than 1,000 other farms in the Klamath Basin of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Although the U.S. government spent millions on dams and canals here to capture water for farming, it has ruled that fish protected by the Endangered Species Act need it most in this bone-dry season.
The farm water will remain locked away in Upper Klamath Lake and out of reach in the Klamath River.
A field at the onset of growing season is furrowed. But Blackman's fields look more like sand dunes. Wind scours the earth, driving sheets of grit into the sky.
"We've dealt with droughts," he says. "They're not good, but they're not the end of the world, like this."
In the Klamath Basin, America's longtime promise of water to all comers has finally run out. It's a tragic chapter in the century-long dream of turning an arid West green by storing and spreading its water.
The Klamath thrived on that dream. But two things got in the way, things that people talked about but never quite believed could shut the water off: The federal government promised too much water to too many, and insatiable thirst ran headlong into the Endangered Species Act.
"We knew it was coming," said Marshall Staunton, who farms just south of the Oregon-California line. "But we thought there would be some compromise. We didn't think it would be this drastic, this hard."
Like any western saga, this one has escalated into a showdown. The weapons, so far, are laws and lawsuits.
There are no winners.
Farmers may lose their property. Collective losses in the Klamath Basin, if they encompass the decline in value of land turned barren for lack of water, could top $500 million. And the dry ground has laid emotions bare.
"They might just go up there and turn the water on," Blackman says. "That's what guys are talking."
Federal reclamation officials, who worked with farmers to build the irrigation system and tame the unforgiving climate, now work behind locked doors and thick security glass.
Environmentalists, who say farmers have long used water at the expense of fish and wildlife, have been warned to stay out of town. Their lives may be in danger.
Native Americans once relied on the fish they call mullet, but others call suckers, as a springtime dietary staple. But they stopped catching suckers before the fish were declared endangered in 1988. Fishermen who once loaded boats with salmon on the Southern Oregon and Northern California coasts no longer can fish there, because coho salmon that spawn in the Klamath River are threatened with extinction.
And the Klamath Basin, world-famous for millions of waterfowl, holds the worst quality water in Oregon.
It all starts in the mountains.
The headwaters of the Klamath River lie high in the Cascades, in and around Crater Lake National Park. Average winter snaowfall there totals almost 45 feet -- more than nearly anywhere else in the country and far more than the few meager feet on the ground this year.
Water rushes downhill to what was once an immense series of shallow lakes and marshes carpeting the valley floor. The largest is Upper Klamath Lake. It laps up next to the City of Klamath Falls and is ground zero of this year's water war.
And this season, almost 80 percent less water than usual will flow into the lake.
Upper Klamath Lake is the broadest lake in Oregon but so shallow a grown man could wade across most of it. It holds the largest native wild trout in the world, some approaching 20 pounds, but massive algae blooms can kill those trout and the endangered suckers that swim with them. Companies harvest the same algae and have made millions by selling it as nutritional supplements. Brief and early runoff this year has filled the lake to its brim. Not a drop will go to farms.
"What people can't understand is that that lake is so full, it's about to overflow and they can't have any," said Rick Woodley of the Klamath Soil and Water Conservation District. "The miracle of all this is we haven't had violence."
Initially, the murky lake was not a promising water source. Only after power companies built hydroelectric dams downstream on the Klamath River did they dam Upper Klamath Lake, in 1921, stabilizing the seesawing seasonal flow of water out of the lake and through their turbines.
That also made it useful to irrigators who, with the government's aid, had drained the valley's marshes to make room for farming. One of the biggest canals soon funneled water from Upper Klamath Lake to those lands.
Unlike most dams, though, the one on Upper Klamath did not raise the lake or boost its capacity. Instead, it replaced a natural barrier at the lake's outlet and allowed operators to manually lower the lake to feed the river as power demands warranted.
A drop of a foot in the lake level can leave wetlands at the upper end of the lake high and dry. That would come to have far-reaching consequences. For centuries those wetlands had supplied Native American tribes with fish, seeds, plants and wildlife.
In 1864, the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin band of Snake Indians signed a treaty with the United States confining them to a reservation that spanned the upper reaches of the lake and assuring them perpetual hunting and fishing rights. Although the government later bought out the reservation in a forced settlement, courts have ruled that the original tribal hunting and fishing rights remain -- and include the resources necessary to sustain them.
Namely, water.
It is the same water the government later developed for farm irrigation. The same water essential to fish that would later fall under the Endangered Species Act. The same water that flows to national wildlife refuges set up to support the waterfowl that once lived amid the basin's plentiful marshes.
The tribes have claimed nearly all the water flowing into Upper Klamath Lake. But they are not the only ones.
Before Oregon passed water laws, settlers and ranchers claimed lake-bound water. The federal Bureau of Reclamation claims water on behalf of the farmers who now have none. Crater Lake National Park claims water. So, too, does the U.S. Forest Service.
In all, there are about 700 claims to water in the Upper Klamath watershed. They overlap in some 5,600 places. Even in the wettest year there would never be enough water to satisfy them all.
It is up to the state to determine who has the first right to the water, especially in a dry year such as this. The state started that process, called adjudication, 26 years ago. Beset by lawsuits and protests by competing irrigators who could see their water rights shrink, it is nowhere near finished.
So the upper basin remains a kind of water free-for-all, where it's unclear who is using how much water. Those nearest the head of the river can take water because it's there, even if those downstream turn out to outrank them.
That makes it unclear whether all the water that should reach Upper Klamath Lake is actually reaching the lake, its endangered suckers, threatened salmon downriver and the farmers who need it.
"We're really hands-off until we complete the adjudication," admits Paul Cleary, director of the state Department of Water Resources.
Simply put, there is no orderly way to dole out what little water there is.
"If there were better management by the state in the upper basin, we'd have a much better idea what the shortfall really is," says Reed Benson of Water Watch of Oregon. "As it is, the feds, the fish, the Endangered Species Act become a convenient whipping boy, because the state is not doing its job."
Since the complex of dams and reservoirs known as the Klamath Project is the only federal irrigation complex here, feeding water to about half the basin's acreage, it alone must meet the high bar of the Endangered Species Act. It cannot make that bar without enough water in the lake to support the endangered sucker, biologists have concluded.
So the Project, which gets most of its water from Upper Klamath Lake, has become the convenient valve to shut off to keep water in the lake.
That leaves the farmers to pay.
"Anything that happens in the system, we have to make up for it," says a frustrated Dave Solem, head of the Klamath Irrigation District, which draws all its water from the lake. "It makes no sense."
Without irrigation, the basin's towns could lose more than crops and wages: they could lose an entire way of life
Monday, May 7, 2001
TULELAKE, Calif. -- Alfalfa. Barley. Wheat. Potatoes. Onions.
They cover hundreds of thousands of acres, turning the Klamath Basin into a verdant springtime quilt -- when there's water.
Ducks swim in irrigation canals. Geese nibble at grain. Thousands of cattle graze, fattening for auction -- when there's water.
These crops and livestock form just a sliver of the world's farm economy.
But here, in this arid basin that spans Southern Oregon and Northern California, they are an indelible part of the physical and working world -- a landscape and livelihood lost without the water that in this year of unprecedented drought will go, instead, to protected fish.
Money from the crops and livestock passes through the hands of farm families who've worked the land for generations. It rings the cash registers of local businesses. And it fills envelopes that farm laborers send to their families in Mexico.
No one knows the final price and impact of the water shut-off -- some farms may get by on private wells. But optimism has evaporated.
Laborers come to this farm town three miles south of the Oregon line to stand on a worn street corner they call "La esquina de la esperanza."
The corner of hope.
They wait each morning for passing pickups to offer work in the fields.
Today there is no hope: No water, no jobs.
"It was a pretty hard surprise," says Venancio Hernandez, who arrived from Mexico a few weeks ago. "How can a fish be worth a human being?"
In recent years, it's hardly been a bonanza.
Klamath Basin crops and livestock produce more than $100 million in an average year, although the profit margin of many farms has tightened as the market for crops such as potatoes has plummeted. The last federal Census of Agriculture, in 1997, reported that about as many Klamath County farms lost money as made money. And agriculture accounts for less than 5 percent of personal income in Klamath County.
But farming claims a much larger piece of the basin's small towns and rural character. Those towns grew up with the federal irrigation project that usually furnishes water.
Already families are pulling children out of schools that form the heart of Tulelake and, in Oregon, Merrill and Malin.
A Latino community that had become a year-round presence and a majority in small towns such as Tulelake and Malin is decreasing.
"If you have water on one year and off the next, it's devastating to the community," says Patty Reeder, principal of Tulelake Elementary School, which has about 100 children of all backgrounds in its popular after-school programs.
In the worst case, which this may be, the district may lose half of its 500 students.
"You lose all of this and wonder if you'll ever get it back," she says.
Klamath Basin farmers arrived near the turn of the century with little except hope to go on. It was hope fueled by a newborn U.S. Reclamation Service, which eagerly reported in a 1916 brochure that its reclamation works had settlers in the Oregon town of Malin "prospering and contented," growing 6-foot grain "which would delight the heart of any farmer."
"Apparently," it said, "there is water everywhere in abundance."
Anyone who actually farmed in the Klamath Basin soon learned the surroundings were not so kind. More than 4,000 feet high, the basin has a short growing season. The average annual rainfall is about 12 inches, a third of Portland's, almost none of it in summer.
Indeed, shortly after the turn of the century, locals had urged the Reclamation Service to buy out modest private irrigation works and subsidize their expansion. Only a much larger federal irrigation project, underwritten in the name of putting useless land to use, would turn the whole basin into farmland.
The Klamath Falls Express told locals in 1904 it was "the chance of their lives to secure government irrigation."
Within five years, a congressional inquiryfound the fledgling project had spent far too much buying out private property in a "scheme" that calls "into question the wisdom and business judgment of those charged with management of the Reclamation Service."
The same federal buyout now haunts descendants of farmers who at the time saw the government as a benevolent partner.
They were farmers like Barry O'Connor. In 1948, he entered a lottery of 2,577 World War II veterans for 44 homesteads in the then-booming Klamath Project. He felt lucky when his name was pulled from a pickle jar in a drawing broadcast nationwide and reported on front pages across the West.
His homestead came with water, of course -- it would have been crazy to accept it otherwise -- and O'Connor has irrigated it ever since. His son took over the farm, but O'Connor still helps out.
"You normally plant spuds the 6th of May," O'Connor says, as if planning this season. "With potatoes, you've got to keep them not too wet and not too dry."
He cannot see why Oregon and the nation are not up in arms over what is happening. The politicians don't seem to be much help.
Even the Bush administration, which seemed friendly to agriculture, could not keep the water on. In early April, Vice President Dick Cheney persuaded biologists to squeeze a little water out for about 10 percent of the project's farmers. The rest get none.
"It doesn't seem right what they're doing," O'Connor says, looking out the window of a cafe in Merrill, population 895. "And nobody seems to care. If we don't get water, there won't be anything left here. It'll go back to desert."
In his hardware store across the street, Tom Omgan is hoping for no more than a 25 percent drop in business. It's the kind of town where everyone fills a role. Omgan drives the town ambulance and worries that the sudden drop in tax revenue will cost the local fire department as much as it will his store.
"This happened so suddenly, we couldn't even get ready for it," he says. "We didn't slow down. Our head hit the windshield when we stopped."
Up the road, farmer and rancher Lynn Pope has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations as he watches the dust blow outside his living room's panoramic window. Land without water falls so dramatically in value, he figures that the loss of irrigation water to his property is the equivalent of a Wall Street baron watching the Dow plummet from 10,000 to 500 overnight.
"Without water, this land isn't worth much," he says. "Nobody's spending any money, because they're not going to get it back."
Many wonder what they will get back even if they do get their water. Frito-Lay, the potato chip-maker, may shift the contracts that offer one of the few ways to make money on potatoes to farmers outside the basin. One group of growers had persuaded Safeway stores in the region to stock premium local potatoes they called "Klamath Fresh Direct," which fetched a higher price than the surplus potatoes the government is now paying to take off the market.
With no premium potatoes, however, they'll lose that precious space on store shelves.
They may not get back the workers, like Hernandez, who will hit the road.
One of them came to Leanne Crawford's house near Tulelake a week ago, wondering if there would be work on her family's farm again this year.
Probably not, she said. She gave him a card for the food bank and a bag of clothes for his family.
Fish center of swirling crisis
Tuesday, May 8, 2001
CHILOQUIN -- Upstream from Upper Klamath Lake along the Sprague River, Adrian Witcraft points at dark, muscular shapes lurking just beneath the surface.
It's a sight he's seen just three times in his life: suckers, each the size of a grown man's arm. There are dozens.
This is the fish, along with coho salmon, that dwells far downstream, that halted the flow of water to more than 1,000 farms below Upper Klamath Lake. Two species of suckers, once known simply as mullet, and the coho are protected under the powerful Endangered Species Act.
It's the fish at the center of the Klamath storm.
The sucker carries deep meaning for the Klamath Tribes. It carries an altogether different meaning for the farmers whose irrigation canals are dry, in part, because the sucker is struggling through its own water crisis.
In their native language, members of the Klamath Tribes call the sucker "Kaptu" or "C'wam;" in English, tribal members such as Witcraft prefer the term mullet.
Now that so much rides on the fish, "sucker" can be a loaded word.
A restaurant in Klamath Falls boldly advertises a "Sucker Fish Sandwich" -- made of cod, actually -- for $1.80, with proceeds going to fight the Endangered Species Act.
"There are plenty of them, and they are junk fish," says Brad Harper of Water for Life, an irrigator advocacy group in Salem. "They don't deserve the protection they're being afforded."
But to Witcraft and the tribes who once depended on the springtime runs for sustenance, the sucker is a vestige of what at one time was a valley full of wildlife: Flocks of waterfowl blocked the sun, deer herds boomed, and rich rivers brought native families together to fish along these shores.
"We're not telling anybody they have to eat a sucker," Witcraft says. "But you don't have to mock another culture. This fish meant something to my grandparents. This valley was one continuous cultural site. That's all been obliterated. People don't want to look back and see what they had to do to get what they have today."
Early farmers, with support and funding from the U.S. government, drained marshes and lakes so vast that steamships ferried people across them. Dams cut off runs of salmon that once stretched the length of the Klamath River -- thick migrations that supported tribes along the river and fishing fleets at the coast. Logging stripped forests that, in the 1960s, supported as many as 60 deer per square mile.
Today, about four deer live in each square mile.
Tribes once hunted and fished throughout the basin. They agreed, in 1864, to give up their homeland for a reservation that the U.S. government, in the 1950s, forced them to sell. Instead, the community centered in Chiloquin sank into unemployment and poverty.
It claims one of the lowest per capita incomes in the state.
"I heard a farmer who lost his water saying he felt like he was part of a big government experiment," Witcraft says. "All I can say is, welcome to the party."
Some tribal members fearful
Some tribal members say they are afraid to shop in Klamath Falls. Racial taunts
liken Native Americans to suckers. Some say local restaurants will not serve
them.
"I'm concerned that it's turning racial," said Tribal Chairman Allen Foreman. "It doesn't need to be that way. We know what it's like to lose your resources. The fish are one of our resources, just like groceries you buy at the store."
The tribes hold a high hand when it comes to water: Courts have ruled their rights supersede all others except those essential to endangered species. But much of the water needs cleaning up.
A scientist employed by the tribes likened the amount of cow manure found in one river entering Upper Klamath Lake to the output of sewage from a city of 350,000. Such waste adds to natural nutrients in the lake, feeding summer algae blooms that send the bloated bodies of trout, suckers and other fish to the surface.
Tribal lore holds that the sucker emerged from the ashes of Mount Mazama, the volcano that erupted 6,000 years ago to form Crater Lake, and sustained the tribes when there was nothing else.
The brawny fish are survivors. They scour the bottoms of lakes and rivers that are naturally dark and murky. The Lost River sucker, inhabiting a river that flows into Tule Lake, is the only living species in a group of fish that otherwise exists only as fossils.
It measures up to 2 feet long and lives upwards of 40 years, slightly larger and longer than the related, and also endangered, Shortnose sucker.
Sucker outlasts droughts
By living long and producing as many as 250,000 eggs, the sucker outlasts
droughts and makes the most of good years -- a strategy not so different from
that of farmers who now see it as an adversary.
The fish were once so plentiful they fed a cannery along the Lost River. Farmers let them flow with irrigation water into fields, where the carcasses decayed into fertilizer.
Native Americans and others caught them by snagging their bodies with hooks. Wildlife agencies poisoned suckers in nearby Lake of the Woods to make room for game fish. Dams cut off much of their spawning beds and even today divert millions of newborn fish down irrigation canals to their death. Repeated algae blooms killed thousands of the fish in Upper Klamath Lake.
Scientists have found an unusually high number of deformed and infected suckers.
In 1986, the tribes stopped fishing for suckers because of declining numbers. In 1988, the federal government listed both species as endangered, with no formal opposition.
"In a very short period of time, they went from being considered a nuisance to this endangered thing, which nobody could really understand," says Dave Solem of the Klamath Irrigation District.
His and other irrigation districts proposed the first recovery plan for the fish. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1993 wrapped much of that into a federal plan, which estimated it would take $7.7 million to bring the species back and predicted all the work would be finished by 2000.
But today few pieces of the plan are in place. The cost far exceeds the original estimate, and federal biologists consider the sucker more imperiled than ever.
"There has been progress, but it has happened slowly," says Steve Lewis, head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Klamath Falls. Many farmers blame him for their plight, because he signed an opinion calling for water for the fish. "Some is because people are dragging their feet. Some of it is funding. Some of it is just obviously going to take longer than we thought."
But the fish remains a mystery. More suckers died during algae-induced fish kills in the 1990s than biologists thought existed. Even now, Lewis says, the numbers are "not well-refined."
Those kills took out most of the older fish that were the most prolific breeders, leaving only a narrow age class. In effect, all the population's eggs are in one basket. Another fish kill could knock them out.
"Listing and recovery are not based on absolute numbers," Lewis says. "It's based on the risk to the species. Water quality and fish kills are still a significant threat to its long-term survival."
Farmers and scientists argue that algae blooms and the fish kills they cause occur more often when the lake is high than when it's drawn down for irrigation -- proof, they say, that they could take water this year. Federal scientists maintain that holding more water in the lake keeps the temperature lower and delays the deadly algae blooms.
And few young survive without higher lake levels, says Douglas Markle, a biologist at Oregon State University.
"Lake levels alone are not the controlling factor for the fish, but they're the only factor we can adjust in the short term to reduce the magnitude of fish kills," Lewis says. "They're the only factor we can control."
The same water vital to the suckers is essential to threatened coho salmon below the lake, in the Klamath River, whose salmon populations once were exceeded by only two other rivers in the country. Last year close to 300,000 salmon died in the river, because the water was so warm and polluted.
Federal biologists ruled that more Upper Klamath Lake water must flow into the river this year so coho salmon will not slide further toward extinction. That cut the water available for farms more than the sucker would have alone.
The Klamath Basin's problems, and solutions, lie in waters that have long poisoned fish and now are kept from farmers
Wednesday, May 9, 2001
KLAMATH FALLS -- No one needs to tell folks here that every drop of water counts.
That's the tragedy of the Klamath Drain: an unglamorous waterway that funnels irrigation runoff from the basin's sprawling farmlands and wildlife refuges into the Klamath River. It contains the worst quality water in Oregon -- too polluted to do anyone, or any fish, much good.
At times, says a state report, "the drain resembles a stagnant pond, complete with fluorescent green patches of mold floating on mats of decaying algae." In it, hardy minnows go belly up.
When hard drought makes water scarce, as it has this year, farm water is withheld to dilute pollutants that feed algae blooms deadly to protected fish.
The Klamath Drain shows that the crisis facing Klamath Basin -- and a way out of it -- has as much to do with water quality as water quantity. If the water were cleaner, some of it would be available to the more than 1,000 farms that this season are going dry.
Many of the lakes and rivers here have always been a murky broth: Some pioneers would not let their horses drink from Upper Klamath Lake. But researchers say intensifying use of the water and the lands around it has compounded problems. Example: the loss of wetlands that once filtered out troublesome nutrients, stored water like a sponge and sheltered young fish.
"To me we're like a guy with five credit cards that are all maxed out," says Phil Norton, manager of the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuges, which also will go without much water this year. "We've overused everything we have. Any bump in the road, and we're in deep."
A road out of the basin's despair may encompass several options:
• Restoring wetlands as natural filters. Trial projects have already reduced pollution in Upper Klamath Lake.
• Building reservoirs and drilling wells to boost water supplies in dry years.
• Reducing water demand by retiring farmland, buying out water rights and improving water conservation.
• Settling and enforcing overlapping water rights so no one takes more than they're entitled to.
• Improving logging and grazing practices to reduce erosion and pollution.
• Assisting imperiled fish by removing dams that block spawning areas and controlling predators.
• And perhaps the most controversial: reforming the Endangered Species Act to ease pressure on local economies.
Leadership lacking
Former Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., formed a working group of farmers, wildlife
advocates and biologists to advocate solutions, but that group lost direction
when Hatfield retired from the Senate in early 1997. That left a leadership
void, worsened by the polarization of this year's drought and the loss of water
to farms.
"We tried, but we didn't get far enough fast enough," says Mark Stern, a biologist with The Nature Conservancy and member of the Hatfield group. "I think that's in part because the answers are complex, but also because we don't have enough leadership at the federal level to work through the conflicting interests."
Any answer will drive up the price taxpayers have already paid for converting the Klamath Basin's marshes and sagebrush to a farm belt. For starters, the dams and canals of the Klamath Project cost the nation more than $50 million. Farmers have reimbursed less than a fifth of that, without interest, based on a formula that considers their ability to pay.
The government has since spent millions studying endangered fish that have declined in part because of the same irrigation works.
Last year, Oregon's Klamath County, the most populated slice of the basin, received more than $3 million in farm subsidies, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Many local farms owe up to a quarter of their profit to government payments. Even before the water was cut off this year, hundreds of farmers clamored to sell their water allotments back to the government in a pilot project to reduce the load on the system.
Federal authorities have now allotted more than $1 million to plant crops to tie down fields that might otherwise erode in the wind and to drill emergency wells. Oregon's congressional delegation is at work on an even broader package of grants to farms that cannot plant crops this year.
And a San Francisco-based conservation group called The American Land Conservancy has bought options to purchase more than 10 percent of farmland in the 200,000-plus-acre Klamath Project. The group hopes Congress will eventually appropriate money to acquire the land and hand it to local irrigators, who could use it to house farms that now operate on the wildlife refuges.
A "refuge" in name alone
The refuges themselves are less wildlands than giant ponds controlled through
dikes and ditches, a microcosm of the basin as a whole. The sight shocked Norton
when he arrived from managing a refuge in Texas. What was once known as Tule
Lake is now known locally as Tule Sump, because it's largely a collection pond
for irrigation runoff.
"I couldn't believe they called this a wildlife refuge," he says.
The 180,000 acres host about 80 percent of the waterfowl, from bald eagles to swans, that migrates up and down the Pacific Flyway.
Shifting the more than 30,000 acres of farms off the refuge would leave more land for wildlife and trim the total farm acreage, leaving more water for others. It also would offer a way out of farms that can no longer compete with declining crop prices and escalating worldwide competition.
"I believe the federal government is the only one willing to buy the land," says John Anderson, who farms along the Oregon-California line and this spring planted a costly crop of mint that will wither without water. "It would reduce the load on the system, so the people who are left know whether there's water or no water.
"We just need an answer."
But as in all things Klamath Basin, the answer is not so easy: Other farmers contend farms provide vital food for wildlife. They say buying their neighbors out would prey upon their weakened industry and pry apart communities.
They would rather see farmland rotated around the refuges, rejuvenating wetlands one section at a time.
"The American farmer can do an important job here," says Rob Crawford, who farms on the Tulelake Refuge. "There can be a lot of marsh, and farms can provide a lot of food for wildlife."
Ken Rykbost, an agronomist at Oregon State University's experiment station in Klamath Falls, argues that pollution is a natural element of the Klamath Basin. The volcanic soils are high in nutrients, he says, and shallow Upper Klamath Lake "is a dying lake," doomed by the continued buildup of such deposits.
"If we remove agriculture from the land, we'll still have a water quality problem," he says.
Many in agriculture supported the purchase by federal agencies and The Nature Conservancy of former ranch land along the upper end of Upper Klamath Lake, home to the most imperiled population of endangered suckers. Restored river channels and wetlands now occupy the land. A new study found that nutrients entering the lake fell 8 percent in the six years after the work.
A drop of about 30 percent should cut off enough nutrients to halt the lake's most toxic algae blooms, which kill fish and in summer make the lake resemble the Klamath Drain.
"The result of not addressing our problems is extreme," says Norton. "We only have to look around to see that.
"I don't think anybody wants to go back to the way it used to be, but we also can't go on the way we've been going."