Gag the Messenger, Kill the Fish

Last month more than 35,000 salmon died in the Klamath River, smothered by low flows, turgid waters, and political indifference. At the time, Bush officials attributed the salmon die-off to a freak of nature. "More water wouldn't have done those fish any good," offered head of the US Bureau of Reclamation, John Keys, who had ordered Klamath River water diverted into irrigation ditches for farmers in southern Oregon.

Now comes proof that Keys was lying. Not only did the Bush crowd know that increased flows were vital to the survival of Klamath salmon and steelhead, but they were told by their own biologists. Twice.

Michael Kelly is a top salmon biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency charged with protecting sea-going fish, such as salmon and steelhead trout. Kelly led the team that reviewed the situation on the Klamath River, which flows from southern Oregon through northern California. For the past couple of years, irrigators and salmon defenders have been locked in a pitched battle over how the river's water should be divided between the potato and alfalfa fields and the fish.

None of the native fish in the Klamath River system are doing very well. But the suckerfish and the coho salmon are teetering on the brink of extinction and both are afforded protection under the Endangered Species Act. Kelly's task was to develop a plan that saved the fish.

In April, Kelly's team also reviewed the Bureau of Reclamation's ten-year plan for allocating the river's water and concluded that it would place the coho in jeopardy. Somehow Kelly's report ended up at the Justice Department, where Ashcroft's lawyers sent back a stinging rebuke ordering Kelly to rewrite his biological opinion.

Kelly issued a new opinion two weeks later, which reached the same conclusion and backed it up with more science and legal analysis. This too was rejected.

Instead, the Bush administration adopted the irrigators' plan, hastily developed by the National Academy of Sciences, which slashed by more than 34 percent the river flows recommended by the biologists, a clear violation of the Endangered Species Act.

"Obviously someone at a higher level ordered the service to accept this new plan," Kelly says.

When Kelly objected, he was told by his superiors to shut up and sign off on the irrigator's plan. He refused. Now Kelly is seeking protection as a whistleblower from a federal court.

He's wise to seek such protection. Other federal scientists who have spoken out about the Bush administration's environmentally hostile maneuvers have not fared well.

Recall Ian Thomas, the former cartographer at the US Geological Survey, who was fired in March of 2001 after he posted to a website maps showing how caribou calving areas would be despoiled by Bush's plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

In March of 2002, Eric Shaeffer, head of regulatory enforcement at the EPA, resigned in disgust after the White House kept him from pursuing legal actions against power plants violating the Clean Air Act and then slashed the enforcement divisions' staff by 200 positions, effectively gutting the division.

Then there is Jim Martin, the former ombudsman at the EPA, who resigned in protest after EPA director, Christie Todd Whitman, ordered his office disbanded and sent FBI agents to seize his files and equipment. Martin was investigating the EPA's mishandling of Superfund sites in New Jersey, a probe that had uncovered unflattering information about Whitman's (and her husband's) deals with polluters during her tenure as governor.

The suppression of Kelly's report echoes similar attacks on federal scientists during the first Bush administration, when White House chief of staff John Sununu quashed reports from biologists linking logging in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the drastic decline of the northern spotted owl.

Kelly says that in addition to ditching his report, the Bush administration also prohibited him from analyzing the risks to coho salmon posed by diverting Klamath River waters to Oregon farmers, another trouncing of the Endangered Species Act.

Would more water have saved those salmon? Sure. The big question is where should the water have come from. On that point, there's plenty of room for debate and blame.

The upper Klamath basin irrigators in Oregon are greedy bullies, on that there's no doubt. But they've got a point when they say they're not the only drain on the Klamath River. Indeed, their share of Klamath River water pales when compared to the amount taken by California agribusiness and the chipmakers of Silicon Valley.

The Trinity River, which slices through steep canyons in northern California, is the Klamath River's biggest tributary.

The Oregon irrigators rightly (though selfishly) contend that the water from Klamath Lake is warmer and thus less useful for salmon than the frigid flows of the Trinity.

Yet, more than 90 percent of the Trinity's annual flow never reaches the Klamath. Instead, it is captured behind 540-foot tall Trinity Dam and redirected southward through the Clear Creek tunnel under the Trinity Alps into the Sacramento River. This is just the beginning of the Trinity's torturous 400-mile route to the Southland, through the Delta-Mendota Canal, the California Aqueduct, and finally onto the fields of the Westlands Water District in the Central Valley. It is an evil masterpiece of geopolitical plumbing.

At 605,000 acres, the Westlands District is bigger than the state of Rhode Island and perhaps more powerful politically. It is the largest irrigation district in the nation, the most profitable and the most lavishly subsidized. It is also one of the most polluted. When the Trinity's water finally filters out of the cotton, lettuce, and tomato fields of the Westlands, it emerges laden with pesticides and highly poisonous selenium into San Joaquin River.

The giant farms of the Westlands Water District have laid claims to more than 1.15 million-acre feet of water from the Trinity/Klamath river system. That's nearly twice as much as the Oregon farmers. These California farms generate about $3 billion in sales. But they also enjoy at least a billion dollars in direct federal subsidies.

Of course, the Westlands is not by nature farming country. It's essentially desert and savanna--parched, dusty, and hot--and depends entirely upon imported water, which it guards ruthlessly through an army of lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians.

In 2000, Bruce Babbitt made a timid attempt to allow 20 percent more water to flow down the Trinity. It was met with fierce resistance from the Westlands farmers, who persuaded a federal judge to slap an injunction on the plan. Babbitt backed down. And the Bush administration says their hands are tied by the courts, even if they wanted to do something.

And so the fish have paid the price. In the entire Klamath/Trinity basin less than 20 percent of the original salmon spawning habitat remains in anything approaching a viable condition. The coho population is literally decimated, having declined by more than 90 percent since the 1950s.

An initial tally of the dead salmon from September's die-off shows that more than half of the fish were headed for the Trinity River to spawn. The death toll of 35,000 (which federal biologists now admit is "conservative") amounts to about a third of the river's annual run.

With so much at stake, it's distressing to see how little of a fight the environmental movement has put up, not only to save the Klamath salmon but also what remains of the Endangered Species Act, as the Bush crowd rips its teeth out one by one.

In the end, if the salmon have any kind of chance, it resides with people like Michael Kelly, who put their careers on the line to save the river, and the tribes of the Klamath basin, who haven't stopped fighting for their treaty rights in the last 100 years.

"We are the people behind the fish," says Troy Fletcher of the Yurok Tribe. It's a good thing that the fish don't stand alone.