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These are trying times for the salmon fleet. It is threatened with a total closure of the fishery from Cape Falcon to Point Sur -- nearly 700 miles of coastline and a dozen ports. This is being proposed by the federal government to “protect” Klamath salmon, where the fall-run is expected to fall below the production floor set for that river of 35,000 natural spawning fall-run chinook for the third straight year. While fishing groups are working to gain some sort of season, even the most optimistic scenario has a season that may just barely keep the fishing infrastructure in place.
The situation fishermen found themselves in last year when seasons were slashed due to low Klamath returns, and again this year when total closures are being threatened, is hardly a surprise. The 2002 decision by the federal government to pursue a policy of providing full water entitlements to irrigators following a drought left little water in the river for the fish. A conscious decision was made to put the fish at risk so the Administration could curry favor with voters in the Klamath Basin. The government succeeded in stopping a lawsuit brought by PCFFA and other fishery and conservation plaintiffs in April of that year aimed at getting necessary flow for fish survival. The federal court ruling against water releases for fish was met that spring by a major kill of Klamath juvenile salmon. Late that summer, an estimated 79,000 spawners died in the river.
The killing hasn’t stopped since. At least two parasites that are native to the river seem to flourish when flows are low and the water is warm and of poor quality – probably because the fish are stressed. Sampling of Klamath juveniles last year found fish healthy in the tributaries but about 80 percent became infected when they entered the mainstem of the river – an infection that was nearly 100 percent fatal.
Now the same federal government, which has said it won’t require fish survival flows in the Klamath basin for the threatened coho until 2010, wants an immediate halt to fishing to maximize returns this year to a river that can’t support them. It should be noted there is no fishery on Klamath coho, which are listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The government is insisting on even greater protections for Klamath fall-run chinook, a key stock in the management of the ocean salmon fishery, that are not listed (at least not yet) and which the government refuses to protect against the parasitic fish kills in the river.
Similar restriction are being called for in the Columbia, where the fleet is faced with more lower river and coastal closures from stock declines in that river system attributed mainly to the operation of the four lower Snake River dams. These are dams that should never have been built, dams that are strangling these once plentiful populations toward oblivion. Every stock from the Snake River, once the mother-lode of all salmon in the Columbia, is now ESA listed as a direct result.
The government’s answer for its callous decisions and wanton actions is to blame fishermen. The government is attempting to imply there’s been overfishing, even though fishermen have met and exceeded escapement goals when the rivers were producing, and even blame climate change – a strange bit of chutzpah from an Administration that denies global warming is even occurring. Our government agency spin-masters are certainly adept at making it up as they go along and engaging in the big lie when it suits them.
What should our response be when the rivers that produce the salmon are destroyed right before their eyes? What should be done about obsolete dams that kill too many fish and provide far less social benefit than the costs of destruction of the fisheries they destroy? What should the political posture of fishermen be in the face of an increasingly hostile federal Administration either in deep denial or stubbornly dedicated to a status quo that is killing our fisheries?
In poet Dylan Thomas’s words, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
We accept our mortality, but we don’t and shall not accept the loss of the salmon or the great fishery these fish have brought us. This is now a struggle for saving the fish and all we hold dear – our way of life, our communities, these fish that nourish our bodies and souls. Now is the time to fight back with all the strength we can collectively muster. Now is the time to reach out for potential allies among sportfishing, Tribal and conservation groups, to defend our livelihoods and our fishing-based communities and our common fishing heritage. In short, to defend not only our right to fish but our simple right to exist.
The Klamath, historically the third most productive river system in America (ranking only after the Columbia and Sacramento-San Joaquin), once produced an estimated 880,000 adult spawners in an average year and was the life-blood of native American communities all up and down the river. Later, canneries from the Klamath fed much of the west coast.
Since “development” of the Klamath River, however, the productive capacity of the river for salmon has steadily declined. The headwaters for the whole river was systematically stripped of its natural wetlands water storage as more and more lands were drained and converted to irrigated farmlands. In 1907 the newly formed U.S. Bureau of Reclamation accelerated the process under federal control, so that today about 230,000 acres of what was mostly once lake bottom or wetlands are now irrigated by the federal government in the federal Klamath Irrigation Project. Surrounding the Project, many acres of non-Project lands were also developed for irrigation, totaling today at least as much additional acreage as on the Project, and additional water permits for that continuing development are still being issued by the State of Oregon.
In the process, the hydrology of the Klamath Basin was dramatically changed. Much of the natural water storage of the upper basin is now gone. Today, spring and summer flows in the mainstem Klamath River have been greatly reduced from their pre-development natural levels, and winter runoff more often results in floods. In addition, without wetlands to act as a natural filter for breaking down pollutants carried by agricultural runoff, the overall quality of water also became a serious problem. The Klamath River is now the most polluted river system in Oregon, and one of the worst in California.
Then starting in 1917, a serious of four small to medium sized hydropower dams, all now owned by PacifiCorp, were constructed in the river, ending in the construction of Iron Gate Dam in 1962. However, Iron Gate was deliberately built with no fish passage for salmon, and now blocks access to an estimated 350 miles of once highly productive salmon spawning and rearing habitat. It also halts and collects water in Iron Gate Reservoir which then heats up in summer sunlight, concentrates nutrients and fosters large algae blooms which all wash downstream.
The three other hydropower dams, CopCo Dams 1 and 2, and J. C. Boyle Dam all have their own negative impacts on water quality. In recent years, toxic blue-green algae blooms have been spreading throughout the hydropower reservoirs, resulting in public health warnings to lakeside and downriver communities to “avoid contact with the water.” The impacts on salmon in that same water cannot be good news.
Additionally, the spread of serious salmon diseases like Ceratomyxa shasta just below the Klamath Hydroelectric Project dams appears also to be linked to the deteriorating water quality conditions created by the dams. C. shasta multiplies rapidly in warm, slow moving water laced with nutrients, breeds prolifically in reservoirs, and is also tied to algae blooms that have become increasingly common in the middle Klamath River region in recent years.
Yet something can actually be done about these dams. The 50-year federal license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for this set of four dams expires this April of 2006. The case for dam removal is building. Even the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences has stated that Iron Gate Dam should be seriously considered for removal.
Many groups, including PCFFA, are pressing for full decommissioning and removal of all four Klamath dams and the full restoration of salmon to their upper basin homeland. Negotiations on the fate of these four dams is ongoing.
Water over-allocation in the Klamath Basin is the other main source of problems for salmon in the Klamath River. Salmon must have abundant, free flowing and cold water to live in. Providing that water means setting aside that water specifically for the fish and not using it for other purposes.
Nevertheless, the two state water agencies and the federal government have more or less ignored fish needs for nearly 90 years, and in the process encouraged the creation of more water demand than the rainfall can now realistically meet. It is estimated that today total water demand in the Klamath Basin, including fish needs, simply cannot be met in seven out of ten years.
However, for the past 90 years it has always been the fish who have taken the brunt of any of the frequent Klamath Basin droughts. The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which controls all flows released at Iron Gate Dam, has always made sure that full irrigation water deliveries were made first to its federal water contractors. Fish only got the leftovers, ignoring the needs of fish and fishing-dependent communities. Lack of sufficient in-river flows is the main reason fish in the lower river have been spiraling downward.
Klamath fishery declines are, unfortunately, also nothing new. Yet even as late as 1979-1982, and in spite of declines, Klamath fall chinook still accounted for roughly 30 percent of all salmon harvested from fishing communities from Fort Bragg, Oregon to nearly Florence, Oregon, the region called the ‘Klamath Management Zone (KMZ). Nevertheless, for decades there have been fewer and fewer salmon coming out of the Klamath River. In spite of a few upward ‘blips’ based on temporarily favorable ocean conditions or slightly better rainfall, and in spite of major restoration efforts, the trend has been downward as both water flows and water quality in the Klamath river steadily declined.
Season cutbacks and reductions became the rule within KMZ ports as fisheries managers were forced to keep pace with these declines. In the past 20 years especially, the end result has been systematic economic strangulation of KMZ coastal ports, culminating in almost complete closures by the mid-1990’s.
These collapses spelled economic disaster for all the once booming salmon fishing ports within the KMZ. Today there is little or no fishing allowed in the KMZ (even in good years), under the ‘weak stock management’ regimes that require us to minimize impacts on weakened Klamath stocks. Fishermen whose families have lived in those ports for generations are now forced to fish hundreds of miles further south or (if they have out-of-state permits) further north to be able to make a living at all.
Ever more restrictions, and ultimately closures, long predate any ESA listings, and can only be blamed on the declining runs themselves, which were in turn caused primarily by declining water flows and deteriorating water quality. These two forces – low flows repeatedly ratcheted down by the Bureau of Reclamation, and deteriorating water quality attributable to both low flows and to the hydropower dams – have literally put these KMZ ports, once the most productive outside Alaska, out of business.
Finally, in 1997 the plight of the once abundant coho salmon in the Klamath River became so grim that it had to be federally listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Coho, of course, are just the indicator species’ for the health of the river. Whatever will kill a coho will also kill a chinook or a steelhead.
In 1998, 1999, and then again and vastly worse in 2000, the lower river salmon runs suffered massive juvenile die-offs of hundreds of thousands each year. By 2000 it became clear that downriver fishermen, salmon-dependent industries and the Tribes were threatened with extinction along with the fish. Thus in 2000 PCFFA led efforts to file suit against the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the National Marine Fisheries Service to get more water in the river to reverse the Klamath salmon extinction trend, not only for coho but for chinook as well.
During the major 2001 drought, for the first time ever, a U.S. District Court ordered minimum flows to be retained in the Klamath River to prevent coho salmon extinction. Minimum lake levels also had to be maintained for other ESA listed fish species. As a partial result, irrigators dependent on the federal Klamath Irrigation Project for irrigation lost about one-third of their usual water allocation, with many getting water too late for their crops and upper basin irrigators suffering between $27 and $42 million in estimated economic losses. This was a tragedy that could have been, and should have been, foreseen and avoided, had federal water allocations been based on better science and more equitable distributions.
Fortunately, most of those Upper Klamath Basin farmers affected by the drought eventually received federal drought disaster assistance to offset their losses, an effort which PCFFA fully supported in Congress.
However, the following year Bush Administration officials bent over backwards, in spite of a continuing drought, to once again deliver normal year water levels to the Klamath Project by shorting fish in the river. The Bureau of Reclamation set water levels from Iron Gate Dam at near record lows in 2002 and for several years following. Yet the Administration was repeatedly warned of the high risk of a fish kill inherent in reducing flows that low by California officials, Tribal scientists and even their own salmon biologists. The Administration’s 2002 decision to severely curtail lower river flows put election year politics ahead of the best available science and fishing communities.
What everyone feared came to pass, and in spades. Not only was there a large juvenile fish kill in the spring of 2002, but in September 2002 an estimated 79,000 otherwise healthy adult spawners, most of them fall chinook, died in the river before they could make it to their spawning grounds. The river was literally littered with rotting fish carcasses for more than 35 miles. That disaster has been called the worst adult fish kill in U.S. history. Unfortunately, it was only the latest and worst such fish kill, not the only one to have hit the river.
PCFFA has written previously about the plight of the Klamath River and the need for fishermen to fight for more water in the river to save their fisheries (see FN, August 2001, “Why the Klamath Matters to Fishermen,” on the web at: www.pcffa.org/fn-aug01.htm). In 2006 we are seeing the full impacts of these Klamath declines and the key role the Klamath plays in all west coast fisheries management south of the Columbia.
PCFFA has also written previously about the political games that were played around water allocations in 2002 by the Bush Administration, how good science was discarded in favor of political opportunism, how that led to the fish kills of 2002 and how that led to our seasons cut back by about 60 percent in 2005 (see FN April 2005, “Federal Klamath Water Policies Led to the 2005 Fisheries Disaster,” at: www.pcffa.org/fn-apr05.htm).
Exactly the same thing is happening to our fishery this year in 2006, only worse. The Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) itself warned of this very problem, in its letter dated 4 December 2002 to the Secretaries of Interior and Commerce, when it noted: “The [2002 adult] fish kill will likely make it impossible to meet the escapement goal this year, and the loss of the reproductive potential of these fish will result in diminished returns three, four and five years into the future.” 2006 is year four.
That PFMC December 2002 fish kill letter is posted on the PCFFA web site at: www.pcffa.org/PFMCKlamathletter12-02.pdf. If we had the adult returns this year from the 79,000 spawners unnecessarily killed in the river in the fall of 2002, we would all be going fishing instead of standing on the docks.
During the truncated 2005 season, economic losses in California and Oregon’s salmon fisheries have been estimated at between $40 to 60 million. These widespread closures prompted 37 Members of Congress to petition Secretary of Commerce Gutierrez for an immediate declaration of disaster (see: www.pcffa.org/SalmonDisasterLetter.pdf). That letter was sent in May of 2005. Nearly a year later, the Administration has still not acted on our disaster request, nor acknowledged in any way that its own water decisions were that disaster’s primary cause. Those same members of Congress and more are now calling for the Administration to appear before Congress to account for these delays and to take action immediately to extend the disaster relief request to 2006.
What can be done to rescue the Klamath? There are two major restoration measures that can be done soon, including: (a) immediately putting more water in the river, both in the spring to aid juvenile out-migration and flush out parasites, and particularly during the arid late summers to aid returning adults and prevent more adult fish kills, and; (b) within the next few years, decommissioning and removing the Klamath dams and restoring salmon access to once-productive habitat.
In the meantime, we must monitor the health of the river, understand more about the disease problems, take whatever immediate emergency measures are possible to mitigate disease-related losses, and maintain key remaining habitat areas and cold water refugia that maintain healthy production.
It especially needs to be emphasized that the Upper Basin Klamath Project farmers who use the water from the Klamath River before it gets downstream are not really to blame for the fisheries declines. Like fishermen who are told where and how to fish, farmers are told how much water they are to get each year by federal agencies who by law are supposed to be taking fish and other lower river water needs into account. It is the key decision-makers in these federal agencies (NMFS and the Bureau of Reclamation) who buckled under political pressure, who ignored the science in 2002 in spite of the risk, and who most directly caused the massive fish kill whose effects we are reeling from today. It is these federal agencies and their political appointees who are truly most to blame for this disaster.
As lower river and coastal fishing leaders and communities, we need to work more closely (and with less anger) with Upper Basin farmers, irrigation districts and their leadership toward greater water stability throughout the Klamath Basin. Continuing this downward cycle of over-appropriation and rotating crises is no longer acceptable to either farmers or fishermen. We must bring the water budget of the Klamath Basin back into balance so that both fish and farms will have the water they truly need to prosper. The long-term sustainability of the Klamath water supply serves both fishermen and farmers alike, and lets our communities and resource-driven economies prosper together. We are, after all, the same kinds of people, making our livelihoods in the same way -- providing high quality food for the tables of America.
The tools already exist to bring water allocations and water supply back into balance within the Klamath Basin. Economic compensation tools like voluntary water banks, plus some combination of water conservation, increased water storage and organized willing-seller water permit buybacks (very similar to groundfish boat buybacks already familiar to fishermen) hold the key to an economically sustainable water future for the whole Klamath basin. The only thing that is apparently lacking is the political will to use them.
The Columbia River is still the most productive salmon river-system in the world, even though the total numbers of wild salmon produced by the river have now dwindled down to between 2 to 3 percent of their original pre-European populations. All the rest are produced in hatcheries intended to mitigate for lost fisheries destroyed by the Federal Columbia River Power System.
After four failed attempts since 1993, however, there is still no biologically or legally legitimate federal salmon restoration plan. The last plan, produced by the Bush Administration in 2004, was deemed “arbitrary and capricious” and tossed out of a federal U.S. District Court by Judge James Redden in a lawsuit in which PCFFA participated. The federal agencies are now under Court Order to redo their salmon plan within one year.
In the meantime and particularly in the Columbia, the White House has tried to shift the blame for salmon declines from the dams (which cumulatively account for about 80 percent of all human-induced salmon mortality) to fishing impacts (accounting for only 5 percent) and to mitigation hatcheries intended to provide for fisheries lost behind dams. Under the new salmon policy announced by Council of Environmental Quality James Connaughton, the White House’s top environmental officer, the Bush Administration is pledging to close both fisheries and hatcheries that “may impact ESA listed species” while simultaneously continuing to keep the Columbia River hydropower dams alive at all costs.
PCFFA has written extensively about the White House’s “new salmon policy” for targeting harvests (and hatcheries that support harvests) in the March issue of Fishermen’s News (see “Bush Administration Outlines New Salmon Policy,” on the web at: www.pcffa.org/fn-mar06.htm). The best that can be said for that “new policy” is that it is cleverly designed as a political diversion to blame the victims of salmon losses rather than address the real problems, and is an attempt to politically deflect attention away from the massive impacts on salmon of the Columbia River dams and away from the Administration’s persistent failure to deal with that reality.
A copy of Mr. Connaughton’s January 25th speech announcing the new policy, and press coverage about his speech, are both posted on the PCFFA website at: www.pcffa.org.
What does the debacle in the Klamath, and the Administration-led fishermen bashing in the Columbia, mean to the average salmon fisherman? Plenty.
It means we can never sit back and accept being “managed” for our impacts on a stock without also taking on the task of seeing that other impacts, over which fisheries managers have no say, are also controlled. Klamath-driven closures this year are pointless unless we demand, with all our voices, that the in-river problems that caused this collapse to begin with are all fully corrected and the river quickly restored to health.
But when the problems driving salmon toward extinction are not fishery related, as they are not in the Klamath or the Columbia, we have a strong duty to bring other federal agencies, and even other industries, to a full accounting for their destruction of habitat, their dewatering of rivers, their pollution and their greed. PCFFA and other fishermen’s groups are doing that, and will continue to do so whenever necessary.
We must also never forget that, compared to harvests, many other impacts (including dewatering of rivers, building fish-killing dams and destruction of salmon-bearing watersheds) are far more destructive and far more irreversible, and represent far more danger for the future of our fisheries because their effects are mostly invisible.
And what is our response to those who would shift the blame from dams that gratuitously kill fish by the millions, with little or no benefit to humanity, to fishermen who try to carefully and selectively harvest a few thousand fish specifically intended for human consumption? We should say to them, “We are already doing our bit to protect and restore these stocks to full health -- now you do yours.” We simply cannot allow the destruction of this resource, for it means the destruction of our communities and our way of life.
Always remember, we who live by this resource are the true stewards of these fisheries. It is our task, and our sacred duty, to protect them for all future generations.
William F. “Zeke” Grader, Jr., is the Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), the west coast’s largest organization of commercial fishermen and fishing families. Glen Spain is PCFFA Northwest Regional Director. Joel Kawahara is a long time fisherman based in Washington State (F/V Karolee) and a Board member of Washington Trollers Association (WTA), a long-time PCFFA member association.
PCFFA can be reached at Southwest Regional Office: PO Box 29370, San Francisco, CA 94129-0370 USA, (415)561-5080; Northwest Regional Office: PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370 USA, (541)689-2000. PCFFA’s email address is: fish1ifr@aol.com and its web site is at: www.pcffa.org.
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