Klamath River News: Protesters Lockdown at PacifiCorp, Discord Threatens Klamath Talks

While I commend the efforts of all who work for environmental causes....we risk many hard fought gains when we carelessly pass along false rumors and unsupportable accusations. The story about use of tasers by Asheville Police officers to "electrocute" environmental protesters is plain and simple a complete fabrication.
The so-called "environmental activists" in this case used this fabricated story for fund-raising purposes. When pressed for evidence to support their nationally distributed claims of taser use, they finally admitted that it had been a fabrication and that no tasers were used in any way on anyone involved in this protest action. Unfortunately, many local Asheville region Environmental groups had to spend time and effort to state that they had NO affliation with the outsiders who fabricated the stories and employed such failed strategies under the banner of Environmentalism.

Credibility is ESSENTIAL if we are to reach our goal of saving our environment. Each and every person has a responsibility to make sure they are reporting facts rather than distorted claims, half-truths, fabrications and outright lies such as those issued in press releases by the group which created such a ruckus in Asheville.

True environmentalists just dont have the time to waste distancing themselves from self-serving, attention grabbing protesters who are using failed tactics from 30 years ago and then trying to get sympathy based on fabricated accusations and lies.

Let's all work to be credible and to be effective in our efforts and in our reporting.

Correction Re: Tazers
author by Southeast Climate Convergencepublication date Wed Aug 15, 2007 04:22Report this post to the editors

CORRECTION

We would like to clarify statements that were made about the Asheville Police Department (APD) using tazers against participants in the action against climate change and mountaintop removal at Bank of America yesterday.

The Climate Convergence sent out a press release saying that people locked down inside the bank were subject to electrocution shocks from tazers, based on the accounts of witnesses inside the bank. Now that the protestors are out of jail, we have learned that this was an inaccurate conclusion based on reasonable suspicion. One protester was heard screaming while pinned down by large group of officers and subjected to excruciating pain compliance holds right after the police were heard yelling back and forth to each asking “Who has a tazer? Get a tazer!” Many of the officers on the scene were equipped with electrocution devises, along with rubber bullets, chemical weapons, dogs, and training in torture techniques. In addition, a certified Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) who attempted to check on the safety of the protesters after hearing shouts from officers about tazers was not allowed to do so.

The APD has a history of using tazers, widely recognized as a form of torture and the cause of several deaths around the country, on nonviolent protesters. In light of increased use of paramilitary tactics by local police forces in civilian situations, such conclusions are to be expected. We reported information we thought to be accurate at the time; in light of new information, we apologize for any inaccuracies we reported.

In Defense of a Living Planet,
The Southeast Convergence for Climate Action
Related Link: http://www.climateconvergence.org

This statement from the SacBee article describes the source of the percieved discord, a scheme of the GW bush/Cheney regime to force massive irrigation subsidies onto the Klamath Basin region for years in exchange for the removal of the lower four Klamath dams..

"Settlement talks began in 2005, about the time PacifiCorp applied to relicense its dams for up to 50 years. Environmentalists want the dams removed to reopen the upper Klamath to salmon.

Several participants said hopes for a balanced agreement began to fade last fall and accelerated with the settlement group's release of the January framework. Among its many principles, the details of which are now being negotiated, is a pledge to increase minimum water supplies for irrigators, and protect farming operations on the 39,000-acre Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, where costly pumping drains rich lake-bottom lands for farming.

Environmentalists long have opposed refuge farming, saying places like Tule Lake should be allowed to return to their natural wetlands state. "This was a deal-killer for us," said Pedery of Oregon Wild. "This is an effort by the Bush administration to lock in agriculture in the refuge."

Felice Pace of the Klamath Forest Alliance said the deal is looking more and more like a bargain with the devil -- the promise of dam removals in exchange for binding water rights for farmers. Also troubling is the decision to virtually exclude California's Scott and Shasta rivers from the talks even though irrigation demands on them affect 35 percent of the water flowing down the Klamath River, Pace said.

"When and if this settlement happens, the governors of Oregon and California will be there to declare the water wars are over and the Klamath is fixed," Pace said. "But what commitments are the states making? I'll be there to protest if the Scott and Shasta rivers are on their current trajectory with no commitments to stop their dewatering."
"

There was a reason that Tule Lake was declared a National Wildlife Refuge, it is a crucial stopover for migratory waterfowl, many of which are threatened or endangered. We cannot be forced by the GW bush regime to choose between the extinction of salmon on the Klamath OR extinction of certain migratory waterfowl from habitat loss (Tule Lake), we demand that a safe and stable habitat exists for BOTH species!!

As usual, the "radical" environmentalists of Oregon Wild are being scapegoated for causing the discord, and are thus excluded from any future discussions on the Klamath watershed..

Let's give Oregon Wild a chance to express their side of the story..

"Fields of conflict in the Klamath"

By Eric Bailey

The Los Angeles Times May 07, 2007

"Agriculture fields have elbowed onto what once were marshes and shallow inland seas, shrinking the Klamath Basin's wetlands by nearly 80%. Environmentalists have long fought to stop farming on the wetlands that remain, mostly on national wildlife refuges, saying the refuges belong to the birds. But now, activists say, farmers in the Klamath Basin appear poised to cement their presence on the refuges, the basin's most productive farmland. Farmers are gaining an edge in closed-door settlement talks over the fate of four dams on the Klamath River, which meanders across two states before pouring into the Pacific Ocean north of Eureka, Calif.

Fowl take flight near the Lower Klamath Lake National Wildlife Refuge. Scientists say the annual bird migration to the Klamath Basin has decreased by two-thirds in the last 50 years.

Migratory birds are flocking to the basin's necklace of federal wildlife refuges straddling Oregon and California — one of the most important stops on the Pacific Flyway. As usual, the geese, mallards and terns are sharing the sanctuaries with tractors.

Agriculture fields have elbowed onto what once were marshes and shallow inland seas, shrinking the basin's wetlands by nearly 80%. Environmentalists have long fought to stop that farming, saying the refuges belong to the birds.

But now, activists say, farmers in the Klamath Basin appear poised to cement their presence on the refuges, the basin's most productive farmland.

Farmers are gaining an edge in closed-door settlement talks over the fate of four dams on the Klamath River, which meanders across two states before pouring into the Pacific Ocean north of Eureka, Calif.

Environmentalists universally support dam removal, which would let endangered salmon reach upriver spawning grounds blocked for nearly a century.

Activists with a pair of Oregon-based groups, however, fear that a looming compromise backed by the Bush administration will come at an unacceptable cost: an agreement to forever allow farming in the refuges.

The 23-page settlement proposes up to $250 million to ease soaring electricity costs for irrigation pumps and possibly finance a renewable energy plant.

Farmers and other big landowners could also be shielded from endangered-species restrictions invoked to revive imperiled fish species: the salmon, two types of suckerfish in Upper Klamath Lake and the bull trout, which is found in upstream tributaries.

"The Bush administration has hijacked these talks about dam removal to advance unrelated policy goals bad for the environment and bad in the long term for the Klamath Basin," said Steve Pedery of Oregon Wild, a Portland nonprofit.

At this point, that resolute stand is a lonely one.

Other participants in the talks, including several national environmental groups, say it's too early to go to the mat over a deal that's anything but done.

"If folks are talking about one thing or another being sold out, we think that's very premature," said Amy Kober of American Rivers. "There's still plenty to be worked out."

The administration's top negotiator declined to discuss details but rejected any notion of pressure from Washington.

"I've had a free rein to do whatever I felt was right," said Steve Thompson, California-Nevada manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "I haven't felt any pressures, other than that Klamath is controversial from all sides."

Forging a consensus on the Klamath has proved extraordinarily complicated. Compromises, experts say, will be inevitable for the proposal to get federal and state support.

"It's a huge stretch to imagine that commercial agriculture is benefiting wildlife populations in the long run," said Nancy Langston, a University of Wisconsin environmental studies professor who has studied the Klamath crisis. "But getting buy-in from as many people in the basin as possible is critical in the long run."

After more than two years of discussions, 26 of the 28 groups — U.S. water and wildlife agencies, the states of California and Oregon, fishermen, four tribes and an array of environmental groups — have agreed to push forward to settle details in the agreement.

Meanwhile, Oregon Wild and WaterWatch of Oregon, the two groups vocally objecting to what they describe as concessions to farmers, have "essentially been voted off the island," said John DeVoe, WaterWatch's executive director.

In addition to pushing for reduced water demand in the basin and higher river flows, the two groups ran aground in their quest to protect the refuges — and lighten the footprint of agriculture.

Before the arrival of settlers in the West, the Klamath Basin's wetlands totaled nearly 360,000 acres, a mix of shallow lakes and marshes under skies filled with migratory birds. Besides harboring wildlife, the marshes naturally carried clean Cascade runoff that emerged like a volcanic broth on its way to the Klamath River.

Change came in 1905, when the precursor to the federal Bureau of Reclamation began to drain marshlands for homesteading farmers.

That same year, a pioneering conservationist named William Finley visited the basin and came away awed by the abundant bird life and vast wetlands. His reports helped persuade President Theodore Roosevelt to establish the first of the basin's refuges in 1908.

In less than a decade, wildlife began to suffer. Completion of a railroad levee in 1917 cut off the biggest refuge's marshy connection to the Klamath River, and within five years a vast expanse had dried up.

Early attempts to farm around the refuges mostly flopped as wildfires burned across parched peat soil.

But the federal Reclamation Service pressed ahead, rerouting whole rivers and building dams and canals. In the 1940s, it bored a mile-long tunnel through Sheepy Ridge to help drain Tule Lake.

Homesteaders settled in the basin, most of them veterans of the two world wars. They built communities and successful agricultural enterprises in a cold, dry land where the growing season barely lasts more than three months.

As Tule Lake receded over the decades, farmers fought to have the fertile lake bottom opened for sale as farms. In 1964, Congress barred homesteading but allowed leased farmland on the refuges.

Today, nearly 15% of the 240,000 farm acres in the Klamath Basin is leased land on two federal wildlife refuges.

A quarter of the Lower Klamath Lake refuge is farmed. At the Tule Lake wildlife refuge, crops sprout on nearly half the land, growing in the rich soil of what used to be lake bottom.

"That's the heartland of the basin," said longtime farmer Sid Staunton, 50. "To shut us out of the refuge would wipe out Tule Lake."

Staunton and his brothers, Marshall and Ed, have farmed the Klamath Basin for decades, just as their father and grandfather before them. They grow potatoes, onions and barley, routinely planting upward of 1,000 acres on the refuge.

Like other farmers, the brothers talk of how agriculture's grains provide feed to migratory birds, about how they've changed their practices to better accommodate wildlife.

They've gone heavily into organic farming, spreading far less fertilizer and pesticide, which can end up in wetlands and rivers.

Meanwhile, crop rotation on the refuge now means flooding farm parcels every couple of years, which allows marshland to sprout anew for a few seasons before being returned to agricultural production.

Agribusiness enthusiastically supports more water for the refuges, which have been parched in recent droughts, said Greg Addington, executive director of the Klamath Water Users Assn., which represents basin farmers.

Addington said reduced farming on the refuges would be a regional economic disaster, knocking out not just growers but the infrastructure that supports them — the seed merchants, fertilizer and pesticide sales, tractor dealerships.

Staunton said Oregon environmentalists don't want to hear such things — they want all the farmers out.

"It's their ultimate goal," he said. "If they can force the farmers to bail, they can flood it all."

Environmentalists counter that agribusiness has gotten its way too long. The pendulum seemed to be swinging back in favor of wildlife during the last years of the Clinton administration, which conducted a formal review that might have curtailed refuge farming. That possibility faded after President Bush took office.

The basin remains home to the largest population of bald eagles in the lower 48 states as well as three of the West's last surviving white pelican breeding colonies. But scientists say the annual migration to the Klamath, which 50 years ago filled the sky with 7 million ducks and geese, has decreased by more than two-thirds.

Environmentalists blame myriad problems: farm equipment that can destroy nests, silt from agricultural runoff, pesticides. But mostly it's a matter of farm fields replacing wetlands. A federal study found that a typical farm acre produces about 200 pounds of waste grain that birds can eat, while a bountiful wetland acre can yield 2,600 pounds of rootlets and tubers.

Pedery of Oregon Wild said restoration of refuge wetlands could help Klamath River salmon rebound, with marsh plants filtering pollutants to improve water quality.

"It's irresponsible to treat these refuges like trading stock," he said. "It's land that was set aside for geese and eagles, not potatoes and onions."
"

article found @;
http://www.oregonwild.org/press-room/press-clips/fields-of-conflict-in-the-klamath