Posted on 09/10/2001 11:15:23 AM PDT by Fury
There's an awfully special fish for you: The endangered sucker of Upper Klamath Lake, down in southern Oregon. To be precise Upper Klamath is the unique habitat of the short-nose sucker and the Lost River sucker, distinct species "collectively referred to as 'suckers,'" as a memo from the Fish and Wildlife Service helpfully notes.
What's so special? That's what men, women, and children on 1,200 Klamath-area farms, whose livelihoods depend on receiving irrigation water from Upper Klamath, would like to know.
You won't find suckers on any sushi menu. Though the Klamath and Modoc Indians have been known to consume them (while curiously also holding them sacred), suckers are not really for eating. Among the unappetizing garbage recyclers of the fish world, they feed on scum, algae, and insects at the bottom of the lake. They're not cute like some tropical fish. If you could get one to stop wriggling you could use it as a big paperweight, assuming you don't mind wet papers.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — which has accepted the designation of suckers as an endangered species, and accordingly cut off water to the farmers from what's called the Klamath Basin Project — hasn't provided a compelling case for starving people to save suckers. But it doesn't have to, guided as it is by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). For the ESA is serenely unconcerned about the human impact of its directives, even if that impact is farms reduced to cracked dried earth, land values nose-diving to $50 an acre from $800, and a total yearly loss of some $250 million. In an analysis conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service, a regional administrator concluded it was "reasonable and prudent" to accept that, in "most years," saving suckers will also allow for sending enough water down from the lake to parched farmers. Of course a farmer must feed his family not only in "most" but in all years.
As far as the ESA is concerned, here are the relevant facts: The Northwest is in the middle of a drought. Whenever water in Upper Klamath Lake falls under 4,139 feet in depth, this threatens the suckers — along with a salmon, the coho, which lives downstream. Both are "endangered" — though former Idaho congressman Helen Chenoweth Hage comments that she finds it hard to believe that coho salmon are endangered when you can buy them in a can in any Albertson's supermarket.
When the logic of the ESA, idiotic verging on sadistic, was applied to the Klamath situation, the Interior Department found that to save the suckers the farmers would have to accept that this was one of those years when they would have to starve, or leave the area. Thus the order came in April to seal all the head gates that lead from the lake to the irrigation canal.
Four times since then farmers and their sympathizers have stormed the gates, necessitating that armed U.S. Bureau of Land Management rangers be stationed to face down a widening ramshackle encampment of thirsty protesters. The rangers stand 6 feet from the angry farmers, a confrontation that has led a local cop to predict riots and homicidal mayhem.
It may be the worst abuse to date of the environmentalist theory that animals have a right to exist, independent of their usefulness or beauty, a right that trumps even the needs of human beings to make a living with honor and dignity.
But the true villains here aren't environmentalists, who have only as much power as the government and the nation are willing to grant them. Instead, blame the federal government as a whole for forgetting the history of the Klamath Project. It's called a Project because its origins go back to when the government started offering homesteads to veterans of World War I and II with the assurance of irrigation water without end.
Some of those veterans are still farming the land around Klamath, or trying to do so, as are their children. A cynic would say they that might be collectively referred to as suckers.
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