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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- <EM>Forwarded<FONT size=-1> by Margie
Whitnah</FONT></EM></DIV><A
href="http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=8b9973723e6ba8007305ea6b38f1f440">http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=8b9973723e6ba8007305ea6b38f1f440</A>
<P><B>Bringing a River Back to Life -- When Water Is More Than a Commodity</B>
<P>Pacific News Service, Commentary, Tim Holt, Aug 09, 2005
<P>Editor's Note: Native Americans across the nation are restoring land and
waterways, but <BR>they face a dominant culture whose agencies are often charged
with simultaneously <BR>protecting and exploiting nature.
<P>DUNSMUIR, Calif.--They are gradually emerging from the deep shadows of the
dominant <BR>culture. Across the Great Plains, Indians are bringing back the
buffalo, the wild mustang <BR>and the wolf. In my own region of Northern
California the 2,200-member Hoopa Valley tribe is <BR>making headway in their
effort to restore a river and a fishery that had sustained them for <BR>10,000
years.
<P>The Indians bring a kind of practical environmentalism to the ongoing debate
over our <BR>relationship to the land and its resources. It is an
environmentalism tied to a particular <BR>place, one that's been their home for
thousands of years. They have learned to live within <BR>the limits of its
resources.
<P>But native peoples must contend with powerful, rapacious forces in the larger
society that <BR>view rivers as irrigation ditches, and water as nothing more
than a commodity to be <BR>bought and sold.
<P>The Hupas and a neighboring tribe, the Yuroks, struggled for 40 years to
restore their <BR>river after it was drained by dams and diversions. The farmers
of the San Joaquin Valley, <BR>300 miles to the south, began siphoning water
from the Trinity after they'd depleted their <BR>groundwater and tapped out the
rivers in their own region.
<P>Last May, after a protracted legal struggle with those farmers, the Hupas
finally saw <BR>flows restored to their decimated river -- at a level only about
half the Trinity's historic <BR>flows but sufficient to bring salmon populations
back to sustainable levels, according to <BR>government biologists.
<P>But even this minimal restoration is far from assured. The Hupas' legal
victory didn't put <BR>an end to the mentality that drained their river in the
first place. The federal Bureau of <BR>Reclamation, the agency that built the
Trinity's dams and diversions, recently promised its <BR>water customers to the
south an additional million acre-feet of water over the next 20 <BR>years, a 15
percent increase over the current level of deliveries.
<P>To achieve this, the Bureau will need to tap more deeply into the Trinity's
two reservoirs. <BR>In dry years, the river's drained reservoirs won't be able
to provide the cool water required <BR>for spawning salmon and steelhead, so any
gains in the fishery made in previous years <BR>could easily be wiped out.
<P>To give itself more flexibility, the Bureau has dropped strict guidelines
that previously <BR>regulated flows from Northern California dams to protect
salmon. This move has raised <BR>cries of alarm from state officials who fear
efforts to restore endangered fish will be <BR>jeopardized, not only in the
Trinity but in the state's main river system, the Sacramento.
<P>The Bureau currently finds itself on both sides of this issue. On the one
hand, it is charged <BR>with carrying out the physical restoration of the
Trinity, reshaping it from the straight <BR>channel of the post-dam era to a
meandering stream with the quiet side pools necessary <BR>for spawning and
nurturing young salmon. Ironically, the benefits from this painstaking <BR>work
are now jeopardized by this same Bureau's plans to ship more water down south.
<BR>What we are witnessing here is a full-blown case of bureaucratic
schizophrenia, an agency <BR>trying to practice resource stewardship and
resource exploitation at the same time, in the <BR>same river.
<P>And it gets even crazier. Some of the Bureau's water customers down south
won't even be <BR>able to use the additional water the Bureau plans to ship
them. In part this is due to <BR>reduced planting because of falling commodity
prices. There are other problems: The <BR>Bureau's biggest agricultural
customer, the San Joaquin valley's sprawling Westlands <BR>Water District, has
started reducing its planted acreage due to chronically poor drainage <BR>and
the accumulation of toxic chemicals and salt in its soils.
<P>But the additional water the Bureau's customers are getting definitely won't
go to waste. <BR>The extra, taxpayer-subsidized water can be sold in the
increasingly lucrative open <BR>market, where agricultural districts can get at
least double what they pay the federal <BR>government for it.
<P>It took the Hoopas and their allies 40 years to halt the draining of their
river and begin the <BR>restoration of its fishery. But the system that drained
the river in the first place, the <BR>system hijacked long ago by corporate
farming interests, remains firmly in place, poised <BR>to exploit the
increasingly valuable commodity it receives at taxpayer expense. From that
<BR>bottom-line perspective, the use of water to grow crops is just one more
"option," and its <BR>use to improve the health of rivers and their fisheries
makes no sense at all.
<BLOCKQUOTE>PNS contributor Tim Holt is an environmental writer living in the
Mt. Shasta region of <BR>Northern California. He is author of "Songs of the
Simple Life," a collection of
essays.</BLOCKQUOTE>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
<BR><I><FONT color=#7e835b><FONT size=-1>(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C.
Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving theincluded information for research and
educational purposes. Klamath Restoration Council has no affiliation whatsoever
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