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Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Fueds
River Impossible (Cont.)

NO, WE CAN'T ALL GET ALONG
ALAS, THE STYLISTIC SINS of the greens don't help matters. In February, the Audubon Society held a conference in K-Falls devoted to bald eagles—the Klamath Basin hosts some 800 eagles in a good winter, the highest overwintering population in the U.S. The Klamath mess was on the table for discussion, as was the environmental community's stance on irrigation. Advocates for all viewpoints had been invited to speak. Dan Keppen, 38, head of the Klamath Falls-based Water Users Association, an advocacy group for farmers, arrived in a dapper black turtleneck, looking like the Matt LeBlanc of farm country. He stretched his facts a bit—claiming that irrigators received "no" water in 2001, when in fact they received about half their usual allotment—and drove home the point that irrigation takes only 4.5 percent of the Klamath's water, while getting 100 percent of the blame. Keppen mentioned options for dealing with the water shortages, used deliberately moderate language, and left with a round of applause.

Then Andy Kerr got up. A rumpled 48-year-old speaking for the environmentalists, he discarded his prepared remarks, announced that he was "infuriated" by Keppen's presentation, and, rubbing both hands over his bald head, launched into an impassioned, rambling rebuttal. Kerr runs a well-regarded environmental consultancy and serves as point man for the Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC) on this issue, but the only words I can use to describe his presentation are blunt ones: ineffective, unprofessional, and condescending.

I call him on it later during a phone conversation. "I am rightly criticized for not playing well with certain parts of the opposition," Kerr tells me. "Let's all sit down and get along? That did not work in the South for desegregation and did not work in the Pacific Northwest for the cutting of old-growth forests. I don't expect Andy Kerr and Dan Keppen to be singing 'Kumbaya' anytime soon."

Kerr has been a leading voice, along with the ONRC and a coalition of environmental groups, in proposing the only realistic, short-term solution: buying up farmland at $4,000 an acre (about twice the market price), then retiring the irrigation rights and pouring the water back into depleted wetlands or the river. This "willing seller" initiative has been condemned furiously by ag leaders. A very few farmers have openly expressed interest, but Norton bluntly refuses to add any new lands to the federal portfolio, anywhere, and Congress shot down a $175 million allocation for willing sellers last year.

Unfortunately, in the same conversation, I get a sense of how easily farmers can distrust the environmental movement. Kerr and I fall into an obscure argument over flow levels in the Link River, the mile-long natural channel that drains Upper Klamath Lake. This is exactly the kind of agonizing minutia that people here argue about all day. Back before the Bureau of Reclamation had dug a deeper cut leading out of the lake, the Link actually ran dry during some summers. Kerr denies this. I discuss it with him while holding the phone in my left hand and a 1918 photo of the river in my right hand. In the photo, K-Falls pioneers are standing in the dry bed, picking up fish.

"That's not true!" Kerr tells me. "It never ran dry!"

The point is not about whether the Link ran dry in 1918. The point is that solutions depend on compromise, compromise depends on trust, and farmers and greens cannot trust each other when they lack even a basic agreement on reality.

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