Federal Fish Policies Hooked on Feelings?

Comments | Environmental Insider News, Feb 6, 2002

The release this week of an interim report prepared by the National Science Foundation regarding last summer's denial of irrigation water to farmers in the Klamath River Basin may yet turn federal fish management policy on its head. The report, which says that three separate federal agencies all got their science wrong (more on this later), was blasted by a Wilderness Society official as "sacrificing logic in its search for clear-cut proof." Better, he said, to rely on one's intuition, and the science be damned!

Fitting the science to "intuition," or feelings, has seemingly been the thematic foundation for Western environmental management in recent years. Three incidents that occurred in Washington State during 1991 highlight this: the lynx hair hoax, the denial of water to firefighters that left four dead, and the denial of water to farmers that left many financially destroyed.

Last December the Washington Times reported that three U.S. Forest Service officials, two U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) officials, and two employees of the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife had planted samples of Canadian lynx hair on rubbing posts and mailed samples of the hair in to laboratories for testing. Speculation was that this was done to provide false information in support of federal bans on public use of the forest areas so as to "protect" the habitat of the lynx.

When confronted, however, the as yet unidentified agents claimed they had been making a blind test of the laboratories' ability to identify lynx hair - which was from captive animals not found in the forests where the samples had been planted. [Of course, one would not need to plant the hair samples in order to run a blind test, but why quibble?] At any rate, even had they done what they claimed, their actions would have violated the survey procedures.

Perhaps more importantly, despite lax coverage of this incident by most national newspapers, these federal and state agencies must now survive a higher level of scrutiny. This is especially so given the excuses made by various officials following the infamous "Thirty Mile Fire" in July 2001, in which four firefighters died after dispatchers delayed by hours sending a helicopter to drop water on the flames because of uncertainty over whether they needed permission to draw water from the nearby Chewuch River, which contains "threatened" fish.

In that incident, firefighters began calling for water drops at dawn, but the U.S. Forest Service log shows its first request for the water came at noon. Yet the helicopter did not take off until Forest Service dispatchers obtained permission from the district ranger, some two hours later. Both USFWS, which has jurisdiction over freshwater threatened and endangered species protection, and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which looks after salmon and other aquatic life that spend time in oceans, denied that their approval was necessary prior to removal of water from the Chewuch (or other rivers containing at-risk species), but the perception that their approval was needed has been blamed for the four deaths.

Which brings us to the National Science Foundation report in response to last summer's intervention in the Klamath Basin. There, federal authorities denied irrigation water to farmers after a determination by the U.S. Department of the Interior that the water was needed to maintain, even increase, stream flows to protect short-nose and Lost River suckers and coho salmon. As a result, farmers in the Klamath Basin lost an entire year of production - and some lost everything.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Klamath River Project is a system of main-stem and tributary dams and diversion structures that store and deliver water for agricultural users. After the suckers and salmon were placed on the endangered and threatened species lists, respectively, USBR was required to assess the potential impairment of these fishes by operation of the Klamath Project. Early last year, USBR completed its study, concluding that operations of the project would be harmful to the welfare of the species without specific constraints on water levels in the lakes to protect the suckers and on water flow in the river to protect the salmon.

But USFWS and NMFS issued separate "biological opinions" two months later stating that the suckers and salmon would be in jeopardy under the USBR proposal. USFWS demanded that lake levels must be higher than those recommended by USBR, while NMFS insisted that minimum flows in the Klamath River's main stem must be higher than those in the USBR plan. Last summer, because of the severe drought in the river basin, USDI determined that the USFWS and NMFS biological opinions must prevail, and water that would have gone to irrigators was directed almost entirely to keeping lake levels and river flows high.

The hue and cry over this policy, which was devastating to area farmers, led Interior Secretary Gale Norton to ask the NSF's National Research Council to independently review the scientific and technical validity of the two biological opinions and of the USBR plan (known as a "reasonable and prudent alternative"). The interim results of what is to be an 18-month study were just released, and none of the federal agencies has emerged as having relied on sound science to make their decisions.