A lack of water and extreme heat is holding the Western United States
hostage. Wildfires started early this season.
Here in Oregon the so-called Bootleg fire has already destroyed an area bigger than Los Angeles.
The mega fire is burning so hot and generating so much energy, that it
is essentially creating its own weather, spreading smoke as far as New York City.
The fire is moving so fast, that many ranchers weren’t able to rescue their cattle.
More than a hundred families have already lost their homes to the flames
while thousands were evacuated.
It’s totally unclear how long it will take fire fighters to get the flames under control.
Many roads are still closed. The National Guard has been deployed to control traffic,
with only ranchers allowed in to check on their cattle in many areas.
The little community of Sprague River is only miles away from the edge of the fire.
Summer has been living here for more than 20 years
There is probably hundreds of cattle that have been lost, and there is probably
hundreds of cattle that are still out there. The Janes lost a bunch, the Jamsie Ranch of
Joe Jane they lost some, the Galgers out here, the Whiskey Creek Ranch, which are like my family.
The fire department put out information signs in the whole area to keep people
updated. Brent and his wife just moved here to start a life as farmers.
This fire has been much bigger. Seeing the clouds from it and just seeing the containment
line only be about this big right here for days and days and days. It’s been a big one.
When the wind blows that hard and the fire is that big, it’s kind of hard to stop,
especially this dry. But I know that they are rationing ground water around here too.
Farmers that are newer to farming, it’s on a first-come first-serve
as far as how long you had your well. And how long you have been using it.
Year to year it is becoming clearer:
access to water is defining who will be able to survive in this area, and who won’t make it.
And it is already a reality, that there is not enough water to meet the demands.
Scott Seus is a father of three and a third generation farmer within the Klamath Basin,
a huge man-made irrigation system. We don’t want to see bloom in the alfalfa like
this. This is a crop under stress and it’s under stress because we can’t get enough water to it.
We are trying to take a very limited groundwater resource and trying to spread it over a lot of
acres to try to keep our perennial crops alive. Scott's 400-acre farm is at an elevation of 4000
feet. Besides alfalfa, he is growing onions, peppermint, garlic and horseradish.
I’m not willing to stand aside and roll over for this. I’m willing to fight for it because it’s
disrespectful to my dad and it’s disrespectful to my grandfather and it’s honestly not right for me
not to give my children the opportunity to raise their family here and to have their kids have the
opportunity to farm. That’s my responsibility and that’s why I don’t walk away from it.
Ben Duval has a much smaller farm, but shares the same problems.
Looking at something like climate change is very concerning, because what does that mean for the
sustainability of what we are doing here into the future. And at the same time I think that
irrigation is a great way for us to be able to be insulated somewhat from climate change, because
we are not dependent on rainfall in a particular month. We can average it out at least over a year
or maybe over several years, if you have enough storage capacity in reservoirs. It gives us an
opportunity to be able to produce crops even when we are seeing more extremes in climate.
Ben wants his daughters to continue the family tradition. He lost a leg in a car accident,
but that hasn’t stopped him from fighting for his family’s right to farm.
The fight for water has already mobilized some farmers, who set up a full time protest
next to the channels that regulate how much water they are allowed to access.
SOT Dan Nielsen, protester We are just here trying to educate people, trying
to get them to stand up and take their water. I mean, it’s our water, I mean we do got to take it,
stand up and get it, or, or we gonna loose it. We gonna have to forcefully take it, and then we have
to get the sheriff or someone who have to come and help us and we gonna have to take it and
get it flowing or we not gonna have water here. This is the very place where officials decide
how the water is divided. Do they divert it to the farmers for their crops or do they keep it
in the lakes and rivers on the native lands. With too little water and the extreme heat,
fish species which are central to the diet and culture of local native tribes are endangered.
All this biomass that we see here and by the fall all this will have decomposed and resulted in
the death of all the young of the year fish. Alex Gonyaw is a biologist who is monitoring
the quality of the water and the status of the fish population for the Klamath tribes.
In the short term there’s not much we can do about climate change, however we can
alter the water quality in a positive way, that means fencing cattle off of streams not
adding any additional phosphorus to the system and allowing the aquaticus ecosystem to heal itself.
Nature is amazing at doing that, but first we need to remove the human pressure from the system.
The things that the native American tribes, the Klamath tribes here value have been largely
completely disregarded during the settlement process, and it continues to be almost disregarded
in terms of striking a balance between the eco system, the values of the tribes, agriculture
and the treatment of the landscape in general. It’s been extremely one sided.
Don Gentry is the chairman of the Klamath Tribes.
The Klamath have been living in this area for thousands of years.
When you look out in the distance and you see the cascades and
how beautiful it looks and then you look into the green water that looks like pea soup this
time of year knowing that that creates conditions that are lethal to our fish, it’s heartbreaking.
We are people of the lakes, marshals and streams. Everything that the creator placed here
in the rivers and marches and the lakes and on the landscape was here and provide subsistence for us-
All those resources even in our legends and stories remind us of how we are to be and what we
are not to how we are to live, that remind us that the creator placed these things here for us for
our subsistence but to never abuse that, you know, we take only what we need, and use everything what
we take, you know, we are are a part of things. I am definitely concerned about violence and just
continued racist based marginalization of who we are and what those fish mean to us. We are
portrayed as not being as important as other folks to generate a lot of money to agriculture.
There hardly seem to be any possible winners in this war over water.
But there will be many losers, if the climate crisis isn't stopped.
Charlotte Seus, whose father could swim in the lake, might be one of them.