Redwood Reader

Recent reports from the Klamath River area illustrate the extent of converging ignorance and greed.
Klamath Fisheries Council has said this is a bad fish year because low flows killed adults and juveniles in separate incidents in this breeding cycle three years ago. THis is opposed to a year of abundance in the Bay Area rarely seen before.
Numbers of seals, sea lions and whales continues to increase, all salmon feeders.
Salvage logging in burnt areas of the Siskyous has been allowed without floor protections. This means tremendous amounts of sediment are about to be cut loose in the watershed. This would be a good place to demonstrate walking machine harvesting. No green trees should be cut so that glomalin production can be maintained where possible, and seeding the worked areas while the personnel are there should be included if they are let in there at all.
The GAO is looking into the Klamath Water Bank. The Water Bank has no hard numbers and guess at availability of groundwater and idling lands. These are proglomalin actions but done in ignorane and hope rather than science. GAO finds no science in water decisions.
Ignorance of aquifer refilling is not at hand, yet it is obvious that if you let water stand over porous ground recharge will occur. Vegetation helps keep that a possibility. The vegetation also creates the surface water zone which retains water rather than draining it into watercourses as a problem.
The Federal Government has allowed farmers to make the calls on up to 85% of water distriibution to many California cities and munincipalities, allowing them to sell their surpluses, which are owned by the People of the State of California.
Drought conditions appear in one year of below average rainfall. Ecosystems bank more water than that for just such emergencies, two to three years worth. This is the declining effect that allows insectsa nad disease to explode when conditions are right. This shows us the real state of current conditions: the landscape is drying out due to land management practices.
Restoration of salmon runs is considered an "industry" because it brings money and jobs. Really it is a repair job that should be permanent, a one time effort, and anything less is suspicious use of taxpayer money. Watershed restoration is a matter of undoing past bad ideas and waiting for the fix to grow in. It should start at the top of a watershed and work its way to the stream.
Dammed rivers may increase flows by strict adherence to glomalin rules in the areas below the dams. This should be studied by GIS since it is likely there is enough land and precipitation to change current flows by better management of the downstream watershed in rivers like the Klamath and the Eel, provided we stop going backward.
HSU's Natural Resources students are complaining the department is adrift and directionless. (Lumberjack, March 05). Glomalin impacts or is critical to all branches of this area and should revitalize the entire department. Glomalin should be addressed in CCAT as well. We need plenty of new young thinkers to go from exploitation to sustainability.
CDF should be responsible for ALL changes to the forest floor whether logging, roads, development or conversion.
Redwood Sciences Lab will find answers to all the unanswered questions at Caspar Creek.
Forest road building needs tighter controls and penalties for displaced sediment.
An informed populace here, where this is easy to see, will have to do battle with developers and farmers for the foreseeable future. It is essential knowledgeable people are part of the debate or development will either crush opposition, or nitpick it apart into inconsequentiality, and the need for sustainability will not be recognized.