Redwood Reader

The dire condition of the Klamath Chinook fishery is having impacts all along the California and Oregon coasts and threatening to close the third largest salmon fishery on the West Coast. The Pacific Fisheries Management Council held hearings last week in Seattle to make a recommendation about the salmon season, and the news is a season shortened from the usual 27 weeks to eleven or even completes closure. They will pass along their recommendation to the deciding agency. Fishermen of all stripes will feel the impact. Oregon’s governor ordered a study so the state will be able to help distressed fishing villages, businesses and families cope with the closure. Today U.S. District Judge Saundra B. Armstrong of Oakland ordered higher flows for fish in order to protect coho in dry years. She also told the National Marine Fisheries Council to develop a workable recovery plan, and the Bureau of Reclamation to implement what it has already been ordered to do. Both sides note this is not a problem now as it is a wet year and the flows are high. Environmentalists have already seen court victories go unfulfilled with catastrophic consequences.
We have followed this story from the beginning because it shows how glomalin can help us with these issues in a concrete and substantial manner. We believe there is a workable plan that calls for some sacrifice by all parties initially that will improve all sectors sustainably, in a few years. A few wet years could be all it takes with a little willingness not to accept the status quo as the beat possible solution.
Because we are comparing runs from just a few years ago, we can discount dam removal for the moment. That can only improve the situation but is not relevant to current conditions. More water in the river can be achieved from higher flows but the watershed as a whole needs repair for optimal flows. Dam removal also expands the spawning range. Farmers should be compensated by implementing federal BMP’s for rainwater harvest across the landscape, off channel ponds, large water tanks and switching to less water intensive types of irrigation.
Our studies show land use is a major component in river health. The lower Klamath has been logged heavily and the impacts are the same as we have been describing here throughout. In a high rainfall area the precipitation interface and fungal water storage systems are disrupted across a wide portion of the landscape. Roads, soil compaction and diverted drainage are causing sedimentation of the channels, widening of the river, removing shade, impacting water temperature and dissolved oxygen and degrading spawning grounds. A steady decline is assured if we do not take this into account. So the lower Klamath region should put a moratorium on clear cuts and road building, or at least restrict them, and try to leave large tracts to regrow the forest that are off limits after early thinning. Aggressive treatment will provide jobs and small wood and chip products. This actually fits in well with TMDLs that are coming to the Klamath (Water Quality Control Board website www.swrcb.ca.gov/rwqcb1. ) because these are the very goals we are tackling in the Mattole, although we had little agricultural residue.
A Eureka Reporter article on the meeting revealed the problem. “We are trying to understand not only what water quality conditions are in the river, but what is causing those water quality conditions to be what they are,” said David Leland, senior water quality engineer for the water board on the project. “So we are looking for cause-and-effect relationships.”
Ultimately, Leland said the water board is looking to develop a tool that can be used to change what those inputs are and then look for a response in the watershed system.”
Most of our sediment came from poor roads and legacy damage. Sediment surveys identified the problem areas for repair, and alternative drainage was introduced restoring natural patterns. Once new sedimentation is prohibited and people understand how to work the forests while retaining its crucial properties the fish will be back and there will be sustainable income from stable landscapes. Agricultural runoff, whether fertilizer, waste or pesticide will be discussed. “McKinleyville resident and fish biologist Pat Higgins told the water board that the situation on the Klamath River was dire. Higgins said a large amount of nutrients being released into the river, primarily from agriculture practices upstream, were causing algal blooms and other toxic conditions for fish, as well as known and new fish diseases that were “piggybacking” on some of those conditions.” While higher flows will help alleviate algae, I recall the ladies telling us about this process from For Sake of the Salmon from the Petaluma River and Stempfl Creek describing how hard it was to gain consensus in an area with 12,000 businesses along the river with 138000 people in the watershed, all with rights. The larger community must decide this needs doing, which, in effect, is why there is a water quality board holding hearings on discharges and impacts on the river, as required by the Clean Water Act. “Although the battle to improve the main channel of the Klamath River may succeed, Higgins said the war to correct the watershed may be lost if the tributaries to the river weren’t addressed rapidly. ‘If these fish can’t get to well-distributed cold water areas en route and we lose a half dozen of these (tributaries) in the next 10 or 15 years before we fix the mainstream temperatures, we may not have salmon to recover,’ he said.”
So far the impacts are mostly to those living in the region. There are others who must understand what is at stake and how they contribute to the problem. One such group are the recreational users of public lands that demand their right to enjoy their horse, ATV, dirt bike, mountain bike most anywhere on public land. Stop. High rainfall forests are much more fragile than you imagine. Another category of public lands is needed, perhaps temporary, that deemphasizes recreation so essential areas have recovery opportunities as well to provide essential far into the future. We would also ban salvage logging in advance just so everyone is clear we are rebuilding the water system by way of cleaning the atmosphere through trees and fungi.
It may seem like a lot of sacrifice for a few fish in terms of dollars, but this story has wider implications. Rising Arctic temperatures and sea levels are causing more notice now and most solutions are technological fixes that are a drop in the bucket or unproven. Redwood Reader has advocated for paying forest owners to grow big trees through sale of carbon credits. It may soon be time to set aside large chunks of land for carbon filtering by vegetation. Glomalin storage does the job. Its just too tempting to cash a large tree out. The trees must be value enhanced for what they do. Consider a large Douglas fir has about one million needles that cover nearly an acre if laid out. There is about one mycorhizzae attached to the roots for every needle, according to web articles mentioned earlier. One early picture showed clover making a gram of glomalin in thirty days, so for the sake of argument lets say each mycorhizzae is making a gram of hyphae sheathing per growing season- one million grams, one thousand kilos, a ton. It may make several, there are no numbers yet and too many unknowns. All of this will be figured out in the next few decades and will be part of a simple mathematical modeling for natural resources since we are talking about a rate of natural occurrence, and its cumulative impacts in terms of collecting and storing water as well as carbon.
It was recently reported CO2 in the atmosphere had doubled since the Industrial Age began. While processes like steel making and lime have contributed lots of CO2, and various combustion processes by billions of people contribute, little is said of the vast amounts of carbon released from the soil through time, and the very few practices we employ that return it, mostly we count on earth to do what it does while allowing that capacity to be diminished daily while continuing to add to the problem. Once carbnon dioxide is recognized as a resource the scramble will be on to collect the lions share and we will have entered a new reality.

Life at Sea Approaching the Shoals
March 26 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-salmon26mar26,1,6229690.story?page=2&coll=la-news-environment This article includes a little background on the story of the Klamath since 2001, when drought caused upper river farmers to demand more water for irrigation.
Judge Rules for Fish in Klamath River Dispute
Eric Bailey, Times Staff Writer March 28, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-klamath28mar28,1,6228547.story?coll=la-news-environmentKlamath River the focus of water board scoping meetingEureka Reporter
by Nathan Rushton, 3/2/2006 www.eurekareporter.com
Web site for Klamath TMDL's at www.swrcb.ca.gov/rwqcb1.