I am responding to the invitation to
comment on Joyce Morrison's June 10
column,
"This land was our land."
How do we ever awaken the people about
the upcoming doom if this path does not
end? I live in the Klamath Basin, and my
family was given a homestead to farm after
WWII to provide food for America.
The pioneers in the past 100 years
built our community from scratch, as it
was an old lake bed. Now these elderly
veterans have been "treated worse than
traitors, because traitors are taken to
court." These were the words of an 80
year-old WWII veteran, who spent his late
teen years defending our country, then the
rest of his life growing food for our
nation.
And the excuse to decimate our
community was the Endangered Species Act.
They do not know how many endangered
sucker fish there were, there are, or how
many they want to have, but they are
"listed."
So they take the water from the farmers
and raise the lake level... while the only
fish kills of suckers were on HIGH water
years.
Yes, we in the Klamath Basin are living
this nightmare, seeing the invasion of
communism and control. And yet everyone
still has a flag waving. There have been
suicides, divorces, auctions, and major
emotional and physical ailments, and the
tens of thousands of sucker fish go their
own way, happy as when the water was
lower, having no clue why all this water
was dumped on them.
Now the government is forcing us to
pump out our untested aquifer, as domestic
wells are going dry, yet allowing a huge
power company to come in and pump out
billions of gallons of water, given
preference for a permit above farmers
wanting to water their crops. They have
forced us to retire land from farming.
They have taken water that we stored...
every penny of the storage paid for by the
farmers, and sent it down the river where
there have been record runs of fish salmon
and the catch limit has been raised.
Then they demand "tribal trust" water,
a blank check for them to take water from
our area and dump it into the ocean.
Historically, this water did not go down
the river. It was a closed basin before
the settlers drained some of the water
from the basin so they could farm this
fertile land. The river used to go dry.
The Nature Conservancy and government
agencies have taken over 90,000 acres out
of farm and cattle production to form more
wetlands that used twice as much water as
farmland. Over $13 million was spent on a
fish screen when they have not even
counted the fish. Thousands of ducks,
geese, and wildlife thrive on our farmland
and in our canals. There are programs to
give temporary easements to the government
for our land. The people do not realize
that when the sucker fish swims in, they
will never get to farm again.
This land was our land.
Jacqui Krizo
Tulelake, California (in the Klamath
Basin, near the Oregon border)
