When someone says “Klamath” I think these words: Water. Fish. Farms. Forest. Fights. It’s a story I saw so often for so many years that I long ago lost interest. So I was delighted to find this weekend’s story in the Oregonian that showed me a different side of Klamath County, Oregon.
One in which geothermal energy is heating greenhouses that help produce a pesticide-free application for strawberry patches, almond orchards and mint fields. The same hot water helps brew beer, raise tropical fish, melt snow off downtown sidewalks and sell homes in Klamath Falls’ Hot Springs neighborhood. And renewable energy is just one plank of a plan to help right the rural area’s economy by focusing on more sustainable business lines.
I don’t know what Kool-Aid the region’s newsrooms were serving this weekend, because it was one of several stories that reexamined iconic Northwest conflicts—the timber wars and salmon recovery—and found pretty constructive solutions.
That’s not to suggest there hasn’t been plenty of real fight to write about. And I’m no fan of self-serving “good news” stories pitched to make someone look good or mask actual problems. But as a journalist, it’s also possible to get so bored with old narratives that you fail to see how the world has moved beyond them in interesting ways.
The Oregonian story isn’t exactly a good news story anyway. It’s about a place where unemployment hit 15 percent. Sure, there’s a little positive spin about the “Sustainable Klamath” brand. But the story manages to offer a real – and surprising – portrait of a community that’s thinking about its future and making investments so history doesn’t repeat itself.
Check out the rest of the Northwest’s top 10 sustainability headlines at Sightline Daily, or get the news delivered via email each morning by clicking here. All of today’s news can be found here.
Photo courtesy of flickr user Tracy27 via the Creative Commons license.
Marcia Armstrong
Let’s call the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement what it is – many wolves and a sheep sitting down to decide what’s for dinner. It’s a trade where special interests bargained away the health, safety and property of those not permitted to participate in the back room secretive process. These interests cannot just “celebrate consensus” in a vacuum – wishing away the large number of people who are opposed to and potentially injured by this deal with the devil. True to historic form, the federal and State governments appear intent upon abandoning the commitments they have made to Siskiyou County to adequately address the human and environmental damage caused by dam removal. Those at the table are apparently beating a fast retreat from financial liability and accountability for their dealings. This leaves the people of Siskiyou County holding the bag for restoration of the raw open scars of drained reservoirs and recovery from the impacts of sediment, which are likely toxic. There is no funding set aside to adequately compensate property owners around the reservoirs for the loss of their property values or Siskiyou County for the loss of tax revenues and impacts to the local economy. To add to the burden, there is no funding dedicated to develop alternative sources of power to replace the loss of clean hydropower. The State of Oregon seeks to shield their ratepayers with a legislated limit on their responsibility for the costs of dam removal. Pacific Power wants to walk away from the dams without further liability. The federal government wants to defer responsibility to some “designated removal entity” with much shallower pockets. All refuse to admit to the fact that dam removal will cost significantly more than what proponents have claimed. Although the Klamath Agreement gives lip service to a cost/benefit analysis to inform a final decision, it’s obvious that major players consider dam removal to be a done deal. At this point, definitive scientific studies supporting the proposal are absent. What we have is an accumulated pile of biased reports commissioned by dam removal advocates intent upon stacking the deck in favor of removal. We also have a suppression of scientific analysis that points toward some serious impacts to human health and the environment – impacts that would add hundreds of millions of dollars to the costs of dam removal. This is the questionable foundation upon which the agreement has been forged. Marcia H. Armstrong, Siskiyou County Supervisor District 5