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Swimming past the California-Oregon border, a lost fish — one of thousands — finds its way home after an exile of over 100 years.
As swarms of salmon migrate north to Oregon along the Klamath River, youth from across the region’s indigenous tribes kayak south through northern California to the Pacific Ocean — a 300-mile celebratory journey that would not have been possible just a year ago.
What’s changed? Beneath the fish and kayaks lie the watery graves of four dams, built in the early 20th century and dismantled over the past two years at a cost of $500 million, the largest and most ambitious dam removal in history.
The return of salmon to the upper Klamath River represents a victory for nature, an exhibition of the century-long transition in how Americans view the environment, and a signal achievement of the 1973 Endangered Species Act.
Manifest destiny had hung up its boots. The forest-chopping, river-choking, nation-building zeal of the 19th and 20th centuries that produced big dams on the Klamath was exhausted by the first decades of the 21st. Led by new public concern about the consequences of industrialization, landmark environmental legislation in the 1970s steadily assured protections for air, water, and wildlands. The National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act (to name a few) are at the heart of today’s public health and ecosystem safeguards — the latter being the legal backbone behind the restoration of the Klamath.
Thus not unlike salmon leaping through whitewater, the country too leapt forward, steadily evolving its values to better protect the Earth, its creatures, and future generations.
Now, a remarkably malevolent view of environmental protection has gathered strength in the White House and Congress that threatens to undo this hard-won progress, seeking to pull the nation 100 years into the past. The Trump administration is taking aim at integral regulatory acts, reversing 55 years of work towards cleaning up the country and restoring ecological values.
California’s stringent air quality rules are being challenged. Trump intends to end President Biden’s extensive clean energy program. The Environmental Protection Agency wants to remove 35-year-old controls on mercury and other toxic emissions, and has ordered coal-fired plants to cancel plans to shut down. The Forest Service proposed to open logging to over 50 million acres of roadless terrain, some of the wildest landscapes in the country. Budgets for environmental science are being slashed; staffing levels of key agencies are being dramatically reduced. The project to restore the Great Lakes, which started in the mid-1960s, could end next year.
What may occur on the Klamath River by year’s end is a microcosm of the nation’s disturbing about-face on its responsibilities to the natural world and public health. Among the essential targets of the federal attack, the Klamath is being used as a testing ground for the dismemberment of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
Endangered Species Act In Danger
Approved by Congress in 1973 with unanimous support in the Senate and just 12 opposition votes in the House, the ESA was the legal force that secured the authority, budget, and personnel to remove 1.4 million cubic yards of dirt, concrete, and steel on the Klamath, restoring the river’s free flow.
Today’s White House, however, is dead set on weakening the ESA, seeking to twist essential legal definitions applied by federal specialists for over half a century.
Acting on a Supreme Court decision from last year, in April the Trump administration proposed to dramatically narrow government capacity to protect endangered species by allowing construction and other human activity that damage their natural habitat. This federal green-light for ecosystem destruction is based on the manipulation of legal verbiage — specifically, the ESA definition of “harm.”
Before 2024, experts at the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could designate a species for protection if there was either direct or indirect “harm” to their habitat. It was illegal to destroy or significantly alter habitat if the damage led to injury or death of a protected species. In interpreting “harm” to include the condition of wild habitat, USFWS and NOAA spent 52 years accomplishing remarkable achievements, like rescuing the bald eagle and grizzly bear from extinction.
Recognizing the power of a broad interpretation of harm, the Trump administration wants to weaken the definition to include only direct actions, like killing or trapping species, as being subject to ESA regulation. The administration’s proposal would give mining, logging, transportation, real estate, and agricultural interests free rein to wreck habitat without interference.
Had such a definition been in place a decade ago, it would have jeopardized the justification for removing the four dams on the Klamath. Countless projects to protect wetlands, forests, deserts, lakes, and rivers would have been much harder to implement under the Trump administration’s definition of harm. Whooping cranes, gray wolves, sea turtles, and hundreds of other endangered species would likely be gone, forever.
The Evolution of American Values
The undermining of the ESA couldn’t find a better testing ground than the Klamath River Basin. Conflicting federal responsibilities between downstream tribal fisheries and upstream agriculture have fueled a long, contentious history of water allocation that is inextricably tied to ESA protections.
As part of the nation-building race of the early 1900s, the United States sought to turn the wetland landscape of the Klamath headwaters into a productive agricultural region. As was customary in the era, the Bureau of Reclamation reshaped the Klamath River and its tributaries into the Klamath Project, with little regard for long-term environmental implications.
The Project’s irrigation supply was promised to newly-settled family farms and ranches. Lower Klamath Lake was drained, canals were dug, and six dams were constructed along the river. Today, the Project supplies irrigation water to over 200,000 acres of farmland, as well as two national wildlife refuges.
But the cost of the Project was heavy for tribal nations as more water was diverted upstream, leaving little to flow south into California. Once-abundant fish were now endangered; the cornerstones of tribal livelihoods and cultural heritage — salmon, steelhead, and suckers — were dying. The dams cut them off from their spawning grounds, and had morphed the river’s cold and fast waters into a hot, sluggish trickle — a breeding ground for toxic algae and parasites. The collateral damage of nation-building was paid little heed by the federal government and larger public.
But the public health impacts of reckless industrialization grew more severe post-WW2, and the modern environmental movement was born. Gaining momentum in the late 20th century, it was institutionalized by the first Earth Day and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. American values had begun to shift.
Now in addition to tribal nations, environmental groups lobbied for federal action to save fish populations on the Klamath, culminating in various species receiving ESA protection in the 1990s. Additionally, the Bureau of Reclamation was tasked with creating and upholding an annual operations plan for the Klamath Project that was governed by the ESA, which required that enough water was both released downstream and left in Upper Klamath Lake to maintain a viable habitat for fish and other wildlife.
Tensions caused by the new restrictions on irrigation water soon came to a head in the drought of 2001. The Bureau of Reclamation shut off the Project’s irrigation water, citing critical conditions for fish as laid out by the ESA. But outcry from farmers reversed the decision in 2002, resulting in a massive fish kill of over 30,000 salmon — a scar which has not yet faded for tribes.
However in the two decades since, tribes and farmers have reached across the divide to find solutions to both parties’ water woes. These continued efforts for collaboration led to the four downstream dams on the Klamath being removed in 2023 and 2024 — a project that found its firm foundation in ESA regulations.
Evolutionary Backsliding
While the Bureau of Reclamation is currently operating the Klamath Project under a conventional ESA-based plan formulated during the Biden administration, new directives from Washington D.C. may upend 30 years of convention.
In May, the Department of the Interior issued a memorandum that put into operational practice the change in the definition of “harm.”
The DOI decided that the ESA only applies to the Bureau of Reclamation’s discretionary actions — which do not include providing contracted irrigation water. This key distinction would allow more water to be taken from the river, in effect exempting the Project from ESA restrictions and diminishing supplies for spawning fish. The DOI specifies that if Reclamation cannot simultaneously fulfill irrigation contracts and satisfy ESA requirements for fish, it “does not have a duty to comply” with the ESA.
The result would be agriculture gaining unrestricted access to as much water as it can use. River levels would plummet, and with them the abundant habitat fostered by dam removal. Healthy runs of salmon would again be lost to the past. The ecological benefits, never mind the legal and cultural principles that produced the Klamath restoration, would erode.
Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok tribe, stresses the threat of reversing ESA safeguards for the Klamath Project.
“If fully implemented as written on the reevaluation memos, it removes any protection for minimum flows in the Klamath River,” Belchik warns. “If that were to happen and the river is de-watered, we could be in a perilous situation. This is exactly what caused the fish kill in 2002. And what we’re risking is going back to those days. And those are days we swore we were never going to go back to.”
From the Center for Biological Diversity, senior attorney Margaret Townsend labels the DOI action “an assault” on the tribes and ecosystem of the Klamath, and an attempt to rewrite the rules in the middle of the game. She attests that Reclamation will face strong legal challenges in “sidestepping its responsibilities” to the ESA, given that the new directive flies in the face of years of prior case law. Judges have repeatedly upheld that ESA flow requirements supersede any irrigation contracts that Reclamation may hold, especially in Klamath Basin cases that have reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
But the Trump administration’s proposed change has ample local support too. In the words of Elizabeth Nielsen, executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association, current restrictions placed by the ESA relegate irrigators to leftovers. The KWUA, which represents farmers and ranchers within the Klamath Project, hopes that the new federal guidelines will shift the status quo in their favor.
“We understand the importance of fisheries, and how it all fits together,” Nielsen clarifies. “We understand the importance of refuges. Over the last year or so there’s been water applied to those areas, largely at the urging of irrigators and through the efforts of irrigators.”
But Nielsen emphasizes that the KWUA’s first priority is working with the Bureau of Reclamation on a new operations plan free from the ESA, based on the DOI’s directives. Reclamation has not yet announced any intentions for reconsultation, although the memorandum mandates it to “reassess its approach to Project operations” and fall in line with DOI guidance.
In a statement to Circle of Blue, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asserted that the Interior Department memorandum is “consistent with the administration’s focus on regulatory certainty and water reliability.” The agency stated it cannot comment further due to ongoing litigation.
“I think the bottom line here is that the Klamath is going to be a test case,” says Townsend, referencing the altered judicial climate. While she has hope that courts will continue to stand by the ESA, she emphasizes the disastrous nation-wide stakes if they change tunes.
“It sets a deeply troubling precedent that could encourage irrigation districts across the West to enter into agreements with Reclamation, and try to undermine ESA protections wherever they conflict with water delivery interests.”
Townsend stresses the importance of counteracting the federal attack on the ESA, before the extent of the damage is too far gone.
“The Trump administration has taken steps to systematically undermine the Endangered Species Act and our nation’s bedrock environmental laws,” Townsend laments. “ They’re sacrificing our species and the sovereignty of tribal nations for the sake of private interests. And all American people will lose if that is allowed to stand.”
Featured image: Photo by Bureau of Land Management