Did some of the issues you brought to light more recently on the refuges represent the product of some research–or were they known already and you amplified them?
They took a lot of research. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund sent a letter to the Interior Department in January demanding that the changes be made concerning agriculture, who in our belief is dominating the management of the refuges in violation of federal law. Interestingly, the irrigation districts sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the Fish and Wildlife Service asking for any information and communications that they [USFWS] had with us. Their implied assumption, I guess, was that [the] Fish and Wildlife Service was feeding us all this information about the illegal pesticide use on the refuges and how water was being mismanaged. My comment was “God, I wish it had been that easy.” A lot of bureaucrats in the Fish and Wildlife Service took the view that anything embarrassing to the agriculture community, or showing that the wildlife was not being adequately provided for, was politically sensitive. We’ve had people in the Bureau of Reclamation and the Fish and Wildlife Service at various levels supply us with information once they saw what we were doing.
I moved down there four years this June and have wondered “Gosh, why did it take me so long [to educate himself about the issues in the basin]?” I’ve thought that somebody who’s smarter could have figured it out faster, but there’s a lot going on. It takes time to develop constituencies. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund is working with us and now we’ve developed a coalition with 13 other conservation groups in California and Oregon, [along with] some of the national groups who are getting involved with the issue. It’s just taken a while to do it. In trying to raise this issue, I’ve been struck by [the comparison with] what we were doing in the early 1980s. I remember James Monteith used to say that his greatest fear was that they’d cut the whole forest down and nobody would notice. It was like being a voice in the wilderness saying that there’s an ecosystem out there and we’re destroying it. All these other issues are important, but what about Oregon’s forests? It’s the same way with these refuges and the water diversions, along with the destruction of the marshes and the precipitous decline of the waterfowl numbers this century. The constituency for these refuges has been the more mild mannered Audubon chapter members. While they very much care about the environment, they haven’t taken the time to do the things that have to be done to protect the resource.
