Does a lot of publicity work have to be done before that image gets transmitted broadly? I was thinking of [howl the ancient forest issue [was elevated].
I think that’s a big part of it and what I feel I’m counting on is building constituencies for the basin. Everybody likes wildlife who has any interest in the environment at all. In some ways that’s easier to talk about than what the mycorrhizae fungus was doing for the health of a forest. Not that this was ever a sexy issue in the forest, either.
I think the wildlife is what it’s built around, and is the reason that my board and staff agreed to have me down here. We don’t know of any other area in the country that you can better make an argument for protecting endangered species, [that] wildlife in general is good for the economy as well as the ecology. We have to do some economic analysis fairly soon to show the value of the wildlife resources. The Wilderness Society, for example, has an economist, Ray Rasker, who looks at communities such as ones around Yellowstone Park. He asked people on the street about their economy, [who responded] “Well, it’s 90 percent lumber and grazing.” Little did they know that [commodities accounted for] 20 percent and the other 80 percent is from retirees and tourists. We think you could do the same thing in the Klamath Basin in the context of the refuges and Crater Lake National Park being analogous to Yellowstone. But that’s just a small part of it, because if you look at the Klamath River which has provided about a third of the Chinook salmon caught in the ocean. If you look at all of the recreation sports fishing jobs along the whole length of the Klamath River, in addition to the commercial fish catch from Fort Bragg to Florence, and add the economies associated with the entire Pacific Flyway that concentrates in the Klamath Basin, and how the Klamath Basin [habitat] affects people who look at or shoot birds from Canada to Mexico, the economic values of the so-called amenities in this area are remarkable. To us, it is penny wise and pound foolish to say that we have to log off a hillside or grow these potatoes instead of flooding this national wildlife refuge. There probably aren’t any other places where you can say [as emphatically] that what we do in such a small geographic area could affect such a broad region and number of economies. We see that as a contribution to what the national groups have been saying for years–that what is good for the environment is good for the economy.
