I think the economic interests in the Klamath Basin know that they have to do this–that they’re foolish not to take the money to do the legitimate restoration work simply because people are not going to want to develop businesses and move to this county if Upper Klamath Lake smells like a sewer like it does every July. Any time we go along with something that had ecological restoration in it, or something the agriculture interests weren’t normally supportive of, it was like “What do we get?” That means “What do we get that makes it easier to make money or rip off a little bit of the resource? Basically we were saying “If this is about ecological restoration, then that’s what it has to be.” We aren’t going to accept ecological restoration where we create something with one hand while destroying something else with the other.
Was Cell Tech helpful at all?
Cell Tech is interesting. With the Hatfield Working Group, its composition included Cell Tech, the Klamath Tribe, the Nature Conservancy, [and] included other people who considered themselves conservationists that were really trying to work it out with the locals, but I think did not recognize some of the inevitable pitfalls we’ve been through with the Forest Service doing these kinds of consensus groups. We were always very careful that ONRC was not to attack the individuals on the working group who were there that had legitimate concerns about the basin and were trying to do the right thing. Cell Tech falls into that category. In other words, I don’t have any complaint with what they do. Regardless of what people think about the algae, in terms of its claim to food value or energy it gives you, Cell Tech has never sprayed one ounce of pesticide or diverted a single acre foot of water and have supported the restoration efforts within the basin. I view them as the kind of industry that we would like to have. When I’ve talked to Cell Tech and explained what we [ONRC] in the context of the Hatfield Working Group [were doing], one of their staff [members] said to me, “Hey, your job is to raise hell–I understand.”
