Rural Cleansing

The Klamath Basin of eastern Oregon is a long way from Vermont, but a struggle now going on there dramatically highlights the radical enviro campaign to make it impossible for people to live in as much as possible of rural America.

Since 1907 over 1200 farms in the Klamath Basin, with an annual revenue of $250 million, have had rights to irrigation water from Upper Klamath Lake. In 1988 the Interior Department decided that two species of Klamath Basin sucker fish were endangered species. For the first three years the Bureau of Reclamation, which controls the lake, struck a careful balance between keeping water up for the sucker fish, while drawing enough down to meet the needs of the farms. But in 1991, a drought year, the Fish and Wildlife Service stated that the endangered sucker fish needed more water.

That set off the Oregon Natural Resources Council, a clone of the Vermont Natural Resources Council. It began what became a series of lawsuits against the Bureau for its failure to protect the fish. This year a federal judge ruled that the Bureau had to shut off the water to save the fish. That decision is a death warrant for the farms. The value of an acre of farmland has plummeted from $2500 to $35.

Having turned the farms back into parched wastelands, destroyed the life savings of the farmers, and wrecked the local agriculture-based economy, the enviros dropped the other shoe. They are urging the federal government to buy the farmland at $4000 an acre.

Then what? Gone will be the farms, derided by the enviros as "raising low-value crops". Gone will be the farming towns. Gone will be local tax base to pay for roads and town services. Gone will be the human race, which is precisely what the enviros want.

Their master plan, evidenced by the "wildlands" project sponsored by a number of environmental groups, is to create vast areas of this country with few or no people. In Northern New England, it's the Northern Forest. In the Great Plains, it's called the Buffalo Commons. In the Klamath Basin, it will probably be called the Great Klamath Desert.

This is, in short, rural cleansing, and the advocates of the idea have long been at work in Vermont.

Gov. George Aiken led the movement to defeat a New Deal "resettlement" scheme to depopulate rural Vermont in the 1930s. In 1972 the proposal reappeared in the form of a state land use plan that would have concentrated what little growth would have been allowed in state-defined "development centers". It was defeated after a four year struggle.

In more recent years, the "rural cleansing:" philosophy was evident when the Preservation Trust of Vermont nominated the entire state to be designated an "endangered place". It was evident when the Northern Forest Coalition groups tried (unsuccessfully) to get Congress to give them $2.5 million to lobby in Montpelier for strict land use controls. It was evident in the 1997 legislature's passage of the "heavy cutting" act, which for the first time put the state in charge of timber harvesting on more than 40 acres of privately owned land.

It is evident when the Vermont Land Trust and the Housing and Conservation Board, working hand in glove, go about buying up development rights from hard pressed farmers, and imposing land easements which forever forbid development. It's evident in the Champion land purchase, where the state spent $4.6 million in return for easements that put future use rights not in the hands of the citizens of this state, but only in the enviro-dominated Agency of Natural Resources and the private Vermont Land Trust.

Rural and small town Vermonters should rally to the cause of their Oregon compatriots. It may not be long before they will need the help of the West to fight off more rural cleansing here.

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August 2001