Agreement another step that doesn’t make sense

 

Herald and News Letter to the Editor April 1, 2010

 

 Genesis 1:26

 

   “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air.” 

    Our government is no longer “of the people, by the people and for the people” when it voted for the Endangered Species Act and placed the spotted owl and the sucker fish as endangered. The listing of the spotted owl caused hundreds of lumber mills to go out of business and thousands of good-paying jobs were lost.

    Because of the sucker fish, hundreds of farmers were without water to grow your food and many of them lost their farms and ranches.

    Now the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement: $1 billion to implement.

    The stakeholders in the agreement want to remove one dam in Klamath County and three in California, which produce clean electricity to thousands of homes and charge Oregonians on their electric bill to pay to remove the dams in California. Then they plan to give away a 94,000-acre forest.

    Our state senator Doug Whitsett and our representative Bill Garrard, who live here, and state Rep. George Gilman know the people and their needs. They are very much against the agreement.

     The Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River was removed and sediment clogged the irrigation system and had to be dredged. Very expensive.

    Before the agreement was signed, the Bureau of Reclamation awarded a $840,000 to Triangle Institute in North Carolina to do the study. Our unemployment is one of the highest in the nation — yet the Bureau went out of state.

    The only way to solve the water problem in Upper Klamath Lake is to dredge in sections for storage and clean water.

    Water is the world’s most treasured resource.

    Water covers 70 percent of the world’s surface. Forty percent of water in the United States is used for agriculture. Not birds or fish.

    Harvey Houston

    Klamath Falls