Introduction Unlike most basins, the headwaters of the Klamath River are in the flat desert of the Great Basin in eastern Oregon, and travel through the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Coast Mountain Range before finally draining into the Pacific Ocean in Northern California. The indigenous peoples who have lived along the Klamath River and its tributaries had livelihoods adapted to the basins varied climates and biophysical attributes. The Klamath Tribe still inhabits the region off the shores of Klamath Lake, the headwaters the Klamath River. The Klamath Tribe is now a composite of three tribes, the Yahooskin, Modoc, and Klamath Tribes with a governing office in Chiloquin, Oregon. Historically, the tribes relied on two fish species,…
Basin Geography The Klamath River Basin is located in the Eastern parts of Northern California and Southern Oregon. The upper portion of the basin lies partially in the arid Great Basin region of South Eastern Oregon and partly in the eastern Cascades. The Klamath Basin Wildlife Refuge complex and much of the farmlands are located in the Upper Basin. The climate in the Upper Klamath Basin varies with changes in elevation, but it is typically dry with precipitation falling in the winter season…
The Klamath River Basin has been fraught environmental resource management issues that have been both highly politicized and publicized in the American West. The problems of water allocation in this region have been the result of conflicting interests between fishermen, tribes, wildlife, and farmers, which rely on scarce water resources for their livelihoods. Doremus and Tarlock(2008) refer to the Klamath Basin as a “problemshed” because its social and ecological problems pervade all of its…
Floods in Klamath County Subject to three major types of flooding, Klamath County is moderately susceptible to this hazard. One such type of flooding, riverine flooding, occurs when a body of water exceeds its capacity and it overflows its banks. Communities in close proximity to natural waterways, such as Beatty, Chiloquin, and Sprague River, are most susceptible to this type of flooding. A specific type of river flooding, shallow area flooding, can also occur in Klamath County. This type of…
Perspectives on wetlands in particular have been instrumental in shaping Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge and debates over wetland policy illustrate the difficulties when attempting to quantify or monetize ecosystems (Robertson and Wainwright 2013). The political debate about how we value systems that provide ecosystem services to humans and animals, but provide some other quality to life that is particularly difficult to quantify, a and are rooted in…
in certain contexts, devolved government processes, such as collaborative or community management, allow powerful capital interests to co-opt democratic processes for further accumulation while circumventing traditional regulatory enforcement (Purcell 2009). These devolved collaborative approaches have been applied in a number of contexts and have been prevalent in the Western United States because of the large proportion of publicly managed lands and resources. In the Klamath River Basin,…
Understanding how sense of place if the Klamath Basin has become a unifying force during the collaborative process is important to understand the functions of culture in collaboration. Because it is in place that politics and the motivations for political behaviors are born, such as the Wise Use Movement or Indigenous Rights Movements (Agnew 1987 p.49). Place-based struggles over environmental resources often serve as particular sites of negotiation where competing representations of place and…
The Klamath National Forest covers roughly 1,700,000 acres between California and Oregon. Besides the usual recreational activities open to the public, the Forest "also helps to meet local and national needs for timber, gold, and other natural resources, explains the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service (FS). http://www.fs.usda.gov/main/klamath/about-forest What the federal agency fails to mention is that sometimes these "needs" for natural resources trump sound science and…
TBA: Klamath Project Draft C Flume Repayment Contract (OR/CA): Reclamation anticipates that the Klamath Irrigation District (KID) will sign a $7.45M loan repayment contract. The public comment period closed May 31, and the KID board of directors have indicated they will sign the contract shortly thereafter. Mid-Pacific Regional Director David Murillo will then sign the contract for Reclamation. KID has received bids for the construction work and has selected a preferred contractor. Site work is…
The purpose of this proposal is to receive approval to continue research for my technical report that urges the nurses of Klamath Falls to refer patients to alternative medicine. This proposal will include an introduction, a statement of problem, and a proposed solution. This document will also an included the scope of my topic, the methods I will use to complete my report, and the schedule I will use to complete my report in a time efficient manner Introduction In this day of age when a person…