High Country News, like everyone
else who covers the West’s environmental issues, loves “unlikely
alliances.” We’re delighted whenever chardonnay-sipping Sierra
Clubbers from Mill Valley fight on the same side of a cause as
Budweiser-swilling elk hunters in Idaho. We love writing about what
happens when surly miners join forces with grassroots greens,
partly because these are some of our rare “good news” stories, but
also because we think they surprise our readers. Witness the spate
of stories in recent years about the “surprising” partnership of
the greens and the hook-and-bullet crowd in fighting gas and oil
drilling in wild places.
Hunters and ranchers
want to save forests and deserts, too? Wow! That’s almost as crazy
as enviros drinking Coors!
But is anyone
really shocked by it nowadays? As much as I love
these stories, they’re hardly new. In fact, I can’t think of one
successful conservation effort that did not
include so-called unlikely partnerships. Consider Teddy Roosevelt,
who was a predator hunter and national park establisher, all
wrapped into one.
I’ve seen miners take a leading role in
river cleanup efforts. A quarter of a century ago, a citizens’
coalition pushed for the formation of the 400,000-acre Weminuche
Wilderness in southwestern Colorado. That coalition was hardly
monolithic: There were Democrats and Republicans, conservationists,
hunters, outfitters, anglers, miners and quite a few farmers and
ranchers. Fact is, most “unlikely alliances” aren’t unlikely at
all.
In this issue’s cover story, however, Matt Jenkins
spins a fascinating tale about what is, in some ways, a genuinely
surprising alliance: Indian tribes on the Klamath River are working
with the region’s farmers on a groundbreaking agreement. It’s
startling because those tribes and those farmers have been fighting
bitterly with each other for years.
At the same time,
maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, the tribes and the
farmers have one fundamental thing in common: They rely on the
river for their food and their livelihoods. While those needs have
competed with one another in the past, they are also what kept
these guys at the bargaining table until an agreement came
together.
It wasn’t easy. Before the farmers and tribes
could hold hands, they both had to endure a lot of pain — massive
fish kills, dried-up fields and the tedium of the negotiations
themselves.
Perhaps that’s the lesson here: Unlikely
alliances don’t happen by magic, they take work. Sometimes the
situation needs to become so dire that the two sides have no other
choice but to get along. Then they can find a bit of common ground,
and their reverence for and reliance upon the land will finally win
out over age-old animosities. And then they will discover that
their alliance was never that unlikely after all.
Jenkins’ is hardly the
first or last word High Country News has or will publish about the
Klamath. To see our previous coverage, please check out our free
archives on www.hcn.org. And while you’re there, look at the Online
News section and the Goat Blog for all kinds of Web-exclusive
content.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Unlikely alliance?.
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