Until I began covering the Klamath River basin as a journalist in 2007, I took for granted that the Endangered Species Act was, as many environmentalists believed, the bedrock^⁠ of American environmental law. For most of this century, the Klamath, which traverses the California-Oregon border, has been considered the nation’s most embattled watershed, and as I learned more about it, I realized that for all of the Act’s good intentions, its deficiencies were as consequential for the basin as its strengths. In this way, as in many others, what happened in the Klamath represents a microcosm of the country.

The Klamath exploded into conflict in 2001, when farmers infuriated by a suspension of water deliveries to their fields carried out four months of civil-disobedient protests— all precipitated by two decisions dictated by the Endangered Species Act. In 1988, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that two fish species, Lost River and shortnose suckers, both central to the culture and diet of the upper basin’s Klamath Tribes, were endangered. And in 1997, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that the Klamath River’s coho salmon, along with other salmon the foundation of lower basin tribes’ culture and diet, were threatened.

The first decision required that Upper Klamath Lake, the basin’s largest lake and the suckers’ primary habitat, would have to be maintained at close to a full water level to help the suckers. The second decision meant that in drought years— which have been plentiful this century— sufficient water releases from the lake into the Klamath River would be required to help the salmon. As the Act prescribed, the decisions focused only on specific species, not the hydrological ecosystem that suckers and salmon share. Yet the two directives mandated an impossibility: they meant that in drought years more water was supposed to be devoted to fish than the river system generated. Though the so-called “Project” farmers of the upper basin had relied on water allocations from Upper Klamath Lake beginning early in the 20th century, the decisions meant that in drought years they’d receive scant allocations or none at all— no wonder they protested. And there would be little or no water for the two national wildlife refuges that support what had once been the greatest feeding and breeding ground for migratory waterfowl on the Pacific Coast. Because the Endangered Species Act did not consider how ecosystems work, it seemed to require that saving some species meant harming others.

It is now obvious that this approach greatly limits the Act’s effectiveness. Further, disputes over its enforcement in the Klamath have engendered dozens of lawsuits involving farmers vs. tribes, tribes vs. tribes, and farmers and tribes vs. the federal government, yet none of them have halted the continuing decline of the two sucker species, now on the verge of extinction, nor have they provided farmers with a reliable, if circumscribed, source of water. All this has shown the profound limitations of legislation and litigation in solving complicated natural resource disputes. Far preferable are solutions arrived at by local constituents who know conditions on the ground far better than legislators and judges. If motivated, they can find more effective solutions based on cooperation and collaboration.

Last year some Klamath farmers and tribal members launched working groups to do precisely that. Inspired by the completion in the Klamath River of the world’s largest dam removal project and the ensuing migration for the first time in a century of thousands of salmon upstream from the former dam sites, they began working together to devise ways to solve the river system’s still-grievous fish habitat and water quality problems. Success would be beneficial for both farmers and tribes: the projects that the working groups are planning would generate more water for farmers and better conditions for fish.

But the spirit of cooperation has been largely stymied by the Trump administration. Instead of supporting actions that benefit all stakeholders, it has picked favorites: it cancelled or froze funding for fish restoration projects, while continuing to provide money for projects that benefit farmers. Even more ominously, Interior Department documents issued at the tail-end of the first Trump administration in January 2020 show that in drought years the federal government intends to embrace a specious legal argument that claims justification for overriding the Endangered Species Act entirely. This will mean that upper Klamath farmers, who are mostly Trump supporters, will get as much water as possible, while prescribed allocations for salmon will be ignored.

Sadly, the Klamath is delivering up one more lesson about the limitations of the Act, and for that matter, all other legislation: no law is secure if those in charge of enforcing it lack integrity.

Jacques Leslie is the author of "Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment", winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for its “elegant, beautiful prose.” He is a Los Angeles Times contributing opinion writer.