The prevailing utilitarian view held that wetlands were wastelands to be turned into productive farmlands. We know better today. Those wetlands were the beginnings of the food chain that made the Klamath River coho salmon runs the third largest on the Pacific Coast. The Klamath Basin wetlands were the nursery of a coastal fishing economy that stretched from Newport, Coos Bay, Bandon, Gold Beach, Port Orford and Brookings down to Eureka and Mendocino. It is all gone.
Commercial fishing is a dead or dying industry on the coast.
For decades, communities on the coast felt the economic pain and social dislocation now being felt in Klamath Falls as their salmon fishing industry collapsed because the unintentional effects of farming systematically destroyed the ecosystem of the Klamath Basin, where the salmon runs began. There are no longer enough wetlands to filter out the polluting nutrients produced by agricultural runoff. The quality of the water in the basin is as serious a problem as the quantity of water available. It was easy to exploit the basin's wetlands. The Klamath River flows south, crosses the Oregon state line and empties into the Pacific Ocean in California.