THE KLAMATH BASIN is one of the most iconic watersheds in North America. It’s also one of the most troubled. The basin, which spans 15,751 square miles along the remote California-Oregon border, was once considered the “Everglades of the West” for its network of more than 440,000 acres of wetlands. The sky blackened each fall with millions of ducks migrating down the Pacific Flyway. And the Klamath River supported some of the largest runs of salmon and steelhead in the world, which sustained Indigenous tribes for generations.
With the Klamath Project, which was approved in 1905, the federal government drained much of the area’s wetlands to make way for agriculture and, soon after, began damming the river for hydroelectric purposes, blocking salmon and steelhead from hundreds of miles of spawning habitat. Still, for years, a tentative balance was struck. Farms received just enough water to grow crops, the Klamath Basin wildlife refuges got just enough water to remain a duck-hunting destination, and the river had just enough water to sustain healthy populations of steelhead and salmon.
In recent years, that’s changed. Overallotment—too many users, not enough water—has created extreme division among local communities. A decades-long megadrought will leave the country’s first National Wildlife Refuge established for migratory waterfowl completely dry by the end of summer. The effects of the dams on the river’s water quality have been compounded by climate change to devastate wild anadromous fish stocks—and the communities that depend on them. As a watershed, the Klamath Basin has reached its breaking point.
Yet this ecological crisis also has the potential to become one of America’s greatest conservation success stories. Local conservation leaders have worked relentlessly to broker agreements among different stakeholders, greenlight the removal of four dams in the largest river restoration project in history, and find creative ways to preserve