MEMOIRS OF A WATER WAR CORRESPONDENT

Staking out canal headgates, weighing 40-pound fish called suckers and baling hay with farmers may not be the typical stuff of journalism, but all were required of reporters covering the water battles that gripped the Klamath Basin during the dry summer of 2001. It was part science, politics, economics, environment, race relations, cops and history, and it demanded knowledge of all of the above. It required walking a line with angry and embittered farmers on one side and long-ignored tribes, reticent biologists and savvy environmentalists on the other. Journalism did not do a perfect job relaying the complex picture of science and human history in the Klamath Basin, but it began to reveal the agricultural region on the California-Oregon line as a rich, diverse, complicated and troubled place that may offer hints of future resource battles throughout the West.