Rep. Walden (R-OR) has introduced a bill concerning Oregon's Klamath River Basin, but you should not confuse it with the Klamath Basin Water Recovery and Economic Restoration Act of 2015, introduced by Sen. Wyden (D-OR). The Klamath Basin contains both the Klamath National Forest and the Fremont-Winema National Forest, and though the Basin has been the subject of disputes among farmers, Native Americans, conservationists, and local officials, they've all come together to negotiate three agreements governing use of the area. Sen. Wyden's bill would codify all three of these agreements in federal law, but Rep. Walden's bill would codify only two of them, excepting the agreement mandating the removal of four local dams -- and the Walden bill would also push those national forests onto two Oregon counties, which very likely won't be able to afford their maintenance and thus will likely sell them off to loggers. And if you liked that bit of corporate welfare, Rep. Walden's bill has another one -- it specifically exempts the corporation that owns the dams from any liability if the dams' removal winds up harming the environment. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Walden bill.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to prohibit the use of oil wastewater to irrigate organic crops, then the League of Conservation Voters still helps you do that. We all know that California, which supplies a great deal of America's fruits and vegetables, is suffering from a terrible drought, which has prompted California agricultural concerns to irrigate their crops with something, but you buy organic fruits and vegetables to get away from wastewater irrigation, not to tolerate it because conditions aren't what we'd like them to be. And if federal standards mandate that organic food can't have any oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, then they damn sure should mandate that organic food can't be awash in oil wastewater, either. A lot of good folks are going to look the other way about this, if they can be convinced that organic farms will die out if they can't get a get-out-of-jail-free card on this matter, at least until the drought lessens. But again: I don't do hostage situations. And we should patronize small, local organic farmers, who can survive droughts better than big ag corporations can. Big corporations deal in volume, after all, and thus get hurt by big events like droughts worse than the small farmers who don't deal in volume.
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