Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

The Klamath river—the second longest river in California, stretching 257 miles from South Crescent City to Oregon—has been an object of environmentalist and humanitarian concern since the 1970s. And it was long before the acknowledgement of the Klamath’s worsening state that climate change, along with anthropogenic factors such as dam implementation, agricultural runoff, commodified farming, and racist governmental policy, had begun to irreversibly damage the once flowing water supply and diverse flora and fauna that used to characterize the Klamath area. These long-standing issues have culminated in mass environmental degradation in the Klamath basin—drought, poisonous algae blooms, mass fish kills, pollution—that threaten the Klamath ecosystem at large. Indigenous tribes like the Yurok people, who have lived in the Klamath area for decades, have been disproportionately negatively affected by the environmental degradation of the Klamath.