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| March 12, 2010 |
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by Bruce Babbitt Creating a balance between the needs of the river and those who use it
In some places the case for removing a dam is so easy to make that one wonders why it took so long. Last December I took a sledgehammer to the Quaker Neck Dam on the Neuse River in North Carolina. As dams go, Quaker Neck isn't much; it's only six feet high and it doesn't generate power. But to the American shad trying to spawn upstream, that six feet might as well be six hundred, blocking off 900 miles of upstream spawning waters. Now biologists and engineers have figured out an alternative water diversion method and the dam has come down. And, just a year later, the shad are spawning seventy miles upstream all the way to the city of Raleigh. Onward to the Kennebec river in Maine. In June I joined Governor King and local officials in Augusta to announce an agreement for the removal of Edwards Dam. Standing on the river bank we could see the dam up to our left, a stone and timber crib structure built clear back in l837 at the start of the Industrial Revolution. On the bank above the dam, we could see the brick skeleton of the long abandoned textile mill. In the river below the striped bass were swimming haplessly in circles searching for a way through the dam. An osprey circled overhead then plunged into the waters to scoop up a stranded fish. The textile mills were eventually abandoned, but the Edwards Dam refused to die. It was converted to produce the electricity that powered the first electric lights in Augusta. But by l997 the dam was producing less than one half of one percent of the power used in the city. Residents began asking the inevitable question. Is that trickle of electric power worth destruction of the legendary runs of Atlantic salmon, stripers and six other species of migratory fish? And now, after 157 years, Edwards Dam is coming down. Each stop on these dam busting tours stirs enormous local, regional and national attention. And I always wonder, what is it about the sound of a sledgehammer on concrete that evokes such a reaction? We routinely demolish buildings that have served their purpose or when there is a better use for the land. Why not dams? For whatever reason, we view dams as akin to the pyramids of Egypt - a permanent part of the landscape, timeless monuments to our civilization and technology. Those 75,000 dams are the cumulative result of two centuries of innovation and progress, accompanied by indifference to the natural world of river ecology. What started out as reasonable and desirable went on and on beyond all logic, overstating benefits, ignoring the damage to fisheries and river systems, and understating the financial costs. At the extreme, dams were built with government subsidies simply to add glamour to real estate developments. It even happened in Yosemite where park officials added a dam at Mirror Lake to raise the water level, thereby "enhancing" the reflection of Half Dome for visitors. In this century, dam building was transformed from local project into national enterprise. Edison and Steinmetz started it with electric lights and long distance transmission. Water power transformed into electricity could be sent instantaneously to every community in the country. Hydro dams became cash registers overflowing with money to finance ever larger projects. It remained only for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the WPA to build dams on the scale of the pharaohs - first came Bonneville Dam and Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia, then the Tennessee Valley Authority, then Shasta Dam on the Sacramento. Dam building became an unstoppable, runaway political juggernaut of spending, job creation and local pride. As the juggernaut rolled on we paid a steadily accumulating price for these projects in the form of fish runs destroyed, downstream rivers altered by changes in temperature, wedges of sediment piling up behind structures, downstream erosion and delta wetlands degraded by lack of fresh water and saltwater intrusion. The great salmon runs of the Columbia River and the Snake drifted toward extinction. The Colorado River ran dry, its great delta, celebrated in the writings of Aldo Leopold, reduced to barren salt flats. The Platte River, once "a mile wide and an inch deep," shriveled, threatening the existence of the vast migratory flocks of sandhill cranes. For decades dam building remained unstoppable. Even John Muir at the height of his powers was unable to stop the City of San Francisco from invading Yosemite National Park to construct the Hetch Hetchy Dam. Then in 1956 the dam builders selected a site within the National Park System, Dinosaur National Monument on the Colorado River. This time the opponents mounted a national campaign and won. But their victory came at a heavy price - as a tradeoff the dam was relocated outside the park, on a little known stretch of the Colorado River called Glen Canyon. In 1963, as the dam gates closed and the river backed up and inundated hundreds of miles of river and canyon, we came to understand that the issue involved more than just keeping dams out of national parks and lamenting the loss of nice scenery. At stake was the integrity and life of the river system itself. I began to reflect on these issues over the course of many days and nights spent in the Grand Canyon over the last half century. I hiked and boated and camped beside the Colorado River before Glen Canyon was built in the 1960s. In those years the Colorado river was a wild, unpredictable, red-brown, sediment-laden torrent, "too thick to drink, too thin to plow," flooding in the spring, languishing in the summer, always reflecting the seasonal weather across its vast Rocky Mountain watershed. When the gates of Glen Canyon Dam, a few miles upstream from Grand Canyon, closed in l963, we started to notice the downstream changes. The warm silt laden waters turned jello green and cold. In the depths of the Grand Canyon the waters rose and fell on a daily cycle, in response to the heating and air conditioning demands in Phoenix and Los Angeles. Over time, as I floated down the river, I saw trees high on the talus slope wither and die for lack of water from seasonal flooding. I saw sandbars, once covered with arrowweed, willow and cottonwood, disappear as the silt free waters scoured the banks down to granite boulders. I saw the once plentiful native fish - unlike those anywhere on earth - driven back into a few isolated tributaries, threatened with extinction. Remorseful river runners and canyon lovers, inspired by the writing of Edward Abbey, began to talk of a campaign to remove the dam and empty Lake Powell. Barry Goldwater ruefully acknowledged that his support for the dam was the one vote of his career that he most regretted. The elegiac photographs of Eliot Porter in The Place No One Knew inspired people in different parts of the country to look at their own rivers with new vision. Gradually the tide of national opinion turned and projects began to come under question. The two dams proposed in Grand Canyon were killed by the Congress. In California Governor Reagan halted a project on the Eel River and the legislature followed with protections for the remaining wild rivers in northern California. Thus it was that the Glen Canyon experience awakened long dormant dreams of river restoration and dam removal. In 1992 Congress took a tentative step in the direction of dam removal by authorizing the National Park Service to examine the feasibility of removing two dams on the Elwha River on the border of Olympic National Park in Washington. The two dams, Elwha and Glines Canyon, present a textbook case for dam removal. The Elwha River rises in the snowfields of the Olympic Mountains, thunders down a narrow canyon toward the Pacific and then slows to a dead halt against the concrete barrier of Glines Canyon Dam. A few miles below Glines Canyon, the river gathers force once again only to come against the second barrier, Elwha Dam. The structures at Elwha and Glines Canyon were erected early in the century to provide power for a then-isolated community on the Olympic Peninsula. Today, however, that community, Port Angeles, has access to the regional power grid in a region where there is a huge surplus of power hanging over the market. Meanwhile the two dams have eliminated one of the great chinook salmon runs of the Northwest. A few of this salmon stock linger on in hatcheries awaiting either restoration or probable extinction. Also awaiting dam removal are over seventy miles of streams radiating downward from the heart of Olympic National Park. In 1996 the Park Service completed an environmental impact study demonstrating the feasibility of taking the dams down. In 1997 I signed a formal decision recommending removal. Having requested us to study and make a recommendation, the Congress is now equivocating, refusing to appropriate the full sum necessary to carry out dam removal. But with strong support from Washington residents and Governor Locke, and partial funding extracted from this Congress under threat of Presidential veto, it now seems only a matter of time until the dams come down and the salmon once again make their way upstream in to the living heart of Olympic National Park. The next big test for river restoration is approaching on the lower Snake River and its four salmon killing dams. And it will be an epic debate, rivaling the great controversies of past years over Hetch Hetchy and Dinosaur National Monument. This time it will not be about protecting scenery within a National Park. It will be about restoring a river ecosystem and its salmon runs. That fact alone demonstrates how we as a nation have come to comprehend that our stewardship obligation extends beyond park borders to encompass entire watersheds and landscapes. The Columbia-Snake is one of the most industrialized river systems in America. The largest of its dams, Grand Coulee, cuts off more than a thousand miles of salmon streams in Washington and British Columbia. Bonneville Dam, dedicated by President Roosevelt in 1937, initiated the damming of the lower river. After that the dams marched relentlessly up river - the Dalles, John Day, McNary, Priest Rapids. Through all this dam building the salmon managed to hang on, continuing their annual migration rites up the Columbia, then into the Snake and on into the Salmon River system of Idaho. Fish ladders helped some. Hatcheries were built by the dozen to boost production of declining stocks and offset fish ground up in turbines and eaten by predators in the long stretches of slack water. Then the scales tipped toward extinction in the 1960s with congressional authorization to build four more dams -- Ice Harbor, Lower Monument, Little Goose, and Lower Granite -- on the Snake River upstream from its confluence with the Columbia. The four dams together were projected to add only a small increment of additional power to the northwest grid, and by then the rationale for adding still more power was wearing thin. Enter a bold new justification - an inland seaport for Idaho. Idaho would have a seaport from which to barge Montana wheat down to the Pacific. Never mind that the Burlington Northern and Union Pacific were already shipping grain by rail on tracks that parallel the river. By 1975 the four Snake River dams were complete, and barges were on the river from Lewiston, Idaho to the Pacific. The salmon runs plummeted. In 1988 just one sockeye salmon managed to find its way back to Redfish Lake in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. The following year it was six. Almost none have been seen since. The over-the-edge effect of these four dams can also be seen in eastern Oregon where the John Day River, a tributary of the Columbia, still has viable salmon runs, while to the east the Grand Ronde, a tributary of the Snake, is virtually devoid of fish. A key difference is that the Grand Ronde enters the Snake above the four dams. One approach to the collapse of salmon runs is to manipulate natural systems even more intensively. Take the fish out of the river and put them in trucks - even as we take the grain out of trucks and put it in the river. Shoot the sea lions that congregate at Ballard Lock to feed on salmon and steelhead. Get rid of the flocks of birds on Rice Island that prey on salmon smolts. Offer bounties for fishermen to catch more of the squawfish that prey on smolts in the lakes behind the dams. More hatcheries. This tinkering in the name of "mitigation" has now gone on for over two decades with little sign of success. It may not be possible to have all the dams and viable salmon runs in the upstream river stretches. There are economic considerations on both sides. Barge transportation does provide a marginal saving over rail transportation. Even small amounts of hydropower do have value as do the disappearing salmon fisheries. But there are also values beyond calculations with pencil and green eyeshade. In 1856, Isaac Stephens, the Governor of Washington territory, set out to make treaties with northwest Indian tribes. The Columbia River tribes ceded land and agreed to reservation boundaries on one condition - that they would be entitled for all time to use customary fishing sites and to share equally in the salmon harvest. Yet without fish there can be no harvest, and the tribes are demanding that the United States, in exercise of its trust responsibilities, take steps to protect and restore the salmon runs. The salmon runs of the Northwest, for both Indians and non-Indians, are an emblem of hope, an object of reverence. Like the sound of migrating geese in autumn or the scent of a campfire, wild, native salmon are a part of us, a link to an older, mysterious world. They are swimming, spawning, biological coordinates that give us a sense of where and who we are. Lose that and you lose something basic, something that all the museums and mitigation projects in the world can never repair. The national debate over the Snake River dams is under way. All parties, including the states and the Indian tribes, are turning to the scientists for an objective look at the alternatives. And the fisheries biologists are moving toward a consensus assessment - marginal mitigation projects are not enough. We probably cannot have salmon runs up into the Rocky Mountains and maintain four dams on the lower Snake River. We have reached the point where the arteries are so clogged that surgery to reduce the blockage may be the only hope, and it will finally be up to the people of the Northwest, their Governors and other elected representatives to decide. Several months ago I participated in a dam busting event in California, the removal of McPherrin Dam on Butte Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River. A farmer who had helped construct the dam in the 1950s told me he was sorry to see the dam go, but that the new substitute water delivery system would probably work, although he wasn't entirely convinced. And then he got to the point. "Are you going to try to take down all the dams?" I told him not to worry, that we had so far taken down only about a dozen structures, all with community support, and that, by my reckoning, meant that we had 74,988 more to go. Those dams are still blocking 600,000 miles of what was once free flowing rivers. That's about seventeen percent of all river mileage in the nation.
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