It
didn’t take long before a biologist for the Stae of Oregon spotted what was the
first chinook salmon to enter the river and ascend beyond the former site of
the cofferdam, where the far larger Iron Gate Dam had also once stood, as
it swam toward the place where it would hopefully mate, spawn the next
generation of salmon and, its life’s purpose completed, die. In death, it will pay its debt forward,
enriching the waters where its offspring would live for a brief time before
they head towards the sea.
It was the first salmon to ascend
the Klamath since 1912, when the river was first dammed.
Scientists believe that it will
be years before salmon and steelhead fully repopulate the Klamath watershed. Removing the dams is a first step, but a
watershed is more than just a river; it encompasses the entire basin, from the
uplands that catch winter snows and funnel snowmelt and rain into the waterway
to the vegetated banks that hold back the silt and keep it from suffocating the
pebbled spawning beds or impairing the aquatic invertebrates on which the
juvenile salmon will feed.
The Klamath River basin suffered
significant damage during the century and more when the dams were in place; it
will now be necessary to restore the native plants needed to fully restore the
watershed. That will take an immense
amount of work to complete, but that work has already begun.
Still, the return of the first
salmon was a major milestone. Roberta
Frost, secretary of the Klamath Tribes, observed that
“The return of our relatives the c’iyaal’s
is overwhelming for our tribe. This is
what our members worked for and believed in for so many decades. I want to honor that work and thank them for
their persistence in the face of what felt like an unmovable obstacle. The salmon are just like our tribal people,
and they know where home is and returned as soon as they were able.”
There is reason to hope that the
Klamath River’s salmon will eventually thrive.
The
story of the Elwha River, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, is similar to that
of the Klamath, although of a somewhat smaller scale. After decades of advocacy spearheaded by the
Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and its supporters, Congress passed a bill that
authorized the removal of two hydroelectric dams on the river. The work, completed in 2014, opened up 70
miles of high-quality habitat that had been denied to the salmon for over a
century.
“With the barriers removed, aquatic organisms
regained access to the entire river.
Anadromous fish such as salmon returned to areas that have been void of
such species for a century.
“The free passage has also prompted a
rapid increase in salmon life history diversity. One example is the ‘re-awakening’ of summer
steelhead, which is likely originating from up-river resident O. mykiss [rainbow
trout] populations. Species such as
Pacific lamprey are also increasing following dam removal…”
So dam removal has been demonstrably
beneficial for rivers and their runs of anadromous fish.
While big rivers and Pacific salmon
have been getting most of the publicity, the impacts have also been beneficial
on smaller East Coast streams. One of
the best examples may be the removal of the Edwards
Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River in 1999, which marked the first time that the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission refused to renew the license of a hydroelectric
dam that its owners wished to continue operating.
In New York,
in
Maryland, in
Massachusetts, and elsewhere
along the Atlantic seaboard, the removal of smaller dams has allowed
alewives, blueback herring, eels, and other anadromous species access to freshwater
habitats and spawning grounds that they have long been denied, sometimes for
more than two centuries.
“Removing the four lower Snake River dams
would reconnect endangered salmon and steelhead to 5,000 miles of pristine,
high-elevation habitat—increasing the Columbia River Basin’s resiliency in the
face of a warming climate, and providing salmon and steelhead with a real
chance to recover to healthy and abundant populations.”
“The fact is that salmon and steelhead
returns [to their spawning grounds] in the Snake River Basin over the past 5
years have been among the lowest ever recorded.
In 2022, some salmon and steelhead returning to the Snake River have
shown some signs of improvement—but only when lumping wild and hatchery fish
counts together, and only when compared to terrible recent seasons…
“It is abundantly clear that the lower
four Snake River dams are the primary cause of declines to wild salmon in the
Snake River basin. The Snake River basin
is the largest, most climate resilient area of salmon habitat left in the lower
48 and contains over 40 percent of all coldwater habitat for Pacific salmon in
the entire contiguous United States.
Salmon are resilient creatures, surviving ice ages and a geologically
active landscape. If we give them access
to the most significant habitat left in the lower 48, then salmon can once
again thrive.”
“Actions since 1855, including the Federal
Government’s construction and operation of dams in the Basin, have severely
depleted fish populations,”
and declared a policy
“…to carry out the requirement of the
Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act, (Public Law
96-501) to operate, manage, and regulate the [Columbia River System] to
adequately protect, mitigate, and enhance fish and wildlife affected by the
Federal dams in the Basin in a manner that provides equitable treatment for
fish and wildlife with the other purposes for which the Federal dams are
managed and operated.”
“when combined with other funding that the
Administration is anticipated to deliver to the region, will bring more than $1
billion in new Federal investments to wild fish restoration over the next
decade and enable an unprecedented 10-year break from decades-long litigation
against the Federal government’s operation of its dams in the Pacific
Northwest.”
The agreement was filed in the
Federal District Court for the District of Oregon, and will be implemented
through a memorandum of understanding between the Federal government, the
states of Washington and Oregon, four Native American tribes, and various
environmental organizations. It appeared
to set the stage for the possible removal of the Snake River dams.
However, this November’s election
has changed the political landscape, ushering in a new administration that is
far more friendly to dams and water projects, and far less friendly to salmon
and free-flowing rivers, than the administration currently in power. The election also appears to have handed both
houses of Congress to a party that is generally more hostile to dam removal.
“This final package, which would make our
region’s dams effectively defunct, confirms what we’ve all known for
years. The Biden Administration is
catering to the wishes of extreme environmental activists that do not
understand both the importance of the dams to our region, and the consequences
of their proposed actions.”
Newhouse and other legislators introduced
a package of nine bills that would prohibit removal of the Snake River
dams. At the same time, a representative
of the affected tribes spoke out in favor of the dams’ removal and in support
of the agreement. Shannon F. Wheeler,
Chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe, observed that
“The Federal dams on the lower Snake and
mainstream Columbia rivers have had—and continue to have—devastating impacts on
the salmon and our people, burdening our Treaty partnership. So today, as Six Sovereigns joining together
with the United States to advance salmon restoration throughout the Basin—including
preparation for the breach of the four lower Snake River dams—we are also
witnessing the restoration of Tribal Treaties to their rightful place under the
rule of law.”
Thus, the table is set for
continued conflict.
The bills introduced in the
House, which would prevent the removal of the Snake River dams, were never
passed and signed into law. The Federal
government seems to have entered into a legally binding agreement to protect
the salmon, and if it steps away from that agreement, perhaps by refusing to
remove the dams, it may well be subject to further litigation and perhaps an
adverse court ruling.
At the same time, with Republicans
now controlling the Senate, there is a very good chance that legislation to
prevent the removal of the Snake River dams would pass both houses of Congress should
it be reintroduced, and there is little doubt that it would be signed into
law. After all, in
the previous Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency took the
remarkable position that
“One option for addressing the conflict
created by the inability to achieve applicable water quality criteria at all
times and in all places is for the States to make changes to their applicable
designated uses. The federal regulation…provides
requirements for establishing, modifying and removing designated uses. A state may designate a use or remove a use
that is not an existing use, if the state conducts a ‘use attainability
analysis’ that demonstrates that attaining the use is not feasible…”
What Trump’s EPA was effectively
suggesting was that if dams rendered rivers such as the Snake unable to support
salmon spawns, the answer was not to remove the dams, but simply to remove “salmon
spawning” from the list of designated uses of the river.
While that might lead to the
salmon’s disappearance from the river, it would make it far easier to leave the
dams in place.
We could expect the same sort of
logic from the incoming administration, given
a president who once spoke of rivers’ waters being
“diverted into the Pacific
Ocean, [emphasis added]”
as if rivers didn’t naturally flow
to the sea, and who
last appointed a Secretary of the Interior who favored diverting waters away
from their natural course, even though their flows were critical to the
survival of Pacific salmon runs and endangered fish species, for the benefit of
the agricultural industry.
“You have millions of gallons of water pouring
down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and
they have essentially a very large faucet.
You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive,
it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. You turn that, and all of that water
aimlessly goes into the Pacific, and if they turned it back, all of that water
would come down here and right into Los Angeles.”
It’s not completely clear what Trump
was talking about, as there is no river
system that can be simply diverted either to Los Angeles or into the Pacific
Ocean—the badly overtaxed Colorado River probably comes closest to his
description, although its usually dry delta opens not on the Pacific, but
on the Gulf of California—but it is pretty clear that someone with his unique understanding
of rivers is probably not going to do much to protect anadromous fish from the
impacts of dams.
And that’s unfortunate, because
the effort to remove dams for the benefit of anadromous fish has gained real
momentum in recent years. Many fish
stocks, on both coasts, have benefitted from dam removals, and it will be sad
to see removal efforts are abandoned.
However, given the current political
environment, it is likely that the last, best chance to save declining runs of
Pacific salmon, as well as other diadromous species, may well expire in just
two more months.
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