On Freeing the Snake River of Four Dams
I am crawling off the riverbank to share some long-seeped ruminations about the Columbia River alongside some prints, mostly made in 2019. It takes a long time to know a home well, to link words for it together, to extend compassion up and down river. As Gary Snyder put it in Practice of the Wild, one lesson we get from wild places is to “take ourselves as no more and no less than another being in the Big Watershed… The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home.” Here is this still-being-shaped story, part artist statement and part essay.
The Columbia River Basin was once the most astounding salmon and steelhead watershed in the world. Before the 1840s, this river ran silver with 16 million spawning fish every year. Now, just 400,000 wild fish find their way home in the entire basin - that’s most of Idaho, Oregon and Washington, as well as parts of Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and British Columbia.
Treaties that guarantee a healthy and harvestable salmon population to the Columbia River tribes go back to 1855, when lands were ceded to non-native hands. We have not been good stewards. Our promises to retain tribal members rights to fish at “all usual and accustomed fishing places…in common with citizens” have been shattered. Instead of fish, we are all left wondering how we got to this dying river replete with dams, development, and ESA listings. So much is broken here. We are experiencing the extinction of the most iconic and important animal in the Pacific Northwest.
This is the story that salmon tell me, a lifelong resident of the Columbia River Basin, also a white settler, also a commercial salmon fisherwoman, and a lover of these lands, rivers, and people. I am awed by salmon. In high icy creeks that feed the Methow River, I’ve found spawned-out salmon rotting into the riverbanks. Amidst the islands of Southeast Alaska, I’ve watched momentous runs from sustainably managed populations fill boats and bears and seals and eagles. Every salmon I’ve worked to catch in Alaska could have been a Columbia River salmon, if we hadn’t dammed this stunning watershed to endangerment. A frenzy of dams built in the 1940s and 50s to provide electricity enabled the development of the Columbia. Now, some of these dams are killing us.
For decades, fish have faced long stretches of stagnant reservoirs, increased exposure to predators, toxic pollution and heat exhaustion. Following the instinct to return home, these fish have time after time rammed their sea-silvered noses into concrete barriers, some of which have no constructed fish passage. Turbines have cut these fish off from returning to their headwaters. They are stopped before they can nourish a web of 130 species. They are stopped, so we pour millions into hatcheries for fish that will never swim as they swim. They are stopped, so we forget traditions and cultural practices.
The extinction of salmon is a central plight in the Pacific Northwest. We have alternatives.
The four dams on the Snake River tributary of the Columbia are under review for removal this year (although the fight to take them out is 40 years old). These impoundments (Ice harbor, lower monumental, little goose and lower granite) stand in the way of the best remaining wild salmon habitat in the Columbia basin. Looking just a couple of years into the warm and murky future, these dams stand in the way of salmon survival.
Studies and plans are underway. We can engineer solutions for power production, grain transportation and irrigation that will replace the services of the four Snake River Dams. But salmon cannot wait another decade. This has to happen now. Our leaders (WA Sen. Maria Cantwell, WA Gov. Jay Inslee, Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson and others) are carrying this cause in the national arena. What we must do is back them, build pressure to enact the removal plan before the end of 2022, and care for our special corners of this watershed.
We cannot accept the extinction of wild salmon
We cannot take our eyes off the river
Remember what used to be here
Remember what was promised
And enact what is still possible.
Learn More…
The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Coalition, representing the voices and sovereign powers of the Umatilla Tribes, Nez Perce Tribes, Yakama Nation and Warm Springs Tribes, manage fisheries and preserve treaty rights. They also have a great Fisheries Timeline.
Save Our Wild Salmon has been a leading advocate for a free-flowing lower Snake River since 1998.
Idaho River United rallies paddlers and conservationists around Snake River fish.