Remove the Dams to Save the Salmon? | Short Film Showcase
[Music] [Music] If you think about the way a river works in a landscape, it essentially functions as the circulatory system. It drains the waste products off of the land, and that sediment is the stuff that basically structures habitat in rivers. Then, once it gets to the coast, it builds beaches; it creates the offshore environments. That flow of material is incredibly important ecologically, and building dams disrupts that.
But there's another aspect to rivers in terms of flow back upstream that most people don't tend to think about. In the Northwest, that's greatly mediated by salmon. Because when salmon leave their native streams as little fish, when they come back a couple of years later, they're huge. They put on like 90% to 95% of their body mass in the marine environment.
What that essentially means is that a large fish run, the kind of fish runs we had historically in the Northwest, can be viewed as a nitrogen pump. That's basically scavenging food out of the oceans and bringing it back on land, feeding the bugs, the trees, and the forest. They feed the eagles, they feed the bears, essentially fertilizing their own world. [Music]
Anything that blocks a river, like a dam, does limit their access to a part of the world that they need to complete their life cycle. [Music] The four dams in the Snake River in the upper reaches of the Columbia Basin are a clear overshoot. They are, in my judgment, largely responsible for the destruction of the salmon runs that we used to see all the way up into the Rocky Mountains in Idaho.
The Snake River Basin holds today the largest intact remaining set of pristine salmon habitat left in the lower 48. We're talking over 5,000 miles of stream habitat in Central Idaho alone. If we took out the four lower Snake River dams, salmon and steelhead would have access back into all those areas. There should not be four dams on the lower Snake River, choking out the most important wild salmon refuge left—5,500 miles of high elevation streams, more resistance to global warming than any other watershed.
If the salmon runs were restored, that would be the jumping-off point to this unbelievable wilderness nexus that is really one of the most beautiful places in the [Music] world. Dams change the habitat. When you disturb the habitat, it can be detrimental to the native fishes and beneficial to non-native fishes. The river is no longer a river; it's a lake, and the lakes are full of predators that like nothing better than to eat a nice young salmon. [Music]
Smoke, the Pacific Northwest right now, according to The Oregonian newspaper, spends a billion dollars a year on salmon recovery, and they're not getting very much for [Music] it. There are study after study now that are showing that hatcheries present on the river reduce the survival of the wild fish. The primary purpose for these dams always was transportation. It was to make Lewiston, Idaho a seaport.
The only reason it's just slightly cheaper to send wheat down the river rather than putting it on the railroad, which runs right along the river, is because of the subsidies given the fiscal condition in this country. The budget issues—now's the time simply to remove that subsidy and you'll find the wheat growers doing very well on the railroad. But a dam is a means to an end, and we've got it the other way around now.
We look at them as instates—they're built, they're there, they're going to stay there forever, and their intent was to increase the economic output of a region in the country. So when they stop doing that, they're no longer viable. A lot of the work that we've done on the economics and cost shows that if you keep the dams, the national economy is losing at least $1,150 million a year. These four dams are really expensive to operate.
The minute they diverge from that end state that you're after, you ought to look at them. It's just—it's wait. We need another tool here. Is it wind energy? Is it solar panels? Let's look at this as a means, not an end. [Music] The beautiful thing about salmon is that if you look at their history, they're incredibly resilient. If you give them half a chance, they can come back.
When you remove the dam and the river becomes a river again, the complexity begins to reappear. There's a ripple effect of restoration that moves all the way through the river basins, all the way upstream. [Music] [Music] [Applause] Removing the lower Snake River dams is one of the big jewels embedded in the Holy Grail of salmon recovery.
This would be the biggest watershed restoration in North America, if not on Earth, if we did this. It's the largest possible salmon recovery venture of which humanity is capable—would be simply the removal of those four dams. [Music] But…