Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities.

• Author: Blumm, Michael C.
• Position: Book review

The salmon wars in the Columbia Basin have been ongoing for decades. (1) Astonishingly, since the Northwest Power Act (2) ordered salmon and hydropower to be coequals in 1980, (3) Columbia Basin salmon runs have declined to about one-half of what they were thirty years ago, despite the expenditure of more than $600 million annually, nearly $10 billion cumulatively. (4) Worse, the listing of Columbia salmon under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) (5) twenty years ago has not only failed to restore wild salmon runs, but also apparently lowered the policy bar from restoring healthy runs to merely preventing their extinction. (6)

This sorry saga is the subject of Steven Hawley's engrossing book, Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities. (7) The startling expenses and miserable results are, according to Hawley, the result of "a skillfully directed symphony of public-relations scares, filthy politics, and crooked science." (8) The book backs up this allegation through a number of interviews with veterans of the salmon wars and a careful perusal of relevant government reports. Included are depictions of an attempt to defund the only independent source of salmon science, (9) the purchase of scientists who tell federal water agencies what they want to hear, (10) and the co-option of a federal agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)--once a salmon advocate--by power and water agencies like the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), which seek to preserve dams and current hydropower operations. (11)

The Obama Administration, whose call for use of unbiased science might have signaled a reversal of decades of failure, has instead chartered a status quo course, attempting to avoid major changes to the dams and their operations by promising to offset the harm they inflict on salmon populations by rehabilitating salmon habitat elsewhere in the basin. (12) This "bait and switch" approach to salmon recovery has repeatedly failed to convince a federal judge that it was consistent with the ESA. (13)

According to Hawley, the somewhat surprising conversion of the Obama Administration to maintain the status quo was the result of the work of a cabal of Washington state politicians, including Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, and Governor Christine Gregoire, who accepted a $40.5 million check from BPA to realign the state's position in the ESA lawsuit. (14) These politicians have become status quo defenders through the efforts of lobbying groups like the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association and Northwest River Partners, coalitions of ports, utilities, and businesses wedded to the current system of dam operations. (15) Hawley alleges that non-scientists like Jeff Stier (at BPA) and Bob Lohn (at several agencies) rewrote scientific findings to coincide with their agencies' positions that the status quo was sufficient to satisfy federal law. (16)

In addition to manipulating the science of salmon recovery, the federal agencies controlling the Columbia hydrosystem have misappropriated the economics. As Hawley points out, one of the basic premises of the Northwest Power Act was that the conservation measures it authorized would redound to the benefit of fish and wildlife, especially the salmon runs. (17) The Act not only aimed to put fish and wildlife and hydroelectric generation on an equal footing, (18) it promised "equitable treatment" for fish and wildlife from federal water managers. (19) One would have thought that, at a minimum, these promises would have produced changes in the way the hydrosystem operates to provide river flows and spills to facilitate salmon migration as more than 3600 megawatts of new conservation measures came on line. (20) But the federal water managers have never offered those changes; the only significant operational changes that have occurred have been the summer spills ordered by federal district judge James Redden. (21)

For Hawley and for several salmon war veterans he interviewed, like Reed Burkholder and Ed Chaney, (22) the obvious solution to significantly restoring the salmon runs is to remove the four federal dams on the Lower Snake River. Some studies suggest this solution not only is economically affordable, but also actually might end up saving money by eliminating the need to maintain the dams and for costly mitigation measures like barging salmon and hatcheries, which only serve to damage wild salmon. (23) However economically and scientifically supportable dam removal may be, (24) it would require an unlikely political transformation. The book...