A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia.

• Author: Keisling, Phil

Blaine Harden W. W. Norton and Company, $25 By Phil Kelsihx

As an award-winning Washington Post reporter, Blaine Harden has spent much of the last decade chronicling the intense--and often bloody--tribal and ethnic conflicts of sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe.

Harden's boyhood home of Moses Lake, Washington, where he returned to write this book about the once-magnificent Columbia river, is certainly not Bosnia. But Harden's keen eyed his ability to get many of his subjects to drop their guards and articulate their prejudices and rationalizations--makes for a dismaying account of greed, short-sightedness, and natural catastrophe in the name of "progress."

Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark encountered a wild river of rushing cataracts and plentiful salmon. Salmon were the center of Native American fife, in terms of religion and culmo as well as diet. (Some anthropologists have put their annual per capita consumption at over 800 pounds. But the river, its fish, and the culture they spawned have become pale reflections of their former selves. Today, the Columbia is what Harden calls a "machine river," controlled and manipulated by more than a dozen major dams. The dams have transformed the river into a series of slow-moving (and now navigable) pools; Lewiston, Idaho, more than 400 miles from the Pacific, is now a major port city. Irrigation water from the Columbia and its tributanes have made the proverbial desert bloom with everything from world-famous red delicious apples to potatoes for 80 percent of the nation's french fries.

But at what price? The massive federal dam-building efforts certainly brought prosperity. Indeed, Harden's own father left a Depression-devastated farm in Montana to find well-paying work in the Pacific Northwest boom towns that sprang up around such structures as the Grand Coulee Dain. But through most of the Columbia River Basin, the salmon are either going or already gone, and an entire way of life with them. In one poignant scene, Harden describes an 86-year-old Native...