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Getting Around Dams
Emily Clinch
Bringing Back the Salmon: Bypassing Dams to Restore Snake River Salmon
Taking a Second Look: Communities and Dam Removal
Produced by Green
Fire Productions
 Since the signing of the
Declaration of Independence, Americans have built an average of one
dam per day. That's a lot of dams. Once held up as man's triumph over
nature — and as sources of cheap power and easy access to water
— dams are now facing more opposition than ever. The time is
right, then, for two new videos — the National Wildlife Federation's
Bringing Back the Salmon and Taking a Second Look,
produced by a coalition of six environmental groups. Both videos examine
the benefits of dam removal, or at least modification. Bringing
Back the Salmon, however, takes a firmer look at the environmental
issues, while Taking a Second Look discusses the social and
economic issues.
Between 1961 and 1975, the federal government built four dams on Snake
River, the Columbia River's largest tributary. Snake River salmon
survived the ice age, but the dams might be too much for them, as
the first minutes of Bringing Back the Salmon explain. The
end of free-flowing water meant almost immediate disaster. As Russ
Biaggne of the Idaho Wildlife Federation says, "when it stopped, it
didn't stop just a little bit. It just stopped... We've already lost
three species in Idaho, species that will never come back, and we're
going to lose the rest of them if we don't do something."
Salmon are born in small streams, where they live for the next one to
two years, before embarking on the trip up the Snake, to the Columbia,
and out to the Pacific Ocean. They'll stay there for anywhere from one
to five years, then swim back upstream, back to the tiny streams in which
they were born, to spawn. Fish ladders, built to help fish bypass dams
on their trip upstream, can help larger salmon. However, the downstream
trip for young salmon is as large a problem, if not a larger one.
Five to 15 percent of fish die at each dam they encounter — and
on the Snake, that means a 20 to 60 percent mortality rate that is
entirely the fault of the four dams. Those fish that do make it to
the ocean are at a disadvantage, too. Tired and battered from
finding their ways through and around dams, they arrive at the
Pacific months late.
The solution Bringing Back the Salmon proposes is a series
of bypasses to the Snake River dams. By demolishing half of each dam,
the dams would still be able to fill part of their original functions,
while fish would no longer be in such danger. Since the dams would
still exist (just in modified forms), there would still be the potential
for hydroelectric power, while the salmon could migrate through the
other, undammed half of the river. The decommissioning would cost
less than $1 billion, while maintenance and construction on the dams
has cost $3 billion so far. However, a complete salmon recovery plan
would also have to involve increased investments in railroads and
other systems to replace the transportation for crops and other goods
lost in the decommissioning, a concept Bringing touches on
but does not thoroughly explore.
If Bringing Back the Salmon is light on the economics and
the public relations of decommissioning dams, Taking a Second
Look fills the gap. Focusing on three communities — West
Bend, Wisconsin; South Lake Tahoe, California; and Augusta, Maine
— that have decommissioned dams, Taking emphasizes the
improvements in community life that can come with a free-flowing river,
showing lots of people boating and fishing. Each community shown has
developed since the decommissioning — in Wisconsin, the previously
flooded land is now a park. The section spotlighting South Lake Tahoe
focuses on the ways the land had to be restored, even digging a new
streambed. Augusta, on the Kennebec River, highlights the restoration
of the river's fish population, which was thought to have vanished.
In an interview with Mike Lessard, a former opponent of decommissioning
the dam at Augusta, he admits that, "it's a definite improvement.
I had to eat some crow, I didn't think [the river] was going to [improve],
but it did." Taking a Second Look is the perfect choice to
show someone who is not yet convinced of the benefits of dam removal.
"I think if you give everything a chance, nature will straighten itself
out," Lessard says. "You've got to give it a chance."
If Bringing Back the Salmon is for the convert, then Taking
a Second Look is for the not-yet-converted. Both are entirely
in support of protecting the environment and restoring the natural
ecosystem, but Taking a Second Look provides a more complete view
of the benefits of a rebuilt environment. Perhaps it's the sense of
urgency in Bringing Back the Salmon — they estimate
that, without intervention, the salmon have only 20 years more —
but the single-mindedness might be off-putting to less committed viewers.
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