The River Game
You must never be greedy with [salmon], and you must see
to it that no one else is greedy.
—Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest
THE SIGN ON her office door read, “State Your Business. Avoid Eye Contact. Leave Quietly. And No One Will Get Hurt.”
It was supposed to be funny, but her adversaries described the sign as sound advice. The woman who worked behind the door, they said, was a single-minded zealot. Given half a chance, she would hype every memo, monopolize every teleconference, and dominate every meeting. She was a bully, they said, who was ruining the river.
Managing the Columbia was once a gentlemanly pursuit. Men from the Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Bonneville Power Administration could meet in an atmosphere of trust and mutual admiration to make no-nonsense decisions about how best to operate the world’s largest hydroelectric system. These men from the federal agencies that built and maintained the big dams were free to extract maximum electricity from the river while preventing floods, keeping barges afloat, diverting water to irrigators, and guaranteeing a slackwater cushion for boaters, windsurfers, and water-skiers.
But that was before Michele DeHart elbowed into the river game.
“She has got a personality that a lot of people have problems with,” said Russell George, chief of reservoir control for the Corps of Engineers in Portland. “There is no way to meet her demands unless we completely tear down the system. It seems ridiculous what you have to do. There is no light at the end of the tunnel.”
Worse than her personality, according to her adversaries, were her appetites.
“There is no satisfying people like her. She wants more, more, more. Constantly more,” said Dan Yibar, a Bureau of Reclamation civil engineer in charge of reservoir oversight in the Columbia Basin.
The power establishment tried to stuff a sock in her mouth. The principal utility lobby in the Pacific Northwest proposed, in an amendment to the Columbia River’s fish and wildlife program, that DeHart “will not make decisions or recommendations . . . and will not engage in advocacy and/or lobbying.” The amendment failed.
“I don’t want this to get too personal,” said Al Wright, author of the sock-in-her-mouth amendment and one of the best-known utility lobbyists in the Northwest. “But she has such an extremely strong personality that she grates on people.
“She is one of these fish terrorists who have been in the business a long time. She and her crowd are blinded by their hatred for the power system. They are so obsessed after all these years that they believe anything that destroys megawatts has to help salmon. It is almost a religious sect. They are operating in the Dark Ages. They will kill anyone who disagrees.”
The fish terrorist’s son, Matt, painted a salmon on a small smooth stone when he was in second grade and gave it to his mother. Indians in the Northwest believe that whoever rubs such a stone acquires the character of a salmon—persistence and determination. DeHart kept the “energy stone” on her office desk in Portland and rubbed it when she was on the phone arguing with the gentlemen from the power side.
“There is something that I do that bothers these men who say I don’t play well with others. It is direct confrontation. I say exactly what I think. Many of the men I deal with in the power system are like boys who want to go fishing and don’t want girls tagging along. The fact that I am a woman adds to their aggravation.
“Think of what I am doing with the river in terms of the Palestinians. They [the federal agencies that run the Columbia and the utilities that sell its power] are like the Israelis. They have taken over all of the river, and we want some of it back. They give a little bit, and think that is enough. But we want more. It’s true what they say, we always want more.”
DeHart, a fish biologist in her early sixties, has been playing and winning the river game for more than three decades. Born in Marseilles, France, she came to the United States at the age of three with her mother and sister. After moving around the West from Colorado to California to eastern Washington, she settled in at the University of Washington in Seattle to study biology. A course on the physiology of cold-blooded animals caught her eye. Intrigued by the physiology of salmon, she became obsessed with what happens inside these creatures as they negotiate dams in the Columbia.
“It was not anything peculiar about salmon. It could have been raccoons. It’s extinction that bothers me. You have a responsibility to all the people and all the creatures that live on the planet. Your behavior cannot be such that it lacks respect for what is around you. That is what is wrong with the Columbia River. I think it’s right to use natural resources, but wrong to destroy them. You are responsible for what comes after you.”
I asked DeHart if she, as other players in the river game claim, wanted vengeance on those who dammed the Columbia.
“I don’t have personal feelings of animosity and I am not demanding retribution. I am asking them to do something they have a hard time even imagining. I am asking them to undo some of this mammoth river system that they have built and operated and profited from.
“I am simply saying that they cannot have it all anymore. They cannot have maximum economic development and expect salmon to survive. What galls me is that this is fixable. The hydrosystem can make money and fish can get up and down the river.
“It’s all about money. No one will actually say that they want salmon to go down the drain because saving them costs too much. That is a horrible moral crime to admit to.”
DeHart demanded modifications in the river that would make it a mechanized version of the historic Columbia, the river that rushed to the sea in the spring and summer. She wanted dams to store more water throughout the winter, rather than feed it to turbines to make electricity. From April through August, she wanted more of the river spilled for the salmon migration.
“If we do not have flows, everything else we do to try to rescue salmon in the river is like moving deck chairs on the Titanic.”
DeHart has long been the director of a Portland-based agency called the Fish Passage Center. Her job and her agency were created as part of a landmark law passed by Congress in 1980. The Northwest Power Act assumed that dams were the principal cause of the decline of salmon in the Columbia and Snake. The law demanded that the hydrosystem be changed so that salmon are treated “on a par” with power and navigation and irrigation.
Managers of the river, under the law, were supposed to pay more attention to fish-saving goals than power-production consequences. The expertise of fish agencies and local Indian tribes was supposed to shape the operation of the river. Northwest consumers of electricity, who for half a century had enjoyed America’s cheapest power, were expected to foot the bill for salmon recovery through slightly higher electricity rates.
The Northwest Power Act, in theory, spelled out a revolution in western water management. It put longtime inmates of the engineered river—Indian tribes and fish agencies—in a position of power. To administer the revolution, the Power Act created a novel bureaucratic creature. Not quite a federal agency, not a state agency, the Northwest Power Planning Council was made up of two gubernatorial appointees from each of the four states in the Northwest. The Council had powers (rather vaguely defined powers, as it turned out) to change the behavior of the federal agencies that built and managed the hydrosystem. For the first time since the dams were built, the Bonneville Power Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Reclamation were supposed to answer to someone other than themselves.
Passage of the Power Act and creation of the Power Council prompted a celebration among champions of salmon. There was effusive talk about how the Northwest was an environmental showcase for the entire United States. It was said to be an enlightened region where concern about endangered species could be married to economic needs. “The whole climate has changed drastically,” enthused the head of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, one of a score of long-frustrated fish groups. Thanks to the Power Act, said one public-interest fish lawyer in Portland, “Utilities could no longer ride roughshod over the public interest.”
The fish agencies and Indian tribes needed a single articulate voice, a coordinator to monitor salmon survival and speak up at meetings with the men who ran the river. To fill this need, the Council created the Fish Passage Center and chose DeHart to run it.
She took the job with the assumption that the rules of the river game had changed. Congress, after all, had ordered “that no longer [should] fish and wildlife be given a secondary status.” When DeHart made demands in the name of the fish agencies and tribes, she expected the power side to do everything it could to cooperate.
Nearly every river user I met insisted that he was on the brink of losing his job and future to “salmon extremists.” Barge pilots, irrigators, and business owners all painted a remarkably similar picture of who was to blame for sabotaging their livelihoods and spoiling the pioneer spirit of the American West. It was a uniformly unflattering portrait, and it looked a lot like DeHart.
She was the river user’s stereotype of a salmon wacko: A bureaucrat with an energy rock. A West Side paper-pusher who preferred salmon to human beings. An environmental extremist who built her career on the backs of Americans who worked for a living. To push the stereotype to its mean-spirited, misogynistic edge (which was where river users often pushed it), DeHart was a female who took a perverse delight in making men squirm. To repeat a Rush Limbaugh-ism that I often heard on my downriver passage, she was one of those femi-Nazis.
In Portland, where she meets on a weekly basis with the players who run the river, DeHart’s adversaries were more careful in their language. Instead of crude sexist attacks, they questioned her grasp of reality.
Al Wright, the mouthpiece for the utilities, told me that DeHart’s worldview would be acceptable if everyone in the Pacific Northwest was “warm and well-fed and affluent. And you got a BMW and you got a four-thousand-square-foot house and you and your wife’s combined salary is a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year.”
But the real world, Wright said, was not so cushy.
“I have never once heard of a utility that had an outage and had its customers call and say, ‘Well I don’t want you to hurt the environment, but sometime in the next two months could you get my lights back on?’ I never once heard of a telephone call like that.”
Wright’s real-world argument, however, did not mention that he and most of the people making it were earning a handsome living from the subsidized river. DeHart’s most passionate critics tended to be either federal bureaucrats or well-paid utility executives or wealthy businessmen with shipping or irrigation interests.
Despite passage of the Northwest Power Act, salmon continued to decline. The most severe drop-off was among Idaho salmon, the fish forced to run the gauntlet of eight federal dams on the Columbia and Snake. Many fish biologists saw a momentum toward extinction that they feared was irreversible. Across the Pacific Northwest, wild salmon were only about 20 percent as abundant as they were historically.
Downstream from Portland, in a century-old fishing village called Skamokawa, Washington, I spent two sad days with a family that had been forced to give up fishing in the Columbia. Kent and Irene Martin’s annual gross income from river fishing had fallen in five years from sixty thousand dollars to one thousand dollars. The strictest fishing restrictions in the history of the river, along with “virtually no fish to catch,” convinced the Martins in 1994 to abandon a way of life that had served their family for four generations.
“The thing that has been most difficult to accept is that it’s our own fault. We in the Pacific Northwest have crapped in our own nest,” said Kent Martin, a bulky bald man with muttonchop whiskers. He found it difficult to keep his voice down and his anger under control.
“It is extermination for us. We have lost the guts of our fishing season. We have not been allowed to catch summer chinook since 1964, but their population continues to go down. You tell me where the fish are dying. Of course, most of it is the dams. But the utilities and the aluminum companies and the federal power agencies continue to tell anybody who will listen that it is everybody’s fault but their own.
“I call them poachers in pinstripes. They ought to be in jail. They don’t have the will, the intention, or the desire to save the fish. If they were serious, they would not be stooging around about our harvest.”
The Pacific Fisheries Management Council, a federal agency that regulates fishing, agreed with Martin. Jim Coon, a staff officer for the Council, told me that if “you took away all the ocean fisheries and took away all the river fisheries, you would see an immediate [upward] blip in the number of adult salmon reaching the dams. But it would be very small and it would not reduce the downward trend. What is happening is not harvest. What is happening is with the river.”
About seven hundred miles upstream from the Martins, on the upper Grand Ronde River in northeast Oregon, wild salmon had all but disappeared by the mid-1990s.
When Michael Farrow, a forty-six-year-old Cayuse and Walla Walla Indian, was a boy, fifteen thousand of those spring chinook salmon returned to that tributary of the Snake. Farrow told me that the absence of the fish made him ashamed of himself and his country.
“When I found out that no one had seen a salmon, I stopped and looked for a long time at the river. I never had such a lonely feeling. I had wanted to train my boys to hook salmon there. My boys are the first generation in ten thousand years that have never fished there. Those fish in the upper Grand Ronde are all but gone, and it is nothing but a sin. Those stocks are so ancient. They were created by someone higher than us. It really ticks me off.”
The confederated tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, for which Farrow worked as director of natural resources, decided unilaterally in 1974—twenty years before there were no spring chinook in the upper Grand Ronde—to suspend all tribal fishing in the river, as well as other streams and rivers in the area. The tribes made the decision after widespread in-stream habitat destruction by wheat farmers, ranchers, and timber operators had combined with Snake River dams to reduce adult returns to a level that alarmed the Native American fishermen.
“The tribes took that action on their own. If you had seen similar good-faith actions by the hydrosystem, as well as by the farmers and the timber companies, we wouldn’t be in the fix we are in,” Farrow said.
There was a dreary familiarity in these fish stories. They were part of a poisonous pattern I experienced on the river. Whether it was making electricity, irrigating the desert, or making plutonium, the pattern held: The federal government moved in on the river with urgent goals, lofty motives, and expensive machinery. It succeeded quickly, beyond anyone’s expectations. It put people to work and won public approval. The Biggest Thing on Earth. The Planned Promised Land. It’s Atomic Bombs!
Then, out along the Columbia, the federal machinery quietly came under the control of narrow interests. Irrigation farmers wrote special rules that allowed them to waste water and pad their subsidies. The keepers of the plutonium factory poisoned their neighbors. Dam builders bullied, cheated, and dispossessed river Indians. And salmon died in dams.
With salmon, though, there was far more transparency. Their decline was an event that everyone witnessed, like a public hanging. Everyone who wanted to know, knew. In a region that consumed twice as much electricity per capita as the rest of the nation, at rates half the national average, everyone with a light switch was a collaborator.
The downwinders were covertly poisoned by a national security apparatus. It was a crime for which there was little or no local responsibility. With salmon, everyone was to blame.
We did it—to save on our monthly electricity bill.
Alarms first went off in the 1930s. Commercial fishermen, Native Americans, and fish biologists warned that the first dams were seriously degrading the world’s largest inland run of salmon. They predicted that more dams would ruin a major regional industry.*
The Colville Indians were the first to see what dams actually do to fish. They noticed a drastic drop in adult salmon jumping Kettle Falls as soon as the first mainstem dam was finished on the Columbia in 1933. Rock Island Dam near Wenatchee, a small dam built by a local utility, had fish ladders. But they did not work well.
“Our total catch at the falls . . . after this dam was completed, was only four hundred salmon [compared to fifteen hundred the previous year],” Pete Lemry, spokesman for the Colville Indians, told a congressional subcommittee in 1933. “And the most salmon we saw this year was two hundred and fifty in one day; we used to see that many in half an hour before the dam was built. The white people ask me what is the matter with the salmon? I say I do not know unless the Rock Island Dam has stopped them.”
By the mid-thirties, warnings from fish biologists and fishing associations in the lower Columbia pressured the United States Senate to pass a resolution that ordered the federal commissioner of fisheries to assess the effect of Bonneville Dam and recommend steps “to attain full conservation of such fish.”
By the forties, with Grand Coulee and Bonneville complete and the salmon catch in the Columbia down to half its thirty-year average, Northwest fish scientists, commercial fishermen, and Indian tribes demanded a moratorium on all new dams. A study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had found that at least 15 percent of juvenile migrants in the Columbia were killed at Bonneville Dam. Although the secretary of Interior forbade publication of this information, it leaked out. Fishermen could add. Each new dam meant fewer juvenile fish going to sea and fewer catchable adults coming home. The fishermen wanted the Corps and the Bureau to slow down, think things through, and figure out how to design safer dams.
The fish lobby was allowed one high-noon confrontation with the builders of dams. It came in Walla Walla, Washington, in June 1947. Fish agencies and Indian tribes were, at the time of the meeting, desperate to head off the building of McNary Dam. Representatives of the power side showed up in force in Walla Walla, along with advisers to the region’s governors. But before they came, they demonstrated who was calling the shots on the river. Two months before the meeting, construction started at McNary.
The chief of fisheries for the Oregon Fish Commission foretold the future in Walla Walla. “The plans of the dam builders, if completed, will completely ruin for all time some of the richest fishery resources of this nation,” Paul Needham said. What particularly alarmed Needham and other biologists were plans to dam the lower Snake. “The finishing touch will be the four-dam plan now being recommended by the Army Engineer Corps for construction on the Snake River to provide slackwater navigation to Lewiston, Idaho. All western biologists with whom I have talked agree that this plan, if followed, will spell the doom of the salmon and steelhead migrations up the Snake. . . .”
The power side, in response, argued that fish passage worked fine. The federal agencies that were building dams, as well as barging companies, the Northwest Development Association, and all the leading Northwest utilities, ignored early research showing that migrating juvenile salmon were dying in turbines. Nearly every member of Congress from the Northwest sent a letter to the meeting, urging that the dams be built as fast as possible—to meet growing power demands and open up slackwater navigation. Choosing to believe what was economically expedient over what was biologically ruinous, the lawmakers invoked a soothing nostrum: “We can have fish and power too.”
The Bureau of Reclamation, however, did not see a need to mince words. It had the courage, or perhaps the arrogance, to admit that fish and power do not mix.
“The Department [of the Interior] feels that the Columbia River fisheries should not be allowed indefinitely to block the full development of the other resources of the river,” said a Bureau press release in advance of the Walla Walla meeting. “The overall benefits to the Pacific Northwest from a thoroughgoing development of the Snake and Columbia are such that the present salmon run must, if necessary, be sacrificed [italics are mine].”
After the Walla Walla meeting, the proposed moratorium on new dams was bumped upstairs to the Federal Interagency River Basins Committee, which unanimously rejected it on the grounds that “facts and evidence presently available do not substantiate the fear” that dams will “result in major loss or extinction of fish life” in the Columbia and Snake.
There is always reasonable doubt about who or what is to blame for disappearing salmon.
“The science, unfortunately, has never been black or white. And the gray has always been marketable, it has always been worth a lot of money,” said Bert Bowler, a fisheries biologist who works for the state of Idaho. “The utilities spend a lot of time and money to exploit the gray and push uncertainty. Politicians like the gray because it means they don’t have to make decisions that will raise voters’ electricity bills.”
DeHart put it more bluntly: “With salmon, you have a dead body and nobody’s fingerprints are on it.”
Here is a memorandum written at Basic American Foods, a large processor of potatoes in the Columbia Basin and a huge consumer of electricity. The memo was sent to the management of the Grant County Public Utility District, a utility that owns two dams on the mid-Columbia and sells electricity at rates that have been advertised as the cheapest in America. The salmon advice was listed in the memo under “some ideas on attack strategies”*:
Reinforce the cost avoidance policy for salmon reclamation and environmental expenditure. Require a mandate, test it by lawsuit, require proof of technical viability and negotiate a long-term implementation schedule prior to implementation [italics are mine].
Salmon themselves encourage corporate obfuscation and interest-group finger pointing. The life cycle of the fish makes controlled scientific experiments—and irrefutable proof of what is responsible for wiping them out—all but impossible. A salmon run, like a chain breaking at its weakest link, can collapse anywhere. From gravel to gravel, from hatching in a mountain stream to dying four or five years later in the same stream after spawning, an Idaho salmon must negotiate up to 1,800 miles of slackwater and figure out how to get around sixteen dams. The fish also has to survive up to four years and more than 4,000 miles of travel in the ocean. Salmon are perhaps the most complex creature ever addressed by the Endangered Species Act.
“People have not awakened to the difficulties of saving these fish,” said Bill Bakke, head of a Portland-based environmental group that helped force the federal government to put Idaho salmon on the endangered species list. “We don’t have a rational scientific program for salmon. All we have is a lot of enviros and business interests fighting each other.”
Dams are clearly not the only problem. Salmon runs on Northwest rivers with no dams are often in as poor shape as runs in the Columbia and Snake. Sorting out the decline of salmon inevitably leads to a recitation of the four H’s: habitat, hatcheries, hydropower, and harvest. The relative sin committed by each H is inversely proportional to how much money you happen to make off the H in question.
Logging and farming have ravaged the gravel streambeds that are both birthplace for young salmon and grave for spawned-out adults. To reproduce before they die, salmon must find clean, permeable gravel beds in their home stream. They dig nests (redds), deposit eggs, fertilize them, and then cover the redds with gravel. If sediment from nearby logging or farming covers the gravel, survival of eggs in the redds drops precipitously.
Hatchlings must quickly find pools of clean water where they can hide, safely protected from fast water that might flush them downstream too soon. Spreading out in the stream, tiny salmon become territorial, staking out a patch of quiet water near swifter currents that deliver drifting food. The young fish need shade to survive hot summer temperatures. They also need fallen trees, boulders, and other large debris that divide streams into secluded spaces where fish can rest and grow and not be seen by predators. As they begin to migrate toward the sea (a journey that can begin anywhere from a few days to four years after emerging from gravel nests), juveniles tend to travel in groups close to the edges of a stream or river, weaving through rocks and fallen timber.
Logging and farming can ruin all this, stripping streams of their complexity, turning them into erosion troughs without food, shade, or hiding places. By the 1990s, the Grand Ronde River was an example of all that could go wrong. Windblown dirt from wheat fields buried gravel beds. Diking of the river, removal of streamside trees, and draining of adjacent wetlands had transformed much of the Grand Ronde into a murky irrigation ditch. Below the few spawning grounds that remained in the upper river, streamside cattle grazing, road construction, and loss of shade created thermal kill zones where summer water temperatures often reached a lethal 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
The plight of the Grand Ronde was similar to that of many rivers in the Columbia Basin. But damaged riverbanks can be nursed back to health. Since the 1990s, costly efforts have been made across the Columbia Basin to do exactly that. The Grande Ronde has been singled out for triage. More that $20 million has been spent to stabilize stream banks, keep cattle away from the river, and plant trees to provide cooling shade to juvenile salmon. So far, though, the benefits of habitat restoration for endangered wild salmon have been underwhelming. Wild salmon runs in the Grande Ronde and many other rivers upstream from dams in the Columbia and Snake remain at high risk of extinction.
A popular treatment for proliferating dams and sick habitats is the salmon hatchery. It has been prescribed since Grand Coulee Dam blocked off the upper Columbia and the dosage grew larger with each passing decade. About 150 million hatchery salmon and steelhead a year are pumped per year into the Columbia and Snake Rivers above Bonneville Dam. A half century ago, nine out of ten of migrating juvenile salmon in the Columbia were wild. Now, more than nine of ten are born in hatcheries.
While hatchery fish have helped prevent a total collapse of the sport, commercial, and Indian catch in the river, they tend to create as many problems as they solve. For starters, about 99 percent of hatchery smolts carry an infectious kidney disease that some fish biologists speculate may drastically reduce their chances of coming back from the sea. The kidney ailment has infected wild salmon, with which migrating hatchery fish share streams and rivers. Cramped conditions on barges and trucks that the Corps of Engineers uses to transport salmon around dams are also responsible.
More important, the genes of hatchery fish are suspect. The federal government’s rush to make up for salmon losses encouraged fish agencies to ignore or fudge the distinct genetic traits that salmon adapted to survive in specific streams. Hatchery managers interbred salmon without regard for geographic origin. They selected for fish that would grow fat and hearty in the concrete confines of the hatchery. For decades, managers measured their success and won promotion on the basis of how many baby fish they put in the river, while paying little attention to the percentage of adults that returned from the sea.
It turned out that hatchery fish were about ten times less likely than wild salmon to come home. To beat these odds, hatchery managers force-fed more and more concrete-cradled smolts into the river system. Tens of millions of hatchery fish were dumped into streams and rivers at the same time that dwindling numbers of wild juveniles were trying to migrate. Hatchery fish, as young migrants, were usually bigger and stronger than their scrawny wild cousins. At McNary Dam, while I was looking at the machines that remove fish from the river for transport on barges, I saw a half-swallowed wild chinook in the mouth of a much larger hatchery steelhead. A fish biologist at the dam told me it was a common sight.
When wild and hatchery fish do manage to return as adults to the same stream, they often interbreed. This degrades the genetic robustness of wild stocks and dramatically reduces the chance that their not-so-wild offspring will find their way home from the sea.
Once young salmon reach the ocean (where, depending on species, they stay for one to four years), questions about what may or may not be killing them become even more difficult. There is the El Niño effect, a periodic fluctuation in the prevailing winds around the Earth that raises the temperature of the coastal waters into which the Columbia River empties. The unhealthful warm water, along with mackerel and other predators that come north with it, reduces survival for young salmon. The unexpectedly severe decline of Pacific salmon in the 1990s is believed to have been caused, in part, by a lethal blend of El Niño with an unusual reduction in an ocean phenomenon called upwelling, which occurs when strong winds churn up the sea and bring up beneficial nutrients from the ocean floor. Ocean conditions sometimes do change in favor of salmon survival. Around 2004, scientists began to monitor an increase in upwelling in the Pacific and returns of adult salmon suddenly exploded. For some species, the number of salmon in the Columbia and Snake jumped to levels not seen since before the dams were built. Stunned by these numbers, fish scientists conceded there was still much about salmon survival rates that they did not understand.
The final major killer of salmon is harvest, which means fishing. Here there is more certainty in assessing blame. Salmon runs in the Columbia were decimated by a fishing free-for-all in the late nineteenth century. Commercial fishermen used fish wheels, nets, and traps to satisfy a hugely profitable canning industry. In 1883, the peak year of river fishing, the commercial catch of just one salmon species, chinook, totaled forty-three million pounds. That was larger than the pre-settlement Indian catch for all salmon species.
“The helpless salmon’s life is gripped between these two forces—the murderous greed of the fishermen and the white man’s advancing civilization—and what hope is there for salmon in the end?” asked Dr. Livingston Stone of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in an 1892 rebuke to the fishing industry.
As concerns the greed of fishermen, hope has come in the form of fishing limits and shorter fishing seasons. The rules have steadily become more restrictive and more strictly enforced. Outright fishing bans on several endangered runs of salmon have been in place for decades.
But fishing regulation, too, is beset by the complexity of salmon behavior. It is illegal to catch the three Snake River species that have been declared endangered. But the fish do not segregate themselves for protection. They swim upstream in the Columbia along with their more numerous relatives who spawn in the Hanford Reach. Gillnetters (either commercial operators or Indian tribes) who go after the abundant Hanford Reach run are likely to catch fish that are on the brink of extinction.
Confusion about what exactly kills salmon has spawned a new salmon-related industry. Cynical fishermen call it biostitution. River users hire teams of marine biologists, ecologists, and natural-resource economists who spend months or even years gathering and analyzing data about the river. These experts—the biostitutes—produce lengthy, chart-ridden reports that invariably suit the financial interests of the river users who hired them.
The Oregon Forest Industries Council hired two eminent fisheries biologists to produce a 328-page tome that came to the not surprising conclusion that logging practices, while bad for fish “in the past,” have improved a lot. The study said that loggers are less guilty than fishermen, dams, or farmers of killing salmon.
The Army Corps of Engineers paid for a study that found that dams do not kill all that many salmon. Pacific Northwest utilities paid for a study that maintained that transporting salmon is better than letting them swim.
The Northwest Power Act was to have blown a whistle on biostitution and stopped the finger pointing. After it was passed in 1980, Indian tribes and regional fish agencies were supposed to call the shots for remaking the river. Neither had been paralyzed by uncertainty. Having watched the steady disappearance of the fish for half a century, Indian tribes and fisheries biologists had always agreed that the principal cause was dams. They also agreed that salmon needed more water in the river. To reduce mortality for juvenile salmon in dams, the agencies and tribes jointly demanded installation of screens and bypass systems. They also wanted to spill more of the river and its fish over dams rather than feeding them through turbines.
When DeHart joined the river game at the Fish Passage Center, she believed that federal law empowered her to act as an agent for the tribes and agencies. She assumed that salmon would receive “equitable treatment.”
Her assumption was wrong. For more than a decade, DeHart was an irritating but ineffectual presence at meetings that decided how the river would be operated. Decisions were made behind her back. Spill requests were denied or ignored.
DeHart’s direct boss, the Northwest Power Planning Council, shied away from challenging the gentlemen from the power side. It demanded increased spill for salmon, but did not make a fuss when the power side said no. It ordered prompt construction of fish screens, but set no deadlines and tolerated long delays. Most important, the Council, which had been instructed by Congress to “heavily rely” on the opinion of fish agencies and Indian tribes, kept questioning, revising, and rejecting that advice. Again and again, the agencies and tribes asked for more water for fish. Each time the Council found reasons why water was too expensive and delivering it, too complicated.
“It breaks my heart. The Power Council could have worked,” DeHart said. “In the end, it turned out to be just eight politicians appointed by four politicians [the governors of Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho]. They respond to special interests and short-term thinking. The tribes and the fish agencies lost out in the bars and restaurants of Portland as the utilities wined and dined.”
Staff members working for the Council, who did not care to speak publicly, agreed. Under Council rules, it was easy for utilities to lobby for delay; they only needed to win over three Council members. Three votes could stop the eight-member body from making any decision.
“By God, yes, the utilities have had control of this apparatus,” said Ted Hallock, himself a Council member from Oregon who retired in 1995. “We were an implicit captive or actual captive of the goddamn utilities.”
A federal appeals court also agreed with DeHart. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ruled in 1994 that the Power Council had, in effect, fallen into bed with utilities, aluminum companies, and other power interests. The court found that the Council had ignored both the letter and spirit of the Northwest Power Act.
The court concluded that Columbia River salmon and the people who depended on them had been betrayed for the sake of the status quo. The river game, the court found, had been rigged.*
By this time, Indian tribes and environmental groups had given up on the Northwest Power Act. Searching for a stronger weapon to protect salmon, they tried the Endangered Species Act, a sweeping law which, at least in theory, ignores all “nonbiological” factors in protecting endangered creatures.
A petition from the tribes and agencies forced the federal government to invoke the act in 1991 to protect Snake River salmon. To enforce this law, yet another federal agency entered the river game. The National Marine Fisheries Service (later called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] Fisheries Service) had the authority, if it chose to use it, to demand sweeping changes in river operations.
Genuine alarm erupted among river users. The last thing they wanted was for the salmon crisis to go the way of the spotted owl. For that bird, a federal judge, acting under authority of the Endangered Species Act, closed five and a half million acres of federal forests until the federal government could come up with a credible protection plan.* River users said the Northwest could not afford such interference. The salmon issue was “orders of magnitude more complicated than the owl,” and should be kept in the hands of responsible local agencies that knew the river and the regional economy.
Seeking to head off draconian enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, river users began talking about regional cooperation to protect salmon. In language that sounded suspiciously like the rhetoric generated earlier when the Northwest Power Act was passed, there was talk of a new era in river management. Farmers, fishermen, utilities, bargers, and industrial users of electricity all stated they were “committed to a solution.”
At first, signs of change were promising. The federal government ordered more water spilled through the hydrosystem. The Corps of Engineers rushed to put in more screens on federal dams. Before long, however, the gentlemen from the power side found that the federal fisheries agency, an arm of the Commerce Department, was not a ferocious advocate of costly change. In announcing its first plan for running the river, it did not demand major systemic changes in the operation of dams. Its biological opinion found that endangered Snake River salmon were not in jeopardy from routine workings of the hydrosystem.
The “no-jeopardy” ruling halted regional cooperation before it began. Environmental groups and Indian tribes immediately sued. And a federal judge in Portland intervened.
U.S. District Judge Malcolm Marsh said he was taking this “rare opportunity to tell all of these players” that the federal government was not standing up for salmon. The judge said, in effect, that DeHart was right: The power side was shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
“. . . the situation literally cries out for a major overhaul,” Marsh wrote. Federal agencies “have narrowly focused their attention on what the establishment is capable of handling with minimal disruption.”
The “establishment” that no one wanted to upset was the Bonneville Power Administration, along with its attending court of utilities and aluminum companies.
Since the river game began in the 1930s, this federal agency has had a genius for getting its way. It was the BPA that hired Woody Guthrie to convince the American people that damming the Columbia was an act of national salvation. The BPA went on to receive credit for what John Gunther, in his 1946 book Inside U.S.A., called “one of the most striking pieces of social legislation in the history of the United States.”
The agency pioneered the “postage-stamp rate,” which made electricity available across the Northwest at one low rate, whether the user lived beside a dam or on a farm five hundred miles away. The BPA forced down power rates charged by all private utilities in the region. It also made the Northwest a national leader in the percentage of farms with electricity.
Bonneville was so efficient at selling “power at cost” that for forty years, between 1940 and 1980, the inflation-adjusted cost of electricity in the Northwest went down. Amazingly, the price dropped nearly fourfold.* A large slice of the American aluminum industry came to the Northwest for cheap electricity. Bonneville became what its first director, J. D. Ross, called a “superpower” of electricity.
By the 1970s, Bonneville was so intoxicated with success that its vision began to blur. The head of the agency at the time, Don Hodel, who would later become secretary of energy under Ronald Reagan, gazed into the future and spotted what he thought was a dark cloud. He became convinced that severe electricity shortages were in store for the Northwest. To guarantee a future of unlimited electricity at a bargain price, Hodel demanded the construction of an armada of nuclear and coal-fired power plants.
The nuclear plants, five in all, were peddled to ratepayers in the Northwest as a rebirth of the New Deal. They would carry on the bold pioneer vision of the men who built Grand Coulee Dam. Without nuclear plants, Hodel warned, “homes will be cold and dark or factories will be closed or both. . . .”
In a celebrated speech that came back to haunt him, Hodel exhorted residents of the Northwest not to surrender their prosperity to weak-kneed, no-growth naysayers who preferred conservation to increased generating capacity.
“I call [them] the Prophets of Shortage. They are the anti-producers, the anti-achievers. The doctrine they preach is that of scarcity and self-denial. By halting the needed expansion of our power system, they can bring this region to its knees.”
There were a number of eminent energy experts who said the Northwest did not need five nuclear plants. But Hodel, boldly pressing ahead, committed the BPA to six billion dollars in bond obligations to pay for three of the plants. He made the commitment before researchers from his own agency had conducted studies to see if they were really needed.
Just a year after the “Prophets of Shortage” speech, the draft of a BPA-commissioned study concluded that conservation was six times cheaper than new nuclear plants and could be carried out with “no significant changes in life style.” Word of the study leaked to many of the small, publicly owned Northwest utilities that Hodel was rounding up to guarantee bonds for his nuclear plants. Hodel kept the utilities on board by denouncing his own agency’s study.
With Hodel leading the way, Bonneville and nearly one hundred public utility districts in the Northwest joined together in the Washington Public Power Supply System or WPPSS, which became infamous as WHOOPS. Together they walked off a cliff, taking electricity consumers from across the Pacific Northwest with them.
The result was the greatest municipal bond default of all time, a financial catastrophe that spawned sixty lawsuits, including the nation’s largest security fraud case. By the time WHOOPS defaulted in 1983, the estimated price tag on the five nuclear plants (only one of which ever produced electricity) had ballooned to a staggering twenty-four billion dollars. Oregon congressman James Weaver called it “the greatest scandal in the history of the Northwest.”
WHOOPS and the BPA became a regional laughing stock, synonyms for fiasco and incompetence. Back in Washington, D.C., Bonneville lost the protected status it had enjoyed since the New Deal. Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, condemned the agency’s “preposterous mythology” that BPA was paying back its eight-billion-dollar dam-building debt to the U.S. Treasury in a timely manner.
“Nothing,” Stockman said, “could be further from the truth.” BPA had finessed a swindle, the budget director said, postponing all payment of principal on its debt to the last year of a fifty-year loan agreement. Stockman called it “the antithesis of sound business principles and loaded with hidden taxpayer subsidies.”
Most damaging was the debt. Payments on one ailing and two stillborn nuclear power plants forced whopping increases in Northwest electricity rates. Rates went up sixfold in just five years (but still were about half the national average). About one-quarter of the average monthly electric bill across the Northwest went to pay for BPA’s nuclear mistakes.
Higher rates meant that the BPA, for the first time in its existence, faced stiff competition. Before WHOOPS, the agency could sell electricity for a tenth of the price of private competitors. After WHOOPS most of that price advantage disappeared. Gas-fired turbines owned by private companies could generate a kilowatt-hour of electricity for about three cents—same as Bonneville. Bonneville’s customers began defecting in the mid-1990s, turning to private suppliers of electricity.*
After WHOOPS, the river game had a new dynamic. Bonneville became a financial weakling at precisely the time that the Northwest Power Act was demanding that it shoulder the cost of saving salmon. Initially, Bonneville tried to escape its responsibilities, joining in a lawsuit that challenged the authority of the Power Council. However, a federal appeals court ruled that there was no reason why the Council could not give direction to a federal power agency.
With legal challenges blocked, Bonneville resorted to what it had always done when it came to salmon—it dissembled and delayed. It balked at providing salmon with the spill that fish agencies and tribes demanded, giving priority instead to energy sales and reservoir refill. When the BPA did spill water for salmon, it exaggerated the cost, even blaming salmon spills for costs that were caused by drought. The old accounting biases of the engineered river remained. Salmon were a burdensome expense, irrigation a sacred duty. When Bonneville did spend money on salmon, it was sloppy. A federal audit found that it paid for hatchery construction, predator control, and poaching enforcement that were never done.
Bad faith on salmon recovery tarnished the BPA’s image almost as much as WHOOPS. Public hearings on salmon and the power agency became sixties-style protest rallies. There were chants of “Hey, Hey, BPA, How Many Fish Did You Kill Today?” The Sierra Club called the agency the “Jeffrey Dahmer of the salmon world,” a reference to the serial killer who himself was murdered in prison after killing and cannibalizing seventeen people.*
Weakened by WHOOPS and stung by public disapproval on the salmon issue, BPA was forced to acknowledge mistakes.
“Sure we are perceived as arrogant. We are aware we are not trusted by many people. We want to change that,” Bonneville spokeswoman Dulcy Mahar said in the mid-1990s. “It is no longer the case that we are a power business and [protecting] fish got tacked onto it. We have got to let our employees know that we see [salmon] goals as so intertwined with generating electricity that you can’t achieve one without the other. We are changing our culture.”
But the power side did not change all that much. A decade after saying it was seeking public trust and shifting priorities toward salmon, the BPA tried to fire DeHart and dismantle the Fish Passage Center. The power side was sick of DeHart’s data, which year after year documented how federal dams kept killing salmon.
Senator Larry Craig, a Republican from Idaho, gave the BPA congressional cover for its effort to throw DeHart out of the river game. In Washington, D.C., Craig inserted unusual language into a 2005 committee report on a bill to fund federal spending on energy and water. BPA “may make no new obligations in support of the Fish Passage Center,” it said. It also said the center should be closed and its responsibilities transferred to other agencies.
“Data cloaked in advocacy creates confusion,” Craig thundered in a speech on the Senate floor. “False science leads to false choice.”
Shortly after the speech, I talked to DeHart in Portland, asking her if she was mad at the senator from Idaho.
“I have never met the man,” she said. “No one from his office ever contacted me. I guess I am flabbergasted. We are biologists and computer scientists, and what we do is just math. Math can’t hurt you.”
But salmon math had clearly riled up Craig, a long-time champion of utility companies in Idaho. In his 2002 election campaign, he received more money from electric utilities than from any other industry. The National Hydropower Association named him legislator of the year.
A few months before Craig’s angry speech on the Senate floor, salmon math, as promulgated by DeHart, had been a decisive factor in a federal court decision that infuriated Craig, Northwest utilities, and the BPA. In Portland, Judge James A. Redden ordered that large amounts of water be spilled over federal dams to increase salmon survival. This meant less water to spin hydropower turbines. Less electricity for BPA and utilities to sell. And, perhaps, less campaign money for Craig.
“Idaho’s water should not be flushed away on experimental policies based on cloudy, inexact assumption,” Craig said in a news release.
The senator justified zeroing out the Fish Passage Center on the grounds that “many questions have arisen regarding the reliability of the technical data.” He quoted from a report of an independent scientific advisory board that reviewed work done by the Fish Passage Center. When I contacted an author of that report, he said that Craig had neglected to mention that the board found the work of the center to be “of high technical quality.”
“Craig was very selective in reflecting just the critical part of a quotation from the report,” said Charles C. Coutant, a fishery ecologist who worked on Columbia salmon issues for sixteen years. “It did give a misleading impression. . . .”
In the Senate, Craig also said that “most” of the data collected by the Fish Passage Center duplicated work already done by other institutions and that shutting down the center would save money. This claim was false, according to fish and game agencies in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho; Indians with fishing rights on the Columbia; and the governors of Oregon and Washington. They all said that eliminating the Fish Passage Center was a bad idea that would reduce the quality and quantity of data on Columbia River salmon. The head of the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife wrote a letter saying that getting rid of the center would “actually increase salmon recovery costs, as the states and tribes will need additional staff to replace lost functions.”
Still, the BPA embraced Craig’s thinking. It attempted to dismantle the Fish Passage Center and put DeHart out of work, even though the Senate committee report language that zeroed out the center was not included in federal law. In 2006, BPA hired two private groups to do the work of the center.
DeHart’s defenders sued in federal court, and in 2007 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stopped BPA and Craig. It saved the Fish Passage Center and DeHart’s job. The court ruled that BPA “acted contrary to law in concluding that the congressional committee report language carried the force of law.” It said that BPA failed to “cogently explain” why it had ignored its obligations under the Northwest Power Act to fund the center. The San Francisco–based appeals court ordered BPA to halt its “arbitrary and capricious” behavior and to continue funding the center.
About nine months after the court ruling, Craig himself was thrown out of the river game. He reluctantly quit the Senate in disgrace after his Republican colleagues told him to go and after weeks of crude jokes on late-night television. Craig had been arrested in a Minneapolis airport men’s room after an undercover officer monitored conduct by the senator that was “often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct.” Craig, a vocal opponent of gay rights in Congress, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. He later insisted that he was not gay. He said he had done nothing wrong in the men’s room when his foot touched that of an undercover officer in the next stall (“I have a wide stance when going to the bathroom”). He said he should not have pleaded guilty.
DeHart, meanwhile, continued to play the river game. Her agency’s data tormented the gentlemen from the power side. Between 1998 and 2010, it showed that spilling water over dams did more to improve salmon survival than any other manipulation of the hydropower system.
“We knew that spill was going to be good for fish,” DeHart told me when I last spoke with her in 2011. “We never knew it was going to be this good.”
Fish scientists, Indian tribes, and, most importantly, the federal judge in charge of enforcing the Endangered Species Act came to rely on the center’s numbers in making decisions about the future of the engineered river. The power side conceded that some spill helped fish, but insisted that it be limited.
DeHart expected the fight over spill to go on indefinitely.
“Water that does not go into turbines does not make electricity,” she said. “It’s about money.”