Preface to the Revised Edition

HERACLITUS WARNED that nobody steps into the same river twice. And nobody frets about that warning more than an author revising a book about a river. Still, Heraclitus had it wrong when it comes to the essence of a river like the Columbia. You can step into the same dammed river twice.

The mainstem of the Columbia is plugged by fourteen fat slabs of concrete that, barring a seismic cataclysm, are not going anywhere. The fattest and most famous of them all, Grand Coulee Dam, was the largest structure in North America when my father helped build it in the late 1930s. It got even bigger when I (briefly and ineptly) helped expand it in the 1970s. Far into the future, it is almost certain to remain the largest and most important hydroelectric plant in the United States.

Throttled by concrete, the Columbia has undergone no fundamental change since A River Lost was first published in 1996. The river still doesn’t flow; it is still operated on a minute-to-minute schedule, with less spontaneity than the faucet in your kitchen sink.

But the context in which that exceedingly large faucet functions has changed substantially. In the past fifteen years, as the United States has stumbled into an era of climate change, soaring energy prices, debt-crippled government, and global food scarcity, the mechanized Columbia has become more valuable—perhaps even more virtuous—than ever before.

With almost no new investment, it continues to produce vast quantities of low-cost electricity, more than half of all the power consumed in the Pacific Northwest. In Washington and Oregon, where environmentalism is a moral imperative and a potent political force, that electricity is more than just an economic blessing. It is increasingly perceived as a social benefit: clean, green, and good for the planet. Its generation does not release the carbon emissions that cause global warming. No other part of America has such a monstrous, renewable, nonpolluting, and highly efficient power source already in operation.

Wind has joined forces with the river in the past decade. Towering wind turbines have been erected by the thousands throughout the Columbia Basin. They cluster where the wind rattles through gorges and valleys carved by the river and its tributaries. High-voltage transmission lines that extend out to remote dams on the Columbia provide a convenient tie-in, allowing wind turbines to plug into and sometimes overwhelm a power grid that has not yet expanded enough to keep up with new wind generation.

When the wind blows, the Northwest’s need for hydroelectricity declines and the river, in effect, becomes a battery, storing energy (as unspilled water) in reservoirs behind dams. Should the wind wane or demand for power increase, electricity is instantly available from dams. This synergetic marriage of wind and river—together with electricity generated by solar plants and electricity saved by conservation—has prompted predictions that over the next two decades there will be enough green power in the Northwest to phase out the use of coal to generate electricity.

A shifting global context has also injected new value into the Columbia Basin Project, the largest all-federal irrigation project in the United States. For nearly six decades, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has funneled water from the Columbia into fertile but arid land in eastern Washington. Massively subsidized by taxpayers, the project focused its benefits on a relative handful of farmers and often produced crops that were surplus to the country’s needs. The irrigation scheme never expanded to its planned one million acres because economists determined that it devoured more wealth than it produced. But as climate change contributes to crop failures from Texas to Ukraine to Australia, global demand for food has surged, making the vast irrigation scheme look increasingly prescient. For the first time in more than a generation, there are state and federal plans to expand the project.

Since the publication of A River Lost, the Columbia’s remarkable capacity to make cheap electricity has been discovered and is being aggressively gobbled up by an entirely new category of user: goliaths of the Internet. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have rushed down to the river in eastern Washington and Oregon to build “server farms.” These huge data centers—air-conditioned warehouses filled with thousands upon thousands of power-hungry servers that communicate with Internet users around the globe—now give nearly everyone on Earth who sends e-mail, uses a smartphone, or streams video a personal stake in the damming of the Columbia.

Dams have operated in the Columbia so effectively and for so long that there is a fairy-tale tendency to think of them as part of nature, as inescapable as rain and wind. George W. Bush was the first American president to try to turn this kind of magical thinking into federal law. His administration concluded in 2004 that federal dams on the Columbia and its primary tributary, the Snake, had become part of the river’s “environmental baseline.”

This is a self-serving fantasy for the Information Age. It protects the reliability of the hydroelectricity used by server farms—and insures that your video streams are instantly available. It guards the interests of politically influential river users, such as utilities, irrigators, and barging companies. But it also allows the federal government to dance away from the costs and consequences of damming the Columbia. These include the destruction of the world’s preeminent salmon river and the torment of Indians whose economic, nutritional, and spiritual lives were built around salmon.

The Bush administration argued that the dams did not jeopardize endangered salmon because they were built before Congress passed the Endangered Species Act. It also argued that hatchery-bred salmon, 150 million of which are dumped into the Columbia each year, should be counted as wild fish when it comes to assessing how many wild salmon the dams have killed.

In his courtroom in Portland, Oregon, U.S. District Court Judge James A. Redden has spent the last decade shredding the logic of these arguments. He characterized the federal government’s reasoning as “a cynical and transparent attempt to avoid responsibility” for dams that continue to kill vast numbers of fish and push thirteen species of salmon and steelhead toward extinction.

Under President Barack Obama, the federal government has behaved very much as it behaved under Bush, Redden made clear in an acidly worded ruling in 2011. He said the government continued to “resist” efforts to operate the dams in a way that would keep more salmon alive.

The judge concluded that since the federal government has a shady history of abruptly changing its mind on the Columbia, abandoning previous commitments, and failing to follow through on “hydropower modifications proven to increase [fish] survival,” the federal courts have no choice but to continue to police the river. He ordered the government to come up with new plans to protect fish that should consider “aggressive action,” including removal of dams.

Ripping dams out of rivers has become a formidable trend in the United States, with nearly five hundred removed or scheduled for demolition. Most of them are relatively small structures, but work began in 2011 to remove two large dams on the Elwha River in western Washington and open up a major salmon ecosystem that had been blocked for more than a century. In what will be the largest dam removal and river restoration project in world history, a plan was approved in 2009 to take four big dams out of the Klamath River in Oregon and California. It would restore more than three hundred miles of fish habitat and could resuscitate a river that before dams had supported the third-largest run of salmon on the West Coast.

Many Indians, fish biologists, and environmentalists have come to regard Redden (who was eighty-two years old in 2011 and who has announced that he will soon retire) as a national treasure—a fearless protector of the river and what’s left of its natural wonder. Still, when a federal judge raises the possibility of removing federal dams from the Columbia and Snake, there is always ferocious political blowback. Some elected officials who look out for the interests of utilities, server farms, irrigators, and other river users view Redden as an interfering, overstepping environmental zealot.

“Once again, a federal judge is trying to run the river with blatant disregard for the critical needs of the Northwest,” the all-Republican Idaho congressional delegation announced after Redden’s decision.

“Reason and common sense need to prevail over an activist judge who is intent on keeping dam removal on the table and keeping this issue tied up in his courtroom for years,” said Congressman Doc Hastings, a Republican from eastern Washington.

For the foreseeable future, then, a clash of economic interests, biological imperatives, and environmental values has been set in concrete on the Columbia. That clash was the primary focus of A River Lost when I wrote the book in the mid-1990s. Heraclitus notwithstanding, it remains the focus of this revised edition.

While conflicts in and around the river are as enduring as the dams, the people who fight them are not. Several of the principal characters in this book, including my father and mother, have passed away. Many of them—dam builders, Indians, irrigators, river barge owners—were elderly when I talked to them. Most were present at the creation of the machine river and their viewpoints remain essential to understanding the problems that continue to roil the Columbia. In revising this book, I have stuck with their remarkable and revealing stories while updating what of significance has changed on and around the river.

Blaine Harden

Seattle, Washington, 2011