DAMS, PART II
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side.
THERE ARE THOSE WHO TELL US NOT TO LISTEN. THERE ARE THOSE WHO tell us we must be reasonable. There are those who caution patience. There are those who against all evidence tell us the system can be made to work. These people are wrong.
They are journalists and scientists and activists and engineers and technicians. They are the doomed men—the already dead though still breathing men—huddling against the walls of the ballroom in the ship, terrified lest anyone break their unacknowledged death watch.
Foresters preside over the murder of forests. Hydrologists preside over the murder of lakes and rivers. Of course they do not call it this. They call it management .
The doomed ones huddled in the ballroom will try to stop you through any means necessary. They have been listening too long to the echo-chambers of their own intra-human institutions, and like Jack of R. D. Laing’s Jack and Jill they must stop anyone from listening to the natural world, lest they be reminded of what they have forgotten—that they and the institutions they serve and with which they identify are murdering the forests and rivers and plains and oceans and skies and aquifers and mountains and those who live in these places, those who are these places. They’ve forgotten also—and will stop anyone from reminding them—that they too were once capable of hearing the salmon and the spotted owl speak. They will kill you to maintain their enforced deafness, because otherwise they will lose their identity as journalists and scientists and activists and engineers and technicians; they will lose their identity as civilized; they will, from their perspective, die.
Usually, though, the experts don’t need to kill us. Instead, they just tell us to trust them, and so we surrender to them. We trust our health to the hospital industry, our safety to the police industry, our children to the education industry, our salvation to the church industry. We trust journalists to tell us what’s going on locally and in the world, and we trust scientists to tell us how the world “works.”
So far as taking out dams, we’re told by experts in the employ of corporations or the government (of occupation) that we should leave dam removal in the hands of experts in the employ of corporations or the government (of occupation).
Here’s one example of how it works. I give a talk, during which I describe civilization’s murder of rivers. I detail how salmon and sturgeon have survived for millions of years, but they are not surviving civilization and its dams. I speak of the need to remove these dams, and I speak of the need to do this now.
A man who looks to be in his mid-fifties stands, says, “I’m a hydrologist. I trust that when you talk about people taking out dams you mean that metaphorically, that you’re saying they need to remove the dams in their own hearts, the things that stop them from doing what they need to do.”
I respond, “Sure, it works as a metaphor, but removing metaphorical dams doesn’t do a damn thing to save salmon.”
Six months later I give another talk in the same town. He comes again, makes the same plea. I respond the same way. This time his wife stands, too. She leans forward, grasps the back of the seat in front of her, and says, voice strong with emotion, “I’m also a hydrologist. I’m here to strongly urge you to not be irresponsible and take this into your own hands. I cannot tell you how much harm you’re causing just by talking about this.”
“Harm to whom?” I ask.
“To the rivers. There may be people who act on your words, and if they take out a dam they’ll kill the river below. Dams fill with sediment, and if you suddenly remove the dam, water will surge down in a muddy flood, scouring the river.”
How can I respond to that? I’m not an expert. Maybe she’s right. I have seen rivers and streams devastated by sediment. I’ve seen pools filled in that before were deep and bright with the flash of fish rising to strike at flies. Admittedly, the sediment I’ve seen came not from dams being removed but from clearcuts causing hillsides to slump into streams, but it’s a powerful image, and I see her point.
We’re in a difficult spot. The rivers are in an even more difficult spot. The rivers are being killed, and if we do not remove the dams they will die. But if we—human beings, not experts—do remove the dams we will kill the rivers.
I don’t know what to do. Maybe I should trust the experts. After all, they know more than I do.
I’m doing a radio call-in show in Olympia, Washington, and I mention my dam dilemma.
Someone calls in, says, “I’ve got exactly two words for you: Toutle River.”
Silence on the line. Finally I say, “Thank you very much, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Three words then: Mt. St. Helens.” It’s clear he’s enjoying this.
“Help me out,” I say.
“When the volcano Mt. St. Helens blew back in 1980, the Toutle River just below it was not only scoured by sediment, it was boiled. A hundred foot wall of water, ash, and debris came down at a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles per hour, annihilating everything in its path. Two hundred square miles of forest were flattened. All animals were presumed dead. That’s something like ten million fish, a million birds, fifteen hundred elk, two hundred bears, and so on. All visible mosses, ferns, and other plants disappeared. About fifteen miles of the river were gone. Not just scoured. Not just boiled. Gone. It looked like a moonscape. Some scientists suggested it would never recover, certainly not in our lifetimes. Others speculated that not even insects would come back.”
“And?”
“The Toutle River is in great shape, except where the Forest Service used the volcano as an excuse to let the timber industry go crazy, and where the Corps of Engineers used it as an excuse to build more of their sorry structures. No, the scientists were uniformly wrong. Insects reinhabited quickly, as did plants and birds. Most of the amphibians are back. The fish are back. The mammals are back.
“Mt. St. Helens caused far more damage than any dam removal ever could. If the river is allowed to recover, it does fine.”
Someone else calls. He says, “I’ve got two more words for you.”
“Is this an Olympia thing?” I ask.
He ignores me. “Missoula Flood.”
“Go on.”
“During the last ice age glaciers dammed the Columbia River and one of its major tributaries, the Clark Fork, creating a lake more than four times as big as Lake Erie. Eventually the water got deep enough, about 2,000 feet, to float the glacier, and that immediately busted the dam. This 2,000-foot wall of water rushed across what is now Idaho and Washington at about 100 miles per hour. The whole lake drained in a couple of days. I think the volume of water was on the order of five or ten cubic miles per hour, more than all the other freshwater flows in the world combined. The flood was strong enough to lift and carry 100-ton rocks all the way to the ocean. Huge backwaters formed everywhere, as the main channel couldn’t hold all that water. A wall of water probably 400 feet tall pushed 100 miles south of the main channel, to what is now Eugene, Oregon. Another wall pushed up the Snake River for about the same distance.”
“Your point is . . .”
“The river and the salmon and the sturgeon survived that flood. The busting of Grand Coulee Dam would be tiny compared to that.”
Silence.
He said, “One more thing. It’s actually incorrect to talk about the Missoula Flood. My understanding is that there were between forty and ninety of them. The river survived them all. It’s not surviving now.”
I contacted the hydrologist and asked him, based on his decades of experience working within the system, to give me his best shot. “If you can convince me,” I said, “that do-it-yourself dam removal is more harmful to rivers than waiting for the government and corporations to take out dams (when the “owners have decided that the cost to repair/maintain the dam is no longer worthwhile”)—or, put another way, if you can show me how acting with the approval of these organizations is better for rivers than acting without it—I will stop calling for people to remove dams on their own.
“I really want what is best for rivers. I don’t trust organizations with members who say they wish salmon would go extinct so people can get on with living, but if the other options are worse, I will regretfully do that. I am open to being convinced.”
The hydrologist is a nice man. I like him very much. We’ve spoken a few times, and notwithstanding our difference of opinion on dam removal we get along. I believe he, too, really does want what is best for rivers, and I’m sure he has accomplished much that is good. He wrote me a kind note telling me the name of the book he said would convince me: “I think you will enjoy reading
Dam Removal: Science and Decision-making, 2002, by The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.
142 It has a bit of everything—well, practically everything—that goes into the decision-making on dam removal. . . . I’m fairly happy about the result, except that it doesn’t deal with complex political issues that swirl around, for example, the Snake River, Colorado River or Columbia River dams. But my point to you was that to blow up dams was a misleading image of ‘jfdi’ (just f…ing do it) and can create as many problems as building it in the first place!”
He continued, “Before I end my professional involvement in rivers and watersheds (which has been extensive globally), I really want to remove a dam—even a small one! I was largely responsible for winning a contract last year to plan the removal of a nine foot dam, but the client went and tied it into a proposal to increase the height of a water supply dam downstream, as mitigation. Quite spoiled my day/week/month. Ah well, I’ll still enjoy it when (and if) they find the money . . .”
I’m sure you can see why I found his note both troubling and puzzling. His explicit goal was to try to convince me to work within the system, yet he was stating outright that in decades of globally extensive involvement with rivers and watersheds this obviously dedicated professional had not been able to remove a single dam, not even a small one. And the one dam removal he’d started to participate in had been stalled by—you guessed it—politics and money. Further, his if implies the distinct possibility the dam may not get removed at all. The failure to remove the dam will, I’m sure, do more to the river than spoil its day/week/month.
Nonetheless, I was happy to order the book, and I read it quickly. I wanted to understand. I soon saw that the book made his case no better than his note. In fact, far worse. I wrote him back, starting my note, “I was surprised to see that Kenneth Lay is one of the trustees of the Heinz Foundation,” the organization that put out this hydrologist’s best shot at convincing me to work within the system.
As you probably know, Kenneth Lay was the head of Enron, the fraudulent energy corporation responsible for the largest bankruptcy ever, costing investors around $30 billion. Lay and Enron were also responsible for the California energy crisis that cost the public billions more. You may recall that energy traders were caught on tape discussing how they had manipulated California’s energy market. For example, one Enron employee was recorded saying, “He just fucks California. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.”
Another responds, “Will you rephrase that?”
“OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day.”
Another Enron employee was caught complaining about possible government fines: “They’re fucking taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?”
“Yeah, Grandma Millie, man.”
“Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour.”
Yet another Enron employee said on tape, “It’d be great. I’d love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy.”
That very nearly happened. Lay made Bush’s shortlist for that position. Enron contributed more than $3.5 million to Republicans between 1989 and 2001. Lay is a good enough friend and strong enough supporter of Bush that during the 2000 Presidential campaign Lay allowed Bush to use Enron jets. They’re good enough friends that Bush nicknamed Lay “Kenny-Boy.”
Bush is not the only member of his administration to have a relationship with Lay and Enron. As of 2002, fifteen high-ranking officials owned Enron stock. These included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, deputy Environmental Protection Agency administrator Linda Fisher, Treasury Under-secretary Peter Fisher, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. Before taking over as Army Secretary, Thomas White was a vice-chair for Enron and owned $50 to $100 million in Enron stock.
It’s not too much to say that Ken Lay and Enron set the Bush Administration’s energy policies. Lay and Enron recommended policies, and Bush and company listened. Lay and Enron recommended people to implement these policies, and Bush and company listened.
143It was a damning enough indictment of the system the hydrologist wanted me to believe in that in his decades working on rivers and watersheds he hadn’t removed a single dam. It was even worse that the document that was supposed to convince me not to act on my own was put out by an organization that had the head of any energy corporation on its board. No energy corporation—no for-profit corporation, but especially no energy corporation—will ever do what is best for rivers or fish (except incidentally, when the “owners have decided that the cost to repair/maintain the dam is no longer worthwhile”). But it’s worse yet that the energy corporation in question is arguably the most spectacularly fraudulent corporation in recent history—quite an accomplishment—and one with close ties to George W. Bush, one of the most destructive enemies the natural world has today.
Amazingly, though, the document gets even worse. The Heinz Foundation had some help with this particular book: its co-producers were FEMA and EPRI.
Let’s take these separately.
FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Administration. It is perhaps most famously known for providing taxpayer-supported flood insurance for people who build in floodplains. This should make clear FEMA’s relationship to dams: dams are often used to control floods. At the very least, FEMA is no friend to wild and unpredictable rivers. What a river might call spring cleaning, and what a meadow might call a welcome and necessary influx of nutrients, FEMA would call an emergency to be managed: a flood.
But FEMA is problematic for other reasons, too. The official FEMA website states: “DISASTER. It strikes anytime, anywhere. It takes many forms—a hurricane, an earthquake, a tornado, a flood, a fire or a hazardous spill, an act of nature or an act of terrorism. It builds over days or weeks, or hits suddenly, without warning. Every year, millions of Americans face disaster, and its terrifying consequences.”
144 Although FEMA emphasizes its response to natural disasters, hints of FEMA’s other purposes slip in. We may gain a clue as to which of these listed disasters FEMA focuses on when we learn that FEMA is part of the Homeland Security Agency.
FEMA’s real focus, any right-wing paranoid conspiracy nut will tell you—and I have to emphasize that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you—is on laying the groundwork to put in place martial law and set up a nondemocratic shadow government. Given the rates of incarceration in this country as well as the absolutely cavalier divorce of the government from people’s and communities’ best interests, using FEMA for these purposes seems like overkill to me. That said, it can be pretty easy to dismiss the claims of the tinfoil hat folks when they state that FEMA spends something on the order of 6 percent of its budget on emergencies, and the rest on “the construction of secret underground facilities to assure continuity of government in case of a major emergency, foreign or domestic.”
145 We can likewise scoff at the claim that an “Executive Order signed by then President Bush in 1989 authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency to build 43 primary camps (having a capacity of 35,000 to 45,000 prisoners each) and also authorized hundreds of secondary facilities. It is interesting to note that several of these facilities can accommodate 100,000 prisoners. These facilities have been completed and many are already manned but as yet contain no prisoners.”
146 That’s all pretty funny, but we might stop laughing when we read the nutcases’ pre-Ashcroft /Guantanamo claim that, “The plan also authorized the establishment of concentration camps for detaining the accused, but no trial.”
147 And how hard will we laugh when we learn, “Three times since 1984, FEMA stood on the threshold of taking control of the nation”?
148 But thank our lucky stars we can stop paying attention and start laughing again when we read the claim that there “have been documented over 60 secret underground virtual cities, built by the government, Federal Reserve Bank owners, and high ranking members of the Committee of 300.”
149Committee of 300 indeed.
Unfortunately, it would be a lot easier to dismiss all of this as paranoid fantasy if what we know of FEMA weren’t so scary. For example, let’s talk about former National Guard General Louis O. Giuffrida, who in 1981 was appointed by Ronald Reagan to head the organization. The two had already worked together. In 1971, when Reagan was governor of California, he and Giuffrida designed Operation Cable Splicer, which consisted of martial law proposals legitimizing the use of the military and police to detain political dissidents. Reagan may have chosen Giuffrida for this job because Giuffrida was experienced at planning to detain those who might get in the way of those in power: at the Army War College the year before, Giuffrida had advocated in writing that in the event of a national uprising at least 21 million “American Negroes” be arrested and transferred to relocation camps.
150 We’re no longer in the realm of delusion, but history, which I suppose could be defined as the place where the delusions of the powerful combine with the force to make them happen. In any case, Giuffrida brought this same verve to FEMA, and joined like-minded people such as General Frank Salcedo, chief of FEMA’s Civil Security Division, who in 1983 articulated his vision for FEMA as a “new frontier in the protection of individual and governmental leaders from assassination, and of civil and military installations from sabotage and/or attack, as well as prevention of dissident groups from gaining access to U.S. opinion, or a global audience in times of crisis.”
151 A little later FEMA developed plans to seize power in these “times of crisis.” FEMA soon led thirty-four other federal agencies (including the FBI, CIA, and the U.S. Treasury) in a massive exercise including, among many other things, plans to place 100,000 U.S. citizens into concentration camps. In a power struggle between FEMA and the FBI, FEMA was forced to turn over dossiers on more than 10,000 of these dissidents.
152 That same year FEMA drafted legislation that would be held in reserve so that in “times of crisis” Congress could have language ready to, according to Jack Anderson, the journalist who broke the story, “suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, effectively eliminate private property, abolish free enterprise, and generally clamp Americans in a totalitarian vise.”
153Floods and hurricanes, indeed.
I’ll tell you something else that does not inspire me to confidence about FEMA’s intent. Although Louis Giuffrida was in charge of FEMA for four years, from 1981 to 1985 (being forced to resign when it was learned he had used $170,000 of taxpayer money to outfit his groovy bachelor pad in Maryland
154), a search of the FEMA website for the word Giuffrida returns the error message: “No indexed terms.” He’s not there. Just like that Giuffrida disappears down the Memory Hole.
What is FEMA? Is it friendly folks who help us in times of disaster, or is it nasty plotters planning the police state, or is it somewhere in between, or is it somewhere else entirely?
I suspect the truth is close to what a friend responded when I asked her about it. She said her husband had worked often with FEMA because his job involved emergency response: “His impression is that they’re largely incompetent. But the main thing he said is that what the agency accomplishes doesn’t have so much to do with it having any sort of will (as was the case with the FBI under Hoover) but rather with the fact that FEMA is in a position to accomplish so many different things that any administration can mobilize it to do whatever it wants, whether that is to help those harmed by a hurricane or to imprison people who disagree with the rulers and generally facilitate a police state.”
We don’t really need to invoke the Committee of 300 to make FEMA a less than credible producer of a book on dam removal. Even in its capacity as insurer of floodplain dwellers FEMA spells bad news for the liberation of rivers.
If FEMA is less than credible on issues concerning dams, EPRI, the other creator of the book, has no credibility whatsoever. EPRI is the Electric Power Research Institute, self-described as “a non-profit energy research consortium for the benefit of utility members . . .” Yes, the hydrologist evidently believed that an organization created explicitly for the benefit of the electrical industry could be relied upon to be truthful concerning the relationship between dams (many of which provide hydroelectricity) and rivers. We may as well ask Jack the Ripper about gender relations. Does anyone want to guess what sort of recommendations EPRI makes concerning dams and the health of rivers? Let’s let EPRI speak for itself as to what it does, and what motivates it: it “provides the knowledge, tools, and expertise you need to build competitive advantage, address environmental challenges, open up new business opportunities, and meet the needs of your energy customers. . . . Whether you are looking for ways to cut operation and maintenance costs, increase revenues, find cost-effective environmental solutions, or develop new markets and opportunities for the future, EPRI delivers solutions that work for you.” In this description, I see plenty of explicit concern for money, for lowering costs and increasing revenues, for gaining “competitive advantage,” for meeting the “needs” of energy customers. But I see no concern for the well-being of rivers and the fish whose lives depend on them. Dying rivers and extirpated fish are at best “challenges” to which EPRI must find “cost-effective environmental solutions.”
155Another Heinz foundation trustee is Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund (which despite its name has received funding from such organizations as the far right Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation). Here is what PR Watch, a project that “investigates and exposes how the public relations industry and other professional propagandists manipulate public information, perceptions and opinion on behalf of governments and special interests,”
156 has to say about Krupp: “One of [PR guru Peter] Sandman’s protégés, Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund has carved out a niche for his organization as a ‘pragmatic’ dealmaker willing to sit down with corporations and negotiate environmental ‘solutions.’”
157Instead of taking out a dam, I’m supposed to sit down with corporate heads and hammer out a deal where they pay for yet another study while the salmon go extinct. I guess then we could get on with living.
No, thank you.
Things keep getting worse. One of the book’s authors is Thomas C. Downs of the law and public relations firm Patton Boggs (with clients including Angola’s national oil company, Texaco, ExxonMobil, Shell, W. R. Grace, Peru, Qatar, and many others). This is Patton Boggs self-description: “Through nearly four decades of practice, we have established a reputation for cutting-edge advocacy by working closely with Congress and regulatory agencies in Washington, litigating in courts across the country, and crafting business transactions around the world. Patton Boggs began as an international law firm concentrating in global business and trade. Founded in 1962 by James R. Patton, Jr., and joined soon after by George Blow and then Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., we have maintained our strong concentration in international and trade law with over 200 international clients from over 70 countries. Patton Boggs, for example, has participated in the formation of every major multilateral trade agreement considered by Congress.” I can’t speak for you, but I don’t particularly want a law firm which lobbied for GATT, NAFTA, FTAA, etc.—and is proud of it—determining whether salmon survive. The website also states: “If the law appears to be the problem, Patton Boggs is well positioned to help effect a change. For example, in a dispute with the Department of Energy and a major aeronautics manufacturer over the threatened loss of valuable trade secrets and confidential data, the Department initially claimed it had no jurisdiction to consider the matter. We secured an amendment to an appropriations bill that not only conferred jurisdiction on the Department of Energy, but also directed it to solve our client’s problem. Not surprisingly, our client obtained all the relief it originally sought.”
158The question is, as always, what do you want? What are your goals? What is important to you? If your goals are to increase revenues, that is what you will do. If your goals are to cut costs, that is what you will do.
The natural world is not valued within this culture except as it can be considered resources convertible to cash.
There was something else about this book that saddened me—besides the content that followed the book’s industry sponsorship. It was the book’s dedication. The book was partly the result of a conference held on September 11-12, 2001. The dedication states, “None of us will forget where we were on September 11, 2001, nor will we forget the thousands of lives lost as a result of such senseless and brutal acts. We dedicate this report to the victims and their families and to the courageous firefighters, police, and rescue teams from New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.”
This was ostensibly a book about dam removal. It was not a book about New York City, airplane safety, or hijackers. Dead people in New York City, Washington, D.C., or Pennsylvania have nothing to do with this book. Dead rivers do. But dead rivers were not mentioned in the dedication. Because they are not important to these people. As I read this book, I kept wondering how it would have been different had the authors cared and dared to dedicate it to the salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, and lamprey killed by dams. The authors remember where they were on September 11, 2001, but do they even remember the date that the Grand Coulee Dam closed off the Columbia? How about the date the Iron Gate closed off the Klamath? They say they will never forget “the thousands of lives lost as a result of such senseless and brutal acts,” yet they forget the many millions of humans and nonhumans destroyed by the senseless acts of civilization, and particularly by the senseless and compulsive acts of dam building. Even if we confine this to humans, how different would this book have been had they dedicated it not to the few thousand killed on 9/11 but to the 40 to 80 million people displaced by dams worldwide? That would have been a dam removal book worth reading.
But of course the authors forget all of this. The primary purpose of the book was never to truly explore whether removing dams is good for rivers, any more than the primary purpose of capitalist media is to convey information useful to individual and communal health, any more than the primary purpose of discourse within an abusive family is to facilitate healthy familial relationships. Henry Adams had it right when he wrote, “The press is the hired agent of a monied system, set up for no other reason than to tell lies where the interests are concerned.” Indeed, telling lies where the interests are concerned is the primary function of all discourse within an abusive structure. This applies to books as well, including those put out by FEMA, EPRI, and the Heinz Foundation. The primary purpose of Dam Removal was to convince people that something is being done about the murder of the planet. If the interests and their experts were doing nothing, then we would know we have to stop the murder ourselves. But if they are doing something—anything—then both we and they can relax, because the experts are taking care of the problem. “See,” they can say and we can hear, “we put out a book on dam removal. We’re working on it. Have patience. Trust us.”
I no longer have patience. I no longer have trust. I no longer have time. Nor do salmon, sturgeon, or the others.
It’s a rigged game. It is now, and within this culture it always has been. So long as this culture stands it always will be. The primary basis for dam removal decision-making by the powers that be is cost-benefit analysis, and the analyses are always—always—stacked in favor of the powers that be. If you are one of them you count. If you’re not, you don’t.
The game just got even more rigged. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle carried an article headlined: “Bush would give dam owners special access: Proposed Interior Dept. rule could mean millions for industry.” The article begins: “The Bush administration has proposed giving dam owners the exclusive right to appeal Interior Department rulings about how dams should be licensed and operated on U.S. rivers through a little-noticed regulatory tweak that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the hydropower industry.
“The proposal would prevent states, Indian tribes and environmental groups from making their own appeals, while granting dam owners the opportunity to take their complaints—and suggested solutions—directly to senior political appointees in the Interior Department.”
Later, it states, “The proposed rule comes at a pivotal time in the history of the hydropower industry. Most privately owned dams were built—and granted 30- to 50-year federal licenses—in an era before federal environmental laws required protection for fish and other riverine life. In the next 15 years, licenses for more than half of the country’s privately owned dams will come up for renewal.
“The hydropower industry has complained that to comply with the law and renew their licenses with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, dam owners are being forced to pay large settlements to mitigate the environmental harm that dams cause fish and communities that depend on fish.”
The purpose of the proposed regulation should be clear: “‘It allows industry to go in and speak their piece without having to deal with the concerns of all the other stakeholders along a river,’ said an Interior Department official who has worked for many years on the dam relicensing process and who asked not to be identified by name, also for fear of retaliation.
159“The hydropower licensing law was written in 1920, and the industry had few problems with it for nearly six decades—until tribes and environmental groups figured out how to use the law in a way that cost the industry a lot of money.”
160Or in a way that would help fish. Or in a way that would help local communities. Or in a way that would help rivers. Or in a way that would help landbases.
Any time any of us figure out how to use their rules to stop the destruction of all we hold dear, those in power change the rules. Why would those in power allow activities that undercut their own power? The purpose of the rules was never to actually protect us or those we love, but rather to provide the illusion of protection. So long as we continue to mistake the illusion of protection for actual protection, all that we love will continue to be destroyed.
Would you believe me if I told you that the game just got even more rigged? Did you believe that possible? Today there was an article in The New York Times entitled, “U.S. Rules Out Dam Removal to Aid Salmon.”
The article begins, “The Bush administration on Tuesday ruled out the possibility of removing federal dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers to protect 11 endangered species of salmon and steelhead, even as a last resort.
“In an opinion issued by the fisheries division of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government declared that the eight large dams on the lower stretch of the two rivers are an immutable part of the salmon’s environment.”
161You read that correctly. According to the federal government, according to this government of occupation, dams are an immutable part of the Columbia. The artifacts of this culture are more important than the landbase.
How could we have ever been so foolish as to expect anything else?
Part of the federal report stated, “It is clear that each of the dams already exists, and their existence is beyond the present discretion” of federal agencies to reverse.
The authors of this opinion are correct. Each of these dams already exists. I suppose we should be glad they at least noticed. Yet if the federal government states explicitly that the existence of these dams “is beyond the present discretion” of the federal government to remove, perhaps just this once we ought to take them at their word, and when time after time they have done the wrong thing perhaps this once—and then every time—we should stop relying on them to do the right thing, and perhaps we should do it ourselves.
If we care about the salmon, it becomes increasingly clear what we need to do.
Here is why we need to not wait for the government to remove dams. California is considering increasing the height of the already environmentally destructive Shasta Dam, over the objections of the Wintu people. Increasing the height of the dam will further inundate places that are sacred to them, such as the place where their young women go for their first menses. The Wintu will almost undoubtedly be steamrolled, in large part because Senator Diane Feinstein is pushing hard for the dam expansion. Why? She could not be more explicit than this: “I believe it is a God-given right as Californians to be able to water gardens and lawns.”
This culture is insane. It must be stopped.
