Aerial view of the Elwha nearshore (April 2016) by Sam Beebe
Summary
In this conclusion to our series on dam removal, we travel from the Klamath up to the Olympic Peninsula, and the site of the former Elwha and Glines Canyon dams. What did it actually take to bring the dams down, and what lessons can we take forward to other ambitious ecosystem renewal projects? This is the second episode of a 2-part series. Part 1 is here.
Corrections to this episode:
While salmon fry may have to contend with hungry bass in other river systems, the Elwha is not one of them.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife releases specifically Chinook salmon into the Elwha river.
Show Notes
This episode features Anne Shaffer (Marine Biologist and Executive Director of the Coastal Watershed Institute), Dave Parks (Hydrogeologist at the Washington Department of Natural Resources), Ryan Hilperts (Director of the Redfish School of Change), and Erika Terence (Development Program Director at the Mid Klamath Watershed Council).
Special thanks to Schuyler Lindberg, Vincent van Haaff, Jose Isordia, Kirsty Johnstone Munroe Cameron, Ilana Fonariov, and Andrjez Kozlowski.
Music for this episode was produced by Radioactive Bishop, Kieran Fearing, and Sunfish Moonlight.
A lot of research goes into each episode of Future Ecologies, including great journalism from a variety of media outlets, and we like to cite our sources:
Hilperts, Ryan Laurel., and Eric Higgs. “The Elwha River Restoration: Challenges and Opportunities for Community Engagement.” 2010.
Love, Robin Milton. Probably More than You Want to Know about the Fishes of the Pacific Coast. Really Big Press, 1996.
“Olympic National Park to Get $54.7 Million in Federal Stimulus Funds.” The Seattle Times, 22 Apr. 2009, www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/olympic-national-park-to-get-547-million-in-federal-stimulus-funds/.
Parks, D. S. “Bluff Recession in the Elwha and Dungeness Littoral Cells, Washington, USA.” Environmental & Engineering Geoscience, vol. 21, no. 2, Jan. 2015, pp. 129–146., doi:10.2113/gseegeosci.21.2.129.
Shaffer, J. Anne, et al. “Large-Scale Dam Removals and Nearshore Ecological Restoration: Lessons Learned from the Elwha Dam Removals.” Ecological Restoration, vol. 35, no. 2, Aug. 2017, pp. 87–101., doi:10.3368/er.35.2.87.
This episode includes soundscape audio recorded by Andrzej Kozlowski. It also includes audio recorded by sidhozen, Sonic-ranger, rfhache, lttldude9, HonorHunter, and klankbeeld, protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses, and accessed through the Freesound Project. A heartfelt thanks to klankbeeld, whose underwater sounds pack made this episode a pleasure to mix.
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. Our website is futureecologies.net. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, iNaturalist, Soundcloud and Youtube. We’re an independent production, and you can support us on Patreon - our supporters have access to cool supporter-only mini-episodes and other perks.
Future Ecologies is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil- Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
This season of Future Ecologies is supported in part by the Vancouver Foundation. Learn more at https://vancouverfoundationsmallarts.ca/.
Your hosts, in our field recording studio / windbreak. Photo by Anne Shaffer
Transcription
Mendel Skulski 00:00
Hey! Welcome back. This is part two of our two part series on dams. We're calling this episode Rushing Downriver.
Music 00:09
[Sploosh, with watery noises underscoring]
Mendel Skulski 00:10
If you haven't already listened to part one, you might want to put this on pause while you go get caught up.
Music 00:14
[Watery noise picks up into steady, synthy music with gusts of wind and cunching of sand coming in the interview]
Anne Shaffer 00:34
But you guys should see this, I mean-
Dave Parks 00:36
So right here was there shore face, prior to dam removal.
Mendel Skulski 00:42
Wow . . . wow.
Dave Parks 00:44
Yeah. So prior to the dam removal, this was the-we would be in about 10 feet of water right here and the beach ended right there, former shoreline.
Mendel Skulski 00:57
This is something like 400 or 500 feet of sandbar sedimentation has come in the last six years.
Anne Shaffer 01:05
[The riverbed] was raised by three meters and then pushed off 100 meters. So the actual river mouth is 100 meters North of where it was and then deposited this delta of about 100 acres.
Mendel Skulski 01:20
That's interesting.
Adam Huggins 01:21
In that protective nook.
Mendel Skulski 01:23
Okay, perfect. Ok what's the best? Best to have the mic in the nook and then...
Adam Huggins 01:28
Oh my goodness, yes. That's a great spot.
Mendel Skulski 01:31
[Laughs] There we go.
Mendel Skulski 01:32
[Only the steady, synthy music underscores now]
Anne Shaffer 01:34
So there are a few, there like a fistful of lessons, that have come from the Elwha. And the two that I try to impart every time I talk to somebody about the project is: these projects take a long time. They take a long time-they shouldn't-they're-it's not rocket science, this isn't, but they do. So-so you can't give up. You just can't.
Music 02:00
[Music deepens with popping before dropping into an intense, chilling electronic song with ecoing snaps and seagulls]
Introduction voiceover 02:20
Broadcasting from Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unseeded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples, this is Future Ecologies, where your hosts, Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski, explore the future of human habitation on planet earth through ecology, design, and sound.
Mendel Skulski 02:53
Before the break, you heard Adam and I getting introduced to the Pacific Northwest's newest beach. It's located at the mouth of the Elwha River, which is on the northern end of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. Elwha's scenario is actually quite different from the Klamath. This whole battle took place inside of a national park, plus the nearshore, with a very different set of stakeholders. It wasn't a case of farmers versus fishermen. In fact, in some ways, it may have been much simpler. But still, the dam removal wasn't settled practically until the walls came down. In this episode, we'll move from the uncertain future of the Klamath River to a watershed in the midst of recovery, examining what it took to reach dam removal, and what happened afterwards.
Music 03:48
[Water over riverrocks washes over previous music]
Mendel Skulski 03:49
Our tour guides were Anne Shaffer:
Anne Shaffer 03:52
I'm Anne Shaffer, I'm the lead scientist and executive director of the Coastal Watershed Institute...
Mendel Skulski 03:58
...and her husband, Dave Parks:
Dave Parks 04:00
I'm Dave Parks. I'm a geologist with the Washington Department of Natural Resources and a cooperator with the Coastal Watershed Institute.
Music 04:08
[Cyclical, tapping music underscores]
Mendel Skulski 04:10
The Elwha River was host to two dams, known as the Elwha and the Glines Canyon Dams. Both were built in the early 20th century in the hydroelectric craze which swept North America, and they were demolished in 2012 and 2014, at the conclusion of a bitter, multi-decade fight for their removal. The Elwha Dam was constructed between 1910 and 1914, six years before the existence of the Federal Power Commission, so the Elwha Dam predated the requirement for an operating license. It didn't, however, predate the laws requiring fish passage; it just ignored them.
Music 04:51
[Music shines through with brighter tonal chords]
Mendel Skulski 04:53
And construction was shoddy. The dam was built on gravel, not bedrock. The lower section blew out after a heavy rain in 1912. In case you don't already know, the Elwha Watershed is the homeland of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, a sovereign nation recognized by the US Federal Government. The 1912 failure of the Elwha Dam is known to the Klallam as "the day the fish were in the trees"-several homes were destroyed in the flood. And despite this, the dam was a financial success. The owners of the Elwha Dam courted investors to build a second dam, further upriver. The Glines Canyon Dam was built by 1927. While the Elwha Dam put the Klallam under personal peril, the Glines Canyon Dam delivered spiritual violence: flooding the valley where it was said, the creator pulled the Klallam from the Earth.
Music 05:44
[A mournful nighttime howl or birdcall is heard, then the music is replaced with only undercurrents of water and dripping]
Adam Huggins 05:54
First: Darkness.
Music 05:56
[Angelic tones, like stained glass and summertime join in the following audio]
Adam Huggins 06:01
Then slowly: Orange. There is only Orange and the taste of Salt, the taste of Yearning. Your whole world is a sphere; jostled gently by the current, but your Waters are still. Your body is not still, you wiggle and stretch, testing your limits, pining to be free.
Music 06:03
[Deep synthy tones harmonize the angelic ones]
Adam Huggins 06:31
Beyond your sphere, your eyes resolve the movements of others. Your Sisters, your Brothers, thousands of siblings, quietly growing in the cold water, in the gravel bed, biding their time.
Adam Huggins 06:45
[Music resolves into a meloncholy piano]
Mendel Skulski 06:53
As early as the 1960s the effect of the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams on salmon populations was already clear. As with the Klamath Dams, the opportunity for any sort of change would come with a cycle of FERC relicensing. Remember, all dams need to be periodically relicensed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, for short.
Ryan Hilperts 07:15
As the relicensing date was coming up, there was this-there was this coalition of people that came together in favor of making recommendations for the salmon to be returned. And so, it was the Sierra Club, the Friends of the Earth, Seattle Audubon and Olympic Park associates, which is an organization, that's a citizen organization that's interested in preserving and helping out the Olympic Park. They collaborated together to intervene in the FERC relicensing so it didn't just get to be a rubber stamp operation, these-these groups of activists and people had made a coalition and they intervened there. And so it sparked a big debate and so it was through, the through the 80s that that, as the licensing process was happening, there was this big debate being built about whether or not the dams could be made reasonable for ecological health or if they should be taken out altogether.
Music 08:18
[Heavy beat with echoing claps starts underscoring]
Mendel Skulski 08:20
That's Ryan Hilperts. She's an instructor at the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, and director of the Red Fish School of Change. You may recall her voice from the top of part one, speaking about restory-ing landscapes, as a way to build our relationships with the places around us, but more on that later. In the lead up to the demolition of the Elwha Dams, Ryan researched the relationship between community engagement and the long term success of large-scale ecological restoration projects. Generations had passed since the dams had been built. Locals on the Olympic Peninsula had grown up with the reservoirs and had fond memories of swimming and fishing on these young lakes, the electricity the dams provided had supported the regional industry through the 20th century: forestry especially.
Ryan Hilperts 09:07
I did get the sense that . . . that there's a bit of a cultural shift happening on the Olympic Peninsula. And people have lived who have lived there for generations had the-had the memories in their families of the Park's annexation of a lot of private land. And, you know, so, so, aside from the whole Elwha project, the National Park well, you know, it wasn't always just a national park, people live there. And as the National Parks' boundaries sort of expanded over the years, they would, they bought a bunch of inholdings in the park. And people have opinions about that, you know, and so I think there's a bit of that, there's a thread of that that was a part of what people felt in opposition. And then also, you know, in the 90s, logging on the peninsula, was a really important industry and then through the 90s there was this whole thing that happened with the Spotted Owl in the forest [Spotted Owl cry] there, it's on the endangered species list and it created-the creation of the Northwest Forest Plan and really severely impacted the logging industry on the peninsula. And there's a perception here, I think a pretty accurate perception, that those changes came about from federal agencies and organizations, of people, environmental organizations, people who don't actually live on the Olympic Peninsula who live in Seattle, and live in Washington, DC, and organize for conservation purposes. And I think people on the Peninsula in the 90s and into the 2000s . . . still felt that they were in the crosshairs of-of that struggle over what can be done on the land.
Mendel Skulski 10:49
Tensions over the removal of the dams eventually grew into a national, partisan battle. Many people of Port Angeles felt threatened by the changes called for by environmentalists. They appeared as outsiders, happy to cast opinions about a cloudy coast, they may never have visited, homesteads and lands had once been annexed and absorbed into Olympic National Park, and the memory of that loss had not yet faded.
Ryan Hilperts 11:11
And people love the Peninsula because they love the place and they love the land and they love the forest and they engage with the land, you know. And then the park is a-park is a magnet for people from all these other places to come. And it's managed by people from other places and people who work the park. Some of them stay there for their whole careers, but a lot of you know the Parkies, in Port Angeles, come in seasonally, and leave so there's a bit of a-I don't want to over characterize that divide-but-but there is a bit of a divide there that I think . . . breeds a bit of a . . . suspicion or . . . resentment is kind of a strong word, but just protectiveness of autonomy that's challenged by having big federal agency control, like a majority of the land that's near where you live.
Music 12:07
[Silence, then a gentle trickling of a riffle]
Adam Huggins 12:24
Weeks have passed. The Yolk is gone. Your egg, dissolved. The light of the shallows beckons. You and your fellow fry have developed a taste for insects humming at the water's surface. Life is easy and playful. The water is sweet and fresh. After only days, a few impatient siblings head downriver into the unknown. [Bubble noise] You will stay for a few months. Some may linger for several years.
Music 12:59
[Trickling riffle gives way into an upbeat electronic beat]
Mendel Skulski 13:06
But after decades of debate, the National Park Service finally came out in favor of dam removal in the early 1990s.
Ryan Hilperts 13:13
Some of the arguments that were really effectively made were that the cost of bringing it up to code essentially, out, you know, outweighed any of the benefits of having the dams in place. They weren't, by that point, they weren't producing very much electricity for the North Olympic Peninsula. They had originally been built to help kind of prop up this timber industry. And they were supplying electricity to the mills and things like that. And at this-by this point in history, that power was coming from someplace else, and there wasn't as much, as much need for them. So there's-there were pragmatic reasons that it didn't make sense to upgrade the dams.
Mendel Skulski 13:54
Then in 1992, president George H.W. Bush signed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act. With that, came federal authorization to identify a path to full restoration of the river.
Music 14:10
[Upbeat electronic beat breaks through]
Mendel Skulski 14:13
Rivers are the link between land and sea. No ecosystem could ever be considered simple, but rivers present uniquely challenging restoration projects. Rivers pass sediment, wood, and nutrients downstream, dropping debris along their banks-home to staggering biodiversity. And some nutrients return to the land, in the form of salmon and other anadromous fish migrating up the river to spawn and die.
Music 14:37
[Upbeat music then fades into riffle trickling noises]
Adam Huggins 14:52
You and your fellow fry learn quickly in the clear, cold, sweet waters of your home. For now, you look more like a tiny glimmer of silver than the King Salmon you will become. To survive until then, you must be fast. The Goals will not reach you behind boulders, the mouths of hungry Bass and Sculpins can't chase you under branches. Gifts of safety from upriver. Floods threatened to wash you away before your time, but you find refuge in the many side channels. Life is dangerous, but the river provides.
Mendel Skulski 15:26
At the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula, just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Vancouver Island, Port Angeles is 15 minutes from the Elwha River. Living and working in Port Angeles since the early 1990s, Anne Schaefer and Dave Parks have been studying the Elwha nearshore, where the river meets the ocean.
Music 15:56
[Gentle wind and waves backdrop the audio]
Anne Shaffer 15:57
The first time I heard about the dam removal project, we were living in Seattle, and I think I don't even remember who I'd heard about it from. But I was interested in doing a study looking at the estuary prior to the dam removal happening. This was-this was prior to the actual enabling legislation, which was in 1992. And one of my first recollections of the project was arguing with the project manager, Brian Winter, at the National Park, who, and I'll never forget it, stated, quote, unquote, "that the near shore was not a part of the project". And so from that day forward, it was a very keen focus of mine, as a marine biologist, to-to really get a handle and some vision on the near shore aspect of the dam removal project.
Mendel Skulski 16:51
Biodiversity flourishes at boundaries, where different environments blur together. The nearshore is no exception.
Anne Shaffer 16:59
And the nearshore system is such a critical component to all the species that are at the heart of the rest-or ecosystem restoration project.
Mendel Skulski 17:08
The nearshore is a place for young anadromous fish to adapt from river life to the open ocean. It's hosts to incredible numbers of algae, invertebrates and plants. And it's the foundation of the food web for many birds; the jurisdiction for dam removal had been defined by the borders of the Olympic National Park, which does not include the river mouth and the nearshore. Despite that, Anne knew that categorically ignoring the estuary would be a glaring omission in the project, and a huge missed opportunity for research.
Anne Shaffer 17:39
There were elements to it that nobody was looking at, and one of the most basic questions of what is the relative contribution of the river and the bluffs to the sediment dynamics of the littoral system? And nobody could answer that, which is shocking when you think about the scale of the project and that was going to unfold and in the important thing to remember with the Elwha project is it's a sediment project. And so when you release two dams, you do restore the fish passage aspect but that's not the critical ecosystem component to it, it's the real linking of the hydrodynamic processes, and that translates to the nearshore as well.
Adam Huggins 18:19
When you say, you say, "littoral", you're not meaning literally?
Anne Shaffer 18:23
The littoral system.
Dave Parks 18:25
Littoral: L-I-T-T-O-R-A-L.
Music 18:28
[Electronic swaying music enters]
Mendel Skulski 18:32
The littoral system essentially means: the shoreline. It includes the waters of the intertidal and the shallow edge of the ocean.
Music 18:48
[Holds a slightly, discordant tone, rising in pitch before fading into a triumphant piano]
Adam Huggins 19:01
One night-restless-you feel a call for change.
Adam Huggins 19:07
Tail first, by moonlight. You let the current carry you.
Adam Huggins 19:16
You wind downriver past eddies, over riffles, rapids, and falls.
Music 19:21
[Piano fades under and plays steadily with riverwater sounds]
Adam Huggins 19:24
You notice a new taste . . . No.
Adam Huggins 19:28
An old taste. The first taste: Salt. You've reached the estuary, where Sweetwater meets the Sea. You'll rest here a while, learn to eat crustaceans and grow.
Music 19:45
[Piano plays with some small oceanic noises and long, sustained tones, then into watery noises]
Anne Shaffer 19:55
So many of the species that are central to the nearshore ecosystem restoration project have life history phases that are literally dependent on the nearshore. So the juvenile salmon that are outmigrating from the river, use the near shore to rear, to feed, to rest, and to transition into their marine and offshore phases. There are smelt species that are anadromous that will migrate along the shoreline and then come up the river to spawn, there are lamprey species that are very critical to the ecosystem of the watershed. And then there are also smelt species that will use the shoreline for migration and spawning-they actually spawn on intertidal beaches, as do Sand Lance-and those are collectively called forage fish, and forage fish are the basis, for again, our coastal system, everything from, you know, salmon to killer whales depend on them. So and, without the nearshore, we don't have the species, we just don't have them.
Mendel Skulski 20:55
The nearshore, the estuary is built out of sediment, erosion in the watershed, which ends up at the river mouth as silt and sand. The amount of sediment at the nearshore is in equilibrium; it's replenished by the river and washed away by the tides. When a dam is built, this balance is lost; sediment accumulates behind the dam and the beautiful, complex nearshore ebbs away.
Anne Shaffer 21:21
It's a key component to the ecosystem. It's its own zone in the ecosystem, and without it, the rest of the watershed doesn't function.
Mendel Skulski 21:30
Of course, to understand the estuary and the pressures put upon it by the dam, it takes significant resources: time, personnel, and of course, funding.
Music 21:41
[Deep, echoing electronic music with snaps is recalled]
Mendel Skulski 21:43
Anne and Dave made a personal commitment to study the nearshore and the Klallan were doing the same. But as long as funding remained uncertain, no university would spare a grad student. There was no institutional support to study the Elwha nearshore.
Music 21:57
[Music fades back to running water]
Anne Shaffer 21:59
Enabling legislation was enacted in 1992. That legislation was actually the resolution of a lawsuit by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe against the Olympic National Park for violating their Treaty Trust Responsibility. The dam removal legislation was a settlement of that lawsuit. So that was enacted in 1992, and then it took 25 years of planning and political, you know, shenanigans, and it was a long, long process, it took 13 appropriations. And for those of us that worked on the project over its entirety, we never knew if or when the project was actually going to happen.
Mendel Skulski 22:42
Then in 2009, the Obama administration issued an economic stimulus package, which included $54 million for the Olympic National Park, much of which was earmarked for the dam removals. From there, the race was on, to collect as much baseline data as possible.
Anne Shaffer 23:00
But as soon as the final pieces of funding dropped into place, everybody was out here. So a lot of the data sets start about two years before the dam removal. And there, we started getting a lot of the nearshore data. So then you start seeing some of these other richer data sets. And so that was really what did it-it was-it was that last gap in the funding, when that dropped into place, bam, everybody was out here.
Mendel Skulski 23:29
Most of what we know about the state of the river prior to dam removal comes from only 18 months of data between the stimulus package and the start of demolition. Finally, almost exactly a century after they were built, the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams were carefully broken apart. Once again, the Elwha River flowed free and 100 years of sediment was released.
Anne Shaffer 23:57
And I have to say ever since that project, every time I hear a jackhammer, [Jackhammer rattles away] I just, it just warms my heart, [Laughs] you know which I've never had that attitude before, so.
Music 24:11
[Deep, clacking tones from the depths echo into silence]
Adam Huggins 24:20
You make your rounds through the shallows and sandbanks: patterns that shift, but always repeat. You notice some krill in the shallows, but they're not worth your while. A shimmer catches your eye, a school of smelt, you flank them, deftly into a corner and snatch one to make your meal. It dawns on you that you no longer fit as easily into the side channels, under the branches, or behind the boulders. It hardly matters. Predators rarely bother you these days. You've grown, and your power has grown with you. Your estuary once so large and Labyrinthine has softened in its mystery, your next move is upon you, and you venture out into the depths.
Music 25:09
[The same tones are sounded again, gently underscoring]
Mendel Skulski 25:16
And just as soon as the dam came down, the fish were back.
Dave Parks 25:21
As soon as, as soon as you pull the dam out, those the fish are in there, just how fast these habitats become used. They they make use of the available habitat very quickly. Some within, literally within hours-
Anne Shaffer 25:38
-We've seen a transition. And almost immediately, we saw this whole new . . . It was like Christmas.
Mendel Skulski 25:46
Animals that had never been seen before in the nearshore were suddenly being documented. Fish like hooligan, redside shiner and lamprey.
Anne Shaffer 25:54
Now the sense is, my intuition, just from working out here for so long-and the data are starting to show it-things seem to be stabilizing.
Mendel Skulski 26:02
But the story of a river renewal is almost as nuanced as the river itself.
Anne Shaffer 26:07
But the other feature that dominates, and this is what we've seen from our sampling, that dominates the system are the hatcheries. We have two hatcheries that operate in the Lower Elwha. One's operated by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, and they release Coho and Steelhead, and then the other is the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife hatchery and they release upwards of 2 million.
Mendel Skulski 26:30
And the return of the nearshore has created habitat for more than just fish and shorebirds. The Pacific Northwest's newest beach has become a quick hit with the local human population.
Anne Shaffer 26:42
As this delta evolves and grows-it's grown by just about 80 acres-it's become very popular for people, and it's basically become a dog park. And so now we're having this intersection between the evolving and restoring ecosystem-
Adam Huggins 27:01
-and canines-
Anne Shaffer 27:03
-and people that own them.
Music 27:06
[Dogs barking, then pointed synth music fades in]
Mendel Skulski 27:07
It's all too easy to think of ecosystem restoration as a time machine, a way to turn back the clock and undo the damage we've sown in our Industrial Age. But that's not how dynamic systems work. The conditions are different now. And change, begets change.
Anne Shaffer 27:25
The thing that we really have to now again, we're having to manage for, is because this has become such a destination. Now, like I say, immediately what's happening is people are challenging it again. So in ways that I don't think they would have otherwise because there is such a nice beach here and it, you know, it does have the caché, the Elwha caché. So now we are seeing, you know, extra development, extra, you know, increase in real estate rates.
Mendel Skulski 27:53
The near shoreprovides all sorts of ecosystem services, some of which have direct impacts to human capital. A healthy near shore comes with flood protection and short breaks, making coastal development that much more appealing.
Music 28:16
[Music breaks through before dropping and flattening into a deep twinkling night like the depths of the sea]
Adam Huggins 28:20
Out at sea, the world is deep and boundless. Your juvenile years are a distant memory. you've traveled, seen wonders, monsters, and sights beyond imagination. You rise towards the waves and feel a small tug inside of you. A magnet in your mind, your blood pulses with new hormones, and you can feel them rebuilding your body one cell at a time. You recall a faraway taste.
Adam Huggins 28:53
You're going home.
Music 29:09
[Low, profound tones underscore]
Mendel Skulski 29:20
In as much as ecosystem restoration is a human project, the measure of its success lives in the minds of people, especially those who call that land home. This kind of success is not based on data points, and checklists, and mandates. It's sustained by the stories we tell our personal connection to our world. Ryan Hilperts explains:
Music 29:41
[Deep, pulsing music from Part 1: Swimming Upstream is recalled]
Ryan Hilperts 29:42
As we build relationships with each other through story, we build relationship with place through story. And, you know, the places where people are building stories. And building relationship with place I think is, this sort of like, the connective tissue of of what the potential focal restoration can be, you know, in the, in the: we build a web and a reciprocity with land when we and water when we-when we know it in the way that it's a character in our stories and we're a character in its story.
Music 30:17
[Resonant, acoustic notes begin and reverberate]
Mendel Skulski 30:22
Realistically, major projects such as dam removals, require huge budgets, planning and clear definitions. These projects can only be taken on by government-scale entities. Their approach to restoration is necessarily bureaucratic and technological, and it seems like the only way to marshal the people and the resources required.
Ryan Hilperts 30:41
That's not to say that people who work professionally in restoration, don't have stories with place, you know, but if we, but if we can see the restoration in the way it excludes people who aren't engaged with it professionally, then-then we lose this opportunity to build all that: that web of support for a place, for communities to.
Mendel Skulski 31:03
So, focal community engagement means talking about the land, making art about the land, and above all, getting as many people as possible to have experiences with the land.
Ryan Hilperts 31:15
Partnerships with unlikely partners I think is important. So, partnerships with elementary schools, and environmental education programs, and math classes, and-you know-organizations for new immigrants, like refugee support agencies, I mean, thinking outside of the box of just your conservation groups, to, to think about who, who cares for this place now and who will care for this place like, you know, finding ways to have all the different kinds of knowledge and all the different kinds of wisdom and all the different kinds of stories be a part of how decisions get made about restoration is probably what we should be aiming for. Because diversity is better. Yeah, and it's we can't be-it's like you can really put that on a checklist for restoration.
Music 32:25
[Soft, resonant acoustic notes play, before a wave washes over and somber piano from music from Part 1: Swimming Upstream is recalled]
Mendel Skulski 32:34
So, with so much uncertainty, what's the story with the Klamath now?
Adam Huggins 32:40
Well, the dams are still there. And salmon populations have reached historic lows in recent years. But even though the Klamath Basin restoration agreement fell apart after Congress blocked it, it looks like the dams might still come out. Ironically, though, some of the concessions and measures to protect farmers and irrigation districts-that were a big part of that deal-they died with it in Congress. And without those measures, many of the constituents of the representatives that torpedoed the deal are going to suffer. You might say that ideology trumps self-interest in this case.
Erica Terrence 33:16
It is a really interesting political phenomenon, and it hasn't completely played itself out, right? Like some of those guys are still in office. But there was a lot of frustration on the part of these Federal Irrigation Districts that were trying really hard to bridge this gulf between communities, and, you know, here, all these people overcame their differences and went to Congress people and said, here, we did it for you.
Adam Huggins 33:37
And even though Congress passed, there was still so much momentum for dam removal, that the primary stakeholders sat down again to figure out how to at least take the dams out, which resulted in the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement.
Erica Terrence 33:49
So now, there is an amended Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement, which is the KHSA you were talking about, and basically what happened, you know, there was a lot of campaigning political pressure put on PacifiCore that owns the dams, to the point where PacifiCore eventually said, this is not worth the bad press, we'll take dams out. So what we did as a mechanism, you know, the legislation failed in Congress. So who's gonna actually do the work? Who's going to take the dams out? It's not going to be the feds. It's not going to be tribes. So who is it going to be? And what they ended up doing was forming a corporation, right? That could take liability, that could accrue the funds, you know, and handle the money. And that's what happened. So now we have this Klamath River Renewal Corperation, which is crazy, but kind of cool, too. I mean, it is this corporate model, right? It's like a corporation built those dams and a corporation's gonna take those dams down!
Adam Huggins 34:48
There's still one last major hurdle to clear. The FERC still has to sign off on the agreement. And right now, four out of the five FERC commissioners are Trump appointees. Not the high profile ones that show up in our news feeds. But still, it's enough to make me concerned that a sort of pro-dam ideology could prevail again.
Erica Terrence 35:08
I think it is a worry, but what we've heard or had telegraphed, even out of the Trump administration, interestingly, is that they won't block it.
Adam Huggins 35:16
So if everything goes smoothly, then the dam should be coming out in 2021.
Erica Terrence 35:22
You know, there's a lot of ways to remove a dam. One of them is to like, clean everything up afterwards, right? Remove all the sediment and remove all the rebar and concrete and another one is just to like kind of blast it, leave the rubble and then that becomes like part of your stream structure, right.
Music 35:39
[Bubbly water jet washes over then a steady clapping track plays]
Erica Terrence 35:43
You know, we don't really understand . . . how to restore a system. And a lot of times the best solution is the simplest solution. You know, when you put large, woody debris in a stream, which we do deliberately to enhance fish habitat, you often don't fret too much about the placement of the logs. Which you used to do, you used to try to like fix it in permanently with rebar and yeah, and the stream is gonna blow it out in the high water anyway and put it where it wants to. And then it might blow it a mile or two downstream and then you have these things, we call them "catcher mitts" that catch other wood, which is good, we want that.
Erica Terrence 36:17
But you might as well just let the stream decide and it's probably a similar story with all the rubble from the dam, right? It's cheaper to do it that way.
Adam Huggins 36:24
Is that-is that what's gonna happen?
Erica Terrence 36:25
It looks very likely that's what's gonna happen.
Adam Huggins 36:27
Ah! So this is more the Rambo approach [Laughs]-
Erica Terrence 36:31
-yeah [Laughs]-
Adam Huggins 36:32
-to dam removal. [Laughs] the Elwha was so controlled that I watched videos of it.
Erica Terrence 36:36
Yeah! I loved watching the videos of the Elwha. This like, soothing, like ah, it can work, look at that!
Music 36:36
[Warm, glowing notes play over the steady track]
Erica Terrence 36:50
No one has, in the history of the world, has really done a dam removal this big, and they're still building them in BC and China, much larger, right? So conceivably, someday, we will be taking those out. But at this point the Elwha is the biggest in the record books and then the Klamath will be that much bigger, still.
Music 37:12
[Steady clap track and intermittent glowing notes continue, an auditory riffle plays]
Mendel Skulski 37:16
And that's it for our two part series on dams. We'll be back in a couple of weeks. If you live near a river, dammed up or otherwise, please take some time to get to know it ...
Adam Huggins 37:21
...and make some stories together.
Mendel Skulski 37:28
If you'd like to see the photo that Anne took of Adam and I in our driftwood recording studio, check out our Instagram @futureecologies.
Adam Huggins 37:35
Please tell everyone you know, subscribe, rate, and review the show wherever podcasts can be found. It really helps us get the word out.
Mendel Skulski 37:44
In this episode, you heard Anne Schaffer, Dave Parks, Ryan Hilperts and Erica Terrence.
Adam Huggins 37:50
This has been an independent production of Future Ecologies. Our first season is supported in part by the Vancouver foundation. If you'd like to help us make the show, you support us on Patreon. We have a whole series of mini episodes available to our supporters. To get access to these, head over to patreon.com/futureecologies.
Mendel Skulski 38:10
You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and iNaturalist, the handle is always futureecologies.
Adam Huggins 38:17
Special thanks to Jose Isordia, Christy Johnston Monroe Cameron,
Mendel Skulski 38:22
Nicole Jahraus, Ilana Fonariov,
Adam Huggins 38:24
Schuyler Lindberg, Vincent van Haaff, and Andrjez Kozlowski.
Mendel Skulski 38:29
Music in this episode was produced by Radioactive Bishop, Kieran Fearing, and Sunfish Moonlight. You can find a full list of musical credits, show notes, and links on our website: futureecologies.net.
Music 38:41
[Auditory riffle returns and music fades to silence]
Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited by Wren Hieu