NEWS

Monday, May 14, 2007

NYTimes on dam removal in the US Pacific Northwest

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Community: Okanagan and Kootenay

The New York Times ran a nice article on Sunday reporting on the growing momentum to remove dams from prominent rivers in the US Pacific Northwest: On the Snake River, Dam’s Natural Allies Seem to Have a Change of Heart.

Throughout the region everyone from farmers to federal judges are deciding to reconsider dams.

“I always believed dams were economically too big of a hurdle to attack,” said Mr. Jones, who is 52. “But I began to realize that we are potentially losing runs of salmon” along this tributary of the Columbia River.

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...Judge James A. Redden of the Federal District Court in Portland, who has presided over the central Endangered Species Act challenge to dam operations and whom the Vancouver Columbian called “the best friend of endangered fish in the Northwest,” has been acerbic in his dismissal of the most recent Bush Administration plan. Among other things, the administration argued that the Columbia River dams could not be removed because they were an immutable part of the landscape, having been built before the Endangered Species Act went into effect. It suggested habitat restoration would save the fish population.

The Bush administration appealed Judge Redden’s 2005 ruling, and last month the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, forcefully backed him. Under the federal government’s theory, the appeals court held, “a listed species could be gradually destroyed, so long as each step on the path to destruction is sufficiently modest. This type of slow slide into oblivion is one of the very ills the Endangered Species Act seeks to prevent.”

On the lower Snake River, four runs of wild fish are threatened and one of these, sockeye salmon, may be irretrievable. Of the others, the spring and summer Chinook salmon, which have been going upriver for the past few weeks, are of most concern.