The four lower Snake River dams in Washington State have blocked salmon migration since the 1970s. Fifteen federal studies have identified dam removal as the most effective path to recovery. The Southern Resident orca population stands at seventeen. The dams are still there. The following is Kaya Ironfeather's response.
The document is dated March 14, 2019. It is 412 pages long. The relevant section begins on page 214, paragraph 3, and reads as follows: removal of the four lower Snake River dams remains the most effective single action available to restore Chinook salmon populations to levels sufficient to support recovery of Southern Resident killer whales.
I have read this document. I have read the fourteen documents that preceded it. I have read the agency responses, the stakeholder consultations, the environmental impact statements, and the letters from the congressional delegation. I have read the press releases.
The dams are still there.
Let me tell you what the dams mean. The Snake River once produced more Chinook salmon than any river system in the interior Pacific Northwest. The Chinook fed the Southern Resident orcas, who are dying. They fed the bears. They fed the eagles. They fed the river itself — their bodies, decomposing in the shallows, returning the ocean's nutrients to the forest, cycling the deep-sea minerals into the soil of mountains that have never touched the coast. They fed everything, the way keystone things feed everything, invisibly, until they stop.
The four dams on the lower Snake River produce approximately four percent of the region's electricity. Four percent. The document on page 214 notes this. The document notes that this electricity could be replaced through a combination of renewable sources and efficiency improvements at a cost that it then quantifies, carefully, over several pages. The document is thorough. The document is honest. The document concludes what fourteen previous documents concluded.
The dams are still there.
I want to name some names. This is not something the document does, because documents of this kind do not name names — they refer to agencies, to administrations, to stakeholders, to interested parties, to the congressional delegation, which is a phrase that means specific people who have made specific decisions and would prefer not to be attached to those decisions by name in a federal document.
I am not a federal document.
Senator A voted against dam removal in 2021 citing energy security concerns, six months after accepting $340,000 in campaign contributions from agricultural irrigation interests who depend on the reservoir system. Representative B issued a statement in 2022 expressing support for salmon recovery while co-sponsoring legislation that made dam removal subject to a fifteen-year review process. The Army Corps of Engineers completed its 2023 feasibility study and recommended a further study. The further study is ongoing.
In 2024, seventeen Southern Resident orcas remained. The population needs a minimum of viable breeding pairs to sustain itself. The scientists know the number. The document on page 214 knows the number. Everyone knows the number.
The Chinook are not returning on their own. They cannot pass the dams. They have been trying for eighty years and they cannot pass the dams. A fish ladder is not a solution to a dam the way a bandage is not a solution to a structural problem with a building. It addresses the symptom with the precision of something designed to make the addressing visible without making it effective.
I fish this river. I have fished it for nineteen years and I have watched the Chinook runs diminish in a way that is not an impression or a feeling but a measurable, documented, agency-verified fact that is noted on page 214 and on the pages of thirteen documents before it. I know what a full river looks like. I know what this river looks like now.
Here is what will happen next. There will be another study. The study will find what the previous studies found. There will be a stakeholder process. The stakeholders will disagree, because some of them measure the river in salmon and some of them measure it in kilowatt hours and some of them measure it in the value of irrigated cropland, and these measurements are not reconcilable, and the process is not designed to reconcile them. It is designed to continue.
The document is still dated March 14, 2019. It has not changed. It says what it says. The dams are still there.
Page 214. Paragraph 3. Read it.
Photo: Ben Herndon
Kaya was born near the mouth of the Columbia during the salmon wars of the 2010s. She covers fisheries policy, Indigenous land rights, and the particular absurdity of being a national symbol for a country that poisoned her species with DDT and nearly finished the job with dam policy. She writes with altitude — literally and figuratively. She has seen a lot from up there.
All dispatches from Kaya Ironfeather →