Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities

In the Pacific Northwest, the Snake River and its wilderness tributaries were once some of the world’s greatest salmon rivers. As recently as a half century ago, they retained some of their historic bounty, with millions of fish returning to spawn. Now, due to four federal dams, the salmon population has dropped close to extinction. Efforts at salmon recovery through fish ladders, hatcheries, and even trucking them over the dams have failed.

Steven Hawley, journalist and self-proclaimed “river rat,” argues that the best hope for the Snake River lies in dam removal, a solution that pits the power authorities and Army Corps of Engineers against a collection of Indian tribes, farmers, fishermen, and river recreationists. The river’s health, as he demonstrates, is closely connected to local economies, fresh water rights, energy independence—and even the health of orca whales in Puget Sound.

The story of the Snake River, its salmon, and its people raises the fundamental questions of who should exercise control over natural resources and which interests should receive highest priority. It also offers surprising counterpoints to the notion of hydropower as a cheap, green, and reliable source of energy, and challenges the wisdom of heavily subsidized water and electricity.

This regional battle is part of an ambitious river restoration movement that stretches across the country from Maine’s Kennebec to California’s Klamath, and engages citizens from a broad social spectrum. In one successful project, the salmon of Butte Creek rebounded from a paltry fourteen fish to twenty thousand within just a few years of rewilding their river, showing the incredible resiliency of nature when given the slightest chance.

Recovering a Lost River depicts the compelling arguments and actions being made on behalf of salmon by a growing army of river warriors. Their message, persistent but disarmingly simple, is that all salmon need is water in their rivers, and a clear way home. 

Flowing through a thousand miles of the American West, from Wyoming to Washington State, the Snake River was once one of the world’s greatest salmon rivers. Hydroelectric dams built during the past fifty years have dropped the salmon population close to extinction.

As recovery efforts have failed, those with a stake in the river’s health—from fishermen and farmers to Native Americans and conservationists—find themselves pitted against the utilities and the federal government. The struggle raises pivotal questions: who should exercise control over natural resources, and which interests should receive highest priority?

In Recovering a Lost River, Hawley shows how river restoration, with dam removal as its centerpiece, is not only virtuous ecological practice but also a growing social and economic enterprise, stretching from Maine’s Kennebec to California’s Klamath, and ultimately, hopefully, to the Snake as well.

Prologue

1) Redeeming the Dammed

2) What They’re Smoking in Alaska this Summer

3) Feed Willy

4) Butte Creek

5) Energy Versus Eternal Delight

6) How the Mighty Were Felled

7) When the Levee Breaks

8) The Fifth H

9) Lies, Dam Lies, and Statistics: The Science of Saving Big Hydro

10) A River Resuscitated

11) The Heart of the Monster

Epilogue The River Why Not

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Sources