Damn Dams

Damn Dams

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Recently retired from the US Fish and Wildlife Service where he spent 30 years as an endangered species biologist, Ted Kuch spoke to me about the perilous future of Northwest salmon and the reasons for that. He punctuated his argument with an interesting example. What's going on with poor salmon and steelhead returns and what has been happening, particularly in the Columbia River Basin, is dams. I was actually president of the Idaho chapter of the American Fisheries Society 20 years ago when we all agreed and made a statement that unless we address the eight dams between Idaho's salmon and the ocean, that we will not be able to recover wild salmon and steelhead runs. And here we are 20 years later. And that reality continues to manifest itself. Recently, Governor Brad Little in Idaho and Representative Mike Simpson have convened a forum to have conversations about what are we going to do to try to save these runs from becoming extinct. Many are extinct. Dams and Hells Canyon wiped out salmon runs into parts of Idaho, Oregon and Nevada. And about it used to have salmon in the salmon. We have laughter doing incredibly poorly. In fact, fishing game is closed seasons this year already. I didn't even open up in the first place. That's how bad runs are right now. So dams are really the big proximal thing that we have to address and the farther upstream you are in places like Idaho and the headwaters of the Columbia basin where the Snake River, the more dams there are the more of a problem it is. You look at salmon that migrate up the Columbia River and instead of turning right into the Snake, they turn left and go up into eastern Washington rivers and they return at a rate 10 times greater than fish and salmon. And the reason is there's no more dams.
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