More and more just start washing up. These are full grown fish that now have gone belly-up.
Bring the salmon home! Un-dam the Klamath!
We were looking at the extinction of our way of life
We came here for the pursuit of happiness, and now we’re being robbed of that.
These dams are coming down, and it’s about damn time!
There’s a growing movement to remove dams on rivers in the United States.
This is Glines Canyon in northwest Washington state, and this is the Elwha River.
For one hundred years a series of dams controlled the flow of water on the Elwha to produce electricity. It was an important source of energy for the nearby town.
But the dams blocked salmon from using the river as they had for thousands of years.
In 2014, the last of the dams was removed and the river could flow freely again.
Fish and other wildlife are making a gradual recovery here.
But is it a good idea to remove dams, which can generate clean hydroelectricity, at a time when the world desperately needs more sources of renewable energy?
In the 20th century, the US led the world in dam building. Dams were promoted as a way to harness unruly nature, bring water to deserts, and spin turbines to generate electricity for a rapidly growing population.
The largest of them were celebrated as marvels of engineering.
To the builders, the flooding of canyons to create artificial lakes was seen as progress with little downside.
But to communities of Native Americans who had fished, hunted and otherwise used rivers for generations, the dams changed everything.
As these structures age, and as awareness about the environmental harm they’ve caused grows, more dams are being considered for removal.
In the past century, over 2000 dams have been removed in the US according to the advocacy group American Rivers
I travelled to the Klamath River region on the border between California and Oregon states to learn how dams there have nearly wiped out the fish population.
This is where many of the problems affecting the river ecosystem originate.
Dams like this one, built in 1962 to generate electricity, not only block fish passage but warm the water, promoting the growth of deadly algae and parasites, and having a devastating impact on communities downriver.
This is the 58th annual Salmon Festival, hosted by members of the Yurok Tribe, who live along the Klamath River near California’s northern border. There are traditional games and a chance to eat salmon fresh from the river, cooked in the customary way.
But in recent years, there has not always been enough salmon to serve.
We've had some rough years that I remember having discussions with the Yurok Tribal Council, you know, deciding whether we were going to serve barbecue chicken at the Salmon Festival.
For the Yurok people, whose tribal land begins at the Pacific Ocean and extends 64 kilometers along the Klamath, salmon is both a primary food source and an integral part of their culture.
The median income for the upper Yurok Reservation is $11,000. The protein that we gather and harvest from salmon isn't a sport. Right. We don't do it for fun necessarily, we do it for our subsistence. It's how we survive.”
The river that sustained the Klamath tribes for thousands of years has changed in just a century, due to the logging, mining and dam construction introduced by white settlers to the region.
The tribe monitors fishing in the river and limits what can be taken and when, in order to protect the declining population. Fewer salmon are returning to the Klamath each year.
The water in the mouth itself can average around 70 degrees and that’s about what you’d see at a public swimming pool or something like that. When they try and come in they get that front of warm water and they think, ‘oh wait the river’s not ready for us.’
Salmon runs have collapsed. They're probably 10 percent of their former selves you know. Different numbers for different runs of fish but, you know, the best estimates are that 90 percent of the fish no longer migrate into the Klamath River, migrate upstream.
The life cycle of salmon is one of natures’ miracles.
They are born in shallow fresh water, often in small river tributaries, and eventually make their way to the ocean where they grow large on rich marine nutrients. After two to five years, they return upriver to their exact birthplace to spawn and begin the cycle again.
Because salmon bring nutrients from the ocean to ecosystems far inland, they are a keystone
species, supporting everything from insects to giant redwood trees.