A Geography of Hope

The Copco 2 dam, built in 1925, was the smallest of the four Klamath dams slated for removal. Photo by Shane Anderson.

Following the removal of four dams on the Klamath River, the work of restoring the watershed is now underway.

The epic task of rewilding a river and restoring its watershed is underway in the Klamath Basin. Now that the four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River have been demolished, billions of seeds are being planted where toxic blue-green algae once floated. As they grow, these native plants stabilize sediment that remains after the reservoirs were drained. As soil builds and nutrients cycle through it, insects arrive, attracting birds. As other fauna and flora find their way to the re-emergent lowlands, the local food chain regains connectivity.

Benefits from restoration projects will take time to become evident, cautioned Barry McCovey, director of the Yurok Tribe’s fisheries department. “From an engineering perspective, when you build a highway or you build a bridge, you do the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and everything’s beautiful and brand new. That’s the best that’s gonna look. Over the years, it’s gonna degrade; it’s just going to get worse and worse. River restoration and dam removal projects are the opposite. When you do the ribbon-cutting ceremony, it’s the worst it’s gonna look cause the heavy equipment just pulled out. It’s muddy, it’s dirty, it doesn’t look like a river yet. But come back in a year. Come back in ten years, come back in twenty years. It just gets better and better and better as the ecosystem fixes itself.”

“If you have a healthy environment for condors, you have a healthy environment for everybody.”

Tiana Williams

This work is a large-scale example of what the tribes have been doing for thousands of years, McCovey said. “We consider ourselves fix-the-world people. Our job is to restore balance. We maintained that balance through our ceremonies and through the work we did on the land with fire. Fixing the world now from my perspective includes heavy equipment and rerouting streams and taking out dams and restoring reservoir lakebeds. When you see our fisheries department working hand in hand with our construction corporation on a major restoration project, you see fixing the earth literally in front of you.”

Bringing a keystone species, spring chinook, back to the Upper Basin helps the ecosystem fix itself. On the lower Klamath, Yuroks reintroduced another keystone species, the condor. Tiana Williams, who manages the tribe’s wildlife department, told me a story that conveys an ecological concept.

“In the beginning of time,” she said, “when the Creator was developing how the world would move forward with the world renewal ethos, he went to all the species of the world and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have these ceremonies. I need this prayer. I need this song. Who will help guide them?’ Everybody immediately started jumping up and singing, trying to catch his eye so their song would be chosen. But Condor didn’t step up. He doesn’t sing particularly well. He hisses and grunts. He isn’t exactly pretty. He has a bald head. So he refused to sing. But the Creator looked into his spirit and said, ‘No, I want to hear your song. You have a kind heart. You’ve flown over the whole world. You can fly higher than anybody else. I know you’ve got a song in there.’ Condor comes over and hisses and grunts, but the Creator hears the spirit of that song and sings it back to him. And it is the most beautiful song that has ever been heard or sung.”

Williams explained, “If you have a healthy environment for condors, you have a healthy environment for everybody. Condors like big open prairies. We’re going to reestablish our prairies through selective harvest and through introduction of fire and removal of invasive species. Ungulates like deer and elk thrive in those prairies and in edge zones where you have a lot more biological diversity. Old growth redwood forests that condors nest in are also good for marbled murrelet and Humboldt marten. So we’ve got this vision of what a beautiful and perfect world for condor is. And really, it’s a beautiful and perfect world for everybody. It’s this target for world renewal and restoration.”

Returning salmon to the Upper Basin requires a condor’s eye view. According to Brad Parrish, the task involves “reconnecting the features on the landscape that allow water throughout the basin to function naturally, to clean itself, to store itself, to slowly release itself in the summertime.” Parrish, the Klamath Tribes’ water rights specialist, warned that if “we’re just focused on where the fish are at, we’re not addressing the issues that restoration requires. You have to give the river what it needs. You have to look at the system as a whole.”

Neither the survival of condors reintroduced within the river canyon nor of spring chinook returning to the headwaters can be assured. For condors, lead poisoning is the leading cause of death. They are scavengers, and many carcasses they feed on were felled by lead bullets. Although thirty states, including California and Oregon, regulate the use of lead ammunition, and although they not only poison wildlife but also humans who eat game, toxic bullets are still widely used. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, between ten and twenty million wild animals die every year of lead poisoning. Hunters use them out of ignorance, or refusal to discard old ammunition, or resistance to any limitation on what they consider gun rights. Like corporations that dismiss the environmental damage they cause as ‘externalities,’ some hunters take no responsibility for diminishing wildlife populations.

“You set the stage and Mother Nature takes over. It’s just a magical thing to see.”

Karl Wenner

The reestablishment of spring chinook in the headwaters depends on a number of factors. Some go beyond the scope of watershed restoration: dearth of nutrients that feed salmon in the ocean; lack of precipitation during drought years; and climate change, which heats the waters and exacerbates the effects of drought. That said, increasing the extent and resilience of their habitat gives wild salmon a fighting chance even in the worst of times. Having evolved over millions of years, their DNA is hard-wired for adaptability.

Reconnecting the landscape as Parrish advises is thwarted by property lines. Although many farmers and ranchers in northeastern California and southcentral Oregon love wildlife, and although many employ conservation measures such as restoring wetlands and keeping cattle out of streams, typical land use practices impair water quality and impact water quantity, reducing the odds that wild salmon will thrive.

Karl Wenner is one of the farmers who reestablished wetlands to reduce the pollution of Upper Klamath Lake. With the aid of funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, he took 70 acres of his 400-acre farm out of production by carving dikes and channels through barley fields. Soon, water flowing from a natural spring germinated seeds of marsh plants dropped by birds. Soon his land teemed with wildlife as waterfowl, pond turtles, and native fish found habitat there. “You set the stage and Mother Nature takes over,” said Wenner. “It’s just a magical thing to see.”

In the Klamath Tribes’ research station, technician Charlie Wright spoke about the Klamath Marsh as […]

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