J. H. W. Tischbein:
Three Beavers Building a Dam (c. 1800)

" … surrounded by the effects of our great-grandfather's profound ignorance."

All who live near the end of the Oregon Trail share a heritage. The valley I call my valley, the one they liked to well they named it twice, was once home to artesian wells. The groundwater was under such pressure that when a well was dug, the water would fountain up high into the air. That aquifer was filled with water that had taken twenty millennia to work its way down out of the mountains and under the valley floor. It could be removed in minutes on no more than a whim.

Our forebears were not system thinkers. They were excellent local problem solvers but often failed to appreciate the effects their solutions might spawn. They sought dominion, to conquer the untamed country. If they needed to divert a stream, nobody seemed to worry very much about the fish that inhabited that stream. They believed they had been given dominion over the land and often acted with an iron hand. They managed to local optimization without great concern for down or upstream effects. Tomorrow would have to take care of itself.

The Dams were first seen as a boon. The tributary rivers came first. In the decade following the turn of the last century, it seemed like every city in the arid west constructed a municipal hydropower dam to provide cheaply that new-fangled electricity. Those cities created PUDs, Public Utility Districts, to prevent outside utilities from controlling their power. Later, the Federal government began "Reclaiming" land adjacent to the West's great rivers, The Columbia, Snake, and Klamath, building enormous dams to provide for irrigation, navigation, and power. Grand Coulee in Central Washington State was built without fish passage. It smothered off the largest Sockeye Salmon fishery in the nation, which had stretched clear into the Canadian Rockies, a thousand miles from the Ocean. No Sockeye were ever able to spawn after Grand Coulee opened.

More dams followed. When Dworshak Dam was completed in 1973, Idaho’s Clearwater River drainage lost its spawning steelhead and salmon. By then, seven dams with fish ladders already stood between the sea and the Clearwater's mouth, each with fish ladders but incapable of transporting fish as the rivers once had. The natives, who possessed rights acknowledged in their treaties of 1855, found it increasingly impossible to harvest their salmon in their historically accustomed places. Into the 1970s, conflicts emerged between licensed sport and commercial fishermen and natives, who were legally due half the harvest and could use techniques forbidden by those not members of the sovereign nations. The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the sovereign's claims, but climate change increasingly took its toll. The once-mighty Umatilla didn't always reach the Columbia due to over-irrigation. Fish became an increasingly scarce commodity.

Meanwhile, out in Puget Sound, the Orca populations were shrinking. Orca appreciate a salmon supper every bit as much as any other. They rely on this increasingly scarce resource. Without it, they're apt to starve. Their ocean was also warming at an increasingly alarming rate, and activists sought solutions to save this iconic native. They proposed breaching those damned dams. Weren't they the cause of the disturbing fall in salmon populations? It only made sense that the more straightforward solution be pursued. The attractiveness was only improved because somebody else would have to act to effect the fix.

A hundred years after Teddy Roosevelt directed his government to develop all waters to their maximum extent, externalities abounded. The dams had been collecting silt deposits since they were built. They now hold cubic miles of the stuff adjacent to some of the world's most fertile and productive farmland. If that silt were just let loose, it would cause more damage to the remaining fish population than building a dozen additional dams. What do we do with the silt, at what cost, and over what timeframe? A barge highway shuttles more than half the country’s wheat grown for export down the dammed waterways. This could be replaced with rail traffic at many multiples of the cost. Renewable electricity powers now great cities. Even the once Dry Shitties glow green now, irrigated. Once barren scabland, the entire Central Washington Plateau has overtaken the rest of the nation in potato production. Your Tater Tots® depend upon those dams.

What might it take to breach those babies? A systems thinker might wonder only to discover that we do not yet possess the science adequate to describe the process by which those Damns might be breached. A hundred years from now, after a century of investment in science, we might be capable of wisely planning alternatives to the inadvertent hellscape our forebears bequeathed us. As system thinkers, though, we owe it to our progeny to do a little better job than to optimize for merely me, me, and me. By the time we manage to create the necessary science. Every damned Dam will have already outlived its designed life. None were built considering how they might one day be decommissioned. Meanwhile, the conditions for the fish and the Orcas continue to degrade.

This argument has raged in editorials and courtrooms over whether and how to breach those dams. Recently, President Biden cut a historic deal with the Sovereigns, who had maintained litigation if only to retain their legal standing. The deal proposed suspending litigation to massively fund an actual investigation into how the damaged salmon runs might be holistically mitigated. Once the system might be understood, perhaps some real mitigation could occur. It might be true that by the time we learn enough to act, the salmon and the Orca might have already perished. No more urgent and short-sighted intervention could have produced any better outcome, for the die was cast long before us. We inherited this mess. It will have to be Grace enough that our generations accepted the inheritance and chose to use science and systems thinking rather than litigating amelioration. We might have already screwed ourselves, anyway.

One of the costs of living in the arid West is these troubling legacies we inherit here. We wonder how to live with Grace in such a place, surrounded by the effects of our great-grandfather's profound arrogance and ignorance, both the benefits and horrifying effects with which we live. We might find our Grace by thinking through what we propose to do to avoid creating such nightmares to pass on to our progeny in turn.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz