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

by Steven Hawley

A powerful argument for why dam removal makes good scientific, economic, and environmental sense—and requires our urgent attention
 
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. 

Genres: Environment, Nonfiction, Science

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Steven Hawley, an environmental journalist, was among the first to write about the historic agreement to tear out Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine. Since then, his work has appeared in High Country News, Bear Deluxe, National Fisherman, OnEarth, Arizona Quarterly, the Oregonian, and Missoula Independent. He lives with his family along the Columbia River.

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last December I read Hawley's recent book, Cracked, about the current fight for removing the dams on the Snake River. This volume, written more than a decade earlier, is essential background information that I wish I had read first. It provides great detail (and citations) regarding the history of the major rivers of the Northwest, their role in indigenous communities, and the hundred and fifty year state and federal actions to take over, and dam, these waterways and destroy their ecosystems in the (arguable) interest of cheaper electricity and carrying goods by barge to the Pacific. Yes, Hawley has a strong partisan perspectivee - but he backs it up with lots of research and personal investigation.

Thanks, Doug!

[Taylor Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book by what appears to be a fellow hood riverite! What a holistic and damming review of our current hydropower system. This book dismantles dams, ecologically, economically, culturally. Basically every-way except literally! I felt a real mourning for my chosen home reading this book, but it felt necessary and empowering to get a full story!!

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good introduction to the issues with damming in the Columbia and Snake River basin.

[Chelsea Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very dense and more textbook esque book, but it contained a lot of good information. I think it's a great starting point for learning about the history of dam removal and salmon politics in the PNW, but since it was written over 10 years ago, there is a lot more research you will need to do afterwards to understand the current state of salmon and dam politics.

[Tony Latham · Rating 5 out of 5]

A horrible story –but a great book. If you have any interest in West Coast salmon/steelhead, political graft, the Columbia River, and its dams based on WW2 era thinking, you need to put this book on your read list. Hawley did a great job researching this beast –I recognize numerous players associated with this river battle. I read Reed Burkholder's book on the economics of removing the lower Snake dams several years ago and have followed the politics of the issue ever since. There are several issues and facts that I was not aware of involving North West fish/dams/politics and the people that Hawley discussed. READ it. -Tony Latham author of Trafficking, a Memoir of an Undercover Game Warden.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be fair, I am probably the ideal audience for this book, but I still think it's great.
Hawley goes into a lot of depth and detail without becoming too technical or scientific and losing the reader. And he includes an extremely broad range of examples and case studies, as well as a number of interviews with people from differing perspectives and backgrounds. Really well done.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic book from a gorge local.

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

mostly history, some recent, good background on entrenched vested interests fighting to keep the dams, potential flooding problems in lewiston, id from silting behind the dams