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BanjoMike has a interesting summary, but I do have to disagree about several of his points.
Diverting river water doesn't work for farms, but the Lower Snake River Dams are about electrical power. That is why the Governors of Washington and Oregon always backtrack when the needle shifts to dam removal. The electricity goes to western Washington and Oregon. It is a LOT of electricity. It would take FOUR nuclear power plants equivalent to the Columbia Generating Station to replace the dams. Western Washington residents would object to nuclear power plants in western Washington.
Simpson's objective is to protect the Snake River dams in Idaho. Idaho has made a mess of the Snake River and they really don't want people to look at the Snake River plain.
However, if the Snake River dams come out, there is no reason for Dworshack Dam in Orofino. I worked on the Clearwater National Forest when the dam gates closed. The Forest Service folks were really mad about ALL the spawning habitat that was REMOVED by that dam.
To save the Salmon, we need to remove the Skagit River dams in western Washington. The Cedar, Green, and Skykomish dams also need to come out. Western Washington needs to protect those watersheds from ALL development and establish a few more as well.
Nobody really cares about the Salmon recovery.
Otherwise we would have a TOTAL ban on fishing, both commercial, tribal and sport. So far, the sport fisherman have taken the hit, while tribal fisheries are totally unregulated for practical purposes. Banning gill nets is a necessary first step.
It is a complex issue, but the Lower Snake River dams are minor when it comes to saving the salmon runs. But they are handy for Idaho and western Washington interests to divert attention from THEIR DAMS.
I suspected it was a domino-effect issue. Dam removals are apparently happening around the West. I would like to know if the overall benefits are outweighing the negative consequences over time.
I have a dream that the Cabinet Gorge Dam regulating the flow of the lower Clark Fork River before the delta could be removed and the North Idaho part of the river restored. The Gorge is a fantastic natural phenomenon in itself, with its sheer rock walls (hence the name Cabinet), and it would rank as one of the natural wonders of the Northwest. Old postcards of the Gorge are breathtaking. As it is now, it has been swallowed up by the dam, and there is no access to what's left of it at all, and just one viewpoint accessible at the dam itself. But..but..but...the dam provides power and jobs, I know. And it would probably depend on also removing the Noxon Dam in Montana, and so forth. We probably can't do without it in NID. I don't even know the specifics of the benefits of the dam. I'm sure there are plenty. But what a spectacular gain for the natural beauty of the area if the CG dam were to be removed--and the fish would love it, too...
Hi, CFF...
Yup. Weighing the known benefits of leaving the dams intact is always easier than trying to estimate how great the unknown benefits may be.
But it's good to remember that the Snake River is not the salmon hatchery waters. Its is only the single road to the fish's destination. There is much more potential benefit to all the other headwaters in the dam destruction than the benefits that are lost to those who use the Snake's waters.
The problem is no one knows just how great or widespread those benefits may be to humanity.
We judge these matters most often considering humans first and everything else secondly.
That's a lingering holdover from the days when the west was first settled. There was so much incredible bounty everywhere that for the first years of settlement, humans over-indulged and took far, far more than they needed. In everything.
They never thought the billion buffaloes on the plains would ever run out, but they did. Millions were killed for their tongues. Only their tongues.
The passenger pigeons were as bountiful, and they were harvest to extinction. The snowy egret was driven close to extinction because of ladies hat fashion. And the egrets once turned the swamps white when they were nesting.
These animal products went all over the world.
Salted Buffalo tongue was a greater delicacy in England and France than it was here, so only a very few ever got rich on the slaughter, but those few grew very rich.
(I have a thing about buffalo tongue, because I've actually eaten it, and to me, it tastes exactly like cow tongue. It also looks identical. As soon as I learned how much of it ended up in London, I was sure at least half of it was actually cow.)
The waste continued into our forests, grasslands, mountains and streams. No one ever thought of any of the consequences for wasting the bounty. It was all more than could be used until they used much of it up. Mostly to make a very easy buck.
Back then, no one ever understood the delicate natural balance nature had created in the west. It took a million years to achieve that, and other natural forces, earthquakes, volcanoes, and ice sheets destroyed that balance several times, so it had to be re-built several times.
The rattlesnake has rattles because of the buffalo. Rattles were a survival mechanism for the snake. A rattler cannot harm a buffalo; they evolved to be immune to their strikes.
But when caught in the middle of a migrating herd, the rattler never stood a chance without something to alert the buffalo they were there. A herd would trump them to a pulp if they had no rattle.
The snake ate the small critters who ate the roots of the native grass that fed the buffalo, so all 3 were under nature's control. The buffalo also fertilized the plains, so the grass was always just as thick as it could be.
Before the passenger pigeon went extinct, farmers would pray they would fly over their farms. The pigeons always roosted at night, and whoever they stopped, the ground was white with their fertile droppings. The fertilizer they provided saved many a farmer's scant crop, and turned a light crop into a bumper. Apple orchards bore fruit after being barren for years.
But the pigeons were also delicious and very easy to shoot. So they ended up in barrels bound for big cities where they were sold cheaper than beef.
These are only a few examples of how everything here depends on everything else. it all has to be in sufficient supply to keep the balance. Once anything becomes short, the balance begins to fall apart.
Unfortunately, some of that old attitude still exists. We don't waste like they did, but these days, the attitude comes from financial reasons, not from endless bounty.
Humans are very quick to spend bad money, and very loathe to spend good money after spending bad money.
How many of us have chosen the wrong color paint for our house and didn't realize it was wrong until the house was painted? How many of us decided to put up with the ugly color afterward because we didn't want to spend more house painting money?
So when we wanted dams for good reasons, we got them. And when we wanted dams for bad reasons, we got them, too. Good or bad, once built, not many wish I could ever want to see the dam come down.
The attitude is: I"m doing OK with this dam. Leave it as it is, and I think I'll continue to do OK. Mess with it, and I don't know if I'll be OK anymore. I wish I could do better, but I don't know how that's possible.
if we want to get serious, we have to learn to get along with ourselves better first.
Last edited by banjomike; 11-25-2021 at 09:53 PM..
Nowadays, we are increasingly forced to live with our ancestor's mistakes.
The forests were one. Now they burn, and we are forced to react to the burning. Then we have to react again to all the lye that comes from the ash mixed with rainwater.
We rect because that's all we can do now. There were warnings, and too few heeded them, while others did to little to correct the balance even though they tried.
But calamity is as big as everything else is in the west. The only easy way to fix a mistake when we mess with nature is to fix the mistake while it's still small. The longer we permit our mistakes to go on, the larger the calamity will be when it comes.
That's very hard to understand when anyone is living in peace in a nice house with a nice paved street in front of it, and nice shade trees and green lawns in the back yard. A great shopping center only a couple of miles away and good schools for the kids and hunky-dory jobs for the grownups.
We all feel safe from nature in our cities. And then, we are always distressed and alarmed when nature comes to visit and destroys our false sense of security with one big fire or one big shake-up.
In Idaho, folks leave one false sense of security for our nature and get busy building a new false sense of security in the pine trees.
Doing anything pro-active to guard against Mother Nature's forces demand a lot of unity and a strong belief that helping my neighbor is helping me as much. Everything is always to big for any little local group to do, so everything demands help from the state.
And when someone else is living 500 miles away from that locality, it's really hard to convince that person he's in danger too. Especially when it requires money.
This is all human nature, and I honestly don't know how to overcome our natural resistance to change anything. Even though our presence in nature is already changing it constantly and steadily.
think we are all so accustomed to controlling our tiny pieces of nature we simply are ignorant of the huge power that exists in our wilderness. That power can work to our benefit when we take it into account, or it can destroy us when we ignore it.
Either way, we cannot control it. The best we can do is to modify some of it just enough to keep some of it in some balance between wild and tamed.
That demands much effort on our part, but it's only then that Old Mother Idaho may grudgingly allow us to escape her full fury when she angers.
You regulars know how much I've preached this. Old Mother Idaho is a beautiful old lady who spreads out her bounty generously, but she can be mighty mean when she bites. if you live here long enough, you will get plenty of both from her.
Her generosity needs no preparation to get. But only mental preparation will save us from her worst bite. A pantry full of food and a box of bullets won't save anyone for longer than a blink of her eye. That's just more false security.
They never thought the billion buffaloes on the plains would ever run out, but they did. Millions were killed for their tongues. Only their tongues.
The passenger pigeons were as bountiful, and they were harvest to extinction. The snowy egret was driven close to extinction because of ladies hat fashion. And the egrets once turned the swamps white when they were nesting.
Not to mention the mammoths!
Mammoths, the furry, small-eared relatives of modern elephants, first appeared around five million years ago and became extinct around 4,000 years ago.... The earliest mammoths to venture into North America... came from Eurasia 1.5 million years ago and did so by marching across the Bering Strait, which wasn’t covered by water like it is today. Hundreds of thousands of years later, another species of mammoth, the woolly mammoth, also crossed the Bering Strait and joined their cousins in North America. The two hybridized to produce the Columbian mammoth, but no one knows exactly when. A recent study estimated that the hybridization event occurred at least 420,000 years ago, but more research is needed to confirm this.
I guess what is known about the mammoth extinction is not so clear cut. Yes, there was human predation, but there was also genomic decay in small populations.....
Nowadays, we are increasingly forced to live with our ancestor's mistakes.
The forests were one. Now they burn, and we are forced to react to the burning. Then we have to react again to all the lye that comes from the ash mixed with rainwater.
We rect because that's all we can do now. There were warnings, and too few heeded them, while others did to little to correct the balance even though they tried.
But calamity is as big as everything else is in the west. The only easy way to fix a mistake when we mess with nature is to fix the mistake while it's still small. The longer we permit our mistakes to go on, the larger the calamity will be when it comes...........
Well I am glad somebody has finally pinned the blame the Indians ("our ancestor's mistakes").
For over 10,000 years the Indians practiced Forestry that met THEIR needs. That was very unthoughtful of them not to anticipate and change their forest management practices to meet the needs of the new European residents.
My forestry education started in 1970. Even then foresters pretty much had it pegged that moving away from the Indian forest management practices was going to lead to dead trees from insects and disease and large fires. In 1970, the Sierra Nevada's were pretty healthy, but foresters knew what layed ahead. I even got to participate in prescribed fires to reduce fire hazard in 1970.
North Idaho, on the other hand, in the 1970's was full of dead trees. It was one of the first things I noticed when I moved to Idaho in the 1970's. Everybody was worried about North Idaho and thought the Sierra's were in good shape.
But the politicians, lawyers, and the scientifically illiterate environmental community decided that NO, it was better to let "nature take its course". Mother nature knows best.
Well, she doesn't care about us.
My professional opinion all these mega-fires will end in about 30-40 years.
Our National Forests will be converted to about 40% brushfields. Another 30% will show substantially less growth due to impacts on soil productivity. The remainder 30% primarily higher elevation forests will function "normally" ecologically.
BUT 30-40 years is an awful long time. Plus for North Idaho in the next two decades we will have a repeat of "The Big Blowup", the 1910 fires.
These are the basic facts about the 1910 fire....the 2025?? fire will be WORSE.
The Great Fire of 1910 burned three million acres and killed enough timber to fill a freight train 2,400 miles
long. Merchantable timber destroyed was estimated to be eight billion board feet, or enough wood to build
800,000 houses. 20 million acres were burned across the entire Northwest
This is one of the more interesting threads I have read on C-D in awhile. I have no knowledge of the topic, but found many of the posts here well-written and informative. Even the off-topic posts are pretty interesting! In prior visits to the pacific northwest, I have seen many of the large dams and reservoirs along the Columbia / Snake river valleys. Of course, I became aware that they were a source of high-output, inexpensive hydro power for the region, and would be difficult to eliminate using some other means of power generation. Thanks to all that have posted here! Carry on!
For over 10,000 years the Indians practiced Forestry that met THEIR needs.
Yes, but thinking that this practice consciously considered environmental impacts would be a mistake. As you say, it was merely a matter of their needs.
Before 1,000 BC, "Archaic people" made use of forest resources by gathering seeds, berries, and nuts and hunting forest animals like the white-tailed deer to help provide additional food sources. It was apparently only during the Woodland Period, 1,000 B.C. through 800 A.D., which followed the Archaic years, that Native Americans not only hunted and fished but they cleared away forestland to make room for fields of planted crops.
Between 800 and 1650 A.D. Native Americans continued to hunt and fish, but they came to mostly rely on agriculture for food. During this era, Native Americans cleared land by girdling (cutting away a ring of bark from trees to stop growth) or setting fire to a group of trees and used stone tools to assist in the planting of crops in the fertilized ash. The widespread adoption of agriculture (prompted in great part by the domestication of corn) resulted in the extensive clearing of forests and also led to the establishment of permanent villages. American Prehistory -- 8000 years of forest management
So by 1500, millions of acres had been cleared to plant corn, squash, and other domesticated plants. As the above link suggests, many scholars today disagree that the original inhabitants of the Americas had little impact on the environment, that is, the early Native Americans were not exactly "ecologically invisible."
The Oregon Trail pioneers recorded in their journals that the Boise River ran red because of the abundance of salmon, obviously referring to the color of the fish. This is where the city of Boise is currently situated.
The Native Tribes did and still consider the Boise Valley sacred. It became known as The Peace Valley because they wouldn't fight each other when along the Boise River and in their sacred burial grounds in the Foothills. If a person is in tune with nature, this valley is sacred and has a spiritual magnetic pull or vibe to it.
I agree the dams need to go between Hells Canyon and Portland.
The Oregon Trail pioneers recorded in their journals that the Boise River ran red because of the abundance of salmon, obviously referring to the color of the fish. This is where the city of Boise is currently situated.
The Native Tribes did and still consider the Boise Valley sacred. It became known as The Peace Valley because they wouldn't fight each other when along the Boise River and in their sacred burial grounds in the Foothills. If a person is in tune with nature, this valley is sacred and has a spiritual magnetic pull or vibe to it..........................
The Boise Valley has always been a very special place to me. Not pleased at how Idaho is treating the Boise Valley these days.
Historical records of "abundance" of fish and game are not very reliable. They are better than nothing, but they are just observations. Humans are notorious for calling things "normal" as what they see in their lifetimes.
Here is an interesting article in the Journal of Forestry from the turn of the century....."Is Aspen Doomed?". The public has not noticed are cared about the decline in aspen stands in the inter-mountain west.
But it is a very real issue.
Read the article and then come up with a strategy to maintain Aspen stands in the western US.
Lots of good information on Aspen, elk, Indians, fire ecology, etc. etc.
Oh, and do realize the role of elk in the current culture of the inter-mountain west.
The ONLY time in my career that I left a politician speechless. He quickly corrected himself and changed the subject.
All I said....."Cy, you believe the Idaho should have FEWER Elk??" In 1978, that would get you voted out of office in Idaho.
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that the Cabinet Gorge Dam regulating the flow of the lower Clark Fork River before the delta could be removed and the North Idaho part of the river restored. The Gorge is a fantastic natural phenomenon in itself, with its sheer rock walls (hence the name Cabinet), and it would rank as one of the natural wonders of the Northwest. Old postcards of the Gorge are breathtaking. As it is now, it has been swallowed up by the dam, and there is no access to what's left of it at all, and just one viewpoint accessible at the dam itself. But..but..but...the dam provides power and jobs, I know. And it would probably depend on also removing the Noxon Dam in Montana, and so forth. We probably can't do without it in NID. I don't even know the specifics of the benefits of the dam. I'm sure there are plenty. But what a spectacular gain for the natural beauty of the area if the CG dam were to be removed--and the fish would love it, too...
