Untaming a river: The stakes behind America’s largest dam removal

They have been waiting for three years, growing fat and long in the tumult of the Pacific Ocean. Now the salmon turn, inexorably, driven by some ancient smell, into the mouth of a river along the wild Northern California coast.

For millennia, Native Americans watched the fish enter the Klamath River. The tribes celebrated them as a gift from the gods, but the fish numbers dwindled. Once the water teemed with millions of fish; last year, only 46,000 chinook salmon migrated successfully.

Huge dams, proclaimed by newcomers to the region as wondrous monuments to their dominance of nature, and promoted by the U.S. government as a way to open the West to settlers, blocked the fish from their upstream spawning grounds and slowed the Klamath in torpid reservoirs.

Now humanity is set to surrender much of the river back to nature. Four large dams on the Klamath River are due to be torn down in what is called the largest dam removal project in American history.

“It’s massive. It’s huge,” says Amy Cordalis, a legal adviser to the Yurok Tribe, of which she is a member, as she watches a heron lumber along the Pacific coast. “For the tribes and for the Yurok, it’s the beginning of healing. We remove those dams, the river runs free, and the salmon can go home.”  

The removal will mark a major victory for environmentalists in their campaign to restore once-wild rivers in the United States by tearing down unneeded dams. It will be a historic victory for Native Americans who were promised eternal fishing rights, only to see fish blocked from their rivers. And it promises to help salmon, once a massive driver of the natural life cycle here in the Pacific Northwest.

But it could be too late. Environmentalists already see fish migrations dwindling in tributaries of the Klamath – a warning of further decline