Klamath dam removal aims to return salmon to waters they could not reach for decades

Down along the lands that used to lie beneath Copco Lake, thickets of California poppies flicker orange in the breeze. The waters that covered this place for more than a century have receded to the old channel of the Klamath River, a waterway that travels hundreds of kilometres from southern Oregon to northern California. Over the past few months, the breaching of four dams has set it free to once again run unimpeded along much of its length.

If the project is successful, salmon will soon begin swimming through waters they could not reach for decades. Bringing back the river holds the tantalizing prospect of undoing past mistakes, but has also raised searching new questions about the viability of restoring natural environments that have been shaped and inhabited by humans.

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The Klamath dam removal is the largest project of its kind in U.S. history. Workers are now blasting and scooping away the concrete and earthen structures, returning much of the dirt to the pits where it was scooped out to build the dams many decades ago, a potent symbol of a much broader reconsideration of the human relationship to the natural world.

It represents a “shift from the Manifest Destiny ideals to more of a place where we can co-exist with our natural environment, and not need to destroy things for money,” said Barry McCovey Jr., the fisheries director for the Yurok tribe, whose reserve straddles the final lengths of the Klamath in northwestern California, where the river flows into the Pacific.

But the removal of the dams has also raised pointed questions about the ways the industrial-scale restoration project is redrawing a hydrological landscape critical to the lives of farmers and homeowners along the Klamath. Some have already seen their wells go dry. Others fear that future diversions of water to help fish will parch irrigated lands, killing crops and straining livelihoods.

“It makes you sad because you’re looking at an ecosystem that was over 100 years old, that we all grew up with – and somebody decided they didn’t like that ecosystem,” said Kitt Lemke, who has lived for 45 years in Copco Lake, a small community named after a body of water that, as of earlier this year, no longer exists. Skeletal remnants of trees now stand on cracked earth that was once covered by the reservoir. Boats sit parked on roadsides, without a lake in which to float.

“I don’t really understand it,” Mr. Lemke said. “We already know going backwards doesn’t work. As a society we don’t want to go backwards.”

The dams on the Klamath, like so many of the hundreds of thousands of water-blocking structures across the U.S., were built at a moment of exuberant western expansion.

Power companies seeking new hydroelectric resources exuded optimism. When they fell short on sand around the Klamath River, they discovered they could dig out nearby volcanic cinders to make concrete. And when building a fish ladder proved impractical, they funded hatcheries that, they believed, would replace spawning grounds.

The salmon were never without spirited defenders. “Sincere, earnest men have fought these up-hill fights to save the people’s fish and game from capitalized greed or careless disregard,” Edwin L. Hedderly, an official at the California Fish and Game Commission, wrote in 1923 about the Klamath.

But the decades of the great dam era of the U.S. were suffused with a belief in the human ability to sculpt the natural world for the better. Rather than washing out to sea, river water could be turned into irrigated fields and power for mines, timber mills and new subdivisions.

“You wanted to maximize resources, and a dam was one way to do it,” said Martin Melosi, an emeritus professor at the University of Houston who has written extensively on environmental history.

Even parks weren’t, in the early days, meant to preserve pristine environments. They were set aside “for human use, so that people could come and visit them and camp,” Prof. Melosi said.

The passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 marked an inflection, pledging the preservation of lands that retained their “primeval character and influence.”

By then, dams had already been installed on many of the country’s rivers, an imprint not merely of concrete and earth, but of the values of an era. Even a few years ago, “the dominant view was these impediments were built for forever,” said Mike McHenry, a biologist for the Lower Elwha Tribe in Washington state.

But dams have lifespans, and many in the U.S. are reaching a time when their owners must decide whether it’s worth the money to bring them up to a modern standard. It’s a moment that has opened the possibility of reconsidering waterways.

“To me, the river needs to be free in almost all scenarios – I mean, if it can be,” said Joshua Chenoweth, a senior riparian ecologist for the Yurok Tribe.

In the U.S., the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act have devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to supporting fish passage, including through dam removal. Last year alone, 79 dams were removed in the U.S., according to American Rivers, a policy and advocacy group that wants to erase 30,000 dams from the American landscape by 2050.

Modern technology has allowed for miracles of restoration, such as the transformation of native seeds harvested by hand around the Klamath into a bank of 19 billion seeds, spread in part by helicopter to rapidly revegetate the river’s banks.

As the dams drained, river rapids unseen in generations have re-emerged. Columns of volcanic rock stretch down to newly exposed shores. Water rushes again down a canyon that had gone dry after hydropower dam engineers diverted the river’s course.

The Yurok and other tribal groups spent many years advocating for the change. Soon after the dams were breached, “it’s starting to look like a river channel again – which is pretty incredible for the amount of damage that was done there over the last 100 years,” said Mr. McCovey, the Yurok fisheries director.

Similar scenes are emerging elsewhere.

In Europe, which counts 1.2 million structures that block river flows, the EU Nature Restoration Law mandates the return of 25,000 kilometres of free-flowing river by 2030. Last year, advocates counted the removal of 487 European dams.

Bob Hughes, a past president of the American Fisheries Society, recently returned from Brazil, which is considering the removal of a small power generation dam that has grown full with sediment – a first for that country. “It’s a change, and people are worried about the change,” said Mr. Hughes, who is an associate professor at Oregon State University.

Around the world, salmon are considered endangered in an increasing number of places. Declining stocks have hurt fisheries, while hatcheries have not delivered vigorous replacement populations. “You can’t farm fish as well as you can raise them naturally through thousands of miles of natural rivers and streams,” Mr. Hughes said.

The 72-kilometre Elwha River on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula offers a glimpse of what is possible. In 2011, crews began to dismantle two dams that had repelled fish from most of a river that once counted annual salmon returns in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. One of the dams was built just eight kilometres from the river’s mouth, creating a biological “system that was on life support. Virtually all the salmon production was supported by hatcheries,” said Mr. McHenry, the biologist for the Lower Elwha Tribe. “In a dammed Elwha, there wasn’t much hope,” he said. Today, with the dams long gone, “there’s hope.”

The fish have, for now, returned in only modest number. Steelhead trout have risen from several hundred to more than 2,000 fish returning in winter. Bull trout nearly a metre long have been seen in the river; some have made it to the headwaters of the Elwha. Pink salmon are up from a handful to 6,500 returning adults last year – an encouraging change, but still far from the million or more that may have returned historically.

Other fish have struggled. The out-migration of chinook salmon smolts has grown dramatically, an indication of successful reproduction in the river – but there has been no discernible increase in the number of returning adults. Biologists believe ocean conditions unrelated to the river are hurting their survival. To measure success will take decades, Mr. McHenry said.

But “frankly, given the changes in the marine environment and stressors from climate change, we may not be able to just wave a wand and recreate what was,” he said.

It’s a preview of the promise and pitfalls of removing dams on the Klamath, which marks the culmination of decades of effort, led largely by four tribal nations, to convince federal authorities and power companies that the fish needed free-flowing water.

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Without dams, salmon will have access to nearly 650 kilometres of river, and tributaries fed by cool meltwaters from glaciers on Mount Shasta, the volcanic peak whose gleaming slopes tower over the region.

Demolishing the dams, however, has done nothing to provide greater flows of water for salmon, since agricultural users upriver still siphon off large volumes for irrigation.

“We’re not making water. We’re making habitat,” said Craig Tucker, a policy advocate for the Karuk Tribe, which is situated along the Klamath in northern California.

Salmon need both, and a recent succession of dry years has raised the stakes.

“We have to fix that. Dry habitat’s not very useful for fish. They have to be wet – so we are resolved to fight that battle and win, just like we were with the dam removal,” Mr. Tucker said.

“I don’t think we have to eliminate agriculture,” he added. “We just have to bring it into balance with the available water supplies.”

Other Klamath water volumes are preserved for a wildlife refuge that provides critical habitat for migratory birds in the Pacific flyway, many of which stop over on journeys to Canada.

The attempt to reallocate the Klamath’s water will provide perhaps the most critical test of how much sacrifice can be demanded in service of fish – and of how much humans are willing to alter their own existence in hopes of restoring what once was.

Today, the river’s water supports vast fields of potatoes, onions, mint, alfalfa, garlic and horseradish, an irrigated crop worth about US$500-million a year.

Previous attempts to remove farmland to protect habitat for sucker fish “proved to be a miserable failure,” said Paul Simmons, executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association, which advocates for agricultural irrigators.

At least 1,400 farms use the irrigation water today. If once-irrigated soil goes dry, it can blow away. Parch the landscape, and communities will shrivel, too, Mr. Simmons said. “Meaningful mental health issues arise,” he said. Some current proposals for devoting more Klamath water to salmon would leave no water for irrigation “in some or many years,” he said.

Many of the area’s farmers have lived here for generations, including those descended from war veterans offered free homesteads in the late 1940s. But they have seen regular cutbacks on water for irrigation to preserve flows for fish.

This year, those restrictions mean the 200 acres of winter grains that farmer Ryan Kliewer seeded may wither in the field. “You want to talk about absolutely agonizing – nauseating, infuriating,” he said.

Mr. Kliewer has invested in a brewery and distillery to showcase the grains grown on Klamath waters. A copper still in his shed is the 14th iteration of a design he has worked hard to refine.

“You have to do things step by step. That’s called good science,” he said. Tearing down the dams, by contrast, feels to him like a major change that has come all at once. He hopes it works. Nothing, he said, would be more fun than launching a drift boat in the Klamath and reeling in salmon.

But he is skeptical.

Can removing concrete and earth really turn back the clock?

Those behind the project are “hoping for an idea to come to fruition,” he said. But “radical actions have radical consequences. And I hope that people know what they’re wishing for.”