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dam-l FW: Babbitt on Removing Dams
Good read.
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From: Hammond, Jay
To: Baccante, Nick; McGregor, Ian; Reid, George; Cadden, Don; HOOTON, Bob
S.; Swiatkiewicz, Vic; Leggett, Jack; Martin, Al; Down, Ted
Subject: FW: Babbitt on Removing Dams (fwd)
Date: Monday, August 17, 1998 1:57PM
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From: Woods, Guy
To: Lindsay, Bob; Hammond, Jay; Morley, Rick
Subject: FW: Babbitt on Removing Dams (fwd)
Date: Monday, August 17, 1998 11:38AM
"Dams are not Forever"
Remarks of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt Ecological
Society of America
August 4, 1998 Baltimore, Maryland
In keeping with the theme of this year's conference, I
would like to briefly revisit some aquatic ecosystems I
have toured since since we last met. Usually my trips to
rivers involve a canoe and paddle, or flyfishing rod and
reel. More recently I arrive with sledgehammer in hand, to
celebrate destruction of dams.
I suspect this breaks with tradition. Six decades ago,
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Interior
Secretary Harold Ickes toured the country to dedicate dams,
new dams, powerful dams, including four of the largest dams
in the history of civilization. They built dams for barge
traffic, for electricity, for irrigation, for drinking
water, for flood control. For most of this century,
politicians have eagerly rushed in, amidst cheering crowds,
to claim credit for the construction of 75,000 dams all
across America. Think about that number. That means we have
been building, on average, one large dam a day, every
single day, since the Declaration of Independence. Many of
these dams have became monuments, expected to last forever.
You could say forever just got a lot shorter.
Starting last June 17: I hoisted a sledgehammer to mark the
removal of four dams, opening 160 miles of the Menominee
River flowing between Wisconsin and Michigan.
September 23: I visited the Olympic Peninsula to see two
Elwha River dams which the Administration plans to remove
to restoreone of the fabled chinook salmon runs of the
river.
December 17: I took my sledgehammer to punch open the 55
year old, 260-foot Quaker Neck Dam on the Neuse River,
opening 925 miles of fish spawning habitat.
May 26: Beside the Kennebec River, in the heart of Augusta,
Maine, I signed documents clearing the way for the removal
of the 160-year-old 917-foot Edwards Hydro Dam.
July 14: On Butte Creek, in the heart of California's
agricultural Central Valley, I took the first crack at
breaking up McPherrin Dam to restore chinook slamon in that
Sacramento river tributary.
July 15: One day later, in downtown Medford, Oregon, I
unpacked the sledgehammer to breach Bear Creek dam, the
first dam removed in the Pacific Northwest, for coho
salmon.
Every stop on this dam-busting tour attracts enormous
local, regional and national attention. In fact, a lot more
attention than we earned with our paddle and canoe during
the National Heritage Tours in 1995 and 1996. Even more
than we got with our flyrod during the rare native fishing
tours last year.
So what is it about the clang of sledgehammer on concrete
that evokes such a response?
I believe that huge public interest reflects a deep,
widespread understanding that America overshot the mark in
our dam building frenzy. In the Nineteenth Century,
construction of the Erie Canal triggered a spasm of canal
building that went on and on, beyond any realistic
expectation of economic return. Having a canal became the
symbol of a progressive community. Everyone just had to
have one, irrespective of its utility.
In this century, dam building has moved on a similar
trajectory -- dams that were clearly justified for their
economic value gradually gave way to projects built with
excessive taxpayer subsidies, then justified by dubious
cost/benefit projections.
The public is now learning that we have paid a steadily
accumulating price for these projects in the form of: fish
spawning runs destroyed, downstream rivers altered by
changes in temperature, unnatural nutrient load and
seasonal flows, wedges of sediment piling up behind
structures, and delta wetlands degraded by lack of fresh
water and saltwater intrusion. Rivers are always on the
move and their inhabitants know no boundaries; salmon and
shad do not read maps, only streams.
The clang of the sledge hammer is one of the oldest sounds
known to man. Yet now, at the end of the twentieth century,
we are using it to ring in an entirely new era of
conservation history, moving beyond preservation or
protection towards a deeper, more complex movement, the
affirmative act of restoration.
Restoration grows out of the same stewardship impulse as
preservation, but pushes beyond, as one might renovate an
old, neglected farm to inhabit once again. Perhaps Aldo
Leopold pointed the way with his sand county shack. Yet he
was only one man, and his focus was more on land than the
nearby river. The coming age of restoration requires the
active involvement of the citizens who live on the entire
watershed. Most of all it requires a creative act; we must
see not only what is, but envision what can be. It requires
us to reach back into our history in order to grasp the
future in which we might live.
Restoration invites us to understand how the natural world
-- with its complex storms, fires, forests, watersheds and
wildlife -- functions as a whole. And the best unit to
measure that whole, how it is more than the sum of its
parts, is the river that runs through us. For that river
reflects the condition of every single acre of the whole,
integrated watershed. Thirty six centuries ago, Emperor Yu
of China advised "To protect your rivers, protect your
mountains." That same rule applies today. To restore our
aquatic ecosystems, look beyond the water's edge out onto
the land that borders it. For the two are inseparable. What
happens on that land inevitably is reflected in our rivers.
But even protecting mountains, we discover, goes only so
far. I doubt that Emperor Yu, for all his wisdom, could
foresee the construction of Three Gorges Dam or what it
would do to the life of that river. And lest we condemn
China too quickly, I should point out that we in America
have been slow to recognize the ecological costs of dams.
And slower still to envision watershed restoration through
dam removal.
I began to reflect on these issues over the course of many
days and nights spent in the Grand Canyon over the last
half century. I hiked and boated and camped beside the
Colorado River before Glen Canyon was built in the 1960s.
In those years it was a wild, unpredictable, brown,
sediment-laden stream flooding into the early summer, then
settling down in the winter. The gates of Glen Canyon were
closed in 1963. Today, you see an ice cold, Jell-O-green
river, manipulated up and down, rising and falling on a
daily cycle, flushed with the regularity, and
predictability, of a giant toilet.
Over time, as I floated down the river, I saw trees on
talus slopes wither and die for lack of water. I saw
sandbars -- once covered with arrow, willow and cottonwood
-- disappear, the banks scoured down to granite boulders. I
saw once plentiful native fish -- unlike those anywhere on
earth -- driven back to the brink of survival in only a few
isolated tributaries.
It may seem hard to comprehend now that, at the time, no
one even considered the possibility of these dramatic
changes in a National Park located just ten miles
downstream. At the time Glen Canyon was built, we were
still thinking of dams as stand alone projects that,
lamentably, flooded out nice scenery upstream. But without
consequences for the entire river system. And the Grand
Canyon is only one of thousands of examples.
Nowhere has the impact of dams been more visible than on
aquatic life. We once believed that freshwater flowing to
the sea was "wasted." By trying to hold it back as long as
possible, we blocked out anadromous fisheries from their
ancient spawning grounds. In the 19th century, from Maine
to the Chesapeake on down to Florida, in the course of
damming rivers, we virtually destroyed the rich Atlantic
salmon, shad, striped bass, herring and sturgeon as they
made their way inland from the Atlantic.
And in this century, with our massive projects up and down
the Pacific-bound rivers, we have repeated this process of
destruction, virtually decimating the great salmon and
steelhead runs of the northwest, by continuing to build
dams clear up into the 1970s. This year, we learn that
roughly one third of all fish, two thirds of all crayfish,
and three quarters of the bivalve freshwater mussels in
America are rare or threatened with extinction.
Let's give the economists their due: We seem to value
something only when it becomes rare. The loss of fisheries
that we once took for granted has led to a new urgency
demanding ways we can replenish them. Every single dam to
which I brought my sledgehammer was removed for the benefit
of one or more endangered aquatic species. Yet despite this
progress there are still -- if we use established figures --
74,993 dams in America, blocking 600,000 miles of what had
once been free flowing rivers. That's about 17 percent of all
rivers in the nation. If one wanted to unleash every one of
those rivers -- something I clearly don't advocate as policy
-- and restore those watersheds, it would take a lot more
than one person swinging a sledgehammer every few months.
But as we contemplate future ceremonies involving dams,
here are some considerations:
1. Dams are not America's answer to the pyramids of Egypt.
We did not build them for religious purposes and they do
not consecrate our values (even if some are named after
Presidents). Dams do, in fact, outlive their function. When
they do, some should go. There is a dam in Pawtucket, Rhode
Island, spanning the Blackstone River. It powered the first
mechanical mill in America, birthplace of our Industrial
Revolution. Today, even as we move centuries beyond the
water powered mills, we have chosen to preserve that dam as
a historic marker of where we once were as a nation. As
such, it is the exception that proves this rule.
2. There also comes a point in the life of a dam where we
can get the same benefits in other ways. On Butte Creek,
the Sacramento River tributary, irrigation farmers could
replace McPherrin Dam and three others with an irrigation
pump and siphon. Quaker Neck Dam, which stored water for
power generators, could be replaced with a different
cooling system.
3. Moreover, in some cases the price for the benefits is
simply too high; the dam has grown too expensive relative
to the loss of fish. On the Kennebec River, the age,
location (close to the river's mouth), huge environmental
costs and low generation at Edwards made it a relatively
easy call, for removal. Owners of dams coming out on the
Menominee found that taking a holistic approach to the
entire watershed would save them time, money and energy.
Some could be phased out, while others reoperated with
screens, fish passage and drawdowns.
But all these conditions rest on the values and the
scientific understanding of the larger community. Who,
besides nature, decides whether a dam stands or falls?
One recent column made a reference to "Babbitt, the
nation's dam-remover-in-chief" as if I were some Roman
emperor giving thumbs up or down. The truth is I have not
brought my sledgehammer to a single dam that was not
approved for removal by consensus of the inhabitants of the
watershed. Each community made a thoughtful, deliberative
choice in how they could restore their river, whether as
part of a downtown restoration -- as Medford, Oregon and
Augusta, Maine -- or to open miles of spawning in rural
areas, from North Carolina to California. Many of these
consensus based decisions are brought about by democratic,
voluntary watershed councils that are cropping up all over
the country.
Larger dams pose more complex issues, for there are more,
and bigger, economic stakeholders. Entire industries, the
price of electricity for millions of people, water storage
for cities. We are rapidly reaching a consensus with
Congress to remove the dams at Elwha and Glines Canyon. The
debate over four dams on the Snake River will surely
continue for years, beyond my time in this office. Yet even
when a community decides that a dam should remain, it may
discover progressive new ways to operate it that restore
some of the ecological damage. That explains the public
interest in the artificial flood that we released at Glen
Canyon to restore Colorado River beaches downstream in the
Grand Canyon.
So what can you do as citizens and scientists to shape this
restoration movement? What you can do asecologists is
research and examine and document the benefits that might
be accrued by restoration of the aquatic ecosystem by
removal or reoperation of a given dam in the watershed you
may be involved in. We have plenty of powerful stakeholders
willing to reassert the known, traditional benefits of dams
-- irrigation, hydropower, urban water authorities,
engineers. But the process of putting a value on the native
life intrinsic to watersheds and ecosystems is something
new, and the degree to which you can do so goes a long way.
There is another way of expressing this: My parents
generation gloried in the construction of dams across
America's rivers. My generation saw how those rivers were
changed, deformed, killed by dams. Your generation must
help decide if, how and where those dams stand or fall.
I am reminded of Ecclesiastes:
One generation passeth away,
and another generation cometh:
but the earth abideth always....
All the rivers runneth to the sea,
yet the sea is not full;
to the place where the rivers flow,
there they flow again...
A beautiful passage, but now haunting, for it is no longer
true due to changes in my lifetime. I think back to my
beloved Colorado River, which I hiked and rafted and saw
change before my eyes. Once one of the mightiest rivers in
America, it no longer makes it to the sea. That is a shame.
As our generation passes, the toughest decisions rest
firmly in your hands.
Thank you.
---
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8 years
fighting auto dependence and road construction.)
http://www.imaja.com/change/environment/mvarticles