Those Dammed Fish in Troubled Waters

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 4, 1999 | by John Elvin

Dam-busters -- green groups whose goal is to free rivers constrained by man-made obstacles -- claim that dams harm salmon. Others say that issue is a red herring.

In terms of maintaining his credibility as an environmentalist, presidential aspirant Al Gore hardly could have chosen a worse place to commit a campaign blunder than Wilder Dam on the Connecticut River, where he attempted to reap the benefits of a colossal but covert release of impounded water just for the sake of an image-enhancing photo op. In the first place, Wilder is a power-generator, a hydropower dam. That puts it at the top of the dambuster hit list, a hot priority target for a coalition of green groups whose goal is the destruction of man-made obstacles to the free flow of America's rivers.

Worsening the blunder on the vice president's part is the fact that the Connecticut River -- not only New England's largest but also its longest river -- is a home to the Atlantic Salmon, a cause celebre for environmental groups and said to have been nearly wiped out a century ago due to the damming of spawning grounds.

The salmon is the big, beautiful fish the greens have enlisted as a symbol to garner public support for destroying hydropower dams, much as they manipulated the spotted owl as a simple, sentimental symbol for their campaign against the timber industry. Mere mention of salmon can be counted on to elicit a knee-jerk "Save the salmon!" reaction among the programmed. Following that, of course, comes the other refrain: "Down with dams!"

"It's a common misperception that the 25-year decline in the West Coast salmon population is due to man-made influences," John Carlisle, director of the environmental policy task force at the National Center for Public Policy Research, tells Insight. Salmon migrate from fresh water to the ocean and back again, a perilous journey under the best of conditions. Environmentalists say that in addition to predators, certainly including man, salmon face a host of survival threats due to the presence of dams. Disorientation, injury and destruction of food sources are among obstacles said to result in death to the migratory fish.

But that's not the whole story. "What those in fishery science have discovered in the past 10 or 15 years is that the ocean is the most pivotal factor," says Carlisle. "Prior to that, the ocean was seen as a stable and benign force ... but now we know that the ocean warms in a cycle repeating every 20 to 30 years. When the ocean gets warmer, the zooplankton, the primary food source for salmon, decline. Since 1975 or '76, zooplankton levels have declined by about 70 percent. That, according to classic ecological theory, translates into a 75 percent decline in the salmon."

Proponents of dam-busting say impoundments on the Columbia and Snake rivers indeed have contributed to declining salmon runs, raising water temperatures, exposing fish to predators, slowing their migration to the sea and killing them in turbines (the latter fact having led to the creation of "fish friendly" advanced-technology turbines now in the demonstration stage of development).

In response, Carlisle says he's not arguing against salmon-friendly dams and other efforts to improve the salmon's chances of survival, but "nothing man can do in the freshwater habitat is going to cause a major increase in the salmon population as long as the ocean is in a negative state. You just have to wait for nature to take its course."

If Carlisle is right -- and there are indications that West Coast salmon are entering a cyclical rebound stage -- then, as he puts it, "The salmon will be rebounded and we'll be stuck with regulations that support the agenda of the environmental movement, which is to destroy economic growth."

Those fighting to retain dams include farmers who will lose an estimated 35,000 acres of land plus the economic benefit of river transportation if the dams are breached, as well as loggers, paper mills and the aluminum industry in Washington state and Idaho. The farmers have several strong advocates in Congress, including Sen. Slade Gorton, the Washington state Republican who heads the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior. Gorton, who sees dam removal as a threat as great to "the overall economy of the Pacific Northwest as we have faced in many years," points out that prior to construction of the dams, eastern Washington "was mostly a dust bowl."

It was the "Down with dams!" attitude that precipitated the removal of Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine about a month prior to Gore's recent adventure. Edwards was dismantled with the aid of another administration heavyweight when it comes to balancing the earth: Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, whose press office crowed that he "will wield a sledgehammer or jackhammer."

After taking a whack at Edwards, which has been serving local industry since 1837, Babbitt mused about destroying another "75,000 aging dams nationwide." That number amounts to every dam cataloged by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as existing in the United States. Of course, dismantling the entire inventory is beyond the wildest dreams of even the most ardent of dam-busters; they have hopes of wrecking only a fraction of existing dams and Babbitt has toned down his rhetoric a bit since the days when an Insight profile quoted him as saying: "I would love to be the first secretary of interior to tear down a really large dam."