In Maine, there’s an effort to put into practice traditional indigenous methods of land management. This sounds like a smart idea to me — ask the people who have lived there for centuries what works, and try that.
Meanwhile, traditional tribal practices have often proved the most sustainable way to manage natural resources. Prescribed burns in forests carried out by generations of Native Americans in the Klamath Mountains in California, for instance, have prevented destructive wildfires better than European settlers’ methods, which suppressed fire and let forests grow too dense. More wildland managers and scientists in North America now recognize the need for prescribed burns, but they still are not being carried out enough to prevent catastrophic fires.
For decades, tribal members in Maine advocated bringing down Penobscot River dams that once powered saw and paper mills to restore an Atlantic salmon fishery. The Penobscot method of timber harvesting, which leaves 75- to 100-foot buffers of trees around rivers and streams, creates ideal conditions for salmon. Salmon like to spawn upriver in shady pools, created by allowing the forest at a river’s edge to thicken and birch trees to fall into it. One afternoon in late October, I watched Penobscot tribal members and scientists from Maine’s department of marine resources release into the Penobscot watershed 80 adult salmon that the state agency had raised in a hatchery, in the hope that they would spawn in such pools and help restore the historic salmon population.
Ah, the salmon. I grew up near a river that used to be thick with salmon, and my childhood was spent watching the fish slowly fade away, and seeing my father growing increasingly frustrated and depressed about it. The rivers were overfished and abused, and steadily declined in productivity. Gosh, maybe we were doing something wrong.
My father, with salmon, in the 1950s
When we lived in Eugene, Oregon, we were just a few blocks from the Willamette River (hint for non-natives: it’s pronounced will-LAM-it, emphasis on the second syllable), and it was a very pretty river, but we never bothered fishing it. I’d occasionally see fly fishermen working it, but nobody was hauling 20 pound silver salmon out of its waters that I know of. Part of the reason was that it was extensively dammed upstream, and as everybody knows, the salmon life cycle requires swimming upstream to spawn, and then the young fish have to navigate downstream to the ocean to mature. Dams kind of get in the way.
But don’t you worry! The Army Corps of Engineers has come up with a solution for the Oregon salmon fishery!
To free salmon stuck behind dams in Oregon’s Willamette River Valley, here’s what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has in mind:
Build a floating vacuum the size of a football field with enough pumps to suck up a small river. Capture tiny young salmon in the vacuum’s mouth and flush them into massive storage tanks. Then load the fish onto trucks, drive them downstream and dump them back into the water. An enormous fish collector like this costs up to $450 million, and nothing of its scale has ever been tested.
The fish collectors are the biggest element of the Army Corps’ $1.9 billion plan to keep the salmon from going extinct.
Yikes. You know, salmon can swim. They’ve been doing it for millions of years, quite competently, until humans started planting great big obstacles in the way. You could just shut down the dams periodically, and let them do what comes naturally, but no…we need a plan that involves fish vacuums and big trucks. They think they’ve got a good reason for that.
The Corps says its devices will work. A cheaper alternative — halting dam operations so fish can pass — would create widespread harm to hydroelectric customers, boaters and farmers, the agency contends.
Moreover, many of the interests the Corps says it’s protecting maintain they don’t need the help — not power companies, not farmers and not businesses reliant on recreational boating.
The Corps’ effort to keep its dams running full-bore is a story of how the taxpayer-funded federal agency, despite decades of criticism, continues to double down on costly feats of engineering to reverse environmental catastrophes its own engineers created.
The only peer-reviewed cost-benefit analysis of the Willamette dams, published in 2021, found that the collective environmental harms, upkeep costs and risks of collapse at the dams outweigh the economic benefits.
This looks like an expensive solution looking for a problem, after years of amplifying the problems that they created. There is already a simpler solution at hand, but it wouldn’t justify the Army Corps of Engineers spending nearly $2 billion.
There is a simpler way to protect fish: opening dam gates and letting salmon ride the current as they would a wild river. It costs next to nothing, would keep the Willamette Valley dams available for their original purpose of flood control and has succeeded on the river system before. This approach is supported by Native American tribes and other critics.
The Corps ruled it out as a long-term solution for most of its 13 Willamette River dams, saying further reservoir drawdowns would conflict with other interests.
The debate and the consequences of the decision are real for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, who have fished the Willamette for thousands of years. Grand Ronde leaders said they’ve met with the Corps seven times to spell out potential alternatives to building giant fish collectors and maintaining hydropower.
“They always feel like they can just build themselves out of problems. And this is really something that we don’t need to build,” said Michael Langley, a former tribal council member for the Grand Ronde.
The fish would flourish, but the recreational boaters would “suffer.” I say fuck the boaters, I support the fish.
The native American tribes know what’s up, and delivered a pithy, if understated, summary.
The tribes filed a letter with the Corps in February that included a pointed summation: “Killing salmon to lose money deserves a deeper analysis.”
For now, though, we’re stuck with a bureaucracy that can’t see clearly, because they’re so wrapped up in technological solutions that make the problems worse…but increase the power of the bureaucrats.
Former employees and scientists who’ve worked closely with the Corps say its officials are afraid to change because drawing down reservoirs and eliminating hydropower would call into question the agency’s usefulness in the Willamette Valley.
“They don’t like to be seen as an agency that can’t execute,” said Judith Marshall, who spent six years as an environmental compliance manager for the Corps.
Marshall, whose work included projects in the Willamette Valley, filed a complaint with the federal Office of Special Counsel in 2017 alleging the Corps ignored obligations under federal environmental laws.
“They’re some of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered,” Marshall said, but “they’re so wound up in their models and what they’re doing, like they can’t see the forest through the trees.”
They’re not thinking old enough. Go back further than solutions dreamed up in the 1930s and examine solutions that were tested in the thousands of years before that.
It would have made my father happy.
No, given the sheer variety of fish ladder systems that have been in use for three centuries, the vacuum and trucking “solution” is one designed to be rejected universally as too expensive to implement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder
Sounds more like the US Army Corps of Engineers is overfunded, given such a Rube Goldberg design and needs to be reminded that one mission remains: eliminating fraud, waste and abuse, all three of which are present in this ridiculous design that thumbs its nose at the very populace that’s overfunding them.
This is like asking them to design a way to get the two miles from my apartment to my local supermarket and they come up with an airport, tram system, tunnel system and heliport, rather than simply fixing the fucked up sidewalks already in place. After the request for quote, I’d stay with using the sidewalk where passable, the street the rest of the time and discuss with my congresscritter the waste of taxpayer monies that they’ve already commissioned in their absurd plan.
I’m not sure this is a “European settlers method” artifact, but a capitalism artifact. When I was a kid growing up in north Florida in the early 50s, I heard my parents and grandparents often talk about how “they” (the timber business via the government) had quit “burning the woods” which meant low-level fires to clear brush.
As I recall they knew the practice had been borrowed from indigenous people.
My paternal grandfather worked in the turpentine industry (that’s what they called it) and prescribed burns were common practice to clear the underbrush since the work involved going through the forests to collect the resins. But my other grandparents…farmers in southwest Georgia…also grew up doing controlled burns to make the woods accessible and reduce risks.
And they talked about these things in direct response to the forest fires that were occurring so they knew intuitively that there was a connection.
The timber business they blamed for stopping the practice was not for construction lumber, much less the turpentine industry, but specifically for the pulp and paper business. In the southeast US, P&P became an enormous business mid-century. P&P depended on growing massive quantities of fast growing pine trees that could be clear cut and quickly turned into paper products. Quantity, not quality, was the key.
Learning from the evidence of what works is something that the Republican states have proven unwilling and incapable of learning. Teen pregnancies and STDs drop in the presence of sex-ed and contraception. The ratio of mass shootings to population is shown to be lower with licensing and background checks. “Trickle down economics” has repeatedly and consistently been proven to be of negative benefit to those who are trickled on. (Same deal with taxation being lighter for those who earn less.) Forced religiosity, and the removal of established rights, has not been shown to lead to more happiness and respect towards others. Trump.
Pence alone pretty much doubled the HIV rate in his state when he was governor. Opposed needle exchanges, cut STD prevention programs, cut sex education. Frankly, I suspect that his real goal was to kill more people than Attila the Hun.
In God’s alsmity mercy, of course.
And now in the House, we’ve got a man in charge and POTUS line of succession that’s also a prosperity gospel lover, for Jesus ordained his Minister Mammon as his successor or something.
The dams on the Willamette are what keep Eugene from becoming a swamp again. (There’s a reason the local college team is called The Ducks. They used to be the Duckfeet, because their home field was often covered in several inches of water) The dams could be safely opened at times, but those aren’t the times when salmon are running. As wzrd1 pointed out, fish ladders are old technology, and much cheaper to build than any pumping system. It bewilders me why there aren’t ladders on every waterway in the state.
two words: Salmon Cannon
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/15/salmon-cannon-fish-dam
The huge dam in my home village Norrfors (“north rapids”) was designed with “water stairs” allowing the salmon to gradually climb the gradient and bypass the dam.
To further offset the effects of fishing in the Bothnic and Baltic seas, a big factory-style salmon “hatchery” was built with huge basins where tiny young salmon were raised and released when they reached a size that made their survival likely.
The stink of the water from the basins being continuously released into the river was substantial- fish feces and urine smell different from the mammalian kind, but just as bad.
The average yearly flow rate of the river is 300 m3 per second but the spring flood is much more. I am.conditioned to get disappointed when I see what passes for “rivers” elsewhere!
PS
Less than century ago, farmhands had it written into their contracts that they would not have to eat salmon more than twice a week. Salmon was poor man’s food!
Artor @ 5
“Fish ladders” – the English term is very close to the Swedish one.
Wzrd1 @ 1
The Swedish dams use low tech solutions. The fish ride the dams down, but most of them follow the water through the hydroelectric turbines and apparently survive what must be an ordeal that would utterly terrify sapient swimmers.
I am reminded of Amory Lovins’ probing question: Technology is the answer but what was the question? The Army Corps is answering a different question than everyone else is contemplating. Probably along the lines of: How can we make the Army Corps look good and worthing of more funding? The salmon are just a vehicle to do that but it could be anything.
I am reminded of Amory Lovins’ probing question: Technology is the answer but what was the question? The Army Corps is answering a different question than everyone else is contemplating. Probably along the lines of: How can we make the Army Corps look good and worthy of more funding? The salmon are just a vehicle to do that but it could be anything.
Bring back the Great Eugene Swamp!
Robbo @ 6, that’s included in the fish ladder article. One selects which approach is a better fit for the conditions anticipated and expected as both normal operation and flood/drought extremes and uses that method.
skeptuckian @ 10, in this case, I disagree. I suspect the Corps selected the most inane, expensive solution possible, as a means to literally avoid actually having to construct anything whatsoever. Interesting, given I’ve read suggestions for fish ladder methods for that very river, yet the Corps comes up with a giant Hoover and Mother Trucker to move the fish. Loads of palms are likely being extremely well greased.
They did that here and still do to a limited extent.
What they found was that hatchery fish were driving the wild salmon to extinction.
It turns out that what you end up breeding with hatchery fish are domesticated salmon that depend on hatcheries for propagation.
But they compete with and interbreed with wild salmon.
It is evolution in action, once again.
In the Willamette river in Oregon, where the questionable fish vacuum idea comes from, there are already 6 fish hatcheries.
“Fuck the boaters” works for me (FL and elsewhere too).
Humans killing off nearly all the North American megafauna >10,000 years ago doesn’t have much to recommend it. I’ll stick with the science-based solutions, thank you very much.
“They’re not thinking old enough. Go back further than solutions dreamed up in the 1930s and examine solutions that were tested in the thousands of years before that.”
Stone Age Religion = Bad.
Stone Age natural resource management = BETTER THEN SCIENCE.
Nope, you don’t get it. Use solutions that have been tested and shown to work, rather than solutions that require vast amounts of money and untested technology.
You did see the word “tested” in my quote, right?
I missed the links to peer-reviewed studies showing how Stone Age “solutions” are superior to the modern one proposed.
Also missed any explication on what these “solutions” may have been.
I’d hazard a guess that nomadic illiterate tribes didn’t have any particular solutions to the problem of dams causing obstacles to salmon migration.
I’d also be interested in just how, exactly, the descendants of illiterate tribes long vanquished have inherited the wisdom of their ancestors.
Are you proposing that perhaps “the oral tradition” has kept these invaluable pearls of resource-management wisdom alive in these communities?
This sounds, in short, like “noble savage” bullshit to me.
Where are the peer reviewed studies showing that 1/2 billion dollar fish vacuums and tanker trucks will work?
There aren’t any.
It’s never been tried before.
You haven’t thought it through.
Thought being an alien concept.
Before those 13 dams were built on the Willamette river, back in the stone age, the salmon runs were doing just fine.
The magic fish vacuum is a last ditch attempt to fix what the dams broke, that is, the salmon fish runs.
This is a workable solution proposed by the critics and in the OP above.
Leave the dams but open them up when fish runs go up and down. These are seasonal runs, mostly in the winter.
If you had bothered to read the entire post you would have seen this.
What I found with Google.
I put in, “Why don’t Willamette river dams have fish ladders” and got this.
I didn’t even know they didn’t have fish ladders. I thought all dams had those.
This looks like poor design planning to me, from generations back when these dams were built.
Perhaps instead of one tall dam, they should have build a series of shorter dams with fish ladders. It might cost more in the short run, but now they are spending billions of dollars in the long run without much to show for it.
As a fan of google, you could have found variations on the fish vacuum, in operation. There are videos, even.
I see. Yes, it never occurred to me that a blog haunted by anti-human misanthropes would take the…. Anti-human misanthropic angle. Quelle surprise!
Reminds me of that famous old bit of wisdom from Margaret Sanger, regarding the poor: “(this) ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
I do wonder if the “nature is best” luddite philosophy applies to the medical professions as well. Certainly illiterate, Stone Age tribes still pass on their “tested” sacred healing wisdom. Perhaps visit a shaman next cancer scare, and bypass the oncologist?
The dams provide hydro-electric (i.e., clean, green) energy. The recreational use of lakes supply tourism dollars.
That “this approach is supported by Native American tribes and other critics,” the Native portion of which make up a total of 1% of Maine’s population, or roughly 13k people, of uncertain education or ability, does not particularly convince me of the rightness of their wisdom in this case.
It seems like this irrational aversion to dams (like the irrational hatred of nuclear power, despite its obvious superiority to all other current forms of energy production) is not really rooted in science, but in some other philosophy.
Anti-human misanthropes? Where did that come from?
I think you’ve got the wrong blog.
I think anyone so stupid that they when the linked article explains the solutions: lower the water level in the dams, allowing the fish to migrate, which even an could figure out for migratory fish.
Banned.
Unlike dumb troll, I actually read the OP and the articles.
Most real scientists involved in fish research don’t think it will work.
It is a huge stress on the fish and it looks like a lot of them just die.
I’ve seen juvenile salmon smolts in streams before.
They are pretty fragile.
Down to trivial insults already.
That is what trolls do when they run out of thoughts.
It never takes long.
It’s not accurate either.
I’m anti-dumb trolls, a mistrollope if you want to put it that way.
I see that PZ just solved one problem involving salmon runs.
I can’t let this pass though.
Cthulhu you can’t even read for comprehension.
No wonder you are an idiot troll. And an out racist.
The Indians involved aren’t in Maine, they are in Oregon.
The Willamette river is in Oregon, not in whatever fantasy land you live in.
I know a lot about the Grand Ronde tribe.
Quite a few of them have college degrees. Some of them are college professors.
For example: OSU Anthropology David Lewis
David Lewis, PhD, is a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, a descendant of the Takelma, Chinook, Molalla, and Santiam Kalapuya peoples of western Oregon …
I know that many of them are more educated than you are.
You read and write like an almost illiterate middle school dropout.
Racist troll:…”people, of uncertain education or ability,”
Tribal Chairman Michael Langley: ““Education and continuous learning is something that my grandfather preached the importance of and I feel it in the very marrow of my bones,” Langley (Tribal Chairperson) said. “… I can’t help but look at this program in front of many of you today and look at the results of the investments we have made in education as a Tribe. Look at those biographies.”
In Realityland, those Native Americans of “uncertain education or ability” have put a huge amount of time and effort into educating their children. And it has worked out well.
@19 PZ
Okay, fair enough. Solutions that are tested and evidence-based, as determined by recent experts and their work. If traditional approaches meet that standard, I’m all for it.
I know this person is banned, but I have to say: We don’t even know if “Stone Age” people had religion and if they did whether it was anything like what we think of as religion. If they had religion perhaps it was better than what religion became in the last two thousand years, particularly with respect to the handful of primary religions in the world. I just read in the Wikipedia article on “Human history” that “Neolithic societies usually worshiped ancestors, sacred places, or anthropomorphic deities.” We don’t know that they “worshiped” anything, and we certainly don’t know that the “usually” did that across all Neolithic societies. That’s an interpretation. They may not have been worshipping. Perhaps they were just being creative, or even silly. Even human practices much later may not have been religion in the later sense of the word. We project onto the artifacts that we find of Paleolithic, Neolithic, and later people our modern idea of religion and never think to question our bias is clouding our interpretation.
This is right in line with the history of the corps of engineers. There’s a great book, “Dams and other disasters; a century of the Army Corps of Engineers in civil works” by Arthur E. Morgan from 1971. A PDF can be checked out from archive.org, and once checked out, downloaded with adbobe drm to avoid the web reader. Warning, it’s full of depressing things, financial waste and rank stupidity being the least of them. They’ve always been fully invested in purposeful environmental destruction and overt racism.
https://archive.org/details/damsotherdisaste0000morg/page/n7/mode/2up
Robro:
They were people, like we are. Might as well ask if they loved or hoped and if that was anything like what we think of as ‘love’ or ‘hope’.
Why do you impute stupidity and/or incompetence unto others?
(Bah)
the “rational” for not doing things to promote the salmon population in the rivers for all its capitalist monetary underpinnings never seems to take into consideration the value of the fish they just write them off without a thought unless forced. I will go farther most development does not seem to take into consideration anything but the limited impact of the development in generating profit for the selected beneficiaries of the particular project everything outside of the immediate project is seen as an impediment and a hindrance and obstacle to be over come. They always support one or two vested interests who do not see anything but their own profit
And the fact that they also destroy local ecosystems, which can only be remedied by a fleet of trucks is apparently not a relevant point at all.
Humanity really needs to learn how to think in terms of large systems of interdependent parts. Evaluating things in isolation is going to be the death of us all.
Banned? Did steveem break that habituation again?
Amazed I didn’t end up that way myself (again, sorry).
Tried and tested, like fish ladders? No, gotta go with trying a more expensive pump and drive fish by fossil fuel truck, which works magically or something.
Or just blow the dams, once drained, as their energy isn’t all that much to begin with, but that won’t be allowed, as it undermines the budget for maintaining them.
Because, maintenance of a concrete object is just that much…
And Daddy Warbucks needs a new aircraft carrier for a yacht.