The Columbia River: not eternally dammed
A documentary on PBS this Tuesday night, based on an earlier book by Blaine Harden about the Grand Coulee Dam, prompts him to reflect on ironies and some hopeful new developments on the mighty 'River Lost.'
Courtesy of W.W. Norton
Blaine Harden, who grew up in central Washington while his father worked on mammoth construction projects, became a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post in eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and northeast Asia. Back in Seattle, he's been a busy contributor to the New York Times, the Economist, and public television. This week he's in the news for a harrowing book about North Korea's brutal prison system, “Escape from Camp 14.”
By coincidence, an earlier book of Harden's has just been re-released in time for a documentary in the PBS “American Experience” series. The TV show, called “Grand Coulee Dam,” will be broadcast tonight (April 3) at 8 pm; it's based on Harden's book, A River Lost: the Life and Death of the Columbia (W.W. Norton, $15.95).
Originally published 16 years ago, A River Lost recounts the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in the 1930s. It can be read either as a compelling account of human enterprise and ingenuity (the taming of a natural resource to create cheap electric power) or a morality tale of human arrogance (the destruction of a great river for private profit). Harden's father helped build the dam, helped bring irrigation to the parched desert, helped raise the standard of living of thousands of farm families, and helped produce aluminum for wartime airplanes and power for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
But by the time Harden returned home, after 20 years of overseas assignments, Grand Coulee was increasingly seen as having killed the mighty river, destroying its salmon runs and trampeling the treaty rights of Native tribes. The Columbia itself, once a majestic and mighty waterway, had been reduced to plumbing.
In a review of the book in the summer of 1996, the New York Times called it “a scathing indictment of technocratic hubris, and of those who play what Mr. Harden calls 'the river game' for shortsighted economic gain.”
No need to worry about salmon runs: Grand Coulee didn't have any fish ladders, and the dam pre-dated the Endangered Species Act at any rate. Native tribes? Piffle. With casual racism, the manager of one of the irrigation districts blames the river's condition on the impoverished Indians for overfishing.
Into this arena of passionate but mismatched interests steps an old-fashioned lawman, federal Judge James A. Redden. From his courtroom in Portland, the 81-year-old Redden rules in favor of the voiceless fish and the disenfrachised Natives. Taken aback, the Establishment digs its heels and virtually refuses to comply. Not just the Bush White House, either. The Obama Administration has been every bit as protective of irrigation districts and power companies. Still, some accommodations have been made, with encouraging consequences.
Spillways on the Columbia's dams have allowed more fish to migrate. At Judge Redden's insistence scientists, rather than power managers, have gained the ability to influence the operation of the river. The Bonneville Power Administration and the US Corps of Engineers are now required to reduce power generation and spill a lot more water (and baby salmon) over the dams. The results are heartening: unexpectedly good survival rates for salmon migration.
“When I reported on the river in the early 1990s, no one knew or dared predict that spill would prove so useful [to survival of the salmon],” Harden wrote to me in an email last week. As a result, Harden says, “Indians up and down the Columbia-Snake are in a much better place. They may be able to hang on to the traditional culture and food. That is a great and noble thing for our government and civil society to do — and I didn't believe it was possible when the book [first] came out.”
The irony is that the West Side environmentalists have joined the biggest users of the Columbia's power. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have built power-hungry server farms in eastern Washington and Oregon, giving “nearly everyone on Earth who sends e-mail, uses a smartphone, or streams video a personal stake in the damming of the Columbia.”
But hydro has found new, unexpected alliances with solar, wind power, and natural gas. Coal-power electricity is likely to be phased out in this part of the country, which is good for the planet. Altogether, Harden says, it is a far happier story than the prison camps of North Korea.
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Apr 3, 11:15 a.m. Inappropriate
We know there are neo-Malthusians who want to take America back to pre-Columbian times. But let's look at what the other 99% want.
Exactly what is the position of the tribes that use the reservoir water and power generation?
The dam supplies irrigation water for 671,000 acres. How much would Washington's economy suffer without the water?
In 2008, 21 billion kWh of electricity was generated with a plant factor of 38.24%. This means $840,000,000 of electricity is created every year (@$0.04/kwh). This cheap power is what keeps the lights on in Seattle, Boeing, Microsoft, Google, and elsewhere.
Economically, 600,000 salmon per year was eliminated. In one study, the Army Corps of Engineers estimated the annual loss was over 1 million fish. So if we divide the electricity produced and divide by the higher number of fish, each salmon would be valued at $840. There are other economic benefits with farming and recreation, and some losses. But it is indisputable that the loss of inexpensive power and irrigation water would dramatically reduce the jobs in Washington State and send jobs to China and elsewhere.
Is that what you really want?
Posted Tue, Apr 3, 12:02 p.m. Inappropriate
Katherine Ransel sends this comment on the next-to-last paragraph:
What the heck is this supposed to mean? “The irony is that the West Side environmentalists have joined the biggest users of the Columbia's power. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have built power-hungry server farms in eastern Washington and Oregon, giving ‘nearly everyone on Earth who sends e-mail, uses a smartphone, or streams video a personal stake in the damming of the Columbia.’
I understand that Holden is quoting Harden in the second sentence. But not in the first, I take it. Those “West Side environmentalists” are responsible for Judge Redden’s rulings. They brought the suits, marshaled the evidence, and convinced Redden, against his natural grain of judicial conservatism, that the salmon deserve better than the government has given them.
Posted Tue, Apr 3, 1:44 p.m. Inappropriate
randydutton:
In your economic analysis you neglect that the fish runs can potentially last for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but the dams won't.
Posted Tue, Apr 3, 4:25 p.m. Inappropriate
"Harden's father helped build the dam, helped bring irrigation to the parched desert, helped raise the standard of living of thousands of farm families, and helped produce aluminum for wartime airplanes and power for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation."
How can such broad accomplishments be shriveled down to "the destruction of a great river for private profit" or "shortsighted economic gain"?
What I would like to see is a calculation of the social, economic and ecological impacts if we were to have had to replace hydro power production with coal burning or atomic generation over the last, what, 80 years instead.
Posted Sun, Apr 8, 10:16 p.m. Inappropriate
Picking nits are in order: although Blaine Harden was prominent, and articulate, as an interviewee in the broadcast, no where is he is credited with providing the basis for the film. Indeed, Harden's 1997 book "A River Lost" is one of several of a long line of serious, eloquent, and well-researched works covering much of the same ground, albeit with shifts in thematic emphasis. Bill Dietrich's 1996 "Northwest Passage..." is possibly the most deeply researched and compelling read on the Columbia River, and the book is not even mentioned in the fairly large list of further reading on the documentary's website. Paul Pitzer's 1994 book "Grand Coulee: Harnessing a Dream", which is a re-casting of his doctoral dissertation, is, though perhaps more cerebral than Harden or Dietrich, generally considered among historians as the definitive historical context and political analysis of Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Project; Pitzer, at least, appears in the documentary film.
Holden's summation of "Harden's father helped build the dam, helped bring irrigation to the parched desert..." is a bit of literary license, if not exaggeration; Harden states in the film that his father lasted only three months as a Grand Coulee construction laborer, before moving on. True, the elder Harden circled back to settle in Moses Lake, but there were, what, 8,000 people working on the dam, then later several tens of thousands to build the Hanford Engineering Works. The elder Harden's story is quintessential "Grapes of Wrath", but a little perspective should not overlook the reality the man was trying to survive along with thousands of others.
The documentary itself is an excellent work, providing a fine compilation of archival film footage and photographs. The "take away" message was fairly even-handed. There is a lot of blame for environmental problems created by hydro power development on the Columbia River, and, the video attempts to avoid tabulating the good and the bad to derive a positive social value or factor. If anything, the video attempts to make clear such social-environmental arithmetic is perhaps foolish without understanding the complex historical and political context then, and now in-play.
Mark DeLeon
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