Removing Dams (From Consideration)

In the minds of hydropower producers, property-rights zealots and timber moguls as well as many grazers, farmers and irrigators, the Endangered Species Act functions like a bovine-spongiform prion, eventually causing madness. It's not that the ESA seriously inconveniences these people; it's just that they can't abide the federal government telling them how to do business, especially when they believe the law's constraints on sacrificing public resources might cost them additional profits. That's why they worked so hard and spent so much money to help bring George W. Bush to power, and that's why so many of them have joined his administration.

Early on, Bush bureaucrats realized they couldn't neutralize the Endangered Species Act with legislation. So they hatched creative and frequently illegal (say the courts) administrative schemes to circumvent the will of Congress and the American public. Consider their machinations with the 12 threatened and endangered salmonid stocks in the Columbia River Basin. First they hired timber lobbyist Mark Rutzick and inserted him into the fish section of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA Fisheries) to dictate salmonid policy. Rutzick had attracted the Bush administration's attention when he led Big Timber's campaign to do away with ESA listings for salmon and steelhead by pretending that there's no difference between wild and hatchery stocks. The feds, Rutzick had declared before he became part of the administration, needed "to use hatchery fish more aggressively to restore salmon runs," a strategy that would "benefit timber-dependent communities and industries."

Under marching orders from its new salmonid czar, NOAA Fisheries appalled the scientific community (including its own biologists) with its May 28, 2004 proclamation that, henceforth, domestic salmonids raised in hatcheries can count as wild fish when determining whether or not a stock requires ESA protection. Who needs clean, cold, free-flowing rivers when we can mass-produce salmon and steelhead in concrete fish factories? [See Conservation, November/December 2004.] Then, on September 9, 2004, NOAA Fisheries released a draft biological opinion smeared with Rutzick's fingerprints. Under the Endangered Species Act the US Fish and Wildlife Service or NOAA is required to issue a biological opinion as to whether or not a project jeopardizes a listed species (the latter agency presides over creatures spending significant parts of their lives in saltwater). If NOAA or the Fish and Wildlife Service determine jeopardy, the project can proceed only if the agency approves "reasonable and prudent alternatives."

But Andy Eller, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Florida, tells me his superiors have privately informed him that, under White House orders, there will be no jeopardy opinions for any species anywhere no matter what.

The Bush administration's draft biological opinion is a court-ordered replacement for the five-year-old Clinton administration document, ruled illegal in May 2003 by US District Judge James Redden on grounds that it contained no mechanism for implementing all the habitat enhancements, hatchery improvements, and dam tweaks it falsely claimed would prevent jeopardy. But, dependent though it was on unproven, unattainable offsite mitigation and failed strategies such as transporting smolts around dams by barge and truck, the Clinton opinion at least acknowledged obvious legal and scientific realities: 1. that salmon and steelhead recovery was the goal of all this prodigious effort and expenditure; 2. that the eight mainstem dams on the Columbia and Snake jeopardize the listed stocks; and 3. that if other prescribed fixes failed, breaching the four most hurtful dams-on the lower Snake River-must at least be considered.

The Bush opinion, on the other hand, is based on the astonishing and unprecedented assertion that, because the dams were built before enactment of ESA, they are as much a part of the natural environment as waterfalls-that is, even though the document acknowledges huge salmonid mortality caused by the dams (over 80 percent of the entire run in some cases), dams no longer count as fish killers. Further, the Bush opinion discards the ESA's plainly stated mission of recovery and proclaims that merely keeping a genetic ember aglow is good enough and that unspecified people at some unspecified future time can worry about restoring the stocks to a point where extinction is no longer likely (provided they're so inclined, because it's strictly voluntary). Finally, the Bush opinion rejects even the remote possibility of breaching the lower Snake River dams, an option that would save money as well as salmonids.

Breaching these four dams, which produce less than five percent of the Northwest's power, would cost under $1 billion. But according the Bush administration's own biological opinion, all the prescribed Rube Goldberg techno-fixes, which the administration admits won't recover the stocks and which haven't worked in the past, will cost $6 billion; and that's just for the next 10 years. Like the Clinton plan, the Bush plan is built around trucking and barging, which in a quarter century has not once resulted in the four- to six-percent adult return needed for recovery or even the two-percent return needed to halt the ongoing extinction process.

A billion dollars spent to get rid of the dams would be a lucrative investment. In addition to saving the $6 billion the administration proposes to spend on just treading water for the next decade, breaching would save $200 million a year now spent on dam repairs. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, restoration of the Snake's natural flow along the 140-mile stretch from Lewiston, Idaho to Pasco, Washington would annually inject $376 million into the regional economy, $65.5 million of it from improved fishing. In 2001 a rare (and brief) salmon season in Idaho, made possible by improved ocean conditions, generated $90 million.

In 2002 the General Accounting Office undertook an exhaustive examination of salmon recovery and reported that, although $3.3 billion had been spent over 20 years, essentially nothing had been accomplished. Finally, despite the climate-induced, short-lived upswing in adult returns after the turn of the 21st century, NOAA Fisheries itself admits that Snake River salmon are in no better shape today than they were when they were listed more than 10 years ago.

This lack of progress was the central message of former Oregon governor John Kitzhaber when he addressed the October 30, 2004 board meeting of American Rivers at the Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington. Kitzhaber, on hand to receive a major award for his courageous advocacy of salmon recovery, had been the only Columbia Basin governor to call for breaching of the lower Snake River dams, describing it as "a scientific no-brainer." After his talk he told me this: "We've won it all in court, and not one thing has happened to recover these fish. I don't think the new draft biological opinion is going to stand up to legal scrutiny, but the tragedy is that it will take NOAA Fisheries two or three years to do another one. This whole debate is not about salmon as much as it is about the Endangered Species Act."