We paddle the free-flowing Kennebec River a day after Edwards Dam came down (NRCM)
Shrouded in the New England mist, Everett “Brownie” Carson carved his paddle through the calm waters of the Kennebec River near Sydney, Maine July 2, 1999. He and I were among a small group of canoeists and kayakers who were floating the 17-mile stretch of the Kennebec River above the Edwards Dams that was free flowing for the first time since Nathaniel Hawthorne walked its banks 160 years earlier. The day before he stood with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Maine Gov. Angus King, industrialists, utility executives and fellow environmentalists as the ancient dam came down after a decade long, bitter battle.
Paddling against a head wind through a thunderstorm, Carson saw waist-deep mud and banks littered with garbage, including a sofa, car tires and a refrigerator. Assorted mussels and other aquatic creatures were left dry. Bald eagles, numerous after their own dramatic recovery, picked off beavers and other prey revealed by the lowered river. Carson was relishing a victory that reverberated across the nation. Since the Edwards Dam came down 1,200 other dams have been removed, restoring rivers and hope for the communities that they run through.
The latest were the dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California. The last was removed last month, opening a waterway to salmon just as the Fall salmon are beginning their run upriver to the places they once spawned. Klamath River lovers can give some of her credit to Brownie Carson and the others in Maine who first got the Edwards Dam removed.
I have followed this river renewal since my newspaper, the Idaho Statesman took the then remarkable path in 1997 in calling for the removal of the four lower Snake dams in Washington. They were downriver from the spawning grounds of Idaho’s salmon and steelhead as were four other dams on the Columbia.
Biologists and economists had determined that removing the four Snake dams would allow Idaho’s salmon populations to recover at the cheapest cost. We said that but the region’s political leaders, dam managers and utility executives rejected the idea, instead choosing to spend $7 billion to keep the dams while improving salmon migration and habitat restoration.
The Statesman’s editorials, written by Susan Whaley, came before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered the Edwards Dam breached. When national newspapers reported on the FERC decision, they often also referred to the Idaho Statesman editorials as part of river restoration movement. Meanwhile my bosses kept sending me around the country to examine how dam removal was working elsewhere. That took me to Maine, the Edwards Dam and in the canoe with Brownie the day after the dam came down.
Carson had just returned wounded from Vietnam in May of 1970 when he joined Earth Day events at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. But the young Marine made news a little over two weeks later at a Vietnam War protest at Colby College in nearby Waterville. A student asked Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, if the United States had troops in neighboring Laos. She said no.
Carson angrily got up and confronted Smith with the deep gouge in his arm. He was wounded in Laos, he said. As the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Service Committee it was her job to know. “And if you do know, how could you lie to us,” Carson said. After running for Congress and getting a law degree Carson joined the Natural Resources Council of Maine and became its executive director. He later was elected to the Maine state senate.
Carson had turned the Natural Resources Council of Maine into one of the strongest, most effective environmental groups in the country. They had worked more than a decade to get the Edwards dam removed. They have helped remove more dams in Maine since.
I had interviewed Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt the day the Edwards dam came down and naturally I asked him about the Snake Dams. But Babbitt wouldn’t talk about the Snake. He was trying to get Washington Sen. Slade Gorton to back funding to complete the studies necessary to eventually remove the Elwa Dams on the Olympic peninsula. The Obama administration succeeded there in 2011 when those dams came down. I got to watch and write about that too.
In 2008, then Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne worked with Oregon, California and PacifiCorp to remove the Klamath Dams in a collaborative deal where everyone got some of what they wanted. But the people who opposed the proposal got Congress to kill the authorization. Environmentalists, the tribes, PacifiCorp and the two states ignored Congress and eventually got the dams removed.
The Klamath story offers lessons for people on both sides of the debate on removing Snake River dams to help imperiled salmon species, as well as for people who reject the kind of collaboration that led to Kempthorne’s Klamath agreement. For people who want the dams removed, the Klamath deal’s failure demonstrates how hard it would be to get Congress to authorize removing the four lower Snake dams in Washington even if the science and economics are clear and the Pacific Northwest supports it.
Ice Harbor Dam
But make no mistake, those four dams will come out because they will end up costing more than keeping them there. PacifiCorp, a private utility, made the obvious business decision. I doubt the bureaucrat at the Bonneville Power Administration will make the same decision simply because, as it has for two decades, the federal government will pick up the tab.
The dam culture runs deep in Western politics and can overwhelm even everyone’s best interests. But eventually money talks. Still, it takes people like Brownie Carson to force the issue.