Climate Change Necessitates New Approaches to Environmentalism

A Case for the Northwest’s Snake River Dams and Salmon Co-existing

By Terry Flores, Huxley Class of 1979

As Huxley College of the Environment enters its fiftieth year, Thomas Henry Huxley’s maxim “Learn what is true to do what is right” couldn’t be timelier. As a graduate of Huxley 40 years ago, I have witnessed huge progress in protecting our nations’ air, water, land and natural resources through passage and implementation of landmark laws during the “golden age” of environmentalism in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. These great achievements were accomplished due to the hard work, dedication and efforts of a variety of environmental groups and involved tools still in prominent use today: litigation, grassroots organizing, fundraising, and lobbying.

Now many esteemed scientists and scholars are calling for broader approaches to address today’s environmental and social challenges, specifically the threat posed by global climate change. A new geologic age called “The Anthropocene Epoch” has been proposed to capture the significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Many scientists believe it is critical to acknowledge and accept that man’s presence and impacts are part of the existing environmental equation and broader, more human-centered approaches are needed to craft better conservation solutions, empower more people and reduce social inequities.

It may no longer be in the collective interest or the planet’s to focus on preserving particular pristine places or only photogenic species for the privileged few, or seek to turn back the ecological clock to some time long ago before humans left their mark on the land and its natural resources. Rather, the imperative to reduce greenhouse emissions supports a broader approach that is less litigious, more inclusive of impacts on others and affected communities and that is data, not dogma, driven.

More human-centered approaches are needed to craft better conservation solutions, empower more people and reduce social inequities.

A case in point that has special meaning for those of us living in the Northwest involves salmon (and more recently orca whales) vs. dams. Environmentalists seeking to have dams removed maintain that society must choose one over the other, while the science and need to reduce carbon emissions argue otherwise.

For decades, environmental groups have invested their passion, time, energy and dollars in a campaign to remove the Snake dams, four of the eight large hydroelectric dams that are federally owned and operated on the Columbia and Snake Rivers in the Pacific Northwest. These dams provide nearly 60 percent of the region’s carbon-free energy at cost to public utility customers throughout the Northwest, keeping electric rates low for everyone. The dams also have locks that allow for river barge transport of goods coming from the mid-West and inland ports, creating an “economic highway” that reduces carbon emissions from truck and train transport. Critically, the federal hydro system is used to back up wind and solar plants in the Northwest, thus amplifying their value in addressing climate change. And, unlike wind or solar, one of the main benefits of hydroelectric generation from dams is that it can be stored and released instantaneously as needed to meet and track energy demand.

However, environmental and other groups behind the Snake river dam removal campaign believe that without their removal, 13 stocks of salmon listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act in the 1990’s will go extinct. Others support dam removal because they want to see a return to free-flowing rivers. These are well intentioned people who care deeply about salmon and rivers. However, theirs is a false choice that is not supported by the best science available, would not help salmon runs in the near term, nor does it adequately address today’s climate change reality or take into account the broader societal interest.

Removal does have a powerful emotional appeal — after all, no one wants to see our iconic salmon, or by association orcas, go extinct. Clearly, some dams with little power or other values such as flood control, irrigation, etc. that adversely affect salmon and other species should be considered for removal, however, with the Snake River dams there is a strong case that more harm than good would result.

“Solutions, not symbols, are what we need.”

In a 2018 paper entitled “Fealty to symbolism is no way to save salmon,” authors Valerie Carranza and Dr. Peter Kareiva¹ note: “Despite an absence of published formal extinction analysis, environmental groups favoring dam removal circulated claims that salmon were doomed to certain extinction if the Snake River dams were not removed. On October 20, 1999, they (the Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited, National Wildlife Federation, American Rivers, etc.) published a ‘timeline to extinction’ in a full page advertisement in the New York Times, with the statement that if the dams were not promptly removed ‘wild Snake River spring chinook salmon, once the largest run of its kind in the world, will be extinct by 2017.’ ”

It’s now 2020 and that prophecy has not proved true. Salmon runs have improved since that claim. The authors note that the billions invested in predator removal, habitat restoration, and improved fish passage and operations at the dams has resulted in downstream survival rates of 86% and 99% at all the dams.

“The problem is that a complex species and river management issue has been reduced to a simply symbolic battle — a battle invoking a choice between evil dams and the certain loss of an iconic species,” Dr. Kareiva and Carranza point out. “Solutions, not symbols, are what we need.”

Photo provided by Terry Flores

Snake River dam removal would require congressional approval, likely take decades and cost billions to gain a 1 or 2% increase in salmon migration survival through the dams if any. This is a terrible investment in salmon recovery as compared to other options, for example reducing the harvest of endangered species (while protecting northwest tribes’ treaty rights), improving hatchery practices and restoring degraded habitats. It also disenfranchises entire communities that rely on the dams for clean, cheap power, flood control, irrigation, and inexpensive, clean transport. Over 20-plus years, $17 billion has been invested to make the dams and their operations more salmon-friendly, including the largest and most expensive habitat restoration program in the nation, and salmon survivals have improved as a result.

The time may come when it makes sense to remove the Snake River dams but it is not now or the foreseeable future based on the urgency of climate change and need to take more immediate, effective actions to benefit salmon. Groups seeking removal maintain that the carbon-free energy provided by the dams could be easily replaced by new wind and solar. However, until these resources can be stored, they are only available when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. In the meantime, we need as much and more clean carbon-free power as we can muster. We especially need resources, like hydro, that magnify our ability to bring other carbon-free resources online like wind and solar. It is a perfect partnership.

In an Anthropocene era characterized by global climate change, the environmental community needs to “think big.” It is time to challenge long held orthodoxy, engage in more critical thinking and dialogue, and limit the use of litigation² and other methods that increase polarization and disenfranchise people and communities.

As movingly stated in the preface to “Effective Conservation Science, data not dogma” (edited by Peter Kareiva, University of California, Michelle Marvier, Santa Clara University, and Brian Silliman, Duke University, 2018), “It is our love of nature and biology that draws us to this work, and that love also drives us to want to get the answers right. In fact, our fear is that uncritical thinking will come back to haunt conservation. Unqualified predictions of imminent extinctions or ecosystem collapse only weaken the credibility of conservation science when those predictions do not come to pass. More importantly, uncritical thinking and weak evidence may lead to misdiagnosed problems and ineffective strategies.”

Huxley’s maxim, “Learn what is true to do what is right,” is even more relevant today.

About the Author

Terry Flores was the Executive Director of Northwest RiverPartners (NWRP) from 2005–2018, a non-profit coalition of northwest electric utilities, agricultural organizations, ports and businesses. NWRP formed as a result of ongoing litigation over northwest federal hydro system operations on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Prior to NWRP, Ms. Flores was Hydroelectric Licensing Director for PacifiCorp, responsible for overseeing licensing activities for the company’s hydro portfolio. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Ecosystems Management from Huxley College of Environmental Studies and a degree in Biology from Western Washington University.

Footnotes

[1] Dr. Kareiva headed research at the National Marine Fisheries Service on Snake River salmon and management options between 1999 and 2002 then Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and is now the head of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.

[2] Litigation is a potent tool which has resulted in changed federal dam operations and other measures that have benefitted listed salmon species, however, nearly three decades of it has also led to increased polarization, diminishing biological returns, and a failure to address other measures to the detriment of salmon recovery.