Montana News
Shoot for the Moon
Going into her junior year of college, Amy Bowers Cordalis got a gig working on the Klamath River. I was on the water every day for the summer. I was a Urok tribal fisheries department fish technician. The job was close to her heart. The region is the ancestral home of many tribes, including the Urok, Karuk, Khupa, Klamath tribes, Shasta Nation, and Modok Nation. And Amy's a Urok tribal member. It was her job to count how many fish tribal members were harvesting. The Klamath runs from the high plains of Oregon to the California coast. Historically, about 800,000 salmon would dash up river every fall to spawn. It was the third largest population of migrating salmon in the country. The river had been damped nearly a century earlier, and the salmon population wasn't nearly as healthy as it once had been. And one balmy September day in 2002, Amy saw something off. I was with another fish technician, and then we were with one of my supervisors, and people started coming down the river, yelling, the fish are dying, the fish are dying. That summer, the Klamath was in the midst of a historic drought, an unrelenting heat. These silvery fish, Chinook salmon, many more than two feet long, were acting weird. They would come up out of the depths of the water with their mouths open and try to get their gills out of the water like they were trying to breathe, and then they would disappear into the water again. We would see that same fish, five or 10 feet down the river float up dead, belly up dead. It wasn't just a few of them. Dead salmon were turning up by the thousands. It felt like we had experienced a nuclear bomb that had gone off in the river and had killed the fish. Mike Belchick was senior fisheries biologist with the tribe. He was on a long weekend when it all started happening, and he got back to service with a voicemail full of messages about the die off. He hurried to the river, hopped in a jet boat, and started heading upstream. The number of dead fish just started climbing. It just got to the point where we couldn't even avoid sucking them up in the jet. He'd run over them, and he'd hear them go through the jet. First, there were dozens of dead fish. Then there were hundreds, then there were thousands, then there were tens of thousands. It's something that you just never forget. And I just remember being shocked, but telling myself like I needed to keep my head here, and we need to figure out what's going on. [MUSIC PLAYING] If you're the biologist, it's like a detective story, like there's a murder here. Let's start getting clues. For Montana Public Radio in the Montana Media Lab, this is The Wide Open. I'm Nick Mott. Our first season, threatened, is all about the Endangered Species Act. This time, a fish-killing mystery that starts with the ESA shows how state and federal wildlife law went from a weapon that was used against tribes to a tool to reclaim what was stripped away. Stay with us. Today, two decades after that fish kill, Amy Bower's Cordalis is an attorney. She runs a nonprofit that advocates for indigenous conservation, and for years, she was General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe. Salmon have always been a part of her life. I couldn't tell you how old I was when my first memory of fish is. I don't remember. There are pictures of me barely walking next to blue tarps laid out on the ground full of adult Chinook salmon. For decades, tribal culture all over the Northwest was sidelined, sometimes violently, in the name of conservation. And Amy's family's story reflects what this legacy meant for the Yurok. The story goes that there was one night that my great-grandmother, Geneva Matt's, was just hankering for fish heads. Salmon heads are a Yurok delicacy. And to the tribe, the relationship with salmon is as old as time itself. And it was September. It was 1969, and I just imagine this glorious, beautiful September day where there's a lot of fish in the river and the temperatures kind of warm and cozy. And you're kind of happy because there's fish in the river, and it's nice and warm. And so she sent my great uncle, Raymond Matt's, down to the family fishing hole. So Amy's uncle Ray puts out a gill net. It's made of these nylon strings that snag fish as they swim through. Gill netting is a fundamental cultural practice to the Yurok, and indigenous harvest only made up a tiny fraction of the overall take of salmon in the river and offshore. Imagine these nets as kind of like a big wall for salmon passing upstream. They're controversial since they're indiscriminate and can snag lots of fish at one time. And starting in the 1930s, the state of California made gill netting illegal. I always say that we became bootleg salmon fishers, you know, because it was like prohibition where you're not supposed to sell it, but we still did, because that was how we made our way of life. By this night in 1969, Amy's uncle Ray had already been arrested 18 times for fishing. He knew the drill. Usually, you could hear the warden coming up the river on a motorboat so you could lay your net and scatter as soon as you heard that rumble approaching. If you were caught fishing, you would get beat up. You would get all your gear taken away and you would get a citation. Sometimes they took him into jail for the night and it was scary, it was dangerous, it was violent, it was expensive. And this night, sure enough, the warden came roaring upstream. But Amy's uncle didn't hide. He'd had enough. So he got arrested. They went through the whole drill, took the gear, they took him to jail. Little later, he appears in court and the judge told him, pay me a dollar. And I'll give it all back to you. And you know, all the gear will dismiss the charges. Just pay me a dollar. And he pounded his fist and said, I have Indian rights and I will not pay you a dollar and I'm gonna, you know, push my case through to the Supreme Court if I have to, to affirm those rights. And essentially, that's what he did. - This legal battle over Amy's uncle's gill net in the Klamath in some ways set the stage for everything that came next. Here's what happened. Back then, the state of California was pretending the Klamath reservation didn't exist at all. The tribe's treaty, like many treaties across the country, promised continued hunting, fishing and gathering in the group's usual and accustomed places. But the Yurok tribe had also lost about 95% of its land during a period called allotment, where reservations all over the country were parceled out into private property, often for non-natives. California argued that the reservation had lost so much of its land to allotment that it had lost what the state called its Indian character. But in 1973, Amy's uncle won in the Supreme Court, forcing the state to recognize the Yurok tribe and with that recognition respect their right to fish. There was a bigger picture here. Across the country, tribes were stepping up to get their rights respected. In the Pacific Northwest, states were limiting tribal fishing rights, supposedly in the name of conservation of fish species. Wildlife law had become a weapon, one tool of many to suppress tribal culture, and tribes were pushing back. The battle caught fire in Washington state and seized the interest of the media. - We have this fishing right. It's a treaty supreme of the land under their constitution, and we're not gonna give up our fishing rights. - Tribes organized fish ants. Think of them kind of like sit-ins, but for fishing. And along with that activism, came brutality from authorities. This is from a Carol Burns documentary from those days that followed specifically Billy Frank Jr. and other indigenous activists on the Nisqually River in Washington. - They have Billy clubs. They have Billy clubs made out of lead pipe. - I came upon one game, Morgan, and he had my two meters by the hair, and he was thrown in one of their faces into a log and, you know, just shaking the other girl. - And so think about what was happening in the country, though, too, right? There was the civil rights movement. Indian country was watching. Indian country's response to the civil rights movement was essentially to assert our treaty rights. - Amy's uncle's Supreme Court case was decided the same year the Endangered Species Act passed. The idea of conservation was in the ether, but tribal perspectives in their relationship with the natural world were siloed and ignored. In the case of the declining salmon on the Klamath, tribal members kept being persecuted for their fishing, even after Amy's uncle won. There was finger pointing on all sides for the decline of salmon, but sport fishermen in particular rallied together, saying that limiting tribal harvest would help conserve or save fish. And by the late 1970s, under pressure from anglers, the state once again cut off your rock fishing. The federal government upheld that decision. - Your rock people went to war, basically, and kept fishing. (light music) - The federal government sent out a team, a SWAT team of federal marshals, armed with full riot gear, machine guns, huge jetboats, trucks, the whole deal. They rolled onto their reservation, like a military occupation, and were sent there to enforce the ban. - The era became known as the Salmon Wars. As we talked, behind us, Amy had a photo hung up of her uncle, and other fishermen getting arrested at a fish in back in those days. - Luckily, you know, no one got severely, no one died, but people were beaten, people were taken to jail, people were very scared. - Over time, a number of other court cases further cemented tribal fishing rights. And gradually, the Iraq's instituted their own fishing regulations, set not by the state or federal government, but generated by the tribe itself. This era is crucial to understand what happened that day on the Klamath, when all the fish died. As all this went down, things weren't looking good for salmon on the Klamath. A lot of forces were pulling away at the fish. Tribal fishing only accounted for a very small percentage of the catch. Much larger in that picture was commercial fishing operations offshore. The river was also a sport fishing treasure. Salmon anglers looking to bag a big fish flocked there from all over the place. At the same time, declining ocean conditions and things like logging and dredging the river for precious minerals had taken a toll too. - Little by little, you know, habitat is getting worse and worse. There's not a lot of water in the river. And so the salmon runs are just starting to dwindle. - And in the first half of the 20th century, the demand for power had dealt another blow to salmon habitat. Four dams were built in the middle of the river. Those dams were devastating to salmon populations because of how the fish reproduce. Salmon instinctively returned to where they hatched to spawn. They swim upstream hundreds of miles pushing against the current. They lay their eggs in gravel beds, sometimes within a meter of where they'd hatched. Nobody really knows exactly how they find their way back there so reliably. Some scientists think they can somehow read the Earth's geomagnetic fields like a map. And for salmon, those four dams were a blockage in this big artery, vital for reproduction. - I always get this visual in my head of like, you know, a salmon, its mission is basically to spawn 'til you die, right? Like, just go. And I just see them hitting their heads or like trying to launch themselves over Iron Gate Dam, which I think is like 189 or 173 feet tall. You know, so obviously they were never gonna make it, but I just envision that until they, you know, die, they're just trying to get over it. - By 2001, co-host salmon, one of two salmon species that migrate up the clammyth, had been listed as threatened under the ESA. So had these two suckerfish that exist in a lake at the top of the river, past the dams, those were crucial to the clammyth, another tribe whose relationship with salmon had been totally severed by the dams decades earlier. So thanks to the Endangered Species Act, the government had to make sure all those fish had enough water. And at the same time, irrigation for this huge zone of farmland was pulling at the flows too. - 230,000 acres of its primarily row crops like potatoes, onions, other some alfalfa, certainly it's economically significant. It drives the economy for that region. - This is where Mike Belchik enters the fray. He's senior water policy analyst for the Yurok tribe and, fun fact, also a pro disc golfer. I met him at his house up a steep gravel road on a tributary to the clammyth, practiced disc golf baskets gleaming in the sun. He started working for the tribe back in the mid 90s. He was hired on as senior fisheries biologist. - I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything about indigenous people, indigenous rights, what their struggles were, how they thought about things. I just took on this big position for the tribe, sight unseen. - Mike was, in a lot of ways, a fish out of water. But working for the tribe, he learned. He began to understand the legacy of colonization. His first few years with the tribe was a good time to get his bearings. They were wet years. There was enough water in the river for all those forces pulling at it. But then in 2001, drought finally came to the clammyth basin. (upbeat music) - Water issues got real, fast. There wasn't enough water left to give the coho, the sucker fish and the farmers the water they all needed to survive. So the Endangered Species Act meant that the feds had no choice. - So reclamation just put their hands up and just said, we have to release this water for the endangered coho. And we have to leave a certain amount of water in for the endangered cup to entwam, which are also known as short nose and lost river suckers. And that meant that there was almost no water for ag. The federal government cut off almost all the water to agriculture in the upper basin. And that set off a huge fight. - We closed tonight with a dispute over a precious commodity. Water and the federal government's decision about which comes first. Farmers are fish. The battleground is the drought stricken clammyth basin in Oregon. - Farms went bankrupt. It was an earthquake up there and they reacted very strongly. (upbeat music) - There were protests, billboards put up with slogans like some suckers stole our water and stopped the rural genocide. The anti-government militia movement got involved. Farming advocates used a blowtorch and chainsaws to open irrigation headgates and symbolically bucketed and siphoned water for their fields. - Farmers field betrayed by the federal government. - You're not getting the irrigation water you need? - Zero. - It's 100% for the fish, zero for the farmers. - We made the basin bloom and now they tell us there is no water that sucker fish are more important than we are. - For Mike Belchik, the stories that ended up on the evening news for the most part totally missed the point. - The entire media story there was hardworking farmers versus ugly sucker fish. And downriver and the salmon and the people downriver weren't even written into the story. It's like we didn't exist at all. That was terribly frustrating. The central issue here was indigenous rights, indigenous people trying to reclaim what was forcibly taken from them and trying to save just to hang on to what they had. And that being the species. - But the frenzy around the fish versus farmer story got the attention of the White House. The Bush administration heard the farmer's cries for help. And in 2002, the Secretary of the Interior, Gail Norton, came to the basin in person to open the headgates to release more water for agriculture. It was a big symbolic affair. Effectively, it meant if water was scarce, there'd be less water for fish. We have to find ways to balance the needs of the ecosystem and of people, she said at the time. - And it was basically like, you lose tribes, sorry to be you, but this is political hardball and you came out on the short end. Catch you next time. (gentle music) - Thing is, the drought wasn't over. - And on September 19th, the fish started dying and they kept on dying and then more of them died. - The fish kill, at least 60,000 Chinook salmon die. - Disaster on the Klamath River, dead salmon everywhere. - Here's Amy. - In those times, it's like, you know, you're helpless because there wasn't anything we could do to stop the fish kill and, you know, like carnage everywhere 'cause the bodies of the salmon were rotting and then, you know, it started to smell really bad. I mean, think about how even just a slice of salmon smells bad after it's been out for a long time. You know, think about 80,000 salmon just rotting in the sun for two weeks. (gentle music) - The stench here is overpowering all along the lower part of the Klamath River. Experts say the number of dead fish could be in the tens of thousands. - This section of river runs through the urine. - For people who have been on the river since time immemorial and stewarded and cared for the river and your whole way of life is around the river, you know, the whole thing felt like an act of ecocide against us because we are so dependent upon the salmon for our livelihood that the killing of those fish felt like it was a killing of us and our culture. (gentle music) - Mike started working to solve the mystery. What killed the fish? It seemed intuitive it had something to do with the drought and the flows, but what exactly? Mike speared a dying salmon with a trident and got to studying it. It turned out it was a disease known as Ick or white spot disease. It's something lots of people with an aquarium might be familiar with. - Well, it turns out the Ick transmission is inhibited by high flows. It's also very temperature sensitive. So if you have low flows and high temperature and a lot of fish, the conditions are right for Ick. - The drought and the heat combined with the abundance of fish migrating up the river and the little water that was left getting sent off to the farms, it all made for a perfect storm. And to Amy, it wasn't just the fish that were under attack. - It meant that we were still at war with the United States. It meant that we were still experiencing aggressive, genocidal, a similaristic acts of ecocide against Yurok people in 2002. It meant that our livelihood, our future was still under attack and at risk. And so it meant that me personally, I had to join the fight. This happened on the boat as I was seeing all these dead fish. My great-grandmother came to me who had passed. She had passed several years before, but she was a very powerful Yurok leader and went through some of the hardest times of colonization and survived. And I just felt her tell me, you need to go to law school and you need to devote your life to protecting this river and making sure this never happens again. And so that's what I did. - We'll be back. - The wide open is supported by High Country News, a nonprofit, reader-supported publication that has been covering the land and communities of the West for more than 50 years. Information on how to receive a wide open listener subscription at hcn.org/subscribe with the code wideopen2024. - The fish kill made it clear that the future of the tribe was bound up with the future of salmon and therefore of the river. In the battle turned from gill nets and police boats to paperwork and courtrooms. In the wake of the fish kill, Amy went to law school. For the years that followed, her training took her away from her home and from the river, but it was never far from her heart. - So I was always home in the summer time to fish and of course I have a big family there and so I was home for holidays and we are also a dance people, so we host ceremonies. So I was home for ceremonies. So you're always sort of moving with the tides, with the river. - Mike Belchik, the fish biologist, was getting an intensive of his own in federal policy and negotiating. This huge opportunity had come along, one that would only come around once every few decades. The four dams on the river that blocked salmon passage were up for something called re-licensing. This is basically a year's long negotiation between the owner of the dam, in this case a company called Pacificor and a government agency called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC. Think of a dam license like a lease. Pacificor is basically using the river, which is a public resource to generate power. So every 30 to 50 years FERC looks at that dam license to make sure things are on the up and up, that legally and environmentally and practically the dam should keep on running. - It's an arcane and incredibly complex process. - When FERC re-licenses a dam, they look at what it means for the environment, for fish and wildlife, for energy conservation and for all kinds of other competing interests. And they also hear comments from the public. The tribes got involved from the outset. They wanted to leverage that negotiation to make things better for fish and for the ecosystem and therefore for tribal culture too. - And FERC is also like tighter than a drum as far as communications go. Like the CIA has more leaks than FERC does. You're not gonna get into the inner sanctum and figure out what they're really thinking. Nobody does, and especially tribes. The dams, to be clear, were put in for a reason. They generated enough electricity to power about 70,000 homes each year. That made up about 2% of Pacific Corps power generation overall. Early on in the re-licensing process, tribal leaders for both the Yurok and Karuk, another tribe that depends on the river, voiced enormous ambitions for the re-licensing process, getting those dams out of the river. - A shoot for the moon, go for removal. - Freeing the Klamath. Doing so would mean salmon could swim upstream to about 400 more miles of spawning habitat. And to the tribes, the dams impact extended beyond just fish migration. - Rivers transport more than just water. They transport nutrients and biota, living things upstream and downstream. And there's a whole spectrum of connection that goes on with the river that's vital to that ecosystem. You put a dam in the middle of it that doesn't have any passage, and you sever that. - It wasn't just the Ix stressing the salmon population. The warm, stagnant water at the base of the dams met with runoff from agriculture, creating poisonous algae blooms, the color of a mad scientist's experiment. And for miles down river of that lowest dam, the severed connection with the river's natural cycles of high flows of water and sediment met parasitic worms had lined the riverbed. Images of it looked almost like a 1960s shag carpet. And those worms cause a disease that kills yet more baby salmon. - Why are we losing 80, 90% of our fish? It's the dams. It's the sediment. It's the worms. It's the out of balanced nature. And so you see what happens when you put something on the river like that, you take the system into ecological tipping points, and you start losing everything. - In the fish restoration world, there's lots of different projects people do. There's floodplain reconnection, off-channel habitat ponds. There's wood jam, structure, complexity additions. But the one that works the best time after time is to remove fish migration barriers and open up habitat that they've been blocked from and give them access to that. Those are have demonstrated the most successful all the time, every time it just have a big track record. So when we looked at dams, we're like, let's get rid of this big fish passage barrier. This would be on a scale that's never really been tried before. - But there was a problem, a big one. - Pacifico made it abundantly clear. Not interested in talking about removal. That's not on the table at all. - So if Pacifico didn't want to entertain the idea on their own, how could the tribes convince them it was the right thing to do? One way would be to speak to the corporation in their own language, money. So the tribes started hashing out a strategy. One of the really important details of the real licensing process is this. Taking endangered and at-risk species into account, the government can mandate fish passage for dams. Those are measures that allow fish to get over dams back to their spawning grounds. There's a big range of what fish passage can look like. There's fish ladders, which are, well, what they sound like. Then there's fish lifts, which are kind of like salmon elevators. And in some places, you can even manually scoop up salmon and truck them around the dam. Thing is, these fish passages cost a whole lot of money. And this is where the strategy kicks in. Pacifico would never remove the dams out of the goodness of the company's heart. But if fish passage has gotten mandated, the dams might suddenly become uneconomical. As in, it'd be cheaper for the company to take the dams out, then to install something like fish ladders on all four of them. It was a long shot, but the tribes thought it could happen. So this was the new battle, one of bureaucracy and economics. And to win it, the tribes realized, wouldn't just take legal maneuvering. They'd also have to change hearts and minds. Thus far, though, tribes had mostly been written out of stories about fish in the river. So what to do about that part of the equation? One night after a particular grueling set of meetings with Pacifico, these would be all day. We sat around in a hotel room in Wierica and came up with this idea of crashing the shareholders' meeting of Scottish power in Edinburgh, Scotland. Scottish power owned Pacifico at the time. The logic was, local media wasn't paying much attention here. But this protest could garner international outrage over the dams. People in Scotland understand a lot about sovereignty and self-determination. They have that in common with the tribes. Whereas a people in America, that's not really something they think about. It's sort of like the air you breathe. You don't really think about that until you don't have it. - It was, Mike says, more than just crashing a corporate meeting, it was a media blitz. - We knew that it was gonna strike a really resonant chord there. When Mike got there, even the customs agent at the airport had heard about what they were doing. It made the major papers and it seized the UK. Not long after that Scotland trip, Pacifico or began to change their tune. - Before that trip, they had consistently said that Dameron was not in the interest of their customers. It was not on the table. It was not something they were interested in talking about. In the media, shortly thereafter, they said, we would entertain a Dameron will settlement if we could make it so that it's in the best interest of our customers. And we were like, that is the first time they've ever said anything like that. - The tribe tried another tack in the battle too. Tribal leaders knew they couldn't just keep endlessly fighting with the farmers they'd butted heads with over water. Mike mentioned Troy Fletcher, tribal member and former executive director of the Iraq tribe. He passed away back in 2015. He was my best friend and my mentor. Spent many hours in cars talking and we spent many hours in the bars drinking after the meetings, Troy was a strategist but he also had empathy for people. And with him, we went from, after the farmers got shut off in 2001 and then the fish kill, we spent a couple of years just bashing each other in the media. These endangered species aren't more important than people. And then we'd be like, well, these farmers are heartless and they don't even care about indigenous people and et cetera, like we went back and forth like that. And Troy one day just announced, we're gonna stop doing that. And we're like, what, are you crazy? Like we're not, no, we're not. Like we're in a battle here. And he goes, no, it's not getting, he goes, is anything any better? No. So we're gonna stop. - So Troy and Mike and others started visiting the farmers in the upper basin. The same people they once fought tooth and nail with. - Troy started to realize, he goes, see, we have like way more in common with them than we have differences. They're worried about their kids moving away and forgetting the culture and everything falling apart. The tribe's worried about the kids moving away, forgetting the culture and everything falling apart. Look at the exact same worries here. This is about people trying to figure out how they can keep their culture going. And whether they're a farmer or whether a tribe, they have culture, you know. And we began to carve out some common ground. (upbeat music) - The tribes were garnering international media attention over dam removal. At least some of the farmers were becoming more understanding. So the social pressure was building, but none of it would matter unless they could get the Sifikor on board with removal. The missing piece of the puzzle was actually getting the fishways prescribed. - So getting the fish, the fish passage mandated. - Right, exactly. - After more than half a decade of negotiating, the federal government released what Mike and so many others advocating for dam removal had been waiting for. They said fish ladders to help salmon reach long lost habitat upstream past the dams would be mandatory. And it turned out those passages would indeed cost a lot of money. According to analyses by both FERC and the tribes, - Dam removal was demonstrably cheaper than the required fishway. - In short, it would cost less money to get those dams out of the river than to retrofit them with a tech that would help salmon swim over them. So the tribes strategy had borne fruit. I'm simplifying a lot here. There was an environmental impact statement that followed a lengthy court case, a whole bunch more legal drama, basically. But eventually, Sifikor against all odds was on board. They agreed. With fish passages mandatory, the economics just made sense. The dams should come out. - In '08, we reached an agreement in principle with the company. I think that's the first time I cried a little bit. - So why wasn't significant to that? Why was that emotional for you? - Because, you know, starting in 2000, it was sort of a kind of a campaign that just looked like it had not a lot of chance of success. At the same time, I always thought we would be successful. Both things were true. When we reached the agreement in principle, you know, Ronnie Pierce, who was the one who told us, shoot for the moon, don't accept anything less. You know, she had passed on and I was thinking about her, you know, and I was thinking how proud she would be, like how far we came. And that here we are sitting down with the company, putting pen to paper and signing an agreement. - Of course, as it too often goes, the elation of success was short-lived. It would take another 12 years of bureaucratic and political back and forth before the next turning point in our story. During this time, Amy Bowers-Cordalis, who had been a fish tech back in 2002 during the fish kill, came back to Europe country to become the tribe's general counsel. She told me about what it felt like at that particular moment back around 2016. - All the work that we do for the river is, it's not only just governmental, it's not only just an exercise of political or governing sovereignty, it's an exercise of spiritual sovereignty as well, because our religion is tied to world renewal and making sure that through a series of ceremonies and, you know, daily practices that we're interacting with the environment in a way that keeps everything balanced. And if things get off balanced, then it's our job as people to renew the balance. And so even though we were up against this huge, well, let's just bring it back to the dam. We were literally up against an almost 200 foot tall iron gate dam, we were hopeful. - For the next few years, there's more waiting, more advocacy. And then in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, FERC, that government agency tasked with decision-making about the dam, released their decision. FERC said, "Sure, remove the dams." But they also said, "Pacificor has to stay on the license." Meaning they were still liable. - And Pacificor said, "Whoa, that violates "a bedrock principle of the project. "The whole deal here, as we hand over the keys, "we walk off into the sunset with no liability from it. "That's the whole deal." So Pacificor filed a notice of termination. They pulled out of the agreement. They sent a letter to everybody saying, "We're done with this. "This violates the principle, "and we don't think we can fix it." But the agreement had a 60-day countdown attached to it. And so we had 60 days to rescue this agreement. - 20 years of work came down to 60 days. The tribes had to act fast. And by then, something else major had happened too. Pacificor had been sold. Scottish power wasn't their owner anymore. Now it was Berkshire Hathaway, owned by Warren Buffett. So to get the dams out, the tribes would need to get one of the wealthiest people in the world on board. And time was running out. - Looking back on it, you know, like as a whole, we sort of had this, it was like completely unjustifiable naivety that we would succeed. And I remember when that 60-day clock was ticking down, I still didn't think we were gonna fail. I was like, "We're gonna find a way out of this." The tribes managed to convince Warren Buffett to send the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway to meet in person. But what then, just some ordinary meeting? - We've always shot the moon. Let's shoot the moon, let's take him up to Blue Creek. Let's get him on boat, take him up river. - Blue Creek was the epicenter of the fish kill, but to the tribe, it means a lot more. - It's the biggest and coldest creek that enters the lower climate. It's a major stop for incoming salmon, but it's also culturally significant. Just the beginning of the trail to the high country, to the prayer seats. There's a big village there. It has a central location in Iraq geography. It's a power spot. And there's a saying that you go to Blue Creek and it changes you. You're never the same after you go to Blue Creek. So we're counting on that. - The reservation lifted its COVID closure for just one day. These big wigs and suits jet in, Amy's on maternity leave, but she gets the call too. The moment was too important not to be there. So Mike, Amy, other tribal officials, and these execs hop on three jet boats. And from the outset, things start to go wrong. One boat overheats, another one bottoms out on a gravel bar. And as they get farther upstream, they hit this rope spanning the river. They can't pass and there are people on both banks, protesters, this they didn't expect. - You know, they get to this barrier and there's Indian people with bandanas and t-shirts, holding signs and bottles with blue-green algae. And it was like, where is this gonna go? - Tribal protesters began to paddle out to the jet boat. Mike told me about one woman who came out and introduced her son. She said, "This is my son, he's 18 years old. "He was in my arms when we went to Scotland, "and he will continue fighting for this river. "We're never giving up." He said, "You made a deal. "You made a deal to take these dams out, "and just 'cause it gets difficult doesn't mean "you get to pull out of the agreement, "tuck your tail in and run. "You can't run from us because we're never giving up. "And when my kid, when he has kids, "they're gonna continue to fight if that's what it takes." And one by one, people came out and that's basically the gist that they said. "You made a deal, and you stick to it, "and you figure out if it gets hard, "then you figure out a way." (gentle music) - For the Indian people who have fought so long for dam removal, you know, to have those folks on the river, you know, they were going to speak their mind. And they did, and they did in a respectful, powerful, moving way. - And after about, you know, 20 minutes of talking at the barricade, they lowered the rope and let us pass on. - The meeting ended, the execs flew home, and nobody really knew what would happen next. The tribes kept strategizing. Eventually, they got the states through which the Klamath runs, California and Oregon, to take over the liability for the dams that Pacific Corps didn't want. And that was enough to ease the company's fears. - Berkshire Hathaway was back on board. - If so, it's that meeting at Blue Creek that finally cleared the way. The media that happened afterwards, Warren Buffett issued a statement saying, "We are going to take out these Klamath dams. "It's long overdue for a restorative justice." And so I was like, "Oh my God, we could have wrote that." And we didn't. They wrote it themselves, and it was Warren Buffett's quote. "At that point, we knew we had it." (gentle music) - Next comes more paperwork, some board meetings. And finally, everything gets approved. All four dams are coming out. - It was remarkable how quickly everything started to happen after we got approval to proceed with dam removal from FERC. The order came out, and then it was like, it was like a week later, the crews, the construction crews had set up camp, you know, even the signs that used to say, hydroelectric project now said, Klamath River Renewal Project. - After more than 20 years of fighting, the largest dam removal in history was underway. We'll be back. - The wide open is supported by the Murray and Jan Ritlin Fund, the Santa Bar Foundation, Humanities Montana, and listeners like you. Ways to contribute and make this kind of journalism possible at mtpr.org. - Welcome back to the wide open. I'm in a truck on a beat up road next to the river at this next stage in the saga on the Klamath. I'm with Dave Muir, who's with a company called Resource Environmental Solutions. While the dams come out, they're in charge of breathing life back into the watershed up here. - Welcome to the largest salmon restoration project ever. It's no small thing and it's happening in, I was gonna say this is happening in God's country, but you live in Montana, so there's some competition here. - I wanted to see what the culmination of this two decades of work looked like. So I met Dave on the banks of the Klamath near the Oregon, California border in the spring of 2024. We drive up a steep hill, hop out of the car, and walk to a vista where we can look down on the first dam, as in the most down river structure. - So what are we seeing here? - You are seeing iron gate dam, this is the lowermost dam, and they are in the process of effective yesterday, starting to remove it, and so below you see what used to be the iron gate reservoir. It's now basically turning into the river course. - As I visit, dam removal has been underway for about a year. One dam is completely gone, and the rest are on their way out. This massive miles long network of reservoirs behind iron gate has been drained. And the hillsides up higher green, covered in lupin and sage, but that gives way sharply to barren brown sediment where the reservoir of water stood for about a century. - There have been a lot of twists and turns, false starts, setbacks, to get to this point where the project is actually happening. - Yeah, you know, here we are, it's finally happening. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. - Driving through the construction, or I guess deconstruction zone, the work was dramatic. The scale was hard to take in since it went miles down the river corridor. It had all been underway for months, and Mike and Amy had watched as they chipped away at the dams. - Is there a moment to you that where you were like, this is for real now, there's no going back, the dams are out? - When I first saw a cough code two out. - That was one of the middle dams, and the first step in the dam deconstruction process was getting that one out of there back in 2023. Since it was in the middle, the operation went down relatively quietly, away from public eyes. Amy got to go see it after it was gone. - I'll never forget walking, there was like a brim. We were walking down the side of the river, and we were pretty far above the riverbed, so we couldn't see the former dam location sites. - Amy went to the top of this gravel mound, where suddenly she could see where the dam once had been. - And then there it was. The dam was gone, the river was flowing, and you could see on the side where there was still some concrete there, so you knew exactly where the dam was, yet it was gone. And I just bawled, I just cried because there was no turning back, that dam was gone, and the river was there. The river was so powerful, and you could just feel how relieved the river was. If you pay attention to the river and really tune in with it, you can feel how it feels, and it will tell you how it feels. And so seeing the river that day, that was a part of the tears, was just to feel how wonderful it felt to be free, you know, to be healthy again. - If dam removal is the surgery, then restoration, planting seeds, keeping out invasive species, that's the physical therapy. The ecosystem-wide healing here will take years. It's just now starting. And to my eyes, it's one thing. I've never seen all this when the dams were intact and the reservoirs full. To Mike and Amy, it all looks very different. Quickly, the river channel re-emerged. And then, Yurok Cruz came in and planted over 70,000 million seeds of native plants. And so now when you go, you see, you know, the river channel and the water is running, and it's getting clearer and clearer. You know, now there's poppies blooming with those bright orange flowers, and there's, you know, green and grass, and it's all native vegetation. And it is beautiful. It is glorious. It is a miracle. It is all that is good in the world. And it happened in a matter of months. - It really makes me feel good. It helps me sleep at night. No one that I feel like I've done some good in the world. Like I've just been so incredibly lucky to be granted this opportunity and put in a position to do something right. And the dam removal is like the physical manifestation of that. Like it goes beyond words and any good intent or anything, and there's something you can point at and just go, I had a part in making that happen. You know, I had a part. And I was stuck through it like through thick and thin until it's actually physically happening on the ground right now. And it's almost, it's just hard to believe. I go up there and I can't even believe my eyes right now. - Mike says this place is likely to be a salmon factory in the long run. It's exactly the kind of habitat they need. But the way Mike and Amy talked about salmon recovery for this piece was very different than say, recovering wolves to restore the vast wilderness of the Northern Rockies, or the Mexican-spotted owl as a proxy for old growth ecosystems of the Southwest. This project, they said, wasn't just for the non-human world. - These restoration projects here, the keystone species, it's people. That's what we're doing these projects for. - Mike isn't indigenous and he wants to make that clear. He says that his tribal colleagues and friends have helped him understand something crucial about this work. Like Frankie Myers, the vice chair for the tribe. - People like Frankie, visionary leaders like him, think about it a lot differently. They're like, who are we restoring? We're storing the Iraq people. And we're doing it one stream restoration project at a time. - Amy told me that ever since Koho got listed, the tribes got to thinking about how they could use the ESA to protect both the species and their own culture. The ESA was a central player in the dam removal story. And the tribes have also filed lawsuits using the law to get more flows to keep fish healthy. - Thing is, she says, that law alone is not enough. - So the ESA was a very effective tool for us to try to get, to help fish. The challenge with the ESA is that the standard, the legal standard for, especially if you're talking about fish and fish needs is bare minimum. And for the Klamath, what that meant was that essentially the Endangered Species Act flows are like the equivalent of putting a human on life support. It's just barely enough to keep your bodily systems and functions going. It's not enough to recover. - Here on the Klamath, the ESA is a very different sort of player than in the lawsuits we've heard about earlier in this season. It's part of this bigger picture, the country's suite of wildlife and conservation laws. Just half a century ago, those laws marginalized tribes. But tribes today have flipped the script and started using those laws, especially the ESA to reclaim what was forcefully, sometimes violently stripped away from them. And I wanna be clear here, it's not just the Yurok people. It's the Karuk and Hupa Valley too, who also depend on the river. And the Klamath farther upstream have been severed from salmon for over a century by the dams. If and when the salmon come back, the next generation is here. We'll have a connection to their culture. I have three little boys and they're getting older. And already it's still, it's sad for me because we haven't had a really strong salmon run, a healthy salmon run since probably 2012. And the oldest one was born that year. And so they and their lifetime have never seen a real healthy run. And so when I take them out fishing now, it's fun 'cause we're on the water, but we're not really catching any fish. I just hope that the fish come back in time for them to have informative fishing experiences and really connect to that fishing way of life. 'Cause that is what every single previous generation of my family has done. So it's like, it's sad, but I do have hope that with the dams coming out, with all this other work we're doing, gosh, I hope by the time they're in their 20s, they're gonna be able to fish the way I did. - Dam removal work is slated to be complete shortly after this show comes out in the fall of 2024. And it's important to note, these dams don't impact irrigation in the upper basin. So the battles over flows and water for salmon and suckers and farmers aren't necessarily over. Some farmers think removing the dams by helping salmon do better could take a bit of the pressure off their own draw of water. Plenty of others are still mad about it. There've been missteps too. Locals expressed concern and outrage over water quality as dam removal unleashed a pulse of sediment into the river system. People who live near or just recreate on those drained reservoirs are furious about the changed landscape. Hundreds of thousands of hatchery raised salmon were released in the wrong area and likely died. Though millions more have since been successfully released. The salmon aren't back yet, but with the dams gone, they could make the journey any time. But the recipe for restoring both ecosystem and culture doesn't end with removing the dams. Amy said, so much work lies ahead. - Dam removal is just the beginning. On my tour with Dave, I walk up close to the river to where I can hear the water flowing and I point my mic its way. This is the Klamath acting like a river again where it hasn't in a long time. The sediment is bare and soft. The river meanders at the bottom of what used to be a reservoir. If I visit the same spot in another five or 10 years down the line, I wonder what I'll see. (gentle music) - Next time on the wide open. - This is the existential battle of our lives. - The plight of polar bears in the wild has really struck a chord with the American public. - Maybe we can drag our policy leaders along kicking and screaming too often. With the Endangered Species Act, it's been a greater benefit to attorneys than it has to the species, and I wanted to change that. - This episode was reported and written by me, Nick Mott. It was produced by Mary Auld with editorial support from Jule Banville, Lee Banville, and Corrin Kates Carney. Our story editor is Lacey Roberts. Jesse Stevenson created art for the season. Our theme music is by Isaac Opatz, arranged and produced by Dylan Rodriguez featuring Jordan Bush on Petalsteel. Other original music is by Dylan Rodriguez. Jake Birch mixed this episode with help from Alice Soder. Web design and marketing is by Josh Burnham. In fact, checking is by Victoria Traxler. Special thanks to Leah Swartz for the conservation, education, and support. And to Amy Bowers Cordalis, Mike Belchik, Ashley Bowers, Dave Muir, Laurel Gonzoli, and everybody else who's talked with me about the Klamath. Follow us, leave a review, do all the things you can do to help us spread the word about this show. And also tune in next week for another episode of The Wide Open. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) This project was produced in collaboration with the Montana Media Lab at the University of Montana School of Journalism. The Lab is a center for audio storytelling and journalism education that elevates perspectives from underserved communities in the West. Learn more at montanamedialab.com. The Wide Open is also a production of Montana Public Radio. MTPR enriches the mind and spirit, inspires a lifetime of learning and connects communities through access to exceptional programming. More information at MTPR.org. The Wide Open is supported by the Murray and Jan Rittland Fund, the Cinnabar Foundation, and Humanities Montana. [BLANK_AUDIO]