Largest dam removal ever, driven by Tribes, kicks off Klamath River recovery

Largest dam removal ever, driven by Tribes, kicks off Klamath River recovery


KLAMATH, CALIFORNIA—Brook M. Thompson was just 7 years old when she witnessed an apocalypse. “A day after our world renewal ceremony, we saw all these fish lined up on the shores, just rotting in piles,” says Thompson, a Yurok tribal member who is also Karuk and living in present-day Northern California. “This is something that’s never happened in our oral history, since time immemorial.” During the 2002 fish kill in the Klamath River, an estimated 30,000 to 70,000 salmon died when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation diverted water to farms instead of letting it flow downstream. This catastrophic event catalyzed a movement to remove four dams that had choked the river for nearly a century. Now, that decades-long tribal-led movement has finally come to fruition. As of Oct. 5, the four lower Klamath hydroelectric dams have been fully removed from the river, freeing 676 kilometers (420 miles) of the river and its tributaries. This is the largest dam-removal project in history. Brook M. Thompson, a member of the Yurok Tribe who is also of Karuk Tribal descent, holds a piece of a demolished Copco dam on the Klamath River in February 2024. Photo courtesy of Brook M. Thompson. “This has been 20-plus years in the making, my entire life, and why I went to university, why I’m doing the degrees I’m doing now,” says Thompson, who is an artist, a restoration engineer for the Yurok Tribe and pursuing a Ph.D. in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Article by:

This story first appeared on Mongabay

South Africa Today – Environment

See also  Indonesian Islamic behemoth’s entry into coal mining sparks youth wing revolt

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.