For its very first public action, back in 1981, the radical environmental group Earth First! unfurled a 300-foot-long black plastic “crack” down the face of Glen Canyon Dam to protest Lake Powell, which had just reached full capacity the year before. In the speech he made that day from the back of a pickup truck, Edward Abbey warned that “the domination of nature leads to the domination of human beings.” We’ve learned a thing or two since then about the consequences of damming rivers. Today, the future of Glen Canyon Dam, which was only completed in 1963, has never been more tenuous, largely due to climate change and drought. “I see this as an invasion,” Abbey said of the dam, likening it to an alien lifeform. “I feel no kinship with that fantastic structure over there.”
I have found myself oddly drawn to dams, I think for a similar reason: their absurd out-of-placeness and decidedly unnatural grandeur. I gawk at the incredible power of water gushing from spillways, and the incredible hubris of the engineers who venture to stop that water in its path. I feel a pit in my stomach, looking out across still reservoirs that used to be rushing rivers. I visited the Elwha River dams in Olympic National Park before they came down, wanting to bear witness to their ugly and obtuse presence in that otherwise vibrant place.
The Elwha and Glines Canyon dams have been gone for a decade now, and signs of their presence are fading into the past. Data from the Elwha River’s recovery is now being used in the Klamath River Basin, where, earlier this year, the largest dam removal project in history began. Four of the six dams on the Klamath have been breached and are slated to be removed entirely in the coming months. (See “Undamming the Klamath.”) It would have been hard to fathom in the 1980s, but the era of dam removal has arrived. And if, as Abbey said, the domination of nature leads to the domination of human beings, perhaps the liberation of rivers will lead to the liberation of human beings — giving communities like the Klamath Tribes, who have spent a century without access to salmon because of the dams, an opportunity for cultural revitalization as the river and its salmon runs return. For the tribes have never sought to dominate nature. They have always sought to live in kinship with nature. And, honestly, what better way is there to live?
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