In this conclusion to our series on dam removal, we travel from the Klamath up to the Olympic Peninsula, and the site of the former Elwha and Glines Canyon dams. What did it actually take to bring the dams down, and what lessons can we take forward to other ambitious ecosystem renewal projects?

For extended show notes, musical credits and more, head to www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe-1-10-rushing-downriver

Corrections to this episode:

• While salmon fry may have to contend with hungry bass in other river systems, the Elwha is not one of them.
• The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife releases specifically Chinook salmon into the Elwha river.

– – –

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Hey! Welcome back. This is part two of our

two part series on dams. We're calling this episode Rushing

Downriver.

[Sploosh, with watery noises underscoring]

If you haven't already listened to part one,

you might want to put this on pause while you go get caught

[Watery noise picks up into steady, synthy music with

up.

gusts of wind and cunching of sand coming in the interview]

But you guys should see this, I mean-

So right here was there shore face, prior to dam

removal.

Wow . . . wow.

Yeah. So prior to the dam removal, this was the-we

would be in about 10 feet of water right here and the beach

ended right there, former shoreline.

This is something like 400 or 500 feet

of sandbar sedimentation has come in the last six years.

[The riverbed] was raised by three meters and then

pushed off 100 meters. So the actual river mouth is 100 meters

North of where it was and then deposited this delta of about

100 acres.

That's interesting.

In that protective nook.

Okay, perfect. Ok what's the best? Best to have

the mic in the nook and then...

Oh my goodness, yes. That's a great spot.

[Laughs] There we go.

[Only the steady, synthy music underscores now]

So there are a few, there like a fistful of

lessons, that have come from the Elwha. And the two that I try to

impart every time I talk to somebody about the project is:

these projects take a long time. They take a long time-they

shouldn't-they're-it's not rocket science, this isn't, but

they do. So-so you can't give up. You just can't.

[Music deepens with popping before dropping into an

intense, chilling electronic song with ecoing snaps and

seagulls]

Broadcasting from Vancouver, British

Columbia, on the unseeded territories of the Musqueam,

Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples, this is Future

Ecologies, where your hosts, Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski,

explore the future of human habitation on planet earth

through ecology, design, and sound.

Before the break, you heard Adam and I

getting introduced to the Pacific Northwest's newest

beach. It's located at the mouth of the Elwha River, which is on

the northern end of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.

Elwha's scenario is actually quite different from the

Klamath. This whole battle took place inside of a national park,

plus the nearshore, with a very different set of stakeholders.

It wasn't a case of farmers versus fishermen. In fact, in

some ways, it may have been much simpler. But still, the dam

removal wasn't settled practically until the walls came

down. In this episode, we'll move from the uncertain future

of the Klamath River to a watershed in the midst of

recovery, examining what it took to reach dam removal, and what

happened afterwards.

[Water over riverrocks washes over previous music]

Our tour guides were Anne Shaffer:

I'm Anne Shaffer, I'm the lead scientist and

executive director of the Coastal Watershed Institute...

...and her husband, Dave Parks:

I'm Dave Parks. I'm a geologist with the Washington

Department of Natural Resources and a cooperator with the

Coastal Watershed Institute.

[Cyclical, tapping music underscores]

The Elwha River was host to two dams, known as

the Elwha and the Glines Canyon Dams. Both were built in the

early 20th century in the hydroelectric craze which swept

North America, and they were demolished in 2012 and 2014, at

the conclusion of a bitter, multi-decade fight for their

removal. The Elwha Dam was constructed between 1910 and

1914, six years before the existence of the Federal Power

Commission, so the Elwha Dam predated the requirement for an

operating license. It didn't, however, predate the laws

requiring fish passage; it just ignored them.

[Music shines through with brighter tonal chords]

And construction was shoddy. The dam was built on

gravel, not bedrock. The lower section blew out after a heavy

rain in 1912. In case you don't already know, the Elwha

Watershed is the homeland of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, a

sovereign nation recognized by the US Federal Government. The

1912 failure of the Elwha Dam is known to the Klallam as "the day

the fish were in the trees"-several homes were

destroyed in the flood. And despite this, the dam was a

financial success. The owners of the Elwha Dam courted investors

to build a second dam, further upriver. The Glines Canyon Dam

was built by 1927. While the Elwha Dam put the Klallam under

personal peril, the Glines Canyon Dam delivered spiritual

flooding the valley where it was said, the creator

pulled the Klallam from the Earth.

[A mournful nighttime howl or birdcall is heard, then

the music is replaced with only undercurrents of water and

dripping]

Darkness.

[Angelic tones, like stained glass and summertime

join in the following audio]

Adam HugginsThen slowly:

Orange. There is only Orange and

[Deep synthy tones harmonize the angelic ones]

the taste of Salt, the taste of Yearning. Your whole world is a

sphere; jostled gently by the current, but your Waters are

still. Your body is not still, you wiggle and stretch, testing

your limits, pining to be free

Beyond your sphere, your eyes resolve the

movements of others. Your Sisters, your Brothers,

thousands of siblings, quietly growing in the cold water, in

the gravel bed, biding their time.

[Music resolves into a meloncholy piano]

As early as the 1960s the effect of the Elwha

and Glines Canyon Dams on salmon populations was already clear.

As with the Klamath Dams, the opportunity for any sort of

change would come with a cycle of FERC relicensing. Remember,

all dams need to be periodically relicensed by the Federal Energy

Regulatory Commission, or FERC, for short.

As the relicensing date was coming up,

there was this-there was this coalition of people that came

together in favor of making recommendations for the salmon

to be returned. And so, it was the Sierra Club, the Friends of

the Earth, Seattle Audubon and Olympic Park associates, which

is an organization, that's a citizen organization that's

interested in preserving and helping out the Olympic Park.

They collaborated together to intervene in the FERC

relicensing so it didn't just get to be a rubber stamp

operation, these-these groups of activists and people had made a

coalition and they intervened there. And so it sparked a big

debate and so it was through, the through the 80s that that,

as the licensing process was happening, there was this big

debate being built about whether or not the dams could be made

reasonable for ecological health or if they should be taken out

altogether.

[Heavy beat with echoing claps starts underscoring]

That's Ryan Hilperts. She's an instructor at

the School of Environmental Studies at the University of

Victoria, and director of the Red Fish School of Change. You

may recall her voice from the top of part one, speaking about

restory-ing landscapes, as a way to build our relationships with

the places around us, but more on that later. In the lead up to

the demolition of the Elwha Dams, Ryan researched the

relationship between community engagement and the long term

success of large-scale ecological restoration projects.

Generations had passed since the dams had been built. Locals on

the Olympic Peninsula had grown up with the reservoirs and had

fond memories of swimming and fishing on these young lakes,

the electricity the dams provided had supported the

regional industry through the 20th century: forestry

especially.

I did get the sense that . . . that there's a

bit of a cultural shift happening on the Olympic

Peninsula. And people have lived who have lived there for

generations had the-had the memories in their families of

the Park's annexation of a lot of private land. And, you know,

so, so, aside from the whole Elwha project, the National Park

well, you know, it wasn't always just a national park, people

live there. And as the National Parks' boundaries sort of

expanded over the years, they would, they bought a bunch of

inholdings in the park. And people have opinions about that,

you know, and so I think there's a bit of that, there's a thread

of that that was a part of what people felt in opposition. And

then also, you know, in the 90s, logging on the peninsula, was a

really important industry and then through the 90s there was

this whole thing that happened with the Spotted Owl in the

forest [Spotted Owl cry] there, it's on the endangered species

list and it created-the creation of the Northwest Forest Plan and

really severely impacted the logging industry on the

peninsula. And there's a perception here, I think a

pretty accurate perception, that those changes came about from

federal agencies and organizations, of people,

environmental organizations, people who don't actually live

on the Olympic Peninsula who live in Seattle, and live in

Washington, DC, and organize for conservation purposes. And I

think people on the Peninsula in the 90s and into the 2000s . . .

still felt that they were in the crosshairs of-of that struggle

over what can be done on the land.

Tensions over the removal of the dams

eventually grew into a national, partisan battle. Many people of

Port Angeles felt threatened by the changes called for by

environmentalists. They appeared as outsiders, happy to cast

opinions about a cloudy coast, they may never have visited,

homesteads and lands had once been annexed and absorbed into

Olympic National Park, and the memory of that loss had not yet

And people love the Peninsula because they love

faded.

the place and they love the land and they love the forest and

they engage with the land, you know. And then the park is

a-park is a magnet for people from all these other places to

come. And it's managed by people from other places and people who

work the park. Some of them stay there for their whole careers,

but a lot of you know the Parkies, in Port Angeles, come

in seasonally, and leave so there's a bit of a-I don't want

to over characterize that divide-but-but there is a bit of

a divide there that I think . . . breeds a bit of a . . .

suspicion or . . . resentment is kind of a strong word, but just

protectiveness of autonomy that's challenged by having big

federal agency control, like a majority of the land that's near

where you live.

[Silence, then a gentle trickling of a riffle

Weeks have passed. The Yolk is gone. Your egg,

dissolved. The light of the shallows beckons. You and your

fellow fry have developed a taste for insects humming at the

water's surface. Life is easy and playful. The water is sweet

and fresh. After only days, a few impatient siblings head

downriver into the unknown. [Bubble noise] You will stay for

a few months. Some may linger for several years.

[Trickling riffle gives way into an upbeat electronic

beat]

But after decades of debate, the National

Park Service finally came out in favor of dam removal in the

early 1990s.

Some of the arguments that were really

effectively made were that the cost of bringing it up to code

essentially, out, you know, outweighed any of the benefits

of having the dams in place. They weren't, by that point,

they weren't producing very much electricity for the North

Olympic Peninsula. They had originally been built to help

kind of prop up this timber industry. And they were

supplying electricity to the mills and things like that. And

at this-by this point in history, that power was coming

from someplace else, and there wasn't as much, as much need for

them. So there's-there were pragmatic reasons that it didn't

make sense to upgrade the dams.

Then in 1992, president George H.W. Bush

signed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act.

With that, came federal authorization to identify a path

to full restoration of the river.

[Upbeat electronic beat breaks through]

Rivers are the link between land and sea. No

ecosystem could ever be considered simple, but rivers

present uniquely challenging restoration projects. Rivers

pass sediment, wood, and nutrients downstream, dropping

debris along their banks-home to staggering biodiversity. And

some nutrients return to the l nd, in the form of salmon and

ther anadromous fish migrating p the river to spawn and die.

[Upbeat music then fades into riffle trickling noises]

You and your fellow fry learn quickly in the

clear, cold, sweet waters of your home. For now, you look

more like a tiny glimmer of silver than the King Salmon you

will become. To survive until then, you must be fast. The

Goals will not reach you behind boulders, the mouths of hungry

Bass and Sculpins can't chase you under branches. Gifts of

safety from upriver. Floods threatened to wash you away

before your time, but you find refuge in the many side

channels. Life is dangerous, but the river provides.

At the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula,

just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Vancouver Island,

Port Angeles is 15 minutes from the Elwha River. Living and

working in Port Angeles since the early 1990s, Anne Schaefer

and Dave Parks have been studying the Elwha nearshore,

where the river meets the ocean.

[Gentle wind and waves backdrop the audio]

The first time I heard about the dam removal

project, we were living in Seattle, and I think I don't

even remember who I'd heard about it from. But I was

interested in doing a study looking at the estuary prior to

the dam removal happening. This was-this was prior to the actual

enabling legislation, which was in 1992. And one of my first

recollections of the project was arguing with the project

manager, Brian Winter, at the National Park, who, and I'll

never forget it, stated, quote, unquote, "that the near shore

was not a part of the project". And so from that day forward, it

was a very keen focus of mine, as a marine biologist, to-to

really get a handle and some vision on the near shore aspect

of the dam removal project.

Biodiversity flourishes at boundaries, where

different environments blur together. The nearshore is no

exception.

And the nearshore system is such a critical

component to all the species that are at the heart of the

rest-or ecosystem restoration project.

The nearshore is a place for young anadromous

fish to adapt from river life to the open ocean. It's hosts to

incredible numbers of algae, invertebrates and plants. And

it's the foundation of the food web for many birds; the

jurisdiction for dam removal had been defined by the borders of

the Olympic National Park, which does not include the river mouth

and the nearshore. Despite that, Anne knew that categorically

ignoring the estuary would be a glaring omission in the project,

and a huge missed opportunity for research.

There were elements to it that nobody was

looking at, and one of the most basic questions of what is the

relative contribution of the river and the bluffs to the

sediment dynamics of the littoral system? And nobody

could answer that, which is shocking when you think about

the scale of the project and that was going to unfold and in

the important thing to remember with the Elwha project is it's a

sediment project. And so when you release two dams, you do

restore the fish passage aspect but that's not the critical

ecosystem component to it, it's the real linking of the

hydrodynamic processes, and that translates to the nearshore as

well.

When you say, you say, "littoral", you're not

meaning literally?

The littoral system.

Dave ParksLittoral:

L-I-T-T-O-R-A-L.

[Electronic swaying music enters]

The littoral system essentially means: the

shoreline. It includes the waters of the intertidal and the

shallow edge of the ocean.

[Holds a slightly, discordant tone, rising in pitch

before fading into a triumphant piano]

One night-restless-you feel a call

for change.

Tail first, by moonlight. You let the current carry you.

You wind downriver past eddies, over riffles, rapids, and falls.

[Piano fades under and plays steadily with riverwater

sounds]

You notice a new taste . . . No.

An old taste. The first taste:

Salt. You've reached the

An old taste. The first taste:

estuary, where Sweetwater meets the Sea. You'll rest here a

An old taste. The first taste:

while, learn to eat crustaceans and grow.

[Piano plays with some small oceanic noises and long,

sustained tones, then into watery noises]

So many of the species that are central to the

nearshore ecosystem restoration project have life history phases

that are literally dependent on the nearshore. So the juvenile

salmon that are outmigrating from the river, use the near

shore to rear, to feed, to rest, and to transition into their

marine and offshore phases. There are smelt species that are

anadromous that will migrate along the shoreline and then

come up the river to spawn, there are lamprey species that

are very critical to the ecosystem of the watershed. And

then there are also smelt species that will use the

shoreline for migration and spawning-they actually spawn on

intertidal beaches, as do Sand Lance-and those are collectively

called forage fish, and forage fish are the basis, for again,

our coastal system, everything from, you know, salmon to killer

whales depend on them. So and, without the nearshore, we don't

have the species, we just don't have them.

The nearshore, the estuary is built out of

sediment, erosion in the watershed, which ends up at the

river mouth as silt and sand. The amount of sediment at the

nearshore is in equilibrium; it's replenished by the river

and washed away by the tides. When a dam is built, this

balance is lost; sediment accumulates behind the dam and

the beautiful, complex nearshore ebbs away.

It's a key component to the ecosystem. It's

its own zone in the ecosystem, and without it, the rest of the

watershed doesn't function.

Of course, to understand the estuary and the

pressures put upon it by the dam, it takes significant

time, personnel, and of course, funding.

[Deep, echoing electronic music with snaps is recalled]

Anne and Dave made a personal commitment to

study the nearshore and the Klallan were doing the same. But

as long as funding remained uncertain, no university would

spare a grad student. There was no institutional support to

study the Elwha nearshore.

[Music fades back to running water]

Enabling legislation was enacted in 1992.

That legislation was actually the resolution of a lawsuit by

the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe against the Olympic National

Park for violating their Treaty Trust Responsibility. The dam

removal legislation was a settlement of that lawsuit. So

that was enacted in 1992, and then it took 25 years of

planning and political, you know, shenanigans, and it was a

long, long process, it took 13 appropriations. And for those of

us that worked on the project over its entirety, we never knew

if or when the project was actually going to happen.

Then in 2009, the Obama administration issued

an economic stimulus package, which included $54 million for

the Olympic National Park, much of which was earmarked for the

dam removals. From there, the race was on, to collect as much

baseline data as possible.

But as soon as the final pieces of funding dropped

into place, everybody was out here. So a lot of the data sets

start about two years before the dam removal. And there, we

started getting a lot of the nearshore data. So then you

start seeing some of these other richer data sets. And so that

was really what did it-it was-it was that last gap in the

funding, when that dropped into place, bam, everybody was out

here.

Most of what we know about the state of the

river prior to dam removal comes from only 18 months of data

between the stimulus package and the start of demolition.

Finally, almost exactly a century after they were built,

the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams were carefully broken apart.

Once again, the Elwha River flowed free and 100 years of

sediment was released.

And I have to say ever since that project, every

time I hear a jackhammer, [Jackhammer rattles away] I

just, it just warms my heart, [Laughs] you know which I've

never had that attitude before, so.

[Deep, clacking tones from the depths echo into

silence]

You make your rounds through the shallows and

patterns that shift, but always repeat. You notice

some krill in the shallows, but they're not worth your while. A

shimmer catches your eye, a school of smelt, you flank them,

deftly into a corner and snatch one to make your meal. It dawns

on you that you no longer fit as easily into the side channels,

under the branches, or behind the boulders. It hardly matters.

Predators rarely bother you these days. You've grown, and

your power has grown with you. Your estuary once so large and

Labyrinthine has softened in its mystery, your next move is upon

you, and you venture out into the depths.

[The same tones are sounded again, gently

underscoring]

And just as soon as the dam came down, the fish

were back.

As soon as, as soon as you pull the dam out, those

the fish are in there, just how fast these habitats become used.

They they make use of the available habitat very quickly.

Some within, literally within hours-

-We've seen a transition. And almost

immediately, we saw this whole new . . . It was like Christmas.

Animals that had never been seen before in the

nearshore were suddenly being documented. Fish like hooligan,

redside shiner and lamprey.

Now the sense is, my intuition, just from working

out here for so long-and the data are starting to show

it-things seem to be stabilizing.

But the story of a river renewal is almost as

nuanced as the river itself.

But the other feature that dominates, and this

is what we've seen from our sampling, that dominates the

system are the hatcheries. We have two hatcheries that operate

in the Lower Elwha. One's operated by the Lower Elwha

Klallam Tribe, and they release Coho and Steelhead, and then the

other is the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife

hatchery and they release upwards of 2 million.

And the return of the nearshore has created

habitat for more than just fish and shorebirds. The Pacific

Northwest's newest beach has become a quick hit with the

local human population.

As this delta evolves and grows-it's grown by

just about 80 acres-it's become very popular for people, and

it's basically become a dog park. And so now we're having

this intersection between the evolving and restoring

ecosystem-

-and canines-

-and people that own them.

[Dogs barking, then pointed synth music fades in]

It's all too easy to think of ecosystem

restoration as a time machine, a way to turn back the clock and

undo the damage we've sown in our Industrial Age. But that's

not how dynamic systems work. The conditions are different

now. And change, begets change.

The thing that we really have to now again, we're

having to manage for, is because this has become such a

destination. Now, like I say, immediately what's happening is

people are challenging it again. So in ways that I don't think

they would have otherwise because there is such a nice

beach here and it, you know, it does have the caché, the Elwha

caché. So now we are seeing, you know, extra development, extra,

you know, increase in real estate rates.

The near shoreprovides all sorts of

ecosystem services, some of which have direct impacts to

human capital. A healthy near shore comes with flood

protection and short breaks, making coastal development that

much more appealing.

[Music breaks through before dropping and flattening

into a deep twinkling night like the depths of the sea]

Out at sea, the world is deep and boundless.

Your juvenile years are a distant memory. you've traveled,

seen wonders, monsters, and sights beyond imagination. You

rise towards the waves and feel a small tug inside of you. A

magnet in your mind, your blood pulses with new hormones, and

you can feel them rebuilding your body one cell at a time.

You recall a faraway taste.

You're going home.

[Low, profound tones underscore]

In as much as ecosystem restoration is a human

project, the measure of its success lives in the minds of

people, especially those who call that land home. This kind

of success is not based on data points, and checklists, and

mandates. It's sustained by the stories we tell our personal

connection to our world. Ryan Hilperts explains:

[Deep, pulsing music from Part 1: Swimming Upstream is

recalled]

As we build relationships with each other

through story, we build relationship with place through

story. And, you know, the places where people are building

stories. And building relationship with place I think

is, this sort of like, the connective tissue of of what the

potential focal restoration can be, you know, in the, in the: we

build a web and a reciprocity with land when we and water when

we-when we know it in the way that it's a character in our

stories and we're a character in its story.

[Resonant, acoustic notes begin and reverberate]

Realistically, major projects such as dam

removals, require huge budgets, planning and clear definitions.

These projects can only be taken on by government-scale entities.

Their approach to restoration is necessarily bureaucratic and

technological, and it seems like the only way to marshal the

people and the resources required.

That's not to say that people who work

professionally in restoration, don't have stories with place,

you know, but if we, but if we can see the restoration in the

way it excludes people who aren't engaged with it

professionally, then-then we lose this opportunity to build

that web of support for a place, for communities to.

So, focal community engagement means

talking about the land, making art about the land, and above

all, getting as many people as possible to have experiences

with the land.

Partnerships with unlikely partners I think is

important. So, partnerships with elementary schools, and

environmental education programs, and math classes,

and-you know-organizations for new immigrants, like refugee

support agencies, I mean, thinking outside of the box of

just your conservation groups, to, to think about who, who

cares for this place now and who will care for this place like,

you know, finding ways to have all the different kinds of

knowledge and all the different kinds of wisdom and all the

different kinds of stories be a part of how decisions get made

about restoration is probably what we should be aiming for.

Because diversity is better. Yeah, and it's we can't be-it's

like you can really put that on a checklist for restoration.

[Soft, resonant acoustic notes play, before a wave washes

over and somber piano from music from Part 1: Swimming Upstream

is recalled]

So, with so much uncertainty, what's the story

with the Klamath now?

Well, the dams are still there. And salmon

populations have reached historic lows in recent years.

But even though the Klamath Basin restoration agreement fell

apart after Congress blocked it, it looks like the dams might

still come out. Ironically, though, some of the concessions

and measures to protect farmers and irrigation districts-that

were a big part of that deal-they died with it in

Congress. And without those measures, many of the

constituents of the representatives that torpedoed

the deal are going to suffer. You might say that ideology

trumps self-interest in this case.

It is a really interesting political

phenomenon, and it hasn't completely played itself out,

right? Like some of those guys are still in office. But there

was a lot of frustration on the part of these Federal Irrigation

Districts that were trying really hard to bridge this gulf

between communities, and, you know, here, all these people

overcame their differences and went to Congress people and

said, here, we did it for you.

And even though Congress passed, there was still

so much momentum for dam removal, that the primary

stakeholders sat down again to figure out how to at least take

the dams out, which resulted in the Klamath Hydroelectric

Settlement Agreement.

So now, there is an amended Klamath Hydroelectric

Settlement Agreement, which is the KHSA you were talking about,

and basically what happened, you know, there was a lot of

campaigning political pressure put on PacifiCore that owns the

dams, to the point where PacifiCore eventually said, this

is not worth the bad press, we'll take dams out. So what we

did as a mechanism, you know, the legislation failed in

Congress. So who's gonna actually do the work? Who's

going to take the dams out? It's not going to be the feds. It's

not going to be tribes. So who is it going to be? And what they

ended up doing was forming a corporation, right? That could

take liability, that could accrue the funds, you know, and

handle the money. And that's what happened. So now we have

this Klamath River Renewal Corperation, which is crazy, but

kind of cool, too. I mean, it is this corporate model, right?

It's like a corporation built those dams and a corporation's

gonna take those dams down!

There's still one last major hurdle to clear. The

FERC still has to sign off on the agreement. And right now,

four out of the five FERC commissioners are Trump

appointees. Not the high profile ones that show up in our news

feeds. But still, it's enough to make me concerned that a sort of

pro-dam ideology could prevail again.

I think it is a worry, but what we've heard or

had telegraphed, even out of the Trump administration,

interestingly, is that they won't block it.

So if everything goes smoothly, then the dam

should be coming out in 2021.

You know, there's a lot of ways to remove

a dam. One of them is to like, clean everything up afterwards,

right? Remove all the sediment and remove all the rebar and

concrete and another one is just to like kind of blast it, leave

the rubble and then that becomes like part of your stream

structure, right.

[Bubbly water jet washes over then a steady clapping

track plays]

You know, we don't really understand . . .

how to restore a system. And a lot of times the best solution

is the simplest solution. You know, when you put large, woody

debris in a stream, which we do deliberately to enhance fish

habitat, you often don't fret too much about the placement of

the logs. Which you used to do, you used to try to like fix it

in permanently with rebar and yeah, and the stream is gonna

blow it out in the high water anyway and put it where it wants

to. And then it might blow it a mile or two downstream and then

you have these things, we call them "catcher mitts" that catch

other wood, which is good, we want that.

But you might as well just let the stream decide and it's

probably a similar story with all the rubble from the dam,

right? It's cheaper to do it that way.

Is that-is that what's gonna happen?

It looks very likely that's what's gonna

happen.

Ah! So this is more the Rambo approach

[Laughs]-

-yeah [Laughs]-

-to dam removal. [Laughs] the Elwha was so

controlled that I watched videos of it.

Yeah! I loved atching the videos of the

[Warm, glowing notes play over the steady track]

lwha. This like, soothing, like ah, it can work, lo

No one has, in the history of the world, has

really done a dam removal this big, and they're still building

them in BC and China, much larger, right? So conceivably,

someday, we will be taking those out. But at this point the Elwha

is the biggest in the record books and then the Klamath will

be that much bigger, still.

[Steady clap track and intermittent glowing notes conti

ue, an auditory riffle pl

And that's it for our two part series on dams.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks. If you live near a river,

...and make some stories together.

dammed up or otherwise, please take some time to get to know

it

If you'd like to see the photo that Anne took of

Adam and I in our driftwood recording studio, check out our

Instagram @futureecologies.

Please tell everyone you know, subscribe,

rate, and review the show wherever podcasts can be found.

It really helps us get the word out.

In this episode, you heard Anne Schaffer, Dave

Parks, Ryan Hilperts and Erica Terrence.

This has been an independent production of Future

Ecologies. Our first season is supported in part by the

Vancouver foundation. If you'd like to help us make the show,

you support us on Patreon. We have a whole series of mini

episodes available to our supporters. To get access to

these, head over to patreon.com/futureecologies.

You can also follow us on Facebook,

Instagram, and iNaturalist, the handle is always

futureecologies.

Special thanks to Jose Isordia, Christy Johnston

Monroe Cameron,

Nicole Jahraus, Ilana Fonariov,

Schuyler Lindberg, Vincent van Haaff, and Andrjez

Kozlowski.

Music in this episode was produced by

Radioactive Bishop, Kieran Fearing, and Sunfish Moonlight.

You can find a full list of musical credits, show notes, and

links on our website:

futureecologies.net.

[Auditory riffle returns and music fades to silence]