The Lower Snake River Dams have done immense damage to the Pacific Northwest’s culture and environment. Native rights, ecological recovery, and regional sustainability rely on breaching these dams and restoring the Snake River. For relevant documentation, please visit Jim’s archive within Resources for Advocates.
Columbia River Basin & Cascadia Bioregion
Indigenous Culture and Regional Ecology
Salmon, Orcas, & More
By 2025, according to a 2021 Nez Perce study, 77% of Snake River Spring/Summer Chinook salmon will be effectively extinct, with little chance of recovery. So when NOAA Fisheries says that inaction will result in “catastrophic loss,” they mean all of it.
LSRD are Snake River salmon’s biggest hurdle–which means breaching is their best hope of renewal. Way back in 2002, the ACOE knew breaching had “the highest probability of success for salmon recovery.” The dams have destroyed spawning grounds, overheated the water, and decimated survival rates. Thankfully, salmon numbers can dramatically rebound after breaching, as the Elwha River has recently shown.
Breached dams mean there will be 10 million fewer young salmon (smolt) deaths annually.
Southern Resident Killer Whales will go extinct soon unless they get more salmon. We are out of time. The population hovers at just 75 orcas, and they are starving. Over 80% of their diet is Chinook salmon; 50% comes from the Columbia Basin; 50% of that historically came from the Snake River basin. Today, about 1% of the historical number of salmon return to the Snake River watershed to spawn. Recovery has to start now, with the best known solution.
These orcas cannot survive without more salmon, fast. Sure, they face plenty of threats–hot water, toxicants, fast ships, loud seas–but they need basic nutrition to thrive and build the population. The SRKW are malnourished, which means few calves and high mortality. As expert Ken Balcomb bluntly explained to President Biden, these orcas are ”on their way out. They’re already going extinct.”
Breaching immediately is the only realistic hope against mutual extinction.
Climate Crisis
Hydropower’s Contributions to Environmental Collapse, Methane, and More
Media
Among other resources in the DamSense archive, these are particularly helpful for articulating arguments about the devastating ecological consequences of the LSRD:
- Estimate of Greenhouse Gas Emissions for the Lower Snake River Dams and Reservoirs using the All-Res Modeling Tool (Tell the Dam Truth, 2024)
- An Update to the 2016 paper. ‘The Lower Snake River Reservoirs Generate Significant Amounts of Methane, a Potent Greenhouse Gas,” by Jim Waddell and John Twa (Twa, July 2020)
- Methane Ebullition in Temperate Hydropower Reservoirs and Implications for US Policy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Miller et al, 2017)
- Evaluating Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Hydropower Complexes on Large Rivers in Eastern Washington (Department of Energy, 2013)
- Transportation Methods, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, and the Lower Snake River Reservoirs (Twa, 2017)