What Makes the River Run?

Roll on, Columbia, roll on
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn
So roll on, Columbia, roll on

One only needs to look at the Grand Canyon to get a glimpse of what a river is capable of doing. The power generated by a millinea of roaring water, eating away at granite and stone, was coveted by man and with little regard for what he was doing to the whole eco system that it supported he took it, river by river by river. And the ecology of each spot was ravaged, the chain of events taking place devastatingly apparant to any with a discerning eye to see it. The discord of an eco system so out of balance it is evidenced by salamandars evacuating quicker than rats from a sinking ship.

There are violent uprising and changes in the earth’s movements throughout its billion+ years of existence and throughout that time creatures, great and small, have come and gone. Usually at a very gradual pace nothing has quite equaled what takes place when humans enter the equation.

A dam displaces water without creating another eco system of transference. Without using biodegradable materials, without allowing things to decompose and add to the silt and the rot of the river to grow and sustain further life then all that can possibly take place is permanent planting and restocking of a fish population that has no hope of sustaining its own multigenerational life. The problem has never been over fishing, it has been the wiping out spawning grounds, of breeders and broodstock and fishfood and healthy waters for it all to live in. It has been the deliberate manipulation of a species in trade for the all-mighty dollar.

And while we can weep for our fish it doesn’t end there. With each fish that doesn’t come back to the river, that doesn’t spawn, laying its eggs or fertilizing with milt, that doesn’t die with its stinking carcass sinking to the bottom of some isolated shoal, that is one less spot on the river that is not fertilizing life. It is not nurturing the ecological system that feeds all of this area and makes it rich in everything that we hold dear whether you like fish or have never had a piece of that rich, moist, delicacy with its slightly gray underside, caress your tongue or not. The fowl of the air, the plants in the fields that are eaten by you or the beef or the deer that you call dinner are sustained by that biomass in the river. And we are about to lose it all.

In exchange, someone, somewhere is about to make some moey. In return we will get to pretend for a little while longer that we have fish while someone makes pretend we have fish programs that are saving our salmon. They don’t tell you how these salmon will procreate without their spawning grounds or without a healthy river in which to do it, however they are sure if there could just be a few more limitations put on the fishermen then the whole species could be recovered.

We have sustainable energy. We have the wind, we have the sun. We have hemp, we have soy. We have geothermal power, we have biofuel. We need to close down our dams and take stock in our energy needs. We need to understand what our river’s purpose is. How we can live WITH the river as well as the life within it and the lives it sustains outside of it.

Vote wisely for those who understand that a dollar saved today, in finding cheap energy, may cost us ten dollars tomorrow in paying for the consequences of that short lived bargain. This is not the time to bring in corporations who preach one thing but do another and whose track record is opposite of what they promise or they have no track record at all. Our salmon are dying on the river and don’t let any con job tell you they are being poached! Aside from a new recipe, alongside an egg or two, the only poaching that occurs with salmon on the Columbia happens when someone steals a bad idea for a project from one corporation to the next.