But regardless, the point is that salmon were still breeding there. The "return" is an unwarranted claim, for they never stopped coming and spawning.
let's read
"Less than a month after four towering dams on the Klamath River were demolished, hundreds of salmon made it into waters they have been cut off from for decades"
what does that mean
"salmon are once more returning to spawn in cool creeks that have been cut off to them for generations."
"salmon, which were cut off from their historic habitat"
"salmon that have quickly made it into previously inaccessible tributaries"
October of this year:
> a fall-run Chinook salmon was identified by ODFW’s fish biologists in a tributary to the Klamath River above the former J.C. Boyle Dam, becoming the first anadromous fish to return to the Klamath Basin in Oregon since 1912 when the first of four hydroelectric dams was constructed, blocking migration.
Nothing you said talked about salmon spillway weirs.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240903-removing-the-kla...
Do we understand the mechanisms of this "genetic memory" (my words, no idea if its accurate or if there is a better word for it)? Butterflies knowing where to fly even though it was their grandparents that last did it - eels traveling thousands of miles to breed in a place theyve never seen - countless bird migrations - even something as simple as how it takes a human baby 12-18 months to walk but many animals walk as soon as they are born. I would love to understand better how this knowledge is inherited
Edit: the article mentions lower concentration of harmful algae and a cooler temperature.
That nature works at all is astonishing.
This is because humans are born with, comparably, extremely immature brains. The animals that can walk after birth are born with more mature brain development than humans are born with, so they are capable of walking.
https://www.livescience.com/9760-study-reveals-infants-walk....
The same way your heart "knows" how to beat - it's a lower level function that happens without your conciousness. That's why people who are brain dead still live and breathe and swallow and digest and their hearts livers and kidneys still do their job.
>>how are they hard wired to search for milk
The ones who didn't died, to put it bluntly. Obviously not human babies, this evolutionary step happened long long time before the earliest hominids.
Do you have neurons in your brain that are pre-wired for these things? Is that encoded in your DNA? Like physically how is it inherited and the selective pressures applied?
On selective pressures: human babies that aren’t born with the ability to nurse, or foals born without the ability to walk—because their in-utero development didn’t allow it—historically don’t survive, and thus don’t reproduce.
Heart cells in a Petri dish will happily beat away.
This is kinda like explaining how a car works with "you fire and replace engineers until it moves".
I believe Salmon use a similar mechanism, but it might be supplemented with chemical signatures. For Salmon, it’s possible that they genetically inherit the capability but learn the location at birth.
It’s not something that was decided by one ancestor and then inherited by everyone else.
It was something that certain birds had a tendency to prefer. Those birds thrived and reproduced at a higher rate, while birds without that preference presumably found less suitable homes.
It’s just natural selection and normal genetic variance. Some offspring every year will be born with slightly difference preferences due to the influence of various genetic differences. Some of those differences will be more beneficial for finding a good “home”, others less so.
There was a recent report of a very confused penguin showing up on a beach far from their normal habitat. Apparently this happens every once in a while. Those cases did not win the genetic lottery (though hopefully it made it back to a more suitable climate)
I would add that there can be many local maxima, so it isnt always about finding less suitable homes. Birds of the same species can have different homes.
I don't think there is particular evidence for "genetic" memory here. The salmon were already further down river, they just kept swimming upstream. While most salmon do return to the place of their birth, a small percentage always stray, which is how salmon are able to colonize new habitats and survive things like ice ages.
Glad they are doing well.
I wonder to what degree that is even true. Like sure they probably return to the same rivers, but how far up the river they swim is likely unrelated to where they were actually born. If you extend that river further or introduce side streams that didn't exist when they were born, they're probably just as likely to end up in one of those places.
This study provides convincing empirical support for fine-scale local selection against dispersal in a large Atlantic salmon meta-population, signifying that local individuals have a marked home ground advantage in reproductive fitness. These results emphasize the notion that migration and dispersal may not be beneficial in all contexts and highlight the potential for selection against dispersal and for local adaptation to drive population divergence across fine spatial scales.
Seems like it might simply be that they go where they adapted to thrive.
Yeah, there's clearly tendencies for the fish to return to where they were born. I'm sure that's driven by all kinds of complex genetic memories and probably more importantly selective advantage due to adaptation to the specific characteristics of the given stream, but genetic memories for a specific stream seems a little bit unlikely.
Because that's not what happened. These fish managed to get there because it was a good place for them to go, not because they were 'returning' to a place they had been before. The 'return' in the title is more about the fact that they are coming back to fill a niche in an area fish were blocked from, not that these specific fish were returning to a place they had been before. It almost seems like they were intentionally muddying the waters with the language used.
I don't think this finding is necessarily relevant here, because Atlantic salmon are totally different. Pacific salmon always die right after spawning. Atlantic salmon return to the ocean after spawning, and will often spawn multiple times.
Pretrained brain modules aren’t the most surprising thing. Humans have plenty of pre trained behaviors, some of which kick in a while after birth.
They physically cannot walk, but they also don't know how to. We know this because they need to practice and acquire skill. If they are deprived of opportunity to learn but their body continues to mature, their mature body does not give them the mature skill.
Evolution isn’t limited to direct methods, as long as it works that’s enough.
Language processing is another example. There’s dedicated neural hardware designed for this specific task.
It’s hard to imagine it being possible to test but I think they’re wrong.
I saw the exact same behavior with my ex-gf's sister's son, who we took in after he was in foster care from birth. The child had clearly not been engaged with properly... the back of his head was bald because he was always on his back in a cramped bassinette and at 11 months he hadn't even learned to turn over. Within 3 months of being with us, he was walking.
That we can't "see" the other side of the connection with our science is due to our science being built with our physical world's constituents (matter & energy), thus those other dimensions are immeasurable with our science's tools. Rupert Sheldrake speaks of this when he says that the genetic code's protein construction genes do not and can not account for the resulting organism's shape. That coordinated construction requires a separate guiding force. That interrelationship is similar to the "memory" that creatures such as salmon have, which is intrinsic to their entire being, not just their physical body, which is only half of our being's totality.
That would make your counterargument a pseudo-counterargument, no?
It's just reaching into one's feelings/nether-regions and blabbering out some words.
You don't even have a sensible counter-theory, right?
But it is also within your potential to treat me better than Eugene Parker's or Boltzman's contemporaries treated them, and instead keep an open mind and open heart and follow the path laid in front of us all that allows us to cure ourselves of our destructive selfishness and begin a new path forward.
If you look through my other comments you can find a more detailed description of the key that unlocks the necessary doors, and with them our latent abilities, which include knowing instead of just thinking.
> That interrelationship is similar to the "memory" that creatures such as salmon have, which is intrinsic to their entire being, not just their physical body, which is only half of our being's totality.
This is all pseudoscience and borderline religious thinking. Rupert Sheldrake and others pushing this line of thinking are not grounded in reality or science.
I’m surprised this is the most upvoted sub comment at the time I’m responding. Is pseudoscience like this really becoming so pervasive that comments like this pass as good information?
Also, you can try to explain how individual proteins arrange themselves into bilaterally symmetrical, organ-infused organisms of astounding complexity, using only protein recipes.
I know you can't explain it, but that doesn't mean you won't try.
There is the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. For many, entire branches of the unknown are unknowable because they refuse to expand their criteria for how they evaluate the facts. Sherlock Holmes' father had a quote to the effect about once you have eliminated the possible, all that's left is the impossible (bad paraphrase, I know).
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
But my comment was geared towards those who believe that what I am suggesting is impossible, so to them, the only possibilities left are what they consider impossible.
My favorite quote from Holmes is the slightly modified one in Jeremy Brett's version of "The Naval Treaty":
"What a lovely thing a rose is. There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be buit up as an exact science by the reason. The highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. It is only goodness which gives excellence, and so I say again, we have much to hope from the flowers."
[The entire high-def Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes tv show series can be found on YouTube.]
The problem is that you’re conflating “I don’t understand it” with “it must be magic”
A hallmark of charlatans and pseudoscience pushers has been to find something they can claim is the boundary of scientific knowledge (often incorrectly) and then assert that everything past that line therefore is magic.
It’s a tale as old as time. Yet every time we make new discoveries they just move the line a little further and claim the magic must be over there now.
Another classic move is to make extraordinary assertions (magical hidden forces) but then when anyone objects they try to push the burden of proving the opposite on to the other person. That’s something you’re doing throughout this thread perhaps with realizing how irrational it all is.
Someone asked how a thing works, and the answer above is essentially just restating that it does in fact work, for some ineffable, immeasurable reason.
So while interesting to think about, it’s not a useful response to the question.
Whether or not something is true is always the beginning of a scientific exploration.
There may in fact be physical, measurable mechanisms that govern these types of animal behavior. Just like there was a physical, measurable explanation for Mercury’s orbit.
What I'm saying here is that we need to push beyond our current scientific paradigms to find out how these inexplicable corner cases actually work. As well, I do realize that the depth of exploration required will be further than most people are willing to plumb, which is demonstrated by the in-their-feelings reactions to my ideas.
And I’m sure whatever we discover that “solves” for dark matter will eventually start showing cracks as well, prompting another deep inquiry into the nature of our universe.
Good times.
That said, when we slam particles together at high enough energies, we do see crossover (briefly) in the form of anti-particles. I couldn't begin to explain the mechanisms behind this, but the structure can be known to seekers of compassionate existence. This is also a hint to the solution to the question of why, after the Big Bang, we don't have an anti-matter left; the answer is that it's where it is, but that we can't detect it with our current tech (or maybe any tech, for all I know).
The universe was made to be known by we human beings, we being the information processors designed to work in harmony with this information-theoretic universe, which is fully queryable by a suitable trained mystic.
A Sufi Murshid (teacher) lived his entire life in a single town that consisted of a single pair of roads that met in the center of town. Late in his life, he stated that, he "knew the stars of the Milky Way better than he knew his town". (A love-consumed mystic remains conscious as our souls leave our bodies when we sleep. What is called astral travel is not limited by our physical body's speed laws; it is bounded only by the "speed of thought".)
Sufi stories are glimpses of corner cases meant to spur us to push past our "known" boundaries. We need to get this world at peace before we can explore our advanced abilities. As Louis Armstrong said, "If lots more of us loved each other, man, this world would be a gasser!"
Is there any empirical test for such things?
Reaching out to become love, we find peace in service, joy in our every interaction.
And, yes, via Castaneda's Don Juan, there is the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. The Creator of all that will ever exist is Unfathomable, Timeless, the Ultimate Loner, but we are capable of communing in some small extent with It, learning a tiny sliver of Its Nature.
Our free will is so sacrosanct that we are free to deny that we even have it, and free to be self-defeating fools living in the misery of our selfishness.
There is a better way, though. The choice is yours, my friend.
If you want to make the argument that a god/creator does in fact exist, it’s up to you to show why.
In the clarity of communing with love, our subjective reality is harmonized with the truth of existence, thus our knowing transcends thinking. It is our highest purpose, but like all great loves, it is freely given with no obligation, only responsibility for our choices and their effects upon others.
As Rumi said, "The Way goes in." I have described this process more fully in other comments.
Peace be with you.
Do you have any suggested material/resources where I can learn more?
But this site has a few different languages, selectable in the upper-right corner of the page: https://mihr.com/
Note that the bulk of the teachings are about self-evolution via transmuting our vices into their corresponding virtues. It is that transformation that unlocks our ability to consciously travel during sleep.
The key to all such teachings is that becoming consumed by compassion is the real goal; all else is just added benefit.
As Steel Pulse put it so eloquently so long ago, "Love is the golden chord that binds all commandments." It is also the scaffolding that boosts our abilities to their greatest height; but, in reality, the spiritual path is really about stripping away our selfish ego-nature that impedes our realizing our full potential.
Peace be with you.
There is talk here on HN about mathematical reasoning but no one talks about how our systems would affect the Earth differently if we used compassion as our modus operandi instead of for-profit plundering of the Earth for selfish profit. That is because selfishness is our default state -- an animalistic state -- and we must choose to transcend it by self-evolving ourselves beyond our selfishness, and into humanitarian systems that cooperate instead of compete.
If you wish to find out how to know the truth in your own subjectively objective reality, browse my other comments. You have your own internal connection that allows the unlocking of your full human potential. Becoming consumed with compassion is a necessary part of that transformation, but we are each free to choose selfishness, and, indeed, most have and are choosing the selfish path. That selfishness is behind every single atrocity ever perpetrated, as well as the spoiling of the Earth for our future generations. For people that choose to become better, the changes come slowly and with drawbacks, but with all art, perseverance and steady effort to improve is the key to success.
We each have the power to rise above that animal selfishness and instead choose to design societies of compassionate service to one and all. That path of love is our only hopeful path forward.
Of course there's a separate guiding force. It's the biochemical environment around the cell. Cells operate on chemical signals they receive from their environment and generate the same; these cause cells to differentiate themselves based on their genetic code, which where the resulting organism's shape comes from. This isn't some kind of mystery, we know how this works, and matter & energy are indeed sufficient to explain it.
It’s not actually a memory that gets encoded in genes.
It’s a tendency to behave in certain ways as influenced by combinations of genes
Ancestors who had the same tendencies, drives, and preferences would have some similar behaviors, resulting in some of them going toward the same places.
So not an actual memory that gets inherited, more like personality traits (but in a more general sense) that lead to similar outcomes.
There is a field of epigenetics which studies heritable changes in cells that occur without DNA alteration, but these signals are much simpler than memories and not a mechanism for carrying memories across generations. A lot of pseudoscience has been written around epigenetics right now so you have to be careful about where you source info on this.
Swim until you can't anymore?
Swim until the current is very weak?
Swim until the water smells/tastes nice?
Someone could probably simulate these and see which matches reality the most.
Some percentage either accidentally or deliberately go up a different river, which is how the species spreads. That's very likely who this story is about.
If that's a "deliberate" evolutionary strategy or just that 100% navigation success doesn't happen is unknowable.
It seems like the fish would have to have had some kind of way to test if the river lead to adequate spawning grounds. And if they had that, they wouldn't really need any memory of any given river.
So, a bunch of salmons have been trying each year in the river with that dam? But:
"hundreds of salmons failed to swim past a dam"
didn't break the news
> > swim up the randomly "wrong" rivers
And the reason for that is discovering new habitats. But the other comment I referred to, mentions this already so I left that out.
Didn't know about this though:
> spawning all these years but below the dams.
I thought, however, that it'd been funny if such a non-event (the fish didn't ...) had been in the news.
EDIT: I don’t mean that as a joke. I think on the timescale of evolution the dam was never there.
You assume: hit the dam > died.
One of the things that makes salmon ladders more effective is introducing artificial noise of falling water. Turns out when salmon find themselves in still water they head for the sounds of the inflow, which dams either don't have, or are from spillways that the salmon cannot navigate.
Most salmon want to go back exactly where they are born, and on a three year cycle (or at least, that's the pattern on the Klamath). So if you were to introduce hatchery salmon in 2024, in 2027 and every three years after you'll have a full run, and only a small number of fish in the remaining years. Which probably isn't good for genetic diversity. So you end up having to stock at least 3 times, or just wait and see what happens.
NOAA page listing the history of work on this river (could use a timeline):
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/habitat-conservati...
Whites Gulch Dam, ca 2008:
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/building-networ...
Salmon are not 100% effective at making it back to their birthplace, and some small fraction stray randomly- which is what allows them to populate new areas and re-populate others where they were wiped out. This article isn't about a lot of salmon - only hundreds, so this is probably the amount that would naturally stray to this region from others, with or without a healthy returning population.
For example, some ~120k chinook salmon returned to the Columbia river this year, so if 0.01% of them strayed to the Klamath river, you'd get about this many.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2017.075...
They get sand up their nose and calibrate based on the magnetism of the iron, iirc
We've studied how the blue photoreceptors in our retinas are actually magnetoreceptive, meaning in the right conditions, suspended in a fluid, they'll align the the Earth's magnetic field just like a compass needle.
I'd read before that this technique was theorized to be used in fruit flies, with the photoreceptors suspended in a fluid in the eye. But more recent studies have failed to replicate the geomagnetic sensing capabilities of fruit flies.
It's still nuts to imagine what that might look like. Distortions in your vision from magnetic sensing sounds so neat.
> a large majority (74%) of successful attacks in high cover were confined to a cluster centred about 20° clockwise of magnetic north with a small (15%) secondary cluster at due south, while attacks in other directions were largely unsuccessful.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3097881/ (there's a nice little chart showing angular preference.
The researchers also mention a previous study they'd worked on in the first paragraph of the introduction, dealing with the geomagnetic alignment of grazing cattle. I hadn't read this one before so I took the time, and it's equally fascinating. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2533210/
That's just a matter of muscular development. Human babies are born early; I believe this is usually attributed to the difficulty of getting the head through the birth canal.
but I am not even kidding. they include a tiny bit of magnetic material in their ear. but it must be a genetic construct that informs them what to do with north, they use it to move to particular undersea canyons out in the ocean they have never been to.
+ How do they end up in one particular river and not another?
This "genetic memory" talk is just uninformed people jumping to conclusions and spreading speculation as fact.
The idea would be that a salmon could be genetically predisposed to follow a certain path, perhaps preferring the smell of a certain combination of chemicals, thus encoding the location. It means the „memory“ would be encoded via genetics as a result of genetic combination and mutations, and the „encoding“ would essentially just be selection. It’s just speculation on how this genetic memory idea could work without actually encoding memories on genes.
Maybe a giant net that lies at the base of the damn, and periodically lifts out of the water to catch the fish and automate the transportation of them to ideal next step drop.
I drove through Klamath Falls yesterday... that storm is sure going to give the river a lot of water to work with. Yeesh.
Our power company, Pacific Power, said they didn't need the dam at all, and it would cost more to maintain than it was worth.
Well designed ladders work efficiently. Fish don’t have to over exert themselves, make jumps (actual leaps to the next step) no bigger than they would naturally (with no dam), and have lots of resting spaces across the ladder where they can regain energy in gentle waters before continuing swimming and jumping upstream. They slowly gain elevation moving across spacious concrete tiers until they reach either a natural release point upstream enough that the strong flow into the dam doesn’t take them, or they end up in a hatchery.
I feel like hatcheries are underrated. Sure the upstream habitats are not the same without the fish and associated ecosystem. But if you have the right equipment, staffing, funding, and all that (basically a good government) the hatcheries could be made to churn out more fish than would be naturally possible. That’s because the trip upstream naturally is hard and many fish won’t make it anyways.
Calling dam removal ‘activist’ implies the push to keep it isn’t. But keeping the dam is just as much about advocacy—it’s about prioritizing things like renewable energy or flood control. Neither side is more ‘scientific’ than the other; they’re both driven by values. Science helps us understand the stakes, but humans decide what matters most. That’s why this stuff gets so messy.
COVID was a perfect example of this. Policies like isolating grandma in a nursing home or pulling kids out of school for two years were framed as ‘following the science,’ but they ignored entire fields of science and vast parts of the human experience. Loneliness has measurable health consequences—science shows it can kill. So do we isolate grandma to protect her from COVID, or risk her dying of loneliness? Similarly, the science of childhood education tells us that pulling kids from school harms them for life. These are real trade-offs, rooted in human values, not just science. And to be frank, that entire discussion was shut down completely. The entire decision making process was incredibly one-sided and myopic.
The same applies to dams. Decisions about whether to keep or remove them aren’t just ‘science versus activism.’ Both sides are informed by science, but they’re also driven by emotion, lived experience, and the values people hold. Science doesn’t tell us what to do—it gives us information about potential outcomes. What we choose depends on how we weigh those outcomes and whose priorities matter most. When rhetoric like ‘keep the dam = science, remove the dam = activism’ takes over, it oversimplifies these deeply human decisions and turns them into unnecessary battles. At the end of the day, it’s not ‘us vs. them’—it’s all of us trying to navigate complex trade-offs in a way that reflects the full spectrum of what matters to humans.
Questions of if (and how far) the salmon will go up the Klamath or if (and how many) homes will flood are example of this. Where opinions of fact differ, time will demonstrate one side to be right or wrong.
This highlights an inherent asymmetry of these situations. If the people who lose their livelihood are eventually proven right, that will be of little consolation. If the conservationist are proven proven wrong, it will be of little consequence.
A covid analogy would be non-parents using bad science to support school closure. If they are right, they lower their risk. If they are wrong, it isnt their kids that suffer.
There are thousands or millions of activists, statistically urban and distant, that like the conceptual idea of a free flowing river with salmon. Most of them will never visit the river. These are pitted against a much smaller number of geographic locals, many of whom may suffer flooding and the loss of their jobs, businesses, and retirements. This is not to say one side is inherently right or wrong- it is still a matter of values.
I thought the article could have done a better job of explaining what the locals realistically stand to lose in this situation, and less time on the conspiracy talk. In my experience, the conspiracy theories come as secondary post-hoc justification for economic and cultural interests of their adherents.
> Neither side is more ‘scientific’ than the other; they’re both driven by values
This isnt always the case. With respect to the science, sometimes different sides claim different and conflicting outcomes. The extent of the salmon run when it returns is a factual prediction, where one side can be shown right or wrong, as is the number of people who will be flooded or lose their jobs.
Towards the end of the article, it talks about spotted owl conservation, where 9 million acres of Forrest were protected, causing 30,000 loggers to lose their job. The environmental activists overstated how much this would help the owls, while the objectors held the position that logging was not big impact and the real driver was out competition from the barred owl. The aftermath showed the position of one side to have more scientific merit, but that is little consolation to those who had their lives destroyed. Inversely, the bad science has no cost to the conservation activists, because they had nothing to lose from the regulation.
This is a bit of a pet issue for me, because I have family who lost their life's work and life savings in similar situations.
While it might be politically pleasurable to imagine a bunch of ivory tower idiots, the real reason driving dam removal isn't salmon, it's preventing catastrophic dam collapse. That's why there's state and federal funding for a lot of dam removal.
The dams being removed are old, obsolete, and end of life. They were usually put in place before we had a power grid.
Leaving them in place isn't an option, they will eventually fail. Spending money to replace or repair a dam that doesn't do anything is a waste.
Removing them also has a ton of environmental benefits, and improves the area for current and future residents.
It really is a win-win situation in that everyone benefits: conservation groups, tribal groups, fishing and hunting groups and taxpayers.
Maybe it was a no-brainer in this situation, but that certainly isn't the picture that the article painted, with 20 years of activism to persuade the damn owner and operator to take them out instead of refurbishing them.
Similarly, if it's such an obvious win-win, why do 80% of the locals not view it that way? Do you think they're simply wrong and have nothing to lose?
The tribes that relied on the salmon in the klamath watershed lost their jobs, subsistence food, and cultural heritage for nearly a hundred years, and this factors precisely nil in your analysis.
To be clear, Im not even necessarily opposed to dam removal. My intent was to explore the dynamic where large numbers of remote people make decisions despite having little skin in the game. This dynamic also has a long history of negatively impacting native Americans too.
The environmental piece is a lovely bonus, but the truth is these dams are obsolete, end-of-life and will eventually fail. Leaving them in place is not an option, they either need to be replaced or removed.
Replacing a dam with no purpose is a waste of money, and the (ahem) downstream benefits of a healthier environment benefits both existing folk and improves land for future generations.
It really is a rare win-win situation.
Hatcheries, OTOH, are a poor simulacrum of a real fishery and a real lifecycle. They might churn out more juveniles than a natural river would, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a larger catch or higher quality catch.
Similarly, a lot of dam preservation pressure is reflexive reactionary thinking that if someone wants to remove the dams, it must be because they're a hippie environmentalist and the dam must be saved to show our commitment to Progress.
Dams have a finite lifespan. Rivers carry sediment. The dams slow the flow of water and the sediment is dropped. This fills up the reservoir behind the dam, eventually making the dam ineffective. In addition, ordinary mechanical stresses wear out dams and they're components, so there is a maintenance cost to just keeping them running.
Many failure modes for dams are catastrophic: a release of water and silt all at once into downstream areas.
Worse, many of the dams that were built in the dam-building boom in the US West from circa 1930 to 1965 or so were not particularly well-thought-out, especially smaller privately planned dams.
In the mid-century American Bureau of Reclamation, building dams was like building new chat services is at Google today. While dams, as a concept, are completely critical to making the western united states survivable with mid-20th century technology, many of the actual dams were not good designs, they are the result of a generation or two of engineers responding to promotion incentives within a large bureaucracy, and they should no more be given the benefit of the doubt as good engineering projects than the last abandoned open source project you saw from Google, Facebook, Uber, etc.
Consider Matilija Dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilija_Dam):
* "In 1941 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned that the dam would not be economically effective, as the steep, erosive topography upstream would cause it to silt up quickly. However, the project moved forward and in 1945 the county issued $682,000 in revenue bonds to fund it. Construction began on 18 June 1946 and was completed on 14 March 1948 at a cost of nearly $4 million, six times the original estimate" * "Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up.[7] The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment.[6] Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt,[1] but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated. In 1964 a safety study was commissioned from Bechtel Corporation, which determined the dam was unsafe and recommended removal." * The dam was notched twice, reducing its capacity and function, and the reservoir was useless by 2020. * Ventura county started trying to remove the dam in 1998 (who knows what happened between 1964 and then), but the dam is still there.
Even the good dams don't last forever, and there is no plan to deal with the sediment build up in the West's dams.
However, the Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers dams are the good ones. The real corkers are the private dams. Consider Rindge Dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindge_Dam) in Malibu, California, which was privately built by the Rindge family when they controlled the entire Mexican land grant rancho that is present-day Malibu:
* Built 1926 * Completely silted up by 1950, 24 years later. 24 years of "useful" life tops ("useful" is suspect because most Rindge family building projects were weird compliance dodges to preserve control of the ranch. They spent decades building and tearing down a railroad because the law on the books at the time prevented the state from using eminent domain to seize their land for road-building if there was a railroad under construction there) * Congress authorized removal study in 1992. * In 2014, dam considered so dangerous due to lack of repairs that the area, which is now in a state park, was closed to the public in 2014. * The dam can't just be knocked down, what would happen to the 600k cubic meters of sediment that are now trapped behind the dam, that should have flowed down the river for the last 100 years? The plan is to _truck the sediment out_. Some will be dumped in the ocean, the rest in _landfills_. * The currently scheduled goal to complete the removal project is _2033_. The dam was been functionally useless for its original purpose since 1950. It's 83 year "useless/dangerous" lifespan will surpass it's 24 year "useful" lifespan by 3.5x! Surely _some_ of that is government beauracracy but not all: it's very difficult to unbuild a silted up dam. It's harder to undo things than it is to do them.
I think there is much more significant "religious faith" in the sanctity of dams than there is "belief that dams are evil because they aren't natural" in the United States. Dams are a powerful symbol of America's mid-century confidence in it's ability to bend nature to its will. Hoover Dam is more than a tourist site, it's something closer to a civic-religious site, like the Lincoln Monument. So is Glen Canyon. Grand Coulee Dam is known to a lot of people as "The Dam That Won World War II" for it's role in powering the aluminum-smelting plants and nuclear material refinement sites in the Northwest. How many pieces of infrastructure are considered war heros in the US?
The sanctity of dams is way more obvious in the northeast. There's hundreds and hundreds of abandoned dams on every trickle of water in the mid-Atlantic and New England, all to power mills that stopped milling 100 years ago, but the dams are still there, and the fish are not.
I.e like here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_of_the_Elwha_River...
Maintaining the facility at full capacity means dealing with the sediment, not just the dam itself. For example, look at what LA County is having to do in the San Gabriels to maintain a damn we want to keep [1].
[1]: https://www.amesconstruction.com/project/san-gabriel-reservo...
I went to Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon and it was kind of like being in an aquarium watching the fish swim upstream. They seemed to get tired and would float backwards with the water current and then start swimming again against the current.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder
They also had a salmon hatchery literally right after the dam. But they had some stats showing that it also had mixed effectiveness.
The one I've read about that stuck with me was dam building by beavers. Some part of the behavior is driven by a dislike of the sound of running water. Someone did an experiment with speakers playing the sound of running water and the beavers near the speakers would attempt to cover them with sticks and mud.
In my head I'm imaging that sound is like nails on a chalkboard to beaver.
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/the-godf-otter-part...
This is true of humans as well. We each make food selections based on what tastes good. We seek particular sexual partners because it feels good. We protect and raise kids because it makes us feel good to do so.
This causes all sorts of evolutionarily weird side effects like people treating pets like kids in order to access the same emotional state as parenting. Or beavers covering speakers with mud and sticks.
Instincts are deterministic, but learned behaviors.
The running water speaker experiment was done in dry land, and beavers are very wary of going out of the water because of their predators, yet they risked working over the speakers.
There's been a disturbing trend with the return of the salmon for people to dress them up in little outfits and take selfies with them because they're so exhausted and easy to catch; it's like shooting fish in apparel.
I hope they are right about this dam not needed for flood prevention. Spain just lost hundreds of people and suffered billions in damages because these kinds of policies.
And the dam removals in Spain have nothing to do with receiving 770 mm of water in one single day. None of the removed dams would have protected an area that was planned to get flooded when the works of the 1960s were done.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/map-shows-existing-river-...
I don't believe the mainstream whitewashing of authorities. Administration openly against dams and waterworks, no alerts due to malfunctioning radars, terrible coordination, and lack of appropriate response.
Source: I personally know people from the affected area.
The article tells both sides of the story of the dam removal in as fair a way as I think is possible. Many of the locals were against it and there was a strong advocacy group that fought for it, including a tribal constituency.
I came away from the article feeling I understood both sides better but with less certainty about what was the right choice.
https://www.siskiyou.news/2024/01/24/blue-green-algae-in-cop...
It pretends to be a regular news site, and even "scientific", to the point where it fooled Google and his site was often at the top of search results. He was also aggressively promoting his articles on Facebook.
The guy is confusing green algae with bacteria. He's also ignoring the fact that the kind of blue-green "algae" in question, Microcystis aeruginosa, isn't the nitrogen-fixing kind. He has no clue was he's talking about, but that doesn't stop him, and he's unfortunately a major source of "knowledge" (confusion and misinformation) for the locals here.
The author seems to have developed quite a strong bias about the area.
To my ears, that is a plain spoken description of the culture of the area, compatible with what I have observed myself over the years.
But then again, I have my own priors, which probably bias me to thinking these people have legitimate reasons to distrust authorities who view their lives as expendable.
I also heard that people at Trinity Pines were shooting at CalFire when they were helping with the fires 8 years ago. Hence the reason why it burned so bad.
How many people are impacted and how? Will they lose their businesses, jobs, and life savings?
The closest it comes is talking about the spotted owl, where 30,000 people lost their loverhoods without compensation due to an environmental regulation that not only failed to deliver, but was doomed from the start. What are the parallels here?
from the link. probably a few more people in recreation indirectly affected, but these are small, remote reservoirs. It's not like we're draining Lake Powell here[1]
[1]: be still my beating heart
Well founded objections should be treated with respect, but I think there's a lot of resistance that's born of (a) reflexive opposition to the 'other side' (b) false generalization of dam-removal arguments applicable to specific dams to all dams, and (c) the incorrect assumption that existing dams must have some utility (equivalently, unawareness of just how many __useless__ dams cover the west, these Klamath dams among them).
Im not even trying to argue these people are correct, Im just perplexed that you seem to deny that the people the article talks about even exist
However, I hold that assumption is incorrect. I believe whole multi-decade process of local consensus-building and compromise that got to removal on the Klamath is a model for future efforts, which will be at least as sensitive to completing interests as these were. Your initial point about the shallowness of objections in TFA is testament to that process. The 'storming' episode you mention happened in ~2003. The failed deliveries from the Klamath were in 2001, and were the result of competing federal priorities (prior-appropriation private water rights, the endangered species act) coming to a head. The farmers seem to have had their concerns addressed since then - all the relevant local irrigation districts were signatories to both the (failed) Restoration Agreement and the (successful) Settlement Agreement.
I think TFA treats the most serious and well-founded objection very sensitively, toward the end:
> I find myself holding two realities in mind that seem hardly able, these days, to share the same space. The first is that the dams have amounted to an ongoing assault on Indigenous communities and rights, and on the many fish that move between fresh water and the sea; removing the barriers will right historical wrongs. The second is that the identities of many people here—their memories, ways of life, worldviews, sense of purpose, idea of home—are bound up in the dammed landscape and even the dams themselves.
This is the tension - once the competing economic and ecological interests are satisfied, the emotional interests remain. A landscape has to change, and a life-way it's supported will no long be possible in that place. That's unambiguously awful for people and families than enjoyed that landscape and life-way in the ~century since the dams were built. But their right to enjoy that landscape unchanged is not absolute; their loss has to be situated within the larger balance of costs and benefits of the project.
Now he works in the environmental police, and is often called to handle cetaceans getting lost in the Seine delta. People freak out because it is an unusual sight nowadays, but he told me this is just a return to how things were. They are stories of dolphins swimming as far back as Paris in the past centuries.
I guess this means we're doing something right, I hope one day we'll be rid of this poisonous brown opaque water flowing through our cities. I really hope one day to be able to see this "clear water" my grandpa told me he learned to swim in.
Sadly, it seems like things are mostly going in the opposite direction
I think he was talking about less turbid water than it is today. I don't think I could see my hand if I were to ever plunge it in the Seine, not that I'm foolish enough to try.
> Although the Bureau of Reclamation’s Link River Dam and PacifiCorp’s Keno Dam currently have fish ladders that will pass anadromous fish, none of PacifiCorp’s Four Facilities (i.e., Iron Gate, Copco 1, Copco 2, and J.C Boyle dams and associated structures) were constructed with adequate fish ladders and, as a result, anadromous fish have been blocked from accessing the upper reaches of the Klamath Basin for close to a century.
N.B. Keno and Link River are _not_ being removed.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/habitat-conservati...
From the 2013 department of the interior report discussing dam removal "Klamath Dam Removal Overview Report for the Secretary of the Interior: An assessment of science and technical information":
> In particular, the Klamath Tribes of the upper basin have experienced their 92nd year (period starting with initial dam construction) without access to salmon and have continued to limit their harvest of suckers to only ceremonial use for the 25th consecutive year because of exceptionally low numbers and ESA protection.
Either they want clean power from hydroelectric dams or the don't.
They were usually put in place before we had a power grid.
[1] https://gastropod.com/bringing-salmon-home-the-story-of-the-...