This is Undammed, the Klamath River Story. A podcast made possible by support from American Rivers. All four dams on the lower Klamath have been fully removed. It's been less than two years from the approval of the dam removals by FERC in November of 2024 to the completion of the process. But the swift timeline of the removals belies the long, uncertain, and turbulent road it took to get here.
As we touched on in the last episode, yes, this dam removal is historic because it's the most ambitious dam removal to date. But it's also historic because it was a campaign designed and led by Native American tribes. in an effort to conserve their ancestral territory and revive their way of life. In this episode, we're going to take a look at the decades-long campaign and talk to some of the people behind this extraordinary and improbable effort to free a river.
My name is Molly Myers. I am a Kadok tribal member. I was born and raised on the Klamath River. My people are from the middle Klamath. We are fish people. I grew up in a traditional fishing family and a family that practiced ceremonies and held on to a lot of our traditions. Molly explained to me what it means to be fish people. We are taught that it's our responsibility to care for and harvest the fish on the river because then they will come back for us.
And so that has been an underlying belief in my life. And there's another core tenant that she grew up with. We believe as cutting people that we're fix the world people. That's what we call ourselves. It's our job and responsibility to manage the land. Which means that humans aren't separate from nature. They're an integral part of it. We don't see wild as a place that doesn't have humans in it.
As Molly mentioned, one of those key roles humans play is sustainably harvesting fish. She has vivid memories of fishing as a kid. My family has always fished traditionally. My dad would fish at Ishy Fishy Falls. Ishy Pishy Falls is a sacred site for the Karuk tribe. Him and my brothers, they would bring home fish, and there would be a lot of fish. We'd be canning, we'd smoke in the smokehouse to preserve, and it was just a really happy time.
time of abundance for us. But then things started to take a turn. As I got into being a little bit older teenager, we started to harvest sick fish. That was what I think my first memory of. feeling like things weren't the same, is that we would get fish that had sick gills, we'd get fish that had lesions. What was happening was that the warm, slow-moving, nutrient-rich water...
was creating prime conditions for algae blooms, which can be lethal for fish. It happened in just a matter of 8 to 10 years that we went from these, like, super healthy, abundant runs to just... really devastating fishery seasons. In addition to the troubles plaguing the salmon populations,
There were also policies implemented that limited the tribe's ability to fish on the Klamath. There were restrictions where we were allowed to fish for two fish a day, a week, I can't remember, but not enough, basically. And especially not enough because not all of our people... fish we would share our fish with other folks in the communities elders and people that didn't have fisher people because
For so long, when you're separated from your culture the way that we were, you lose that. You lose the knowledge that it takes to make a dipnet and how to do it. There's even like a little bit of a... I guess you get embarrassed, right? You get embarrassed to be an adult that doesn't know how to fish or doesn't know how to do these things. It's really hard to learn those things once you're an adult. So Molly's dad and brothers would fish for those who couldn't.
and share what they caught. So I remember my brothers getting tickets. I remember them being arrested for fishing. Not only was Molly watching fish populations decline, She was also witnessing her community lose traditional knowledge of how to fish. What would become of the Karuk people, the fish people, if they could no longer fish? If they no longer knew how?
Molly and other tribe members knew they had to do something. And so we were starting to realize that these dams were a huge part of our problem. So the license was coming up. It was a 50-year license. At first, the idea was just to secure provisions that would improve fish. habitat.
like better fish passage or maintaining higher water levels. Molly and other tribe members started attending FERC meetings to share their concerns and lay out these requests. Again, FERC, or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is the group responsible for licensing the dams. So we were going to these hearings and we were testifying, we were pouring our heart out and we're bringing our families in to talk about how this was impacting us. And they were basically just ignoring us.
Until one particularly frustrating meeting sparked an idea. And it was like, we need to get rid of the dams. Like, we should just go for dam removal. And it was kind of like a joke almost. It was like, yeah, that's dam removal. But it just picked up traction. Dam removal started becoming less of a pipe dream and more of a platform.
And then there was this moment that really changed everything. In 2001, the Klamath saw the worst drought in its history. By this point, coho salmon in the Klamath Basin were on the endangered species list. which meant the federal government was under obligation to protect them. What they needed was more water, which meant someone was going to lose water, and that someone was going to be farmers.
We'll get into the topic of farming on the Klamath Basin in a future episode, but for now what you need to know is that the Klamath Project on the Klamath River is a network of irrigation canals, storage reservoirs, and hydroelectric dams. that supplies water for about 240,000 acres of farmland. In 2001, the federal government made the decision to, for the first time, entirely cut off the flow of irrigation water to those farmers.
This led to farmer protests in the Upper Basin, some as large as 18,000 people, which again we'll get into in another episode. The pressure worked, and the Bush administration boosted deliveries to farmers the following year. despite the persistent drought conditions and the impact this would have on salmon. And then right after that, we were looking at the numbers are tens of thousands of dead adult salmon, our entire fishery, dead.
and rotting on the river. According to official estimates, about 34,000 fish died. But some counts estimate that over 70,000 adult Chinook salmon were killed when returning to the river to spawn that year. making it the largest salmon kill in the history of the United States. Many tribal members who I spoke with remember this moment vividly, even though it happened over 20 years ago.
Molly is one of those people. She was pregnant with her first child in the fall of 2002. Not only does she remember the sight of all those fish floating lifelessly in the river, but something else about that time has also stayed with her. I'll never, like, when you're pregnant, you smell things more than regular people do. It was impactful. It left Molly with a deep sense of foreboding.
And I was also starting to think in my mind, is my son ever going to get to fish? Is my son ever going to get to do these things that were so much a part of my life? growing up and made me who I am, am I going to be able to pass that on? So I guess that kind of lit a fire in me too, right? This fight for our next generations, it was a real turning point. It was a sense of desperation. And that was really the catalyst that got us all moving together in the same direction. My name is Craig Tucker.
Today I'm a natural resources policy consultant, but I've worked with the Karuk tribe and other tribes in the Klamath Basin for about 20 years. Craig is another individual who got involved pretty early on in the Klamath Dam Removal Campaign.
He wasn't an obvious candidate for this work. His academic background is in biochemistry. But he found his calling pretty early on as a river activist. I wanted to do something important. And if you're in California, there's nothing more important than water policy. And I have a great affection for rivers. I'm a kayaker and river afters from way back. Craig was working for an environmental group in Sacramento called Friends of the River when the fish kill happened.
It was really devastating for people as you talked to tribal members who were there. It was like a traumatic experience. It was like the death of relatives for folks. But I do think... It really galvanized tribal communities from different tribes to come together and say, we're not having it. It also galvanized Craig Tucker. And a colleague at Friends of the River, Kelly Catlin.
was the attorney working on the relicensing process for Pacificor's Klamath River Dams. Pacificor is the company that owned the Klamath Dams. And so... I think Kelly really appreciated there was an opportunity to remove dams because the economics of these dams are marginal or best. And there was going to be a lot of pressure to solve things in the climate because the fish killed.
made international headlines. And although I had no experience working in tribal communities, it was very clear to me that if there was going to be a real campaign to remove dams in the Klamath River... We would certainly be led by the tribes. And so we started reaching out to tribal leaders on the Klamath River. Once a coalition of tribal leaders had been formed, they decided their best angle would be a corporate responsibility campaign.
Going after an agency like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission did not seem particularly strategic. But the company that owned the dams was owned by a Scottish multinational energy company called Scottish Power. I know the layers of ownership are a bit confusing, but at this point, Scottish Power, an energy company based in Scotland, owned Pacific Core, which owned the dams. We did some strategizing and concluded that what we needed to do was kick off our...
campaign to bring the salmon home by loading up on airplanes and going to Scotland and crashing the shareholders needing Scottish power. This was in 2004. But in 2005, Scottish Power sold Pacificor to Warren Buffett's Mid-American Energy Company, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, which is one of the largest companies in the world. So the campaign shifted to pressuring Berkshire Hathaway.
through efforts such as staging demonstrations at shareholder meetings. That's how this whole thing started, was confronting the company and the shareholders on their home turf. This is our life. It's not numbers on paper. It's not numbers in a bank account. It's everyday life for thousands of people.
You guys gotta remember, this next generation is rising up. Warren Buffett, you really do need to take down all of those dams as soon as possible. We need more water in our rivers. But there are two elements to the issue of salmon population decline. One is the dams themselves.
but the other is how the water is allocated. To put it simply, even without the dams, there's still not enough water in the Klamath to satisfy everyone's demands on it. This was an issue that the campaign had to take up with the government. Getting after Pacific Order, we were having negotiations at the same time with the irrigators in the Bureau of Reclamation to try to figure out what is the solution to that problem.
The Bureau of Reclamation is a federal agency which oversees water resource management in the western United States. It's essentially in charge of deciding who gets how much water. The negotiations Craig is referring to resulted in the KBRA. or the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement. The goal of the KBRA was to balance the water demands of the fish, agriculture, and wildlife refuges. For all the division between the groups in the Klamath Basin,
The KBRA was actually a rare piece of legislation which almost everyone was behind. We'll talk more about the KBRA in a later episode, but one component of it was the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement. which was an agreement to remove the dams. In 2010, the KBRA was signed by the governors of California and Oregon, as well as the chairman of the Klamath Tribes. The KBRA then made it through the Senate.
But a conservative Congress refused to pass legislation that would result in dam removals. Craig has some thoughts about why that is. These dams weren't making money, don't provide flood control. Don't provide irrigation water. Don't provide drinking water. There's really no reason to keep them. But in the West, I think dams and irrigation infrastructure is really intertwined with the...
the mythology and the ideology of manifest destiny. They are part of God's commandment to go forth and conquer the wilderness, to let the desert bloom. They're really sort of monuments of manifest destiny. And so I think it was really difficult for conservative Republican congressmen from the West to vote for a package that included dam removal, even though the dams were worthless.
So the KBRA died in Congress, and none of that legislation that would determine how to allocate water in a way everyone could agree on passed. But ironically, this wasn't the end of the dam removal piece of the legislation. The one thing we did not need Congress for is removing dams because the Federal Power Act creates a pathway for dam removal where you apply to FERC for permission to remove a dam and they can grant it.
So the KBRA died, but the KHSA continued forward. So despite the major setback of losing the KBRA... The dream of dam removal was still alive. But it felt like it was moving at a snail's pace. It's very challenging. It's everything from... NEPA compliance. In California, we have CEQA. We have Clean Water Act stuff. It was a ton of permits to navigate to get this final approval to go for the dam removal. It took 10 years to move through regulatory compliance. And then one day...
It happened. I was on travel. I was in the IRC justice office in Seattle when we got the word that IRC had it on their agenda. And... It was embarrassing because I like burst into tears and it's still right now. It's very just thinking about it, but it still feels a little unreal sometimes. After all these years it was finally time to celebrate.
We wanted to do a watch party for the FERC meeting so we can see FERC actually say approve it and all that. So we decided that we were going to go back to the place where we had went after that FERC meeting. decades ago. So we set up a Starlink connection at the River Bar and we brought down a TV. The meeting was on East Coast time. So they were all gathered at five in the morning. And we built a big bonfire.
and celebrated that moment. And honestly, we actually missed it because it was on the consent calendar. Everybody's hanging out, having a good time, really celebratory mood. And then somebody... Wait a minute, guys. I think they just approved it. So we all went rushing over there to the TV and it was on the consent calendar. There's not even a blip in the meeting that day that they approved the largest dam removal.
For Molly, for whom it took two decades to get to this point, it was strange that the decision could be made in the span of a few seconds. The actual removals have also progressed really quickly. And so now we're sitting in these meetings and we're talking about this dam removal timeline and it's, okay, this year we're going to be halfway done and the next year we're going to be all the way done. And I'm like...
Like, what? We spend our whole lives working towards this, and then it feels like it's just going to go in the blink of an eye. For Pacificor and for the federal government,
The decision came down to removing infrastructure that was no longer cost effective. For Molly, it's been a lifelong effort that has not only consumed her, but also her family. My husband Frankie and I have been... working together on this project like even long before we were dating or married like we were we worked together on this and it's we keep going back to saying it's so emotional too
To actually be living this, we wondered if we would see this in our lifetime. Craig also found it hard to believe that he was actually getting to witness this moment. I did have this sort of sense of laying down a burden I've been carrying for a long time. And I think a lot of my colleagues felt that too. I'm not sure I would have signed on for this had I known it would take 20 years. I thought... Craig says that what kept him going all this time...
was the sense that he was at least doing something. I feel like our world's in trouble. The rate at which we're losing our biodiversity, we're still pumping carbon in the air, creating, permanently changing the weather of the planet. It's a real catastrophe. And nobody can solve it, but everyone can solve it. And so I think what I, the work we're doing here on the Klamath is like, I'm doing what I can do. My colleagues are doing what they can do.
Lord knows these tribes are doing a lot of heavy lifting. And hopefully people all around the planet will see what we've achieved. and it'll inspire people. Sometimes David slays Goliath, and sometimes you win, and you can do this. And Craig thinks that maybe, in the effort to address other instances of environmental disasters and social injustice, there's something to be learned from the campaign to remove the Klamath dams. It's not only instructive for...
water and dams. It's sort of an example of how small communities, any community, can defend itself from corporate interests. and exploitation, and win. This is a case study in how small communities can get organized, build coalitions. For example, Craig believes that one of the biggest lessons from this experience has to do with how the campaign was run.
and I emphasize this when I talk to other non-Native folks that find themselves working in Native communities, is the fact that it was led by Native people. No one cares about this place, and no one cares about these fish more than karuks and yuroks and hupa people. I think for Western culture, our history, my history, is angling. things aren't going so well, pick up and move over to the next place. Most indigenous cultures, it's not really an option.
Their creation stories, their religion tells them that, hey, they're put on this planet to be stewards of this particular spot. And so they're going to fight for the tenacity to protect these things in a way that... I was like, hey, I know white guys that like to fish and they'll fight hard to protect that place they like to go fishing. For those of us who like to kayak, we'll protect that place we like to go kayaking. But that's not the kind of...
dedication I'm talking about. It's like that story about breakfast, you know, the chickens really involved with the pigs committed. Right. And so. You got to have those folks who are really committed. And no one cares as much as tribal folks. And no one's going to work harder and defend these places the way Native people are going to.
If this is an example for other communities fighting similar uphill battles to preserve or reclaim their natural resources, I wondered what Molly thought were the key ingredients that made this campaign successful. She told me she attributes it to two things. The first is her family. I have brought my children along every step of this campaign. I think that every culture values their children and their next generation. When you show people...
how it's going to impact the next generation, I think it's relatable. And so I really made an effort to bring them along with everything I did.
And then there was the tribal coalition they were able to create. We came together as tribal people. And we say that a lot. All the tribes could just come together, could just get along. What could we do? And so that's a large part of what we did, even though... we didn't always agree and even though our tribal governments don't agree even now still sometimes on a lot of things but the important part of that you recognize that we had shared
goals. And I really think that was what contributed to the success here was that we were able to work together as Indigenous people from different tribes that were focus on the same goal. Craig had told me that what motivated him was the desire to do what he could and maybe inspire people to do the same. Molly's motivation came from a slightly different place.
We really didn't want our kids to have to fight the same fight as we were fighting. We wanted to fix it. We are fix the world people and we wanted to fix it. And so really. I threw my whole life into it, honestly, and drug my kids right along with me. I got five kids and every single one of them has been protesting and traveling and engaged, even if they don't know it right now.
because some of them are still pretty little. They've been engaged their whole lives. Molly didn't want her kids to spend their whole lives fighting for their cultural identity. She wanted them just to be able to live it. They're allowed to be.
full-time indians and that's like their job my oldest is a cultural resources technician he goes out and he spends all of his time in the woods and out in our country protector and manager and steward of the land and I'm very proud that he's able to do that and that he doesn't have to be out in the world. fighting for things in the same way as we did. He doesn't have to get spit on. He gets to be the best Paduk person.
And our daughter, she wants to be a language teacher. And I'm proud that we've been able to push through a lot of the stuff that we did. Dam removal is certainly not the end of the road. There's plenty of work left to do for Molly and for her family. In fact, it's really only the beginning. Recognize that dam removal is not alone going to fix the river. We recognize that we need these restoration efforts.
climb over this hill there's another mountain in front of us which is restoration and water use the water is going to be cleaner the river is going to be free flowing but it's still a finite amount of water and so I think that is something that I feel like is really important to share as we go forward and to make sure that people understand that this isn't done. We still have a lot of work to do.
We're going to hopefully take some of these lessons that we've learned on how to work together. But instead of despair about the future, that next year's salmon run may be even worse than the last, there's now a sense of possibility. that Native people can regain their relationship with this place and their culture that depends on it. When I envision a healthy climate river, I see our runs of fish come back. I see our different species healthy and plentiful. I see coho.
Chinook and lamprey and steelhead and green and white sturgeon. I see acorns that are abundant. I see fire on the ground. I see my kids doing... the same things in the same place as their people have done for thousands of years. I I see people practicing their ceremonies and their culture freely. I see a world where we don't feel like we have to. Assimilate to survive. In the next episode, we'll zoom out a little and drill into the question, why remove dams?
with Ann Willis, the California Regional Director at American Rivers. We'll hear about the wild history of dam building in the West, why we've entered into this new era of dam removal, how American Rivers thinks about which dams to remove, and why dam removal is only one piece of the work to revitalize rivers. Special thanks for this episode goes to Molly Myers and Craig Tucker. This podcast was produced by Blue Canoe Studios.