Why we blew up a dam — and saved a river | Amy Bowers Cordalis
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What is the historical significance of the Klamath River to the Yurok Tribe?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. It was the largest dam removal in American history and the largest salmon restoration project in the world. For indigenous advocate and attorney Amy Bowers Cordalis, the fight to make it happen began years earlier on a riverbank watching salmon die in the tens of thousands.
The last three or four generations of my family. witness the salmon runs declined, they witness the river become sicker and sicker, more polluted, really because of the impacts of colonization.
Amy is a member of the Euroc tribe, whose home along the Klamath River in Northern California was for thousands of years one of the great salmon fisheries on the continent. That was until a century of extraction and series of dams nearly destroyed it. In her talk, she tells the story about her tribe working alongside an unlikely coalition took down those dams and the remarkable recovery that has followed. Later.
Came home and went past historical spawning grounds not accessed in a hundred years. The salmon remembered.
What? They remembered. And stick around after the talk. Amy and I spoke about the generations who fought before her, the coalition that made the impossible happen, and what it looks like to live in balance with the natural world. We also get into why dam removal turned out to be the better deal for everyone, and how all of us can begin to restore a little balance in our own lives. That's coming up right after a short break.
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And now our TED talk and conversation of the day. In
the beginning, there were shapeless spirits roaming the universe, and they went to the Creator and said, We are lonely. Please help us. And the creator said, I will make you a place to be together on one condition. You must take care of it. The spirits agreed. And the creator made the earth. And sent the spirits down to the earth to become land and water, plants, animals and humans, making everything on earth alive. The кретер тол майстрис: You will never want for anything. So long as you live in a balance with the natural world. Never take more than what you need, give thanks and protect what gives you life. That is a version of my nation, the Yurok tribes creation story. It's not spiritual parallel, it's a set of instructions, simple, practical rules about how humans are meant to live on earth.
А вона телевлас. resilience and victory and what it means to remember. Since time immemorial, my nation has lived by these instructions. The lower Klamath River, and what is now known as Northern California, is our home and our lifeblood. Under our stewardship, the Klamath salmon runs grew to be the third largest in all the continental US. We had an abundant fishing way of life. Caring for all that gave us life. Then in the eighteen hundreds, everything changed. Newcomers arrived and they viewed our world through the lens of extraction. Gold, timber, water, land, and people. The balance was disrupted, and suffering ensued in this place. By nineteen ten, over ninety percent of California's indigenous population had been slaughtered.
It was genocide. By the two thousands, the Klamath River, our ancient relative, had been transformed by dams, habitat loss, water diversions, and warming polluted waters. The dams built without fish passage blocked the salmon from accessing over 400 miles of historical spawning grounds. Our salmon runs fell to five percent of their historical abundance. The hydropower from the dams wasn't green either.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the historical significance of the Klamath River to the Yurok Tribe?
0:03–6:41
2
How did colonization and dam construction impact salmon runs on the Klamath River?
6:41–14:20
3
Why did Amy Bowers Cordalis decide to become a lawyer to protect the river?
14:20–21:20
4
What strategies did Indigenous peoples use to build a coalition for dam removal?
21:20–28:58
5
How was the $500 million settlement negotiated to remove the dams?
28:58–36:16
6
What have been the ecological results since the dams were taken down?
36:16–39:13
Speakers
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