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By Root 2398 0

or subspecies go extinct.’ I would turn that statement around: There is a cost beyond which you just have to let destructive pieces of technology go extinct. There is a cost beyond which you have to let a treasonous collaboration between government and industry go extinct. There is a cost beyond which you have to let destructive worldviews go extinct. There is a cost beyond which you have to let civilization go extinct. The extinction of the salmon is not a price I’m willing to pay to support the irrigators, barging industry, aluminum industry, and producers of electricity, each of which is fighting desperately to cause salmon to go extinct.

“It may be incorrect to say outright that dams are ‘a poison for which there is no antidote.’ There is a realistic way to save salmon. I’m not speaking, of course, of the runs already extinct. The culture will forever carry that crime on our collective conscience. But other runs can be saved by a simple expedient. Remove dams that kill salmon. Blow them up. Even from a strictly economic perspective (in other words, from a perspective that ignores life), the dams aren’t necessary: Randy Hardy, Bonneville Power Administration Head, admits there is a ‘glut of power on the market at rates lower than’ that of the dams. Yet instead of removing dams the Administration’s response is to approach state and federal governments to request further subsidies. The public pays to kill the salmon. Corporate interests obstruct the removal of dams just as dams stand in the way of salmon on their way to spawn. For years politicians have studied the salmon to death, with each study revealing what we already know, that dams kill salmon. We’ve known this forever: laws were passed during the reigns of both Richard the Lionheart and Robert I (Robert the Bruce) in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries forbidding the erection of fixtures that would impede the passage of salmon on rivers and streams.358

“Steve Clark of the Bureau of Reclamation gave us the real reason for the studies, when he said that he wished that salmon would go extinct so that we can ‘get on with living.’

“Industry representatives at this and other panels have repeatedly stressed the need for proven solutions. I will give them a proven solution: blow the dams and allow the Columbia to once again be a wild river. It is time for us to stop studies that have been a mere stalling tactic on the part of politicians and the business interests they represent. It is time to find a way to remove the dams—dams that are killing salmon—so that we, and the salmon, can get on with living.”

I received a standing ovation for that testimony (from the audience, obviously, not from the panelists), and throughout the rest of the evening, many of the speakers said simply, “I support the Jensen alternative. Blow the dams.”

Weeks later, I gave the following testimony at another panel:359

“Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. Every day I tell myself I should continue to write. Yet I’m not always convinced I’m making the right decision. I’ve written books, good ones, and people have read them. At the same time I know it’s not a lack of words that’s killing salmon, but rather the presence of dams.

“Anyone who lives in this region and who knows anything about salmon knows the dams must go. And anyone who knows anything about politics knows the dams will stay, at least for now. Scientists study, politicians and businesspeople lie and delay, bureaucrats hold sham public-input meetings, activists write letters and press releases, I write books and articles, and still the salmon die. It’s a cozy relationship for all of us but the salmon.

“In the 1930s, prior to building the dams, the United States government knew the dams would kill salmon, and proceeded anyway. One reason they proceeded, and they were very explicit about this, is that salmon are central to many of the region’s indigenous cultures, and much as killing buffalo helped bring Plains Indians to terms, the government knew killing salmon would break the collective