Four Dam Removals on the Klamath River, with Amy Bowers Cordalis

Notable Quotes

• The Klamath River is essential for Yurok people: “Think of a vein that goes through your heart and then fuels your body and provides nutrients to your whole body. The river is like that for us. Everything that we do, whether it’s just salmon fishing or fishing for other foods, whether it’s collecting basket materials, whether it’s recreation and just enjoying things and bringing family together, or even just getting us through hard times, we go to the river for solace and to feel better.” (8:14)
• Dams amplified the impacts of agriculture on the Klamath River: “Farmers use various chemicals to maximize their crops: pesticides, herbicides, and all those things. They apply that to … former wetlands, and all of that agricultural runoff ends up in the river and in these reservoirs behind the dams. The way that the dams were built is such that the top layer of the reservoir water is what is released into the river, so that tends to be the most polluted and the warmest … Then, that would just flow down the river and essentially poison the entire stretch of river.” (12:54)
• Klamath River case marked a shift in the priorities of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: “The chairman, along with a couple of the commissioners, noted that [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] had a really bad track record of considering Tribal rights and environmental rights in relicensing proceedings, and that they weren’t going to do that anymore, and that the vote on Klamath was going to signal in a new era where the public interest would include the rights of the environment, the rights of Tribes—and of course, power development and money, as well. But no longer would it just be those two.” (32:20)

Top of the Stack

• “Undammed” video with Amy Bowers Cordalis
• Treaty Justice by Charles Wilkinson
• The Water Remembers by Amy Bowers Cordalis

The Full Transcript

Editor’s note: This transcript contains phonetic interpretations of the traditional language of the Yurok Tribe and may contain spelling errors.

Margaret Walls: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Margaret Walls. My guest today is Amy Bowers Cordalis. Amy is the founder and principal of Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group. Ridges to Riffles' mission is to help Indigenous peoples protect and restore the natural and cultural resources they rely on to maintain their identity and sovereignty. Amy is a member of the Yurok Tribe in California. She's also an attorney, and she was instrumental in fighting on behalf of the Yurok and other tribes for removal of the dams on the Klamath River. That's what we're going to talk with Amy about today.

I'm going to give some quick background, and we'll go over this in more detail, but there are—or rather there were—six dams along the Klamath River. Now, the Klamath runs from southern Oregon through northwestern California and out to the Pacific Ocean.

Those dams were built by the US government, and the oldest one dates back to about 1918, so they were getting really old. Like many dams, they've caused some serious ecological harm. They’ve caused algae and other water-quality problems, and importantly, they blocked passage to salmon spawning grounds. Last October, the first of four scheduled dam removals took place on the Klamath, and the remaining three, I believe, are scheduled to happen this year.

I'm really excited to have Amy on the show to talk about all of this, including the instrumental role the Yurok and other Tribes played in advocating for removal. Stay with us.

Hi, Amy. Welcome to Resources Radio. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Amy Bowers Cordalis: Aiyekwee (hello). Thank you for having me.

Margaret Walls: Before we dive into a discussion of these dams, the river, the fish, and the Tribe, I want to start with a little bit about you. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to work on these issues?

Amy Bowers Cordalis: I'm going to start introducing myself in Yurok, because that's the way that we bring ourselves to the world. So, aiyekwee, Nek ‘new, Amy Cordalis. [Speaking in Yurok.] That is an introduction in the Yurok language. Essentially, I said my name, my village, and that I was happy to be here today.

My family is from the mouth of the Klamath River on the north side. We're from a village called Rekwoi, and it's a very beautiful, powerful place where the Klamath River meets the Pacific Ocean. You can just imagine it's in the very, very northern corner of California. We are surrounded by the redwood forest, the Redwood National Park, and the village sits on a hill that looks over a big, vast, blue, green estuary; the mouth of the river; and the ocean.

There's a river bar that separates the estuary from the river, and the waves and the ocean are pretty powerful. There's this constant roar of waves and then, overlooking all of that, pretty close to the village, is a Yurok sacred site. It's a really big rock that is in the shape of a woman with a baby basket on her back, and her name is Oregos.

That is where my family is from, and I have had the great honor of representing the Yurok Tribe first as its general council. Then, once things got even more bad on the Klamath River, the council asked me to transition my role and focus exclusively on Klamath River restoration. We can get into what that work was, but I am really honored to have served the Tribe as its lawyer in that work. I am also, most importantly, two things: I am a mother, and I am also a devoted salmon fisherwoman.

The Klamath River used to be the third-largest salmon-producing river in the whole lower continental United States. My ancestors enjoyed a fishing way of life, which meant that we harvested three runs of salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, eulachon, eels, and all kinds of other first foods from the river. I was very lucky to have been raised on, I guess, what you could call the remnants that were still present of that way of life. That upbringing and the joy of fishing and being on the river is what led me to this work and in part was also triggered by some events that we'll get into during the conversation.

Margaret Walls: Actually, Amy, you're getting a little bit into my first question. I'm going to ask you a little bit more about this, because I decided, instead of starting this conversation on the dams, I would like to start with the river, the fish, your Tribe, and the interconnections between them. You've given us a sense of that and a little bit about yourself, but just maybe broaden that a little bit about how important the river and the fish are to the Yurok way of life and what we need to understand about that.

Amy Bowers Cordalis: Yurok people to this day, even though there aren't many fish left, continue to live a fishing-based way of life the best that they can. Yurok's aboriginal territory stretched across about 1.5 million acres in what is now known as the far northern coast of California. Think about the Pacific Ocean–Oregon–California border: We are tucked into the California side of the border. We've got territory, originally, that was coastal, river, high country—kind of first coastal range, redwoods, big lagoons. It's a really biodiverse place and really fascinating.

Our territory was dramatically reduced in 1855, when the reservation was created. In that, we reserved a mile on either side of the Klamath River from my home village up 45 miles to the confluence of the Klamath and the Trinity Rivers at the village of Weitchpec. That allowed us to stay in some of our largest villages and allowed us to continue to fish the river and to some extent continue that way of life.

We were cut off from our coastal areas, our prairies, and also our high country, which is our sacred lands. We continued to go to those places and try to get resources, but it was difficult. In any event, we kept that connection to the river.

I was in a meeting yesterday with an elder who described the river as … She said, “It's the lifeblood of the people.” And then, she said, “It's almost like a vein.” Think of a vein that goes through your heart and then fuels your body and provides nutrients to your whole body. The river is like that for us. Everything that we do, whether it's just salmon fishing or fishing for other foods, whether it's collecting basket materials, whether it's recreation and just enjoying things and bringing family together, or even just getting us through hard times, we go to the river for solace and to feel better.

The river provides all those different aspects of what you need in order to be a healthy human. I will also add that we've always had a layer or an element of commercial fishing. The river was also an economic means for us, as well.

The river itself is gorgeous. I think, too, about what the river was like, predevelopment. You had mentioned earlier how, for the first dam, the project really started back in 1912. But then, in addition to that, at the headwaters, there's a federal reclamation project that was authorized in 1905, and construction started in 1908. That really did a lot of ecological damage to the upper basin, which then flowed down to my part of the river. I mention that briefly now, because, predevelopment of the river, I just can't even imagine how gorgeous it was.

That would've been my great grandma's age and her sort of time; she was really of the last generation to experience the river totally undeveloped. The river itself is just marvelous. There would've been cool clean water, and it's a big river that goes through canyons that would've had redwood trees on them. It just would've been so beautiful. We get some of that now, but a lot of the redwood trees are gone, because they've been logged, and water quality now is very poor. The water temperatures are hot, also. It's not the same, but that's why we're working on it, right, to get it back to what our ancestors enjoyed so that we can have that same quality of life that they enjoyed.

Margaret Walls: Just so people understand … I don't know if you're comfortable giving a little more explanation about why the dams are the problem—not all of the problem—but the big part of the problem in these water-quality issues.

Amy Bowers Cordalis: The dams were built, like you said, between 1918 and 1962, and they were built on the third-largest salmon-producing river in the whole lower continental United States without any fish passage. The lowest dam is called Iron Gate Dam, and it is almost 200 feet tall. It is literally an iron gate that the fish cannot pass, so they die trying.

There's that piece of it in terms of why they're so bad, but then, with respect to the water quality, what happens is that, behind the dams, there are large reservoirs. Going back to the headwaters, there is a very large reclamation project, one of the largest in the country, and that reclamation project essentially converted almost 200,000 acres of wetlands into agricultural lands. The ecological function those wetlands performed was basically to allow the water to seep through the land, then the land would pick up all the bad things, then that water would filter down into the river, and then it would flow down through the whole river.

Well, when they drain those and then put agricultural fields there, the farmers use various chemicals to maximize their crops: pesticides, herbicides, and all those things. They apply that to these former wetlands, and all of that agricultural runoff ends up in the river and in these reservoirs behind the dams. The way that the dams were built is such that the top layer of the reservoir water is what is released into the river, so that tends to be the most polluted and the warmest. That's what's been flowing down the river. For almost 20, 25 years now, the reservoirs and the water quality got so bad that every year in the summer, there would be toxic blue-green algae that would bloom, and there was a lot of it. Then, that would just flow down the river and essentially poison the entire stretch of river.

There's 200 river miles below Iron Gate Dam, so that's obviously a massive water-quality problem. In addition to that, the water itself was also really, really warm. Then, it's nutrient-dense with nitrates and phosphorus. All of that leads to really poor water quality, and then that leads to fish disease, and then that kills the fish. It's just a whole downward trend toward ecological collapse.

Margaret Walls: Right. Thanks for that explanation. There's a lot of things going on there. I think a lot of people just think about the dams blocking passage, but it's a lot more than that.

Amy, I read about this huge fish kill in 2002, and that seemed to galvanize people to get things moving on these removals. Can you talk about that a little bit? Was it as important as I read it to be?

Amy Bowers Cordalis: Yes.

Margaret Walls: What happened there?

Amy Bowers Cordalis: It definitely galvanized a whole new generation of Yurok people to fight for the river, but also it galvanized almost every person who had a role in managing Klamath resources or who was in some way involved or wanted to get involved. So, think about the river as a whole. The Klamath Basin is a big river with a big lake at the top in the federal reclamation project. In the middle, there are the dams, and then, at the bottom, there's the Karuk people, the Yurok people. We had been sort of under this water-management system for almost 100 years, where water from the lake was diverted for agriculture. We talked about the runoff and how that would go into the river. The dams weren't holding back water or using water in any way, but the way that I described how they worked, they were contributing to all kinds of poor water quality and environmental issues.

At the bottom, Yurok and Karuk were trying to maintain a fishing way of life and have a commercial fishery and subsistence and whatnot. Then 2002 happens, and it's a drought year. It was anticipated that a very large run of fall Chinook salmon was expected to come home. The year before, in 2001, the irrigation allocation at the top of the basin had been reduced to provide flows for coho salmon on the river, which are listed under the Endangered Species Act. The agricultural community was very upset about that. So 2002 comes, and the writing's kind of on the wall that this is a dry year; there's not going to be enough water for the farmers to have a full allocation and for the coho salmon to have what they need for flows and what's required by law under the Endangered Species Act.

They appealed to the then–vice president, Dick Cheney. The result was that a very large amount of water was diverted out of the Klamath to support agricultural deliveries. That happened almost at the exact same time as the bulk of that large Chinook salmon run returned to the river, and it was hot. As a result, a fish disease called Ich spread through almost the entire salmon run and killed them. It was like a war zone. Up and down the river within the lower 20 miles, rotten fish bodies lined the banks of the river three, four layers deep in the eddies—that's where the water kind of spins in a circle.

The fish carcasses just so eerily spinned. It was horrid, all floating on the water. The way that the fish disease works is it attacks their gills and almost attacks their insides, so their bodies were exploding from the inside out, and their bellies had literally looked like they had swallowed a bomb or something. Eventually they just started rotting. It just smelled like death.

By the end of it, it's estimated about 78,000 adult Chinook salmon died, and these salmon were anywhere from 12 to 30 pounds; so, very large fish. What was so awful was that there is nothing like that in Yurok's stories or our history. We have been on that river since the beginning of time, and nothing like that has ever happened, so we knew this was not a natural thing. Looking at those fish, quickly, we figured out it was Ich, but there was really nothing you could do to save them. The disease just had to run its course. They tried to release some more water to try to help, but the damage had already been done, because the fish had already been infected.

I remember I worked for Tribal fisheries that year. I was a fish technician. When we first started observing the fish kill, when they first started dying, I was on a boat on the river and just saw all of this. I didn't know this word at that time, but later came to appreciate that, for Yurok people, that fish kill was an active ecocide. We are so dependent upon fish for our whole survival. We are so dependent upon the river for survival … Diverting that much water, the resulting flows were the lowest flows on record.

It was essentially like depriving the river of oxygen. If we think about what would happen to us if we didn't have oxygen, we would die. That's essentially what was happening to the river. We felt like the US government doing that was an active form of ecocide against the Yurok people. That's how we all felt. As a result, there were several Yurok people who were absolutely galvanized by that experience, who had similar experiences as to my experience, and reacted in the same ways. It launched a whole movement to then prevent that kind of thing from ever happening again, but more importantly, fully restoring the river.

Margaret Walls: This comes at great cost—$450 million, I saw—to remove these dams. I know there were some vested interests on the other side. You mentioned agriculture, and I know there's communities on some of those reservoirs. What do you think ultimately determined this outcome that the dams are actually finally getting removed?

Amy Bowers Cordalis: It ended up being about $550 million.

Margaret Walls: Thanks for the correction.

Amy Bowers Cordalis: The dams do not impact agricultural deliveries or agriculture at all in a negative way. In fact, it helps agriculture because—and we can get into this later in detail—the river will heal and the fish will heal, which means that they could potentially have less regulatory burdens on them through the ESA [Endangered Species Act] and whatnot. Dam removal is in the agricultural community's interests.

There are some folks around the reservoirs who were concerned that their property values would be diminished because instead of having lakefront property, they would then have riverfront property. It's interesting that there were concerns there, because the lakefront property they had, the lake was not usable. You couldn't swim in it, you couldn't fish from it, and it was almost year-round a very bright green from the toxic algae blooms. Even now, the reservoirs have been drawn down and the river channel has returned, and it's already a healthy, beautiful flowing river. So, that's exciting.

There were two inflection points. First, after the fish kill happened, there was a lot of discussion amongst the Tribes, the states of Oregon and California, the federal government, and nongovernmental organizations, about what we needed to do to heal the river. It was identified that dams were a major contributing factor to the river's demise, along with not enough water, and then the agricultural runoff. The thing is that in 2006, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which goes by FERC, license to operate the Klamath dams was set to expire. In 2004, just two years after the fish kill, PacifiCorp, which owned the dams, filed to relicense the dams for another 50 years. That created a regulatory process that all the people, the entities, the states, and whatnot, could participate in to essentially either advocate for keeping the dams in as they are for another 50 years or remove them; you probably know which side we were on as Yurok.

That created the space for us to advocate for actual dam removal. At first, people really laughed at the idea and literally laughed at Yurok Tribal leadership for saying, "Yeah, let's remove all four dams." I should mention, too—you had said there's six dams. Four of those dams block fish passage, and the other two dams are basically like natural reefs that have been slightly elevated. They're not a significant problem. In any event, people were laughing at Yurok Tribal leadership, but nonetheless, Yurok Tribal leadership was preparing briefs and documents advocating for dam removal that were presented to FERC and became a part of the FERC record.

Fast-forward several years, I guess it was 2007 or 2008, FERC released an environmental impact statement, which is a precursor to releasing an order that would either reauthorize or have certain conditions required or deny the relicensing. In that environmental impact statement, it recommended that the dams be relicensed with mandatory fish prescriptions, which essentially were installing fish ladders. PacifiCorp did an economic analysis, and it turned out that just removing the dams was cheaper than installing the fish passage.

This was a big moment, because all of a sudden now, we had PacifiCorp's attention, and from their perspective, dam removal became a viable option, because it was cheaper for their ratepayers. They called for a stay of the FERC proceedings and then negotiations with the Tribes, the state of California, and the federal government. That led to two historical agreements that were signed in early 2010, 2012-ish: the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement and the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement. Those two agreements were companion agreements.

The Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement had provisions to essentially make sure there was enough water in the river for ecosystem needs, but also agricultural needs, and it had a lot of habitat-restoration work. The Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement was the dam-removal agreement. The dam-removal agreement contemplated removal of the four dams by 2020, and it essentially put the process of approving dam removal into the hands of Congress. After several years, basically until 2016, everyone tried to get Congress to approve the legislation to authorize Klamath dam removal, and they just didn't. The Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement had a self-terminating provision, so it died in 2016. Then, it became, Well, what's the fate of the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement and dam removal? What are we going to do here?

We ended up negotiating an amendment to the hydroelectric settlement agreement that took the approval process from Congress and put it back into FERC's hands. Then, we essentially restarted the relicensing proceedings. Those concluded in November of 2022, and maybe two weeks after, the dam decommissioning teams and crews rolled into the lower Klamath hydroelectric project and set up shop to start dam removal. That's how it all happened.

Margaret Walls: Those relicensing moments—that's an inflection point. Everybody's watching those to see if they can get dams out, I think.

Amy Bowers Cordalis: 100 percent, because it's really in FERC's hands to decide the future of American rivers' Tribal culture environment, and they have the regulatory authority to either relicense or issue new conditions on licenses or say no and take the dams out. We had a really interesting experience with FERC. The standard that FERC uses to decide the disposition of dams is by considering what's in the public interest. For the past however long FERC has been around, a hundred and some years, public interest has been about money, profit, and power generation, and that's really been it.

In the Klamath dam-removal proceeding, there was this really powerful moment, particularly in the hearing, during which FERC was going to vote on approving dam decommissioning through approving or denying a licensed surrender order. The chairman, along with a couple of the commissioners, noted that FERC had a really bad track record of considering Tribal rights and environmental rights in relicensing proceedings, and that they weren't going to do that anymore, and that the vote on Klamath was going to signal in a new era where the public interest would include the rights of the environment, the rights of Tribes—and of course, power development and money, as well. But no longer would it just be those two.

Margaret Walls: Wow. That's interesting.

Amy, we need to close the podcast.

Amy Bowers Cordalis: Oh my goodness.

Margaret Walls: I know. It can go fast.

Amy Bowers Cordalis: Okay.

Margaret Walls: We always end with a regular feature we call Top of the Stack. I'm going to ask you, what's on the top of your stack? What are you reading or listening to, or what would you like to recommend to our listeners?

Amy Bowers Cordalis: Thank you. Well, I have a couple recommendations. If you would like to learn more about this story, Patagonia just released a film called Undammed, which features my work on the Klamath, and it's a fun film. We go fishing a lot. You get to see the dams. If you're interested in learning more and getting a visual of what all these things look like—oh, and there's some explosions of dams, too, in the film; that's a real high point—you can just go to the Patagonia website, and it's there. If you do a quick Google search, the film is on YouTube, totally free of charge, so anyone can check it out.

The other book that I am reading currently—actually no, I finished it, but I just love it—is called Treaty Justice. It is a new book by Charles Wilkinson, who sadly passed away not so long ago. The book is about the people and the grassroots movement behind United States vs. Washington, which was the 1973 landmark case that affirmed that Tribal treaties were still good law, and that, particularly, the Tribes in question up in Washington were entitled to 50 percent of the whole salmon harvest in Washington State. It's really that case and that movement that were the origins of the rise of the modern Tribal governments as we see them today and the beginning point of Indigenous conservation and political rights movements. It's a beautiful, beautiful book. Charles was such a wonderful person and author, and we miss him dearly. I would check out Treaty Justice.

Something to look forward to—I have a book coming out in December. It's called The Water Remembers, and it's a nonfiction book about my family's multigenerational struggle to protect Yurok fishing rights, the river, our culture, our sovereignty, and how that all impacted and influenced Klamath dam removal. I do share some fun stories about some shenanigans and dam removal and blowing up dams. If all of this is in your wheelhouse, I encourage you to—or even if it's not in your wheelhouse—try something new.

Margaret Walls: Exactly.

Amy Bowers Cordalis: Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Margaret Walls: Yeah, thank you. I can recommend that Patagonia movie, too. I watched it. It's fantastic.

Amy, thank you so much for coming on Resources Radio and telling everybody about the Klamath dam removals and the work of Ridges to Riffles and your work. We appreciate it.

Amy Bowers Cordalis: Wok-hlew’ (thank you).

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