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Disputes Meira's Claims by Chris Norden Lewiston Tribune, January 27, 2019

I hope people who attended or read about Kirstin Meira's Lewiston presentation about salmon and dams have enough critical skepticism to consider that the information she presented might either be cherry-picked or flat-out wrong, given her role as lobbyist for a small but politically influential set of heavily taxpayer-subsidized commercial barging interests.

Having monitored this issue pretty closely for about a quarter of a century, I'm fully convinced the Columbia-Snake river ecosystem is in crisis, and that a major contributing factor are the four lower Snake River dams. They should be breached, bypassed or removed altogether, in either case allowing migratory fish runs and their inland habitat an opportunity to recover and return to a more natural condition.

In particular, slower-moving, warmer river conditions as well as impeded upstream and downstream passage result in unsustainable fish mortality, which will eventually lead to the extinction of these culturally and economically invaluable and irreplaceable populations.

It would be tragic folly for the residents of this region to sacrifice our own natural and cultural heritage in exchange for an economic benefit that is dubious at best, unequally enjoyed and clearly not justifiable in terms of any cost-benefit reckoning I can think of.

We shovel untold dollars -- literally billions -- into failed efforts to keep salmon and steelhead from going extinct, despite the fact that ag and other industrial shipping can be done in lots of other ways, including some that would improve the region's transportation infrastructure at the same time.

Related Pages:
River Advocate: Removing Dams Won't Help Orcas, Environment, Economy by Matthew Weaver, Capital Press, 1/18/19
Orca Survival May Be Impossible without Lower Snake River Dam Removal, Scientists Say by Lynda Mapes, Seattle Times, 10/15/18