<
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240903-removing-the-klamath-river-dams-to-restore-the-river-what-happens-next>
'
The Klamath River is free of four huge dams for the first time in
generations. But for the Yurok tribe, the river's restoration is only just
beginning – starting with 18 billion seeds.
Brook Thompson has been fishing on the Klamath River ever since she could stand
up in a boat. To Thompson and her family, who are part of the Karuk and Yurok
tribes from northern California, fishing is second nature. "The river was our
grocery store," the 28-year-old explains. That was until a catastrophic fish
die off happened in 2002.
"It changed everything," Thompson remembers. "We'd always had plenty of food up
until then. As a seven-year-old, the salmon were almost as big as me, and I saw
thousands of their bodies piled up on the shoreline, I smelled their rotting
flesh. It was apocalyptic."
The Yurok Reservation sits on the final 44 miles (71km) of the Klamath River
before it meets the Pacific Ocean – a remote strip of land where there is one
convenience store attached to the local gas station. Pre-contact, their
territory spanned more than one million acres (400,000 hectares). The tribe
relies on the river and the land for sustenance. And in the oral history of the
Yurok tribe, which extends back thousands of years, there was no record of
anything like this ever happening before.
"Since time immemorial, nothing like this had ever happened to us. A whole
generation of salmon died on that one day," says Thompson. Low water flow from
the Iron Gate Dam, one of four on the lower Klamath River, was found to be a
"substantial causative factor", a report from the Yurok Tribal Fisheries
Program found.'
See also
As removal of dams frees Klamath River, California tribes see hope of
saving salmon:
<
https://web.archive.org/web/20240905171109/https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-08-28/klamath-river-dam-removal-completed>
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/60-ready/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
