32nd of a Series

“[The removal of the Klamath River dams] is historic and life changing. And it means that the Yurok people have a future. It means the river has a future; the salmon have a future.”

- Amy Cordalis

“If you build it, he will come,” the disembodied voice tells Joe Kinsella in an Iowa cornfield in “Field of Dreams.” What river restoration people across the country are increasingly discovering is that if you unbuild a dam, the fish will come back – fish that have been unable to return to their spawning grounds for generations.

The latest and most spectacular example is the Klamath River in the Pacific Northwest, where the last of four dams will soon be removed, and the river will flow free for the first time in more than a century. It is the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.

On the other side of the country, dam removal has been going on for over 25 years in the state of Maine, and its “rivers are experiencing an incredible comeback.”

The first to go was the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River on July 1, 1999. According to a timeline from the Natural Resources Council of Maine, the river was first dammed in 1837, just “below the head of tide” in Augusta – even though residents had already spent three years protesting against the proposed dam’s impact on the state’s fisheries. In the 1990s NRCM assembled a diverse and unlikely coalition of environmental groups, Indigenous tribes, state and federal agencies, and even energy producers to form the Penobscot River Restoration Trust, which, after long and difficult negotiations, hammered out an agreement to remove the 162-year-old dam.

No one really knew if, when, and in what numbers fish would return to spawn. They quickly found out – almost immediately fish were gathering at the river’s mouth. A decade later, “the river has totally come alive,” NRCM reported, “the water quality . . . has improved,  millions of fish are returning to long-lost spawning habitat, Osprey and eagles soar along the river, and Maine people and visitors paddle on what feels like a wilderness river.”

Before the removals, Atlantic salmon were on the brink of extinction, while herring swimming upstream to spawn numbered in the hundreds, sometimes the thousands. Last spring their number exceeded six million.

I can’t shake this image of fish – from eels to salmon – swimming around the Atlantic, trying desperately to find their way home. Millions die, but not all, and somehow, when a dam is removed, they know to come back. I‘m not the only one in awe: “I’ve already seen a river come back before my own eyes,” said Laura Rose Day, who led the project at NRCM and is now director of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust. “Just a day or two after the Edwards Dam came out, we had sturgeon swimming up the Kennebec River. The fish know what to do.”

The return of the fish resurrected the river’s ecosystem. “The lower Kennebec River is now teeming with life,” reports American Rivers, “including the largest restored river herring run in the U.S., the largest natural aggregation of bald eagles ever recorded in the East, leaping sturgeon and thousands of American shad in downtown Waterville.”

The impact is economic as well as environmental and esthetic, as groups ranging from the Penobscot nation to Maine’s lobstermen depend on the Kennebec’s fish for their livelihood.

Amid all the debates over the importance of technology and the power of artificial intelligence, I’m reminded by stories such as these that it is only life that is miraculous.