A Review of Fish Passage Provisions in the License Application for the Hells Canyon Complex

Energy Storage in the 21st Century

Felt Dam Draft License Application Comment

“The Grand Salmon” team welcomed by Nez Perce in Lewiston, where the Snake River ‘is dead.’

The Grand Salmon team welcomed to shore by Nez Perce people and community members in Lewiston, ID. Photo credit: Megan Mack The Grand Salmon Source to Sea team is not only paddling 1,000 miles in solidarity to raise awareness about dwindling salmon populations in the Snake River Basin and a moratorium on the Stibnite mine […]

TAKE ACTION: Public comment period open for Murray / Inslee draft report

Ice Harbor dam on the Lower Snake River. Photo credit: Matt Stoecker Salmon recovery efforts in the Northwest received high profile, nationwide attention last week as Senator Patty Murray and the Governor Jay Inslee of Washington released their Lower Snake River Dams: Benefit Replacement Draft Report. The report finds that replacing the four Lower Snake […]

Spirit of the Waters Totem Journey tours the Pacific Northwest

The Orca totem is touring throughout the Northwest. Photo by Kurt Russo FORT HALL, IDAHO – A traveling Totem Pole is circulating around various stops in the Pacific Northwest this May through an Indigenous led effort to raise awareness for the movement to remove the Snake River dams and restore the salmon runs to health. […]

Reframing Water Use in an Endless Drought Era

A dry landscape in the foothills of smoky Stanley, Idaho in September. © Tess McEnroe for IRU Drought, by its very definition, is an anomaly. A promise that this too shall pass. However, we must accept that this aridity is our new water era. We can no longer claim that we are in a prolonged […]

The Klamath & the Snake River: Dam Removal by Example

The push to remove four dams on the Klamath River in northern California cleared another hurdle in early March when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released a report that outlined the benefits dam removal would have for the river’s salmon. The federal plan, known as a draft EIS, assessed the environmental effects of a […]

Columbia Basin Initiative- One Year Later

This February marks the one-year anniversary of Congressman Mike Simpson’s Columbia Basin Initiative, a framework for salmon recovery, investment in infrastructure, and clean energy development across the Northwest. The CBI represents a significant shift in regional discourse surrounding Lower Snake River Dam (LSRD) breaching. Tribal communities, riverside towns, and people that care about and rely […]

The Hydropower Myth, Part II; Is Hydropower as ‘Green’ as Promised?

Enormous releases of greenhouse gas emissions, species decline and extinction, and habitat fragmentation. While you’d be right if you assumed these were characteristics of fossil-fuel plants that have had devastating impacts on our planet, you might be surprised that these are also representative of the Hydrosystem. Long touted as clean, greenhouse-free power, new science has […]

Myth of the Hydrosystem: the safety of dams

In November of 2017, with the Hebgen Dam’s final phase of its $40 million upgrade and rehabilitation nearly completed, it now had the latest in safety and technological improvements. Despite being a state of the art facility, less than four years since those upgrades were completed, the Hebgen Dam malfunctioned in November of this year, […]

2021 Salmon Run Recap: Warm Water Spelled Trouble for Migrating Fish

In 2021, Idaho’s salmon and steelhead returns continued to follow the declining population trends of the last few years, resulting in another year of very low abundance. 

What happens to fish populations when dams are removed?

In 2014, the final pieces of two dams on the Elwha River in Washington were removed. The famous river restoration and fish recovery story was decades in the making and culminated in what is now a free-flowing Elwha from its source high in Olympic National Park to the sea. The river became a living laboratory […]