The largest dam removal project in U.S. history is now underway along the California-Oregon border, where four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River are coming down — and where Native American tribes are leading one of the most ambitious ecological restoration efforts ever attempted.
At a glance
- Klamath River restoration: Four dams built starting in 1918 are being demolished, and when work is complete, more than 400 miles of river will reopen to threatened salmon and other wildlife.
- Native seed collection: For five years before demolition began, tribal members gathered seeds by hand from native plant species. Nearly 17 billion seeds are planned for planting along the newly freed riverbanks over the coming decade.
- Dam removal cost: The $500 million project is funded by taxpayers and PacifiCorp ratepayers, with the Klamath River Renewal Corporation — a dedicated nonprofit — overseeing the work.
A century of damage, a decade to restore
Power company PacifiCorp built the four Klamath River dams starting in 1918 to generate electricity. Over the following century, the structures blocked the natural flow of the river and disrupted the lifecycle of salmon — fish that spend most of their lives in the Pacific Ocean before returning to mountain streams to spawn.
The consequences were severe. In 2002, a combination of low water and warm temperatures triggered a bacterial outbreak that killed more than 34,000 fish, mostly Chinook salmon. The disaster galvanized decades of advocacy from tribal nations and environmental groups, culminating in federal regulators approving a removal plan in 2022 C.E.
Crews have already removed Copco No. 2, the smallest of the four dams. The remaining three are expected to come down after their reservoirs drain in 2024 C.E. The project will empty three reservoirs covering about 3.5 square miles near the state border — exposing soil to sunlight for the first time in over a century.
What tribes are doing with 17 billion seeds
Removing concrete is only the beginning. The harder work is what comes next.
Over five years before demolition started, members of the Karuk, Yurok, and other tribal nations gathered seeds by hand from native plants along the Klamath basin. Those seeds — from more than 98 species including woolly sunflower, Idaho fescue, and Blue bunch wheat grass — have been sent to nurseries and will be sown across the newly exposed riverbanks as water levels fall.
Helicopters will bring in hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs, including root wads placed in the water to create fish habitat. Each species serves a specific role. Lupine grows fast and prepares the soil. Oak trees mature slowly and eventually shade younger plants beneath them. The Yurok Tribe hired its own restoration botanist to oversee the effort.
“It’s a wonderful marriage of tribal traditional ecological knowledge and western science,” said Mark Bransom, CEO of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation.
The urgency is deliberate. Without aggressive planting, invasive species like yellow starthistle could colonize the bare soil before native plants take hold. “Nature didn’t take its course when dams got put in,” said Dave Meurer, director of community affairs for Resource Environmental Solutions, the company leading restoration. “Our goal is to give nature a head start.”
Why this matters to the Karuk and Yurok peoples
For the tribal nations of the Klamath basin, salmon are not simply wildlife. They are a foundation of culture, ceremony, and survival.
Kenneth Brink, vice chairman of the Karuk Tribe, put it plainly: “The river is our church, the salmon is our cross. That’s how it relates to the people. So it’s very sacred to us.”
Multiple times a year, Brink and other tribal members participate in ceremonial salmon fishing using handheld nets. In many recent years, there have been no fish to catch. The dams disrupted runs that once defined the rhythm of life for communities along the river.
“When the river gets to flow freely again, the people can also begin to worship freely again,” Brink said.
The scale of tribal involvement in this project goes beyond symbolism. Tribal members were hired to collect seeds. Tribal ecological knowledge shaped planting plans. The nations have been partners in the process from the start — not consulted after the fact, but embedded in every phase.
A movement’s greatest test
The Klamath removal fits into a broader national trend. More than 2,000 dams have been removed across the U.S. as of early 2023 C.E., the majority within the last 25 years, according to the advocacy group American Rivers. The 65 dams removed in the U.S. in 2022 C.E. combined to reconnect 430 miles of river — roughly the same as this single Klamath project alone.
The previous record holder was Washington state’s Elwha River, where two dams built in the early 1900s came down after Congress approved their removal in 1992 C.E. Workers finished the job in 2014 C.E., opening about 70 miles of salmon habitat. Within months of removal, salmon were recolonizing stretches of river they had not accessed in over a century. The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe opened a limited subsistence coho fishery — its first since the dams fell.
Biologists caution that it will take at least a generation for the Klamath to fully recover. The restoration planting alone will be monitored and managed for a decade. Opposition has not disappeared: the Siskiyou County Water Users Association filed a federal lawsuit to stop the demolition, and some residents who built homes along the reservoirs object to losing what became familiar lakefront land. That tension is real, and it has no easy resolution.
But the ecological logic is hard to dispute. The U.S. Department of the Interior backed the plan, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is monitoring recovery of threatened Chinook and coho salmon, as well as Pacific lamprey, which tribes also regard as culturally vital.
For the Karuk, Yurok, and the other nations of the Klamath basin, the dams going down is not the end of a fight. It is the start of something longer and, in some ways, more demanding — growing a river back to life, one seed at a time.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Spectrum News 1
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights win at COP30 protects 160 million hectares
- Uganda reintroduces rhinos to the wild in Kidepo
- The Good News for Humankind archive on river restoration
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