The epic task of rewilding a river and restoring its watershed is underway in the Klamath Basin. Now that the four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River have been demolished, billions of seeds are being planted where toxic blue-green algae once floated. As they grow, these native plants stabilize sediment that remains after the reservoirs were drained. As soil builds and nutrients cycle through it, insects arrive, attracting birds. As other fauna and flora find their way to the re-emergent lowlands, the local food chain regains connectivity.

Benefits from restoration projects will take time to become evident, cautioned Barry McCovey, director of the Yurok Tribe’s fisheries department. “From an engineering perspective, when you build a highway or you build a bridge, you do the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and everything’s beautiful and brand new. That’s the best that’s gonna look. Over the years, it’s gonna degrade; it’s just going to get worse and worse. River restoration and dam removal projects are the opposite. When you do the ribbon-cutting ceremony, it’s the worst it’s gonna look cause the heavy equipment just pulled out. It’s muddy, it’s dirty, it doesn’t look like a river yet. But come back in a year. Come back in ten years, come back in twenty years. It just gets better and better and better as the ecosystem fixes itself.”

This work is a large-scale example of what the tribes have been doing for thousands of years, McCovey said. “We consider ourselves fix-the-world people. Our job is to restore balance. We maintained that balance through our ceremonies and through the work we did on the land with fire. Fixing the world now from my perspective includes heavy equipment and rerouting streams and taking out dams and restoring reservoir lakebeds. When you see our fisheries department working hand in hand with our construction corporation on a major restoration project, you see fixing the earth literally in front of you.”

Bringing a keystone species, spring chinook, back to the Upper Basin helps the ecosystem fix itself. On the lower Klamath, Yuroks reintroduced another keystone species, the condor. Tiana Williams, who manages the tribe’s wildlife department, told me a story that conveys an ecological concept.

“In the beginning of time,” she said, “when the Creator was developing how the world would move forward with the world renewal ethos, he went to all the species of the world and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have these ceremonies. I need this prayer. I need this song. Who will help guide them?’ Everybody immediately started jumping up and singing, trying to catch his eye so their song would be chosen. But Condor didn’t step up. He doesn’t sing particularly well. He hisses and grunts. He isn’t exactly pretty. He has a bald head. So he refused to sing. But the Creator looked into his spirit and said, ‘No, I want to hear your song. You have a kind heart. You’ve flown over the whole world. You can fly higher than anybody else. I know you’ve got a song in there.’ Condor comes over and hisses and grunts, but the Creator hears the spirit of that song and sings it back to him. And it is the most beautiful song that has ever been heard or sung.”

Williams explained, “If you have a healthy environment for condors, you have a healthy environment for everybody. Condors like big open prairies. We’re going to reestablish our prairies through selective harvest and through introduction of fire and removal of invasive species. Ungulates like deer and elk thrive in those prairies and in edge zones where you have a lot more biological diversity. Old growth redwood forests that condors nest in are also good for marbled murrelet and Humboldt marten. So we’ve got this vision of what a beautiful and perfect world for condor is. And really, it’s a beautiful and perfect world for everybody. It’s this target for world renewal and restoration.”

Returning salmon to the Upper Basin requires a condor’s eye view. According to Brad Parrish, the task involves “reconnecting the features on the landscape that allow water throughout the basin to function naturally, to clean itself, to store itself, to slowly release itself in the summertime.” Parrish, the Klamath Tribes’ water rights specialist, warned that if “we’re just focused on where the fish are at, we’re not addressing the issues that restoration requires. You have to give the river what it needs. You have to look at the system as a whole.”

Neither the survival of condors reintroduced within the river canyon nor of spring chinook returning to the headwaters can be assured. For condors, lead poisoning is the leading cause of death. They are scavengers, and many carcasses they feed on were felled by lead bullets. Although thirty states, including California and Oregon, regulate the use of lead ammunition, and although they not only poison wildlife but also humans who eat game, toxic bullets are still widely used. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, between ten and twenty million wild animals die every year of lead poisoning. Hunters use them out of ignorance, or refusal to discard old ammunition, or resistance to any limitation on what they consider gun rights. Like corporations that dismiss the environmental damage they cause as ‘externalities,’ some hunters take no responsibility for diminishing wildlife populations.

The reestablishment of spring chinook in the headwaters depends on a number of factors. Some go beyond the scope of watershed restoration: dearth of nutrients that feed salmon in the ocean; lack of precipitation during drought years; and climate change, which heats the waters and exacerbates the effects of drought. That said, increasing the extent and resilience of their habitat gives wild salmon a fighting chance even in the worst of times. Having evolved over millions of years, their DNA is hard-wired for adaptability.

Reconnecting the landscape as Parrish advises is thwarted by property lines. Although many farmers and ranchers in northeastern California and southcentral Oregon love wildlife, and although many employ conservation measures such as restoring wetlands and keeping cattle out of streams, typical land use practices impair water quality and impact water quantity, reducing the odds that wild salmon will thrive.

Karl Wenner is one of the farmers who reestablished wetlands to reduce the pollution of Upper Klamath Lake. With the aid of funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, he took 70 acres of his 400-acre farm out of production by carving dikes and channels through barley fields. Soon, water flowing from a natural spring germinated seeds of marsh plants dropped by birds. Soon his land teemed with wildlife as waterfowl, pond turtles, and native fish found habitat there. “You set the stage and Mother Nature takes over,” said Wenner. “It’s just a magical thing to see.”

In the Klamath Tribes’ research station, technician Charlie Wright spoke about the Klamath Marsh as “a big piece of the puzzle. It’s high up on our watershed. It’s a huge sponge. It would fill the tributaries and all their little creeks through the dry season. The problem is we get to the dry season and there’s no water where there used to be constantly water flowing.” Diversions for agriculture cause this desiccation, she said. Canals dug six feet deep draw water across the marsh and into fields.

Near the research station, several large net-covered ponds protect endangered young c’waam and koptu from birds. Researchers keep them alive, hoping that someday juveniles will reproduce in natural waters. Today, only ancient suckerfish inhabit Klamath Lake. When they die, the species will no longer exist in the wild unless water quality improves. “Algae blooms are so abundant,” said Wright, “because so much fertilizer is dumped into that lake on a regular basis from agriculture. What happens to plants when you pour fertilizer on them? They do extraordinarily, but then that lake gets hot and the plants die and it drops the oxygen in that lake, and the baby fish suffocate.”

The Klamath River flows from Klamath Lake. Accordingly, the lake’s water quality could affect the health of chinook salmon in the headwaters. How will they survive in water that kills suckers? Barry McCovey said he expects salmon to migrate through the lake early in the year before snow melts and planting season begins, when its water is less toxic. “The spring salmon would get into the tributaries, whether it’s the Williamson or the Sprague, find these nice, deep, cold pools, hole up all summer and spawn in the fall. Then their offspring would emigrate from the system in the spring. They can dodge the really poor water quality time that’s in the summer.” Over the long run, he said, “in order for there to be healthy salmon runs, we need koptu and c’waam to be healthy. Before there were dams, anadromous fish from the Pacific Ocean swam up the Klamath River and into Klamath Lake right next to koptu and c’waam and interacted with them. For millions of years all these species evolved together.”

I asked Brad Parrish whether he thought spring chinook will take hold in the headwaters. “Will the fish make it up here? You’re damn right,” he answered. “I’ve seen the will of those fish. All they live for is to go in the ocean, get bigger, and come back and spawn. You just have to give the fish the opportunity to do it, and they will. Are there gonna be things we could make better—water quality in the lake, habitat availability in the Upper Basin? Yeah, sure. But could they make it right now? I know damn well they could.”

The prospect that spring chinook, the largest, strongest salmon, once caught by the thousands in a day for the canning industry, then counted in the hundreds per year in their Salmon River refugia, will thrive once again makes an appealing storyline. Another narrative makes Indians the protagonist. After a history of suffering from genocide, war, resource conflicts, cultural suppression and racism, the tribes rescued an endangered charismatic species. The fact that they prevailed over a corporation owned by billionaire Warren Buffett suggests a compelling David-versus-Goliath drama. Yet productive thought about the future of this region requires more than a good story about the past. It begins with understanding what has happened in terms that apply to humanity and nature alike.

The Klamath Basin is united by water and divided by people. Nonetheless, in recent years, many of its diverse communities came together with a common goal. And they succeeded in ending the extraction of energy from the river into the grid via hydroelectric dams. McCovey explained why that matters. ”You know,” he said, “the energy from the ocean stopped making its way to the Upper Basin, and the energy from the Upper Basin, whether it’s the minerals and the sediments and all the good things that come out of those mountains and all the good things that come out of the wetlands and the lakes and fed the river and helped keep the river healthy, those things all stopped. The energy flow completely stopped.” What dam removal does is allow energy to flow throughout the region again. “Anyone who knows about energy and understands that everything, all this stuff, is connected, knows that the ramifications of that are massive, but not well understood.”

The concept of energy flow is central to the science of ecology. Aldo Leopold was the first to apply this form of knowledge to the fields of land management and wildlife conservation. “Land,” he wrote, “is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption, some is stored in soils, peats, forests, but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.” The connection between humanity and nature flows through this fountain, for humans are part of this energy flow, whether we disrupt it or restore it.

What connects us with nature and with each other more than anything else is food. The word for ‘salmon’ in both Yurok and Karuk languages means ‘food,’ or ‘to eat,’ and loving salmon as food generates other forms of energy: physical work to meet life’s necessities, cultural expression, and circulation of goods. In this region of family farms and ranches, loving beef and potatoes, no less than salmon, sets physical, cultural and economic energies in motion. The Bucket Brigade protest of the farm water cutoff in 2001 polarized two kinds of food, agriculturally produced goods on one hand, and naturally reproducing aquatic species on the other. In alliance with the tribes, however, food producers realized that their disparate communities are connected within a Basin-wide community of lands, waters, and wildlife.

That realization rejects what Leopold called “the fallacious notion that the wild community is one thing, the human community another.” Instead, he remarked, “that land is a community is a basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.” Leopold discovered as a scientist and manager of lands what the tribes have known over millennia, that “conservation becomes possible only when man assumes the role of citizen in a community of which soils and waters, plants and animals are fellow members, each dependent on the others, and each entitled to his place in the sun.”

The future of the Klamath Basin depends on whether ecosystem restoration renews the cultural and economic vitality of the entire region. Following the flow of energy through soils, waters and foods offers a guideline for long-term conservation and resilient growth. How to achieve this is an open question. There has never been a dam removal and watershed conservation project of this magnitude before. Besides, climate change disrupts once predictable natural patterns, affecting every aspect of the food chain. Clearly, collaborative adaptive management based on science and common sense is needed. Little else is certain.

Excerpted from River of Renewal: Myth and History in the Klamath Basin, Second Edition, by Stephen Most, copyright © 2024. Used with permission of Oregon State University Press.