[HN Gopher] Salmon return to lay eggs in historic habitat after ...
___________________________________________________________________
Salmon return to lay eggs in historic habitat after Klamath River
dam removal
Author : gmays
Score : 383 points
Date : 2024-11-22 13:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.opb.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.opb.org)
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| I thought that project already had salmon spillway weirs.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Fish ladders and spillway weirs are fish killers that impose a
| decimation on the salmon population at each elevation change.
| Dams destroy the estuary and natural wetland environments that
| salmon need to reproduce. Dams reduce water flow and silt over
| gravel beds. Dam impoundments cause stream and river
| temperatures to rise, suffocating fish. Dam removal is not just
| obstacle removal, it is habitat restoration and rehabilitation.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Much of what you said is an exaggeration, for where a habitat
| disappears with a dam, different habitats appear.
|
| But regardless, the point is that salmon were still breeding
| there. The "return" is an unwarranted claim, for they never
| stopped coming and spawning.
| ruined wrote:
| >salmon were still breeding there. The "return" is an
| unwarranted claim, for they never stopped coming and
| spawning.
|
| let's read
|
| "Less than a month after four towering dams on the Klamath
| River were demolished, hundreds of salmon made it into
| waters they have been cut off from for decades"
|
| what does that mean
|
| "salmon are once more returning to spawn in cool creeks
| that have been cut off to them for generations."
|
| "salmon, which were cut off from their historic habitat"
|
| "salmon that have quickly made it into previously
| inaccessible tributaries"
| dylan604 wrote:
| so...you're saying that the salmon are able to access
| places they haven't been able to access? that's like
| you're trying to tell us that the damn dam was what was
| preventing it. it's like the dam being removed was the
| reason for these salmon to gain access to the spots. i'm
| still confused. /s
| soco wrote:
| Different habitats of algae and mud, so I'll agree of
| course better than nothing while also very far from the
| previous quality.
| SalmonSnarker wrote:
| Salmon were _not_ still breeding there, this is the first
| return in over 100 years.
|
| October of this year:
|
| > a fall-run Chinook salmon was identified by ODFW's fish
| biologists in a tributary to the Klamath River above the
| former J.C. Boyle Dam, becoming the first anadromous fish
| to return to the Klamath Basin in Oregon since 1912 when
| the first of four hydroelectric dams was constructed,
| blocking migration.
|
| https://www.dfw.state.or.us/news/2024/10_Oct/101724.asp
| duxup wrote:
| I feel like that's just a block of true-ish text but doesn't
| address the actual comment.
|
| Nothing you said talked about salmon spillway weirs.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Not dams impose climate change that destroys all things.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| This isn't exactly true. Fish ladders and weirs shouldn't be
| grouped together like this. Many hatcheries have a weir
| salmon cannot cross and a ladder as the alternative path the
| fish take by feeling the flow of water across the ladder and
| going upstream. The ladders lead to hatcheries where the fish
| reproduce. And new tiny fish are efficiently raised in
| protected tanks and later released to go back downstream. In
| other words, the weir and ladder are a combination to make
| the hatchery work, and not substitutes for each other. Also
| ladders can work very well. There are many badly designed
| ones but the good ones basically let every fish move
| upstream.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Yeah the dams also tend to regulate flows in the river system
| which doesn't allow natural cycles of peaks and valleys to
| help regulate parasites.
| astura wrote:
| This article is better at explaining environmental issues the
| dam caused
|
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240903-removing-the-kla...
| timdiggerm wrote:
| They don't work all that well compared to an open river.
| netcraft wrote:
| >Less than a month after four towering dams on the Klamath River
| were demolished, hundreds of salmon made it into waters they have
| been cut off from for decades to spawn in cool creeks
|
| Do we understand the mechanisms of this "genetic memory" (my
| words, no idea if its accurate or if there is a better word for
| it)? Butterflies knowing where to fly even though it was their
| grandparents that last did it - eels traveling thousands of miles
| to breed in a place theyve never seen - countless bird migrations
| - even something as simple as how it takes a human baby 12-18
| months to walk but many animals walk as soon as they are born. I
| would love to understand better how this knowledge is inherited
| kranner wrote:
| There could be an environmental feature they prefer in that
| spot.
|
| Edit: the article mentions lower concentration of harmful algae
| and a cooler temperature.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| But then how are they aware of _those_ conditions Also, the
| preference usually is more on the side of where they 're born
| vs optimal proper placement
| chmod775 wrote:
| Nice water flows downstream, terminates in the ocean. They
| simply follow it back upstream.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I'm with you on this. Found some tasty water? Swim
| towards it. It gets tastier the further we go? Keep
| going.
| monknomo wrote:
| Yeah, no need to make this complicated.
| rightbyte wrote:
| So how do they find the river outlet into the ocean?
| There surely is some bird compass thing involved. I am
| only half joking when I write that Venus guides them.
|
| That nature works at all is astonishing.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| Word gets around? Animals probably have way better
| communication than we think. One crab says to a friendly
| eel "hey dont tell those damn Salmon but this estuary is
| good again" and before you know it, everyone's favourite
| restaurant is booked out till March.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I used to go to this estuary until it became too crowded.
| jaggederest wrote:
| It's all chemoception, the same as with single cell
| organisms. They swim towards a saline gradient ( which
| they can taste, for sure ) and follow it up into fresher
| and fresher water.
| Angostura wrote:
| Thanks, I was bang my head on this one, until you
| suggested a nice simple solution
| astura wrote:
| > how it takes a human baby 12-18 months to walk but many
| animals walk as soon as they are born.
|
| This is because humans are born with, comparably, extremely
| immature brains. The animals that can walk after birth are born
| with more mature brain development than humans are born with,
| so they are capable of walking.
|
| https://www.livescience.com/9760-study-reveals-infants-walk....
| netcraft wrote:
| sure - but how did a horse foal learn how to walk within an
| hour of their legs being in contact with the ground? Or even
| for human babies, how are they hard wired to search for milk
| or even breathe?
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Humans and horses don't share the same evolutionary
| pressures. A foal gets eaten if it can't walk right away,
| we don't. Evidently our super brains are worth all the
| hassle. Unsatisfactory answer, maybe.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>or even breathe
|
| The same way your heart "knows" how to beat - it's a lower
| level function that happens without your conciousness.
| That's why people who are brain dead still live and breathe
| and swallow and digest and their hearts livers and kidneys
| still do their job.
|
| >>how are they hard wired to search for milk
|
| The ones who didn't died, to put it bluntly. Obviously not
| human babies, this evolutionary step happened long long
| time before the earliest hominids.
| netcraft wrote:
| totally - but to be clear the question I have is more
| like "where in the body is this knowledge encoded (for
| lack of a better term)"
|
| Do you have neurons in your brain that are pre-wired for
| these things? Is that encoded in your DNA? Like
| physically how is it inherited and the selective
| pressures applied?
| zamfi wrote:
| Yes, yes, and you got it. Largely it's DNA that controls
| development of neurons/muscles/etc. that mediate nursing,
| walking, and so on.
|
| On selective pressures: human babies that aren't born
| with the ability to nurse, or foals born without the
| ability to walk--because their in-utero development
| didn't allow it--historically don't survive, and thus
| don't reproduce.
| detourdog wrote:
| I think it's a chemical structure reacting to an
| energetic stimulus.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _same way your heart "knows" how to beat - it's a lower
| level function that happens without your conciousness_
|
| Heart cells in a Petri dish will happily beat away.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That isn't an explanation of _how_ it works.
|
| This is kinda like explaining how a car works with "you
| fire and replace engineers until it moves".
| evilduck wrote:
| It's not completely brain development, look up the stepping
| reflex in human babies. Humans are just as neurally pre-wired
| to walk as foals are on day one but we're also born long
| before we're anywhere near strong enough to do it, it takes
| at least another 6 months of physical growth and
| strengthening out of the womb before babies even try.
| conradev wrote:
| The book Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead covers birds' magnetic
| sense in Chapter 6. Research has demonstrated that seabirds
| have a magnetic map and compass that they use to navigate home,
| but it doesn't discuss how this knowledge is inherited.
|
| I believe Salmon use a similar mechanism, but it might be
| supplemented with chemical signatures. For Salmon, it's
| possible that they genetically inherit the capability but learn
| the location at birth.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Salmon do use magnetic senses to navigate the oceans as well,
| but it is an acute sense of smell (among other things) that
| allows (most of) them to return to the headwaters of their
| birth.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| None of those salmon were born there because the Damn was
| in the way
| jimnotgym wrote:
| They were born in the lower part of the river, below the
| dam. They just followed it up a bit!
| Aurornis wrote:
| > seabirds have a magnetic map and compass that they use to
| navigate home, but it doesn't discuss how this knowledge is
| inherited.
|
| It's not something that was decided by one ancestor and then
| inherited by everyone else.
|
| It was something that certain birds had a tendency to prefer.
| Those birds thrived and reproduced at a higher rate, while
| birds without that preference presumably found less suitable
| homes.
|
| It's just natural selection and normal genetic variance. Some
| offspring every year will be born with slightly difference
| preferences due to the influence of various genetic
| differences. Some of those differences will be more
| beneficial for finding a good "home", others less so.
|
| There was a recent report of a very confused penguin showing
| up on a beach far from their normal habitat. Apparently this
| happens every once in a while. Those cases did not win the
| genetic lottery (though hopefully it made it back to a more
| suitable climate)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| For animals like seabirds, a big part of the location could
| be non-genetic, as birds have different home roosts.
|
| I would add that there can be many local maxima, so it isnt
| always about finding less suitable homes. Birds of the same
| species can have different homes.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Do we understand the mechanisms of this "genetic memory"
|
| I don't think there is particular evidence for "genetic" memory
| here. The salmon were already further down river, they just
| kept swimming upstream. While most salmon do return to the
| place of their birth, a small percentage always stray, which is
| how salmon are able to colonize new habitats and survive things
| like ice ages.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Exactly that. They also need the right kind of gravel to
| spawn in. The kind you find in mountain streams.
|
| Glad they are doing well.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >While most salmon do return to the place of their birth
|
| I wonder to what degree that is even true. Like sure they
| probably return to the same rivers, but how far up the river
| they swim is likely unrelated to where they were actually
| born. If you extend that river further or introduce side
| streams that didn't exist when they were born, they're
| probably just as likely to end up in one of those places.
| tokai wrote:
| Looking at salmon research literature I found a study[0] with
| the following conclusion:
|
| _This study provides convincing empirical support for fine-
| scale local selection against dispersal in a large Atlantic
| salmon meta-population, signifying that local individuals have
| a marked home ground advantage in reproductive fitness. These
| results emphasize the notion that migration and dispersal may
| not be beneficial in all contexts and highlight the potential
| for selection against dispersal and for local adaptation to
| drive population divergence across fine spatial scales._
|
| Seems like it might simply be that they go where they adapted
| to thrive.
|
| [0] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aav1112
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That doesn't really explain how they know to find this place,
| decades after the last time any member of their species
| visited it. It explains _why_ evolution selected for this
| behavior, but the more interesting part is _how_ it happens
| in an individual salmon.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Clearly, the story that salmon go back to spawn and their
| birth pool is not 100% true
| RaftPeople wrote:
| This is total and complete speculation, but possibly some
| sort of genetic or epigenetic driven system favoring some
| sort of chemical gradient/fingerprint unique to each river,
| maybe?
| inciampati wrote:
| In order to survive, you wouldn't want to be wiped out if
| your home stream vanished. You'd want at least the likely
| chance of going to another stream to spawn and breed.
| Probably the salmon just swim upriver when they want to
| spawn. And it happened to be that now the Klamath is open.
|
| Yeah, there's clearly tendencies for the fish to return to
| where they were born. I'm sure that's driven by all kinds
| of complex genetic memories and probably more importantly
| selective advantage due to adaptation to the specific
| characteristics of the given stream, but genetic memories
| for a specific stream seems a little bit unlikely.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >That doesn't really explain how they know to find this
| place, decades after the last time any member of their
| species visited it.
|
| Because that's not what happened. These fish managed to get
| there because it was a good place for them to go, not
| because they were 'returning' to a place they had been
| before. The 'return' in the title is more about the fact
| that they are coming back to fill a niche in an area fish
| were blocked from, not that these specific fish were
| returning to a place they had been before. It almost seems
| like they were intentionally muddying the waters with the
| language used.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| They don't. They knew how to find the river already, they
| just went further up the river now the dam had gone. This
| is no great feat of navigation, to follow the river until
| you find nice gravel to spawn in.
| jewayne wrote:
| > _a large Atlantic salmon meta-population_
|
| I don't think this finding is necessarily relevant here,
| because Atlantic salmon are totally different. Pacific salmon
| always die right after spawning. Atlantic salmon return to
| the ocean after spawning, and will often spawn multiple
| times.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| * a proportion of Atlantic salmon return to the sea after
| spawning, mostly females. Most still die
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Human babies physically cannot walk. It's not merely a
| knowledge check.
|
| Pretrained brain modules aren't the most surprising thing.
| Humans have plenty of pre trained behaviors, some of which kick
| in a while after birth.
| DFHippie wrote:
| > Human babies physically cannot walk. It's not merely a
| knowledge check.
|
| They physically cannot walk, but they also don't know how to.
| We know this because they need to practice and acquire skill.
| If they are deprived of opportunity to learn but their body
| continues to mature, their mature body does not give them the
| mature skill.
| Retric wrote:
| Practice itself is an instinctual behavior.
|
| Evolution isn't limited to direct methods, as long as it
| works that's enough.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| It may be that humans practice things, but they're still
| mostly pretrained capabilities that activate. Most of
| walking and balance is subconscious and not "learned" via
| experience. We have dedicated neural hardware for this.
|
| Language processing is another example. There's dedicated
| neural hardware designed for this specific task.
| mekoka wrote:
| Are you saying that a human left to their own devices would
| not eventually walk? That walking erect is mimicry?
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I think they're saying a human that was not able to
| practice walking would not be able to walk even if their
| muscles were fine; like an inverted Neo waking up from
| the matrix.
|
| It's hard to imagine it being possible to test but I
| think they're wrong.
| mekoka wrote:
| That's why I'm asking to clarify what they meant. Because
| from observing how quickly other animals (including other
| apes) acquire motor skills from birth, I don't see why we
| should attribute walking to a practiced skill for human
| infants, rather than a physical sturdying of their body
| to sustain the activity.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I never crawled. My parents were worried, they went to
| doctors who assured them that I was mostly alright, and then
| one day, I got up and started walking.
|
| I saw the exact same behavior with my ex-gf's sister's son,
| who we took in after he was in foster care from birth. The
| child had clearly not been engaged with properly... the back
| of his head was bald because he was always on his back in a
| cramped bassinette and at 11 months he hadn't even learned to
| turn over. Within 3 months of being with us, he was walking.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| I know it's going to sound like a bunch of hooey, but
| information really is the most intrinsic element of all aspects
| of this universe, especially when it comes to life. The life
| force is a thing that is interrelated with our physical bodies,
| but is not the physical body. It's just like the zen concept of
| "Not 2, not 1". Our minds have the same relationship with our
| brains. They're not separate, they're not the same; they're
| interrelated.
|
| That we can't "see" the other side of the connection with our
| science is due to our science being built with our physical
| world's constituents (matter & energy), thus those other
| dimensions are immeasurable with our science's tools. Rupert
| Sheldrake speaks of this when he says that the genetic code's
| protein construction genes do not and can not account for the
| resulting organism's shape. That coordinated construction
| requires a separate guiding force. That interrelationship is
| similar to the "memory" that creatures such as salmon have,
| which is intrinsic to their entire being, not just their
| physical body, which is only half of our being's totality.
| abid786 wrote:
| This is a bunch of pseudoscience that isn't proven by
| anything at all and isn't peer reviewed either
| MrMcCall wrote:
| And your proof that it's wrong is ... ?
|
| That would make your counterargument a pseudo-
| counterargument, no?
|
| It's just reaching into one's feelings/nether-regions and
| blabbering out some words.
|
| You don't even have a sensible counter-theory, right?
| calfuris wrote:
| The vast majority of possible explanations for anything
| are wrong, so "correct unless disproven" is not a
| sensible default. Your evidence that it's _right_ is ...
| ?
| MrMcCall wrote:
| I can't provide what is, by definition, subjective proof.
| You must seek and find it yourself, in accordance with
| our shared universe, which has the same interface with
| you as it does with me. You could not look at me and
| comprehend the truth of what my life's choices have
| wrought upon my being, the happiness my family
| experiences, even within our poverty. No, you surely can
| easily deny that as well, and it is your free will's
| ability to do just that.
|
| But it is also within your potential to treat me better
| than Eugene Parker's or Boltzman's contemporaries treated
| them, and instead keep an open mind and open heart and
| follow the path laid in front of us all that allows us to
| cure ourselves of our destructive selfishness and begin a
| new path forward.
|
| If you look through my other comments you can find a more
| detailed description of the key that unlocks the
| necessary doors, and with them our latent abilities,
| which include knowing instead of just thinking.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Rupert Sheldrake speaks of this when he says that the
| genetic code's protein construction genes do not and can not
| account for the resulting organism's shape.
|
| > That interrelationship is similar to the "memory" that
| creatures such as salmon have, which is intrinsic to their
| entire being, not just their physical body, which is only
| half of our being's totality.
|
| This is all pseudoscience and borderline religious thinking.
| Rupert Sheldrake and others pushing this line of thinking are
| not grounded in reality or science.
|
| I'm surprised this is the most upvoted sub comment at the
| time I'm responding. Is pseudoscience like this really
| becoming so pervasive that comments like this pass as good
| information?
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Well, when your science explains where the 5/6ths of the
| missing matter in the universe is, or where the "dark
| energy" is, I'm all ears.
|
| Also, you can try to explain how individual proteins
| arrange themselves into bilaterally symmetrical, organ-
| infused organisms of astounding complexity, using only
| protein recipes.
|
| I know you can't explain it, but that doesn't mean you
| won't try.
|
| There is the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. For
| many, entire branches of the unknown are unknowable because
| they refuse to expand their criteria for how they evaluate
| the facts. Sherlock Holmes' father had a quote to the
| effect about once you have eliminated the possible, all
| that's left is the impossible (bad paraphrase, I know).
| Aloisius wrote:
| That's beyond bad paraphrasing - that's the polar
| opposite of the original.
|
| When you have eliminated the _impossible_ , whatever
| remains, however _improbable_ , must be the truth.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Thanks for that. I stand corrected.
|
| But my comment was geared towards those who believe that
| what I am suggesting is impossible, so to them, the only
| possibilities left are what they consider impossible.
|
| My favorite quote from Holmes is the slightly modified
| one in Jeremy Brett's version of "The Naval Treaty":
|
| "What a lovely thing a rose is. There is nothing in which
| deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be buit
| up as an exact science by the reason. The highest
| assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to
| rest in the flowers. It is only goodness which gives
| excellence, and so I say again, we have much to hope from
| the flowers."
|
| [The entire high-def Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes tv show
| series can be found on YouTube.]
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Also, you can try to explain how individual proteins
| arrange themselves into bilaterally symmetrical, organ-
| infused organisms of astounding complexity, using only
| protein recipes.
|
| The problem is that you're conflating "I don't understand
| it" with "it must be magic"
|
| A hallmark of charlatans and pseudoscience pushers has
| been to find something they can claim is the boundary of
| scientific knowledge (often incorrectly) and then assert
| that everything past that line therefore is magic.
|
| It's a tale as old as time. Yet every time we make new
| discoveries they just move the line a little further and
| claim the magic must be over there now.
|
| Another classic move is to make extraordinary assertions
| (magical hidden forces) but then when anyone objects they
| try to push the burden of proving the opposite on to the
| other person. That's something you're doing throughout
| this thread perhaps with realizing how irrational it all
| is.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Whether or not this is "true," it's not explanatory.
|
| Someone asked how a thing works, and the answer above is
| essentially just restating that it does in fact work, for
| some ineffable, immeasurable reason.
|
| So while interesting to think about, it's not a useful
| response to the question.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| We understood that Mercury's orbit was wrong per Newton's
| laws long before Einstein came along to explain to us why.
|
| Whether or not something is true is _always_ the beginning
| of a scientific exploration.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Of course, but if we don't know how something works, it's
| ok to just say "we don't know yet."
|
| There may in fact be physical, measurable mechanisms that
| govern these types of animal behavior. Just like there
| was a physical, measurable explanation for Mercury's
| orbit.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Yes, but it was Einstein's imagination that provided the
| theoretical framework that allowed the longstanding
| physical measurement to line up. If his imagination was
| limited by Newton's laws, he would have never come up
| with GR. If he had said that mass causes time to vary, he
| would have been laughed out of the room, with much ad
| hominem shouting.
|
| What I'm saying here is that we need to push beyond our
| current scientific paradigms to find out how these
| inexplicable corner cases actually work. As well, I do
| realize that the depth of exploration required will be
| further than most people are willing to plumb, which is
| demonstrated by the in-their-feelings reactions to my
| ideas.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| And now dark matter is throwing a wrench in Einstein's
| stuff. Like Newton's laws, Einstein's stuff gets is
| mostly right (impressively so, even!) but breaks inside
| black holes and doesn't seem to exactly line up with what
| we observe about what keeps galaxies in tact.
|
| And I'm sure whatever we discover that "solves" for dark
| matter will eventually start showing cracks as well,
| prompting another deep inquiry into the nature of our
| universe.
|
| Good times.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| 5/6ths of the universe's matter is missing, or
| thereabouts. That fact aligns with there being six
| vibrationally distinct dimensions in our 3-space (our
| physical dimension being just one of them, our soul
| inhabiting its counter-dimension, all things in our
| universe having been created in pairs). The matter/energy
| from each dimension are distinct, so we can't detect the
| others using instruments made with ours, yet -- somehow,
| I don't know how -- the mass combines to contribute to
| the gravitational inertia that keeps the galaxies from
| flying apart.
|
| That said, when we slam particles together at high enough
| energies, we do see crossover (briefly) in the form of
| anti-particles. I couldn't begin to explain the
| mechanisms behind this, but the structure can be known to
| seekers of compassionate existence. This is also a hint
| to the solution to the question of why, after the Big
| Bang, we don't have an anti-matter left; the answer is
| that it's where it is, but that we can't detect it with
| our current tech (or maybe any tech, for all I know).
|
| The universe was made to be known by we human beings, we
| being the information processors designed to work in
| harmony with this information-theoretic universe, which
| is fully queryable by a suitable trained mystic.
|
| A Sufi Murshid (teacher) lived his entire life in a
| single town that consisted of a single pair of roads that
| met in the center of town. Late in his life, he stated
| that, he "knew the stars of the Milky Way better than he
| knew his town". (A love-consumed mystic remains conscious
| as our souls leave our bodies when we sleep. What is
| called astral travel is not limited by our physical
| body's speed laws; it is bounded only by the "speed of
| thought".)
|
| Sufi stories are glimpses of corner cases meant to spur
| us to push past our "known" boundaries. We need to get
| this world at peace before we can explore our advanced
| abilities. As Louis Armstrong said, "If lots more of us
| loved each other, man, this world would be a gasser!"
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _our soul_
|
| Is there any empirical test for such things?
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| There may well never be. Not everything about our
| existence is knowable. An uncomfortable fact, indeed.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| It is not uncomfortable once we realizing that we are but
| a mote, a talented mote in charge of the Earth, but a
| mote nonetheless. Once reaching humility, we are then
| free to bask in the glory of being a human being with the
| power to choose selfless love or selfish foolery, the
| power to learn and explore this magnificent universe full
| of wonder.
|
| Reaching out to become love, we find peace in service,
| joy in our every interaction.
|
| And, yes, via Castaneda's Don Juan, there is the known,
| the unknown, and the unknowable. The Creator of all that
| will ever exist is Unfathomable, Timeless, the Ultimate
| Loner, but we are capable of communing in some small
| extent with It, learning a tiny sliver of Its Nature.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| And they're never will be > without faith, God is nothing
| > If there was proof in God, you would have to worship
| him. That's not the world we live in.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Loving God is not for God's benefit, for It can gain
| nothing from us. Loving It reflects back into our
| consciousness, thereby helping us become love-oriented.
|
| Our free will is so sacrosanct that we are free to deny
| that we even have it, and free to be self-defeating fools
| living in the misery of our selfishness.
|
| There is a better way, though. The choice is yours, my
| friend.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| You hypothesize that a god/creator exists, yet you do not
| show any convincing argument that this is the case.
|
| If you want to make the argument that a god/creator does
| in fact exist, it's up to you to show why.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| The test is to connect with our Creator and ask for the
| proof you seek. It is why we are here, but we are free to
| choose to ignore our potential, because our free will is
| so freely given that we are free to choose ignorance over
| fulfilling humanity's highest purpose.
|
| In the clarity of communing with love, our subjective
| reality is harmonized with the truth of existence, thus
| our knowing transcends thinking. It is our highest
| purpose, but like all great loves, it is freely given
| with no obligation, only responsibility for our choices
| and their effects upon others.
|
| As Rumi said, "The Way goes in." I have described this
| process more fully in other comments.
|
| Peace be with you.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Okay sure, faith is fine and I don't oppose people being
| religious, but it seems very strange to slot this stuff
| into a discussion about physics if it's not empirical.
| hiatus wrote:
| > A Sufi Murshid (teacher) lived his entire life in a
| single town that consisted of a single pair of roads that
| met in the center of town. Late in his life, he stated
| that, he "knew the stars of the Milky Way better than he
| knew his town". (A love-consumed mystic remains conscious
| as our souls leave our bodies when we sleep. What is
| called astral travel is not limited by our physical
| body's speed laws; it is bounded only by the "speed of
| thought".)
|
| Do you have any suggested material/resources where I can
| learn more?
| MrMcCall wrote:
| This appears to only be in German: https://zwwa.de/
|
| But this site has a few different languages, selectable
| in the upper-right corner of the page: https://mihr.com/
|
| Note that the bulk of the teachings are about self-
| evolution via transmuting our vices into their
| corresponding virtues. It is that transformation that
| unlocks our ability to consciously travel during sleep.
|
| The key to all such teachings is that becoming consumed
| by compassion is the _real_ goal; all else is just added
| benefit.
|
| As Steel Pulse put it so eloquently so long ago, "Love is
| the golden chord that binds all commandments." It is also
| the scaffolding that boosts our abilities to their
| greatest height; but, in reality, the spiritual path is
| really about stripping away our selfish ego-nature that
| impedes our realizing our full potential.
|
| Peace be with you.
| EasyMark wrote:
| what you're saying is basically untestable and that's why
| most scientific minded people only talk about such things
| over beers or dismiss it entirely. It's not unlike religion
| or crystals. I mean we can't necessarily disprove them as
| they are based mostly on faith in an untestable conclusion.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| I suggest that our universal resistence to such ideas is
| the result of a concerted effort upon our minds and hearts
| to convince us to embrace selfishly ignorant foolishness
| rather than selflessly wise service.
|
| There is talk here on HN about mathematical reasoning but
| no one talks about how our systems would affect the Earth
| differently if we used compassion as our modus operandi
| instead of for-profit plundering of the Earth for selfish
| profit. That is because selfishness is our default state --
| an animalistic state -- and we must choose to transcend it
| by self-evolving ourselves beyond our selfishness, and into
| humanitarian systems that cooperate instead of compete.
|
| If you wish to find out how to know the truth in your own
| subjectively objective reality, browse my other comments.
| You have your own internal connection that allows the
| unlocking of your full human potential. Becoming consumed
| with compassion is a necessary part of that transformation,
| but we are each free to choose selfishness, and, indeed,
| most have and are choosing the selfish path. That
| selfishness is behind every single atrocity ever
| perpetrated, as well as the spoiling of the Earth for our
| future generations. For people that choose to become
| better, the changes come slowly and with drawbacks, but
| with all art, perseverance and steady effort to improve is
| the key to success.
|
| We each have the power to rise above that animal
| selfishness and instead choose to design societies of
| compassionate service to one and all. That path of love is
| our only hopeful path forward.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| If selfishness were our default state (as you state) no
| baby would ever be nursed. No wounded person would be
| treated. No missing person would be searched for.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| There are degrees; complete sociopathy is unlikely
| because it defeats self-preservation. Most people are
| mostly selfish towards out-groups. But, yeah, some
| mothers are really selfish.
| roughly wrote:
| > Rupert Sheldrake speaks of this when he says that the
| genetic code's protein construction genes do not and can not
| account for the resulting organism's shape. That coordinated
| construction requires a separate guiding force.
|
| Of course there's a separate guiding force. It's the
| biochemical environment around the cell. Cells operate on
| chemical signals they receive from their environment and
| generate the same; these cause cells to differentiate
| themselves based on their genetic code, which where the
| resulting organism's shape comes from. This isn't some kind
| of mystery, we know how this works, and matter & energy are
| indeed sufficient to explain it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Do we understand the mechanisms of this "genetic memory" (my
| words, no idea if its accurate or if there is a better word for
| it)?
|
| It's not actually a memory that gets encoded in genes.
|
| It's a tendency to behave in certain ways as influenced by
| combinations of genes
|
| Ancestors who had the same tendencies, drives, and preferences
| would have some similar behaviors, resulting in some of them
| going toward the same places.
|
| So not an actual memory that gets inherited, more like
| personality traits (but in a more general sense) that lead to
| similar outcomes.
|
| There is a field of epigenetics which studies heritable changes
| in cells that occur without DNA alteration, but these signals
| are much simpler than memories and not a mechanism for carrying
| memories across generations. A lot of pseudoscience has been
| written around epigenetics right now so you have to be careful
| about where you source info on this.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The simplest answer in this specific case is that there is no
| genetic memory involved, and salmon will just swim upstream
| into any fresh water stream they come across.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Could be very very simple.
|
| Swim until you can't anymore?
|
| Swim until the current is very weak?
|
| Swim until the water smells/tastes nice?
|
| Someone could probably simulate these and see which matches
| reality the most.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It's not a genetic memory. They return to the place they were
| born. This is probably based on the "scent" of that place, and
| maybe other factors.
|
| Some percentage either accidentally or deliberately go up a
| different river, which is how the species spreads. That's very
| likely who this story is about.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I think the point is if they "return to the place they are
| born" then why would they go back to the waterways freed up
| by destroying this damn. Clearly they have some heirachy in
| where they prefer to spawn and this place is at or near the
| top, or they would have opted to return to where they were
| born
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Most of them go back to their birthplace, but some end up
| elsewhere.
|
| If that's a "deliberate" evolutionary strategy or just that
| 100% navigation success doesn't happen is unknowable.
| piuantiderp wrote:
| Might just be some kind of salinity thing. Upstream -> Less
| minerals dissolved
| locallost wrote:
| The story about eels is especially fascinating. I was told in
| my fishing course they can even get across small patches of
| land to continue on their journey. I did not bother to fact
| check it though.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| My 100% speculation is emergent behaviour from the brain
| itself. Same way human interactions have remained largely the
| same over thousands of years. Also, we don't notice the salmon
| that swam up dead ends elsewhere.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| If some salmon group had been simplistically "programmed" to go
| up these waters, they would have been trying and failing to go
| up the river during the entire time the dam was there and so
| likely wiped out as a group/subspecies.
|
| It seems like the fish would have to have had some kind of way
| to test if the river lead to adequate spawning grounds. And if
| they had that, they wouldn't really need any memory of any
| given river.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Another comment says that some salmons (a small fraction)
| swim up the randomly "wrong" rivers, instead of back to where
| they were born.
|
| So, a bunch of salmons have been trying each year in the
| river with that dam? But:
|
| "hundreds of salmons failed to swim past a dam"
|
| didn't break the news
| jimnotgym wrote:
| No. Thousands have been entering and spawning all these
| years but below the dams. Now the dams are gone some are
| spawning higher up the river. Not really suprising that
| they spread out a bit into new habitat, is it?
| baxtr wrote:
| I'd assume that evolution in salmon is just not fast enough to
| catchup with the dam.
|
| EDIT: I don't mean that as a joke. I think on the timescale of
| evolution the dam was never there.
| mulmen wrote:
| Ok but the first generation to hit the dam died there and had
| no offspring. Any salmon spawning in these streams have no
| connection to pre-dam salmon.
| baxtr wrote:
| Right. But their genes do.
|
| You assume: hit the dam > died.
| mulmen wrote:
| Yeah pretty much. That's why the dams were breached.
| baxtr wrote:
| And why there still left then?
| jimnotgym wrote:
| No it isn't. The remaining salmon population spawned
| below the first dam because their habitat was cut off.
| This reduced spawning and juvenile habitat meant less
| salmon. Now they have the whole river they are spreading
| out and the numbers can increase again
| hinkley wrote:
| This news is about the end of a dam removal project. I believe
| this is also the end of the oldest dam removal project. The
| Klamath and IIRC the local tribes were the original test for
| salmon restoration/dam breach projects in the PNW, and
| subsequent programs are copying their success.
|
| One of the things that makes salmon ladders more effective is
| introducing artificial noise of falling water. Turns out when
| salmon find themselves in still water they head for the sounds
| of the inflow, which dams either don't have, or are from
| spillways that the salmon cannot navigate.
|
| Most salmon want to go back exactly where they are born, and on
| a three year cycle (or at least, that's the pattern on the
| Klamath). So if you were to introduce hatchery salmon in 2024,
| in 2027 and every three years after you'll have a full run, and
| only a small number of fish in the remaining years. Which
| probably isn't good for genetic diversity. So you end up having
| to stock at least 3 times, or just wait and see what happens.
|
| NOAA page listing the history of work on this river (could use
| a timeline):
|
| https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/habitat-conservati...
|
| Whites Gulch Dam, ca 2008:
|
| https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/building-networ...
| senord wrote:
| these are hatchery fish; they were born on the klamath and
| they're returning to it. the only difference is that now they
| can make it to tributaries and spawn naturally, instead of
| being collected and having their eggs harvested and fertilized
| by humans back at the hatchery
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Salmon have no "genetic memory" - if you release baby salmon
| from a hatchery that were bred from adults caught elsewhere,
| they remember where they were released- not where they are
| genetically from-, and swim back to the area of the hatchery.
| It appears to be regular memory learned from experience. It is
| believed to be mostly chemical sensing, e.g. specific smells
| that they are remembering and returning to.
|
| Salmon are not 100% effective at making it back to their
| birthplace, and some small fraction stray randomly- which is
| what allows them to populate new areas and re-populate others
| where they were wiped out. This article isn't about a lot of
| salmon - only hundreds, so this is probably the amount that
| would naturally stray to this region from others, with or
| without a healthy returning population.
|
| For example, some ~120k chinook salmon returned to the Columbia
| river this year, so if 0.01% of them strayed to the Klamath
| river, you'd get about this many.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Salmon have also displayed possible geomagnetic navigation
| capabilities, similarly to homing pigeons.
|
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2017.075.
| ..
| tyre wrote:
| This is how sea turtles do it, too, and why sea turtle
| release has to happen on the beach despite the higher risk
| of predators.
|
| They get sand up their nose and calibrate based on the
| magnetism of the iron, iirc
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Humans may be capable of geomagnetic sensing as well. As
| a human myself, I've got to imagine this is extremely
| difficult to control for sensing vs other forms of
| navigation (sun, stars, moon, wind, animal migration,
| etc.)
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Well for example we've shown that red foxes have strong
| preference to pouncing in a north-eastern direction, and
| in other directions their accuracy plummets. It's
| believed that this is due to geomagnetic sensing.
|
| We've studied how the blue photoreceptors in our retinas
| are actually magnetoreceptive, meaning in the right
| conditions, suspended in a fluid, they'll align the the
| Earth's magnetic field just like a compass needle.
|
| I'd read before that this technique was theorized to be
| used in fruit flies, with the photoreceptors suspended in
| a fluid in the eye. But more recent studies have failed
| to replicate the geomagnetic sensing capabilities of
| fruit flies.
|
| It's still nuts to imagine what that might look like.
| Distortions in your vision from magnetic sensing sounds
| so neat.
| wbl wrote:
| So when will prey evolve to always face southwest?
| noworriesnate wrote:
| This is actually a common tenant of rabbit religions FYI
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Oh well that's the funny thing, Southwest is the next
| best direction given that it's on the same axis as
| northeast.
|
| > a large majority (74%) of successful attacks in high
| cover were confined to a cluster centred about 20deg
| clockwise of magnetic north with a small (15%) secondary
| cluster at due south, while attacks in other directions
| were largely unsuccessful.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3097881/
| (there's a nice little chart showing angular preference.
|
| The researchers also mention a previous study they'd
| worked on in the first paragraph of the introduction,
| dealing with the geomagnetic alignment of grazing cattle.
| I hadn't read this one before so I took the time, and
| it's equally fascinating.
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2533210/
| wbl wrote:
| If the fox jumps northeast preferentially prey facing
| that way will see the fox more often. There is some
| equilibrium here I can't calculate but that was the
| thinking behind my joke.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Oh, yeah that went over my head, that's actually pretty
| funny.
| withinrafael wrote:
| I was also curious about how a popular beaver [1] was raised by
| humans and "instinctively" knew how to build dams.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DggHeuhpFvg
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > even something as simple as how it takes a human baby 12-18
| months to walk but many animals walk as soon as they are born.
|
| That's just a matter of muscular development. Human babies are
| born early; I believe this is usually attributed to the
| difficulty of getting the head through the birth canal.
| tejtm wrote:
| magnets...
|
| but I am not even kidding. they include a tiny bit of magnetic
| material in their ear. but it must be a genetic construct that
| informs them what to do with north, they use it to move to
| particular undersea canyons out in the ocean they have never
| been to.
| nf3 wrote:
| It is a mystery, like lots of other phenomena that science
| fails to explain. Personally I think all those creatures are
| much more intelligent and aware than we give them credit for.
| Viewing these creatures as simple automatons is as silly as
| viewing humans as such.
| everyone wrote:
| I'm most curious about how the salmon found it so fast.. Did
| their instincts predispose them to go there, if they were in the
| area? or was there some physical trace they were following? or is
| there some weird lamarkian genetic memory thing going on? .. In
| fact do we know now salmon normally navigate 1000's of miles back
| to their spawn location?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| They swim towards where they feel water flowing from. They keep
| going until their bodies are breaking down. Fish at the spawn
| location often have rotting bodies, even as they still live -
| losing color and with their flesh changing consistency.
| everyone wrote:
| But what about at the start when they are in the ocean and
| water isn't flowing from anywhere in particular?
|
| + How do they end up in one particular river and not another?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| That part is not really known. Various things have been
| suspected like memory of magnetic fields, salinity,
| temperature patterns, odors, etc. Basically they may be
| memorizing those on the way out and end up coming back to
| the same shoreline. From there it's following upstream
| water pressure (which is how salmon ladders induce them to
| follow the ladder).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Do rivers have a smell? Animals have a keen sense of smell
| and the volume of rivers is enormous. Seems like a random-
| walk sniffing for rivers would be effective.
| lupusreal wrote:
| How do they know? I thought salmon always return to the same
| river, so a river no salmon come from won't get any returning,
| but I guess a certain percent are adventurous?
| ivandenysov wrote:
| If all salmon returned to the same river then there would be
| only one river with Salmon spawning. Maybe they do have perfect
| memory, but a certain percentage of them get carried to other
| rivers by birds of prey who want to have Salmon in THEIR river
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Actually- its birds like ducks eating the eggs and a
| percentage of eggs surviving the ingestion and being shit out
| into a new river
| optimalsolver wrote:
| The elegant beauty of Nature.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The river wasn't entirely inaccessible to salmon, the dams just
| prevented access to the upper lakes and river segments.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Most salmon do, but a small percentage always stray. If you
| think about it, it is kinda an obviously necessary behavior
| given that many current salmon habitats were not present during
| the last ice age.
| duxup wrote:
| Lots of discussion about salmon memory and such, but is it
| possible this is just Salmon finding "hey this is a great spot"?
| It is hard to imagine salmon not being flexible to some extent,
| and still surviving.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep... also add the "let's go up the river as far as we can,
| and we'll find a nice spot somewhere over there".
| ant6n wrote:
| Well, maybe this ,,find a nice spot" search function is the
| ,,memory" that's encoded in genetics.
| shkkmo wrote:
| It's already been established that a sense of smell is
| vital in Salmon's ability to return to the headwaters of
| their birth. I'm not aware of any "genetic" component, it
| is simply that Salmon remember the smell of where they were
| born and most salmon try and return. The feat is amazing
| and there are many "instinctual" behaviors involved, but no
| evidence that there is a genetic heritage from a specific
| headwaters is important in returning to that headwaters.
|
| This "genetic memory" talk is just uninformed people
| jumping to conclusions and spreading speculation as fact.
| ant6n wrote:
| I'm merely proposing a mechanism for how it could be
| possible to have salmon return to the same spot after
| several generations, if that actually does happen.
|
| The idea would be that a salmon could be genetically
| predisposed to follow a certain path, perhaps preferring
| the smell of a certain combination of chemicals, thus
| encoding the location. It means the ,,memory" would be
| encoded via genetics as a result of genetic combination
| and mutations, and the ,,encoding" would essentially just
| be selection. It's just speculation on how this genetic
| memory idea could work without actually encoding memories
| on genes.
| detourdog wrote:
| Sometimes young Moose from the north run past the mating
| grounds through excitement. They end up in my neighborhood
| for the season and then run back north.
| Hilift wrote:
| Salmon are also making a resurgence in some areas where storm
| water runoff is being controlled and filtered. A chemical in
| tires to prevent cracking is lethal for Chinook and Steelhead,
| so keeping that out of watersheds could create huge population
| increases due to the amount of eggs. "6PPD-quinone, that is
| deadly to coho salmon at extremely low concentrations and is
| often found in urban streams. Stormwater run-off from roads
| kills both juvenile and adult coho within a matter of a few
| hours. Even stormwater diluted to a mixture of just 5 percent
| highway runoff still killed juvenile coho, the new research
| found." https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/roadway-
| runoff-...
| proee wrote:
| I'm surprised we could never engineer a proper salmon "elevator"
| to bypass the damn. Given the price of removing the damn, there
| seems to be a huge budget for creating some sort of high-tech
| Robo-elevator to scoop the fish out and drive them way upstream
| in a robo-vehicle.
|
| Maybe a giant net that lies at the base of the damn, and
| periodically lifts out of the water to catch the fish and
| automate the transportation of them to ideal next step drop.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| There are definitely ones that work very well. Ladders with
| just the right water flow and step sizes, chutes that whisk
| away fish in a tube, etc. As dumb as it sounds one of the more
| effective methods is having fish collect into concentrated
| tanks that are then trucked upstream to the right spot.
| proee wrote:
| Then why couldn't they make that work for this damn? I'm
| assuming there must be other motivating factors for removing
| the damn.
| davidw wrote:
| Most of the Klamath dams were pretty old and not all that
| useful for other things like electricity generation or
| flood control, IIRC.
|
| I drove through Klamath Falls yesterday... that storm is
| sure going to give the river a lot of water to work with.
| Yeesh.
| patall wrote:
| In the article it says energy for 70k households. Not
| saying you are wrong but that is substantial.
| calibas wrote:
| It could power 70k homes at full capacity. Important
| note, it wasn't at full capacity, and the entire county
| of Siskiyou is only about 40k people (not homes).
|
| Our power company, Pacific Power, said they didn't need
| the dam at all, and it would cost more to maintain than
| it was worth.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| A lot of the dam removal pressure is activist not
| scientific - people who have come to believe dams are evil
| because they aren't natural. Some of it is cultural - with
| upstream tribal lands where people cannot practice
| traditional life or activities like fishing without
| returning fish each season. Some of it is practical - we
| don't do a good job maintaining old dams and new
| replacement projects are expensive. But I do worry that the
| new dam removal movement is sacrificing renewable energy
| and flood control and navigable rivers for little gain,
| when they could find solutions that keep the dams and help
| upstream environments.
|
| Well designed ladders work efficiently. Fish don't have to
| over exert themselves, make jumps (actual leaps to the next
| step) no bigger than they would naturally (with no dam),
| and have lots of resting spaces across the ladder where
| they can regain energy in gentle waters before continuing
| swimming and jumping upstream. They slowly gain elevation
| moving across spacious concrete tiers until they reach
| either a natural release point upstream enough that the
| strong flow into the dam doesn't take them, or they end up
| in a hatchery.
|
| I feel like hatcheries are underrated. Sure the upstream
| habitats are not the same without the fish and associated
| ecosystem. But if you have the right equipment, staffing,
| funding, and all that (basically a good government) the
| hatcheries could be made to churn out more fish than would
| be naturally possible. That's because the trip upstream
| naturally is hard and many fish won't make it anyways.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Keeping the dam isn't a 'scientific' decision because
| science doesn't make decisions--it just tells us what
| might happen: more fish, less renewable energy, changes
| to flood control, etc. The real decision is about trade-
| offs, like how much we value fish versus clean energy,
| upstream ecosystems versus downstream economies, or
| cultural traditions versus infrastructure costs.
|
| Calling dam removal 'activist' implies the push to keep
| it isn't. But keeping the dam is just as much about
| advocacy--it's about prioritizing things like renewable
| energy or flood control. Neither side is more
| 'scientific' than the other; they're both driven by
| values. Science helps us understand the stakes, but
| humans decide what matters most. That's why this stuff
| gets so messy.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Thank you. So many people confuse their own values with
| science. Science might say "If you take action X, thing A
| increases" and a person who values thing A _hears_
| "Science says we should take action X". _That is not
| correct_. Science informs you about the impacts of your
| actions (imperfectly), and it is a social
| /cultural/political (and most definitely _not_ a
| scientific) discussion which of those impacts we actually
| prefer.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Thank you--this is exactly the point. People confuse
| their own values with science, and 'follow the science'
| rhetoric only makes it worse. Science might say, 'If you
| take action X, thing A increases,' but deciding whether
| to take action X involves weighing A against everything
| else we care about--values, costs, benefits, and human
| experience.
|
| COVID was a perfect example of this. Policies like
| isolating grandma in a nursing home or pulling kids out
| of school for two years were framed as 'following the
| science,' but they ignored entire fields of science and
| vast parts of the human experience. Loneliness has
| measurable health consequences--science shows it can
| kill. So do we isolate grandma to protect her from COVID,
| or risk her dying of loneliness? Similarly, the science
| of childhood education tells us that pulling kids from
| school harms them for life. These are real trade-offs,
| rooted in human values, not just science. And to be
| frank, that entire discussion was shut down completely.
| The entire decision making process was incredibly one-
| sided and myopic.
|
| The same applies to dams. Decisions about whether to keep
| or remove them aren't just 'science versus activism.'
| Both sides are informed by science, but they're also
| driven by emotion, lived experience, and the values
| people hold. Science doesn't tell us what to do--it gives
| us information about potential outcomes. What we choose
| depends on how we weigh those outcomes and whose
| priorities matter most. When rhetoric like 'keep the dam
| = science, remove the dam = activism' takes over, it
| oversimplifies these deeply human decisions and turns
| them into unnecessary battles. At the end of the day,
| it's not 'us vs. them'--it's all of us trying to navigate
| complex trade-offs in a way that reflects the full
| spectrum of what matters to humans.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That doesn't negate the fact that one (or both) side can
| use bad or motivated science to justify their positions
| in a way that is falsifiable.
|
| Questions of if (and how far) the salmon will go up the
| Klamath or if (and how many) homes will flood are example
| of this. Where opinions of fact differ, time will
| demonstrate one side to be right or wrong.
|
| This highlights an inherent asymmetry of these
| situations. If the people who lose their livelihood are
| eventually proven right, that will be of little
| consolation. If the conservationist are proven proven
| wrong, it will be of little consequence.
|
| A covid analogy would be non-parents using bad science to
| support school closure. If they are right, they lower
| their risk. If they are wrong, it isnt their kids that
| suffer.
| verisimi wrote:
| Yes, but it's not like science is something independent.
| The biases of scientists who live in a society are bound
| to be present. Also whoever funds science studies
| (government, corporations, military) gets to determine
| what is considered.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think "activist" in this context is simply shorthand
| for "environmental activists" has a local/distant
| component, as well as a direct/indirect component to the
| impact.
|
| There are thousands or millions of activists,
| statistically urban and distant, that like the conceptual
| idea of a free flowing river with salmon. Most of them
| will never visit the river. These are pitted against a
| much smaller number of geographic locals, many of whom
| may suffer flooding and the loss of their jobs,
| businesses, and retirements. This is not to say one side
| is inherently right or wrong- it is still a matter of
| values.
|
| I thought the article could have done a better job of
| explaining what the locals realistically stand to lose in
| this situation, and less time on the conspiracy talk. In
| my experience, the conspiracy theories come as secondary
| post-hoc justification for economic and cultural
| interests of their adherents.
|
| > Neither side is more 'scientific' than the other;
| they're both driven by values
|
| This isnt always the case. With respect to the science,
| sometimes different sides claim different and conflicting
| outcomes. The extent of the salmon run when it returns is
| a factual prediction, where one side can be shown right
| or wrong, as is the number of people who will be flooded
| or lose their jobs.
|
| Towards the end of the article, it talks about spotted
| owl conservation, where 9 million acres of Forrest were
| protected, causing 30,000 loggers to lose their job. The
| environmental activists overstated how much this would
| help the owls, while the objectors held the position that
| logging was not big impact and the real driver was out
| competition from the barred owl. The aftermath showed the
| position of one side to have more scientific merit, but
| that is little consolation to those who had their lives
| destroyed. Inversely, the bad science has no cost to the
| conservation activists, because they had nothing to lose
| from the regulation.
|
| This is a bit of a pet issue for me, because I have
| family who lost their life's work and life savings in
| similar situations.
| habinero wrote:
| You're letting your prejudices jump you to wrong
| conclusions about what's going on.
|
| While it might be politically pleasurable to imagine a
| bunch of ivory tower idiots, the real reason driving dam
| removal isn't salmon, it's preventing catastrophic dam
| collapse. That's why there's state and federal funding
| for a lot of dam removal.
|
| The dams being removed are old, obsolete, and end of
| life. They were usually put in place before we had a
| power grid.
|
| Leaving them in place isn't an option, they will
| eventually fail. Spending money to replace or repair a
| dam that doesn't do anything is a waste.
|
| Removing them also has a ton of environmental benefits,
| and improves the area for current and future residents.
|
| It really is a win-win situation in that everyone
| benefits: conservation groups, tribal groups, fishing and
| hunting groups and taxpayers.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I'm not pretending to be an expert on this specific
| situation. That's mostly weighing in on The insider
| outside her conflict and the question of skin in the
| game, which plays out frequently in the situations.
|
| Maybe it was a no-brainer in this situation, but that
| certainly isn't the picture that the article painted,
| with 20 years of activism to persuade the damn owner and
| operator to take them out instead of refurbishing them.
|
| Similarly, if it's such an obvious win-win, why do 80% of
| the locals not view it that way? Do you think they're
| simply wrong and have nothing to lose?
| SalmonSnarker wrote:
| It is striking to me that the only locals you seem to
| care about in your set of responses here are the _white_
| locals? Your hypothetical contrast between "remote
| activists" who want to remove the dams and the "local
| stalwarts" totally ignores the people who have been most
| impacted and lost the most through the existence of these
| dams.
|
| The tribes that relied on the salmon in the klamath
| watershed lost their jobs, subsistence food, and cultural
| heritage for nearly a hundred years, and this factors
| precisely _nil_ in your analysis.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You are right, I didn't cover them in my analysis. That
| was not the dynamic I chose to focus on.
|
| To be clear, Im not even necessarily opposed to dam
| removal. My intent was to explore the dynamic where large
| numbers of remote people make decisions despite having
| little skin in the game. This dynamic also has a long
| history of negatively impacting native Americans too.
| habinero wrote:
| No. Dam removal is driven primarily by practicality.
|
| The environmental piece is a lovely bonus, but the truth
| is these dams are obsolete, end-of-life and will
| eventually fail. Leaving them in place is not an option,
| they either need to be replaced or removed.
|
| Replacing a dam with no purpose is a waste of money, and
| the (ahem) downstream benefits of a healthier environment
| benefits both existing folk and improves land for future
| generations.
|
| It really is a rare win-win situation.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Ladders can be fine, but I think one has to accept that
| the cost:benefit of installing a good ladder at an old
| dam might favor just removing the dam.
|
| Hatcheries, OTOH, are a poor simulacrum of a real fishery
| and a real lifecycle. They might churn out more juveniles
| than a natural river would, but that doesn't necessarily
| translate into a larger catch or higher quality catch.
| somedudetbh wrote:
| > A lot of the dam removal pressure is activist not
| scientific - people who have come to believe dams are
| evil because they aren't natural
|
| Similarly, a lot of dam preservation pressure is
| reflexive reactionary thinking that if someone wants to
| remove the dams, it must be because they're a hippie
| environmentalist and the dam must be saved to show our
| commitment to Progress.
|
| Dams have a finite lifespan. Rivers carry sediment. The
| dams slow the flow of water and the sediment is dropped.
| This fills up the reservoir behind the dam, eventually
| making the dam ineffective. In addition, ordinary
| mechanical stresses wear out dams and they're components,
| so there is a maintenance cost to just keeping them
| running.
|
| Many failure modes for dams are catastrophic: a release
| of water and silt all at once into downstream areas.
|
| Worse, many of the dams that were built in the dam-
| building boom in the US West from circa 1930 to 1965 or
| so were not particularly well-thought-out, especially
| smaller privately planned dams.
|
| In the mid-century American Bureau of Reclamation,
| building dams was like building new chat services is at
| Google today. While dams, as a concept, are completely
| critical to making the western united states survivable
| with mid-20th century technology, many of the actual dams
| were not good designs, they are the result of a
| generation or two of engineers responding to promotion
| incentives within a large bureaucracy, and they should no
| more be given the benefit of the doubt as good
| engineering projects than the last abandoned open source
| project you saw from Google, Facebook, Uber, etc.
|
| Consider Matilija Dam
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilija_Dam):
|
| * "In 1941 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned that
| the dam would not be economically effective, as the
| steep, erosive topography upstream would cause it to silt
| up quickly. However, the project moved forward and in
| 1945 the county issued $682,000 in revenue bonds to fund
| it. Construction began on 18 June 1946 and was completed
| on 14 March 1948 at a cost of nearly $4 million, six
| times the original estimate" * "Almost immediately after
| construction, the dam began silting up.[7] The dam traps
| about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River
| system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing
| sediment.[6] Initially, engineers had estimated it would
| take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt,[1] but
| within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate
| was much faster than anticipated. In 1964 a safety study
| was commissioned from Bechtel Corporation, which
| determined the dam was unsafe and recommended removal." *
| The dam was notched twice, reducing its capacity and
| function, and the reservoir was useless by 2020. *
| Ventura county started trying to remove the dam in 1998
| (who knows what happened between 1964 and then), but the
| dam is still there.
|
| Even the good dams don't last forever, and there is no
| plan to deal with the sediment build up in the West's
| dams.
|
| However, the Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers dams
| are the good ones. The real corkers are the private dams.
| Consider Rindge Dam
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindge_Dam) in Malibu,
| California, which was privately built by the Rindge
| family when they controlled the entire Mexican land grant
| rancho that is present-day Malibu:
|
| * Built 1926 * Completely silted up by 1950, 24 years
| later. 24 years of "useful" life tops ("useful" is
| suspect because most Rindge family building projects were
| weird compliance dodges to preserve control of the ranch.
| They spent decades building and tearing down a railroad
| because the law on the books at the time prevented the
| state from using eminent domain to seize their land for
| road-building if there was a railroad under construction
| there) * Congress authorized removal study in 1992. * In
| 2014, dam considered so dangerous due to lack of repairs
| that the area, which is now in a state park, was closed
| to the public in 2014. * The dam can't just be knocked
| down, what would happen to the 600k cubic meters of
| sediment that are now trapped behind the dam, that should
| have flowed down the river for the last 100 years? The
| plan is to _truck the sediment out_. Some will be dumped
| in the ocean, the rest in _landfills_. * The currently
| scheduled goal to complete the removal project is _2033_.
| The dam was been functionally useless for its original
| purpose since 1950. It's 83 year "useless/dangerous"
| lifespan will surpass it's 24 year "useful" lifespan by
| 3.5x! Surely _some_ of that is government beauracracy but
| not all: it's very difficult to unbuild a silted up dam.
| It's harder to undo things than it is to do them.
|
| I think there is much more significant "religious faith"
| in the sanctity of dams than there is "belief that dams
| are evil because they aren't natural" in the United
| States. Dams are a powerful symbol of America's mid-
| century confidence in it's ability to bend nature to its
| will. Hoover Dam is more than a tourist site, it's
| something closer to a civic-religious site, like the
| Lincoln Monument. So is Glen Canyon. Grand Coulee Dam is
| known to a lot of people as "The Dam That Won World War
| II" for it's role in powering the aluminum-smelting
| plants and nuclear material refinement sites in the
| Northwest. How many pieces of infrastructure are
| considered war heros in the US?
|
| The sanctity of dams is way more obvious in the
| northeast. There's hundreds and hundreds of abandoned
| dams on every trickle of water in the mid-Atlantic and
| New England, all to power mills that stopped milling 100
| years ago, but the dams are still there, and the fish are
| not.
| patall wrote:
| One is surely sediment erosion. All the small gravel that
| would usually end up in the delta being collected behind
| the dam.
|
| I.e like here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_of
| _the_Elwha_River...
| kristjansson wrote:
| It's not just cost of a retrofit. Like other structures,
| the utility of a dam depreciates over time. Unlike other
| structures, some of that is due to sediment accumulating
| behind the dam, not the facility itself wearing down. This
| happens faster than you'd expect - service life for a dam
| can be <100 years.
|
| Maintaining the facility at full capacity means dealing
| with the sediment, not just the dam itself. For example,
| look at what LA County is having to do in the San Gabriels
| to maintain a damn we want to keep [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.amesconstruction.com/project/san-gabriel-
| reservo...
| schmichael wrote:
| Trucking is definitely not an efficient way of moving salmon
| past dams: https://www.opb.org/article/2023/10/31/willamette-
| river-salm...
| nwsm wrote:
| Things like that have been developed
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z3ZyGlqUkA
| lizknope wrote:
| Fish ladders have been around for centuries. They have mixed
| results.
|
| I went to Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River between
| Washington and Oregon and it was kind of like being in an
| aquarium watching the fish swim upstream. They seemed to get
| tired and would float backwards with the water current and then
| start swimming again against the current.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder
|
| They also had a salmon hatchery literally right after the dam.
| But they had some stats showing that it also had mixed
| effectiveness.
| sophacles wrote:
| But why? The cost of upkeep for the dams compared to the amount
| of utility they provided was already too high to preserve the
| dam. Adding this sort of mechansim would only add to the cost
| of upkeep, making the preservation of the dam an even worse
| proposition.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Animal behavior usually has a weird combination of inborn
| instinct and learned behavior.
|
| The one I've read about that stuck with me was dam building by
| beavers. Some part of the behavior is driven by a dislike of the
| sound of running water. Someone did an experiment with speakers
| playing the sound of running water and the beavers near the
| speakers would attempt to cover them with sticks and mud.
|
| In my head I'm imaging that sound is like nails on a chalkboard
| to beaver.
| ics wrote:
| I like the sound of running water from a fountain. But if I
| hear it inside, I assume there's a leak and I go looking for it
| to fix. Maybe the beavers just need to visit the zen garden.
| finnh wrote:
| Not a beaver, but close: an otter wreaked repeat havoc in the
| Sun Yat-sen botanical garden in Vancouver, eating many
| valuable koi:
|
| https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/the-godf-otter-
| part...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Instinct shows up locally as emotion. An individual animal acts
| based on their emotional state, and their emotional state is
| governed by a set of rules deep in their brain of which they
| are not conscious, many of which are set by birth.
|
| This is true of humans as well. We each make food selections
| based on what tastes good. We seek particular sexual partners
| because it feels good. We protect and raise kids because it
| makes us feel good to do so.
|
| This causes all sorts of evolutionarily weird side effects like
| people treating pets like kids in order to access the same
| emotional state as parenting. Or beavers covering speakers with
| mud and sticks.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| evolution uses whatever hook it can find to tune behavior.
| Brains of sufficient complexity have to learn, you can't fit
| even enough information in DNA to manually wire up a brain,
| and its hard enough to guess how a barin will end up being
| wired. you can attach a squirrels optic nerve to their
| auditory cortex and they'll learn to see. (I may have the
| animal wrong). You can grow a brain completely inside out
| that will function.
|
| Instincts are deterministic, but learned behaviors.
| athenot wrote:
| "Dislike" may be an anthropomorphism. Perhaps it's more of an
| opportunity for the beavers, since dams are their habitat and
| provide a food source for them.
| EasyMark wrote:
| yep it could be just as likely that they enjoy building the
| dam whenever they hear water. seems much less stressful on
| the system
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Evolution doesn't mind how it feels, it only matters if
| it's effective at adaptation. It could be that running
| water in their homes stresses them as much as it stresses
| us, albeit for different reasons.
|
| The running water speaker experiment was done in dry land,
| and beavers are very wary of going out of the water because
| of their predators, yet they risked working over the
| speakers.
| grouseway wrote:
| Maybe that's a thing, but here's a video of a pet beaver making
| a "dam" out of stuffies and other household objects.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ImdlZtOU80
| neom wrote:
| Probably the best use of 45 minutes on youtube, I've watched it
| 4 times now and still love it every time:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDbIAy9sMHk (doc on beavers)
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| The impact of human presence on those behaviors can't be
| overstated, either.
|
| There's been a disturbing trend with the return of the salmon
| for people to dress them up in little outfits and take selfies
| with them because they're so exhausted and easy to catch; it's
| like shooting fish in apparel.
| wiether wrote:
| I'm not sure if I want to ask for proof, to know you're not
| joking; or if I don't want to learn that this madness is
| actually real...
| alecco wrote:
| There are systems to allow salmon to go over dams. From ladders
| to cannons.
|
| I hope they are right about this dam not needed for flood
| prevention. Spain just lost hundreds of people and suffered
| billions in damages because these kinds of policies.
| Rygian wrote:
| Getting fish ladders to work where they exist, or built where
| they are lacking, is not an easy feat either.
|
| And the dam removals in Spain have nothing to do with receiving
| 770 mm of water in one single day. None of the removed dams
| would have protected an area that was planned to get flooded
| when the works of the 1960s were done.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/map-shows-existing-river-...
| alecco wrote:
| There was a project to add flood prevention dams in the area
| but it was blocked for 20 years by the party in power. And it
| was from their own party's campaign promise. Also, the
| cleanup of existing dams and rivers was blocked due to
| environmental reasons. And the EU government was backing all
| this. At least most of Valencia was spared due to works made
| over 50 years ago.
|
| I don't believe the mainstream whitewashing of authorities.
| Administration openly against dams and waterworks, no alerts
| due to malfunctioning radars, terrible coordination, and lack
| of appropriate response.
|
| Source: I personally know people from the affected area.
| aesch wrote:
| I read a fascinating article on this dam removal last week!
| https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-other-side-of-the-wor...
|
| The article tells both sides of the story of the dam removal in
| as fair a way as I think is possible. Many of the locals were
| against it and there was a strong advocacy group that fought for
| it, including a tribal constituency.
|
| I came away from the article feeling I understood both sides
| better but with less certainty about what was the right choice.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| People will believe and fight for literally anything, surely
| thousands of years of con men has taught us that. The fact that
| this guy with a whopping 4 generations in the area doesn't
| agree means next to nothing to me.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The point isnt that some guy doesnt agree, it is the ideas
| and information they are communicating.
| calibas wrote:
| A lot of the local opposition to dam removal is because of this
| guy specifically. Here's his article on why the toxic
| cyanobacteria that was in the former reservoirs is actually
| good for the river:
|
| https://www.siskiyou.news/2024/01/24/blue-green-algae-in-cop...
|
| It pretends to be a regular news site, and even "scientific",
| to the point where it fooled Google and his site was often at
| the top of search results. He was also aggressively promoting
| his articles on Facebook.
|
| The guy is confusing green algae with bacteria. He's also
| ignoring the fact that the kind of blue-green "algae" in
| question, Microcystis aeruginosa, isn't the nitrogen-fixing
| kind. He has no clue was he's talking about, but that doesn't
| stop him, and he's unfortunately a major source of "knowledge"
| (confusion and misinformation) for the locals here.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| > Resistance to dam removal on the Klamath is emblematic of the
| profound mistrust of official narratives that increasingly
| leads to such upside-down outcomes as survivors of climate
| disasters denying climate change, or rural communities accusing
| the wildfire fighters who protect their homes of deliberately
| setting the fires. Reservoir Reach is a place where, if KRRC is
| using helicopters to prep for dam removal, it must make sure
| the public knows that the choppers aren't carrying out black
| ops against American sovereignty on behalf of the United
| Nations.
|
| The author seems to have developed quite a strong bias about
| the area.
| marssaxman wrote:
| What about that statement sounds biased to you?
|
| To my ears, that is a plain spoken description of the culture
| of the area, compatible with what I have observed myself over
| the years.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It seems like it is painting with an overly broad brush,
| condemnation by anecdote, and characterization by the
| negative extremes.
|
| But then again, I have my own priors, which probably bias
| me to thinking these people have legitimate reasons to
| distrust authorities who view their lives as expendable.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| We must have completely different experiences, then. What
| years and where were you active in the is area? I've been
| visiting for over a decade doing hiking, fishing,
| spelunking, etc. Every town had tin hatters, but to paint
| the whole town like that is certainly extreme.
| genter wrote:
| I've never heard anyone express concern about UN
| helicopters, but at least in Southern Humboldt, there was
| a huge fear about the state and federal government using
| helicopters to bust people for growing weed. My uncle had
| a camera in the kitchen that he or my cousins would grab
| and pretend to take pictures of low flying aircraft (it
| was illegal to fly too close and thus any evidence
| collected would be thrown out by the court). I wouldn't
| be surprised if less scrupulous people would do something
| with a deer rifle. PG&E still announces in Lost Coast
| Outpost when they're inspecting power lines.
|
| I also heard that people at Trinity Pines were shooting
| at CalFire when they were helping with the fires 8 years
| ago. Hence the reason why it burned so bad.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Not a bad article, all things considered, but I do think it
| gives a shallow treatment to reasons of the objectors to dam
| removal.
|
| How many people are impacted and how? Will they lose their
| businesses, jobs, and life savings?
|
| The closest it comes is talking about the spotted owl, where
| 30,000 people lost their loverhoods without compensation due to
| an environmental regulation that not only failed to deliver,
| but was doomed from the start. What are the parallels here?
| kristjansson wrote:
| > According to PacifiCorp, the Oregon-based company that owns
| the Klamath dams today, the structures are mainly monitored
| and controlled remotely--from Lewis River, Washington, more
| than 500 kilometers away. Local jobs add up to 13, and all
| the affected employees either retired, voluntarily left the
| company, or will be reassigned within it.
|
| from the link. probably a few more people in recreation
| indirectly affected, but these are small, remote reservoirs.
| It's not like we're draining Lake Powell here[1]
|
| [1]: be still my beating heart
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I was thinking more in terms of farmers and community along
| the river, people with lakeside land, and those downstream
| exposed to flooding, essentially wherever there opposition
| is pulling it's support from.
| kristjansson wrote:
| These are mountain dams, without meaningful irrigation or
| flood control applications, and dwindling hydroelectric
| utility. They impounded 3 reservoirs with a total surface
| area ~1/20th of Lake Washington, one of which has ~100
| privately owned frontage parcels. Those owners lose their
| lakefront, but in a few years will enjoy views over and
| access to a river valley instead.
|
| Well founded objections should be treated with respect,
| but I think there's a lot of resistance that's born of
| (a) reflexive opposition to the 'other side' (b) false
| generalization of dam-removal arguments applicable to
| specific dams to all dams, and (c) the incorrect
| assumption that existing dams must have some utility
| (equivalently, unawareness of just how many __useless__
| dams cover the west, these Klamath dams among them).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I dont think I'm pulling from generalizations, just the
| stated impacts form the people that live there. The
| article talks about farmers "storming" meetings and their
| water from the Klamath being cut off in the past.
|
| Im not even trying to argue these people are correct, Im
| just perplexed that you seem to deny that the people the
| article talks about even exist
| kristjansson wrote:
| I didn't say you were generalizing, I said that some
| (esp. ex post, sympathetic) resistance to removal seems
| to come from generalizing the removal proponents' desire
| to remove _these_ dams to a desire to remove _other_
| dams. Resisting the removal out of concerns about
| irrigation (in which these dams play ~no role) or
| hydroelectricity (of which these dams' contribution was
| minimal) makes sense if the resistors assume that future
| efforts will move more directly against their interests.
| I don't think this is far off - see all the stuff in the
| article about Agenda21, everything being a pretext for
| removing the current residents, etc.
|
| However, I hold that assumption is incorrect. I believe
| whole multi-decade process of local consensus-building
| and compromise that got to removal on the Klamath is a
| model for future efforts, which will be at least as
| sensitive to completing interests as these were. Your
| initial point about the shallowness of objections in TFA
| is testament to that process. The 'storming' episode you
| mention happened in ~2003. The failed deliveries from the
| Klamath were in 2001, and were the result of competing
| federal priorities (prior-appropriation private water
| rights, the endangered species act) coming to a head. The
| farmers seem to have had their concerns addressed since
| then - all the relevant local irrigation districts were
| signatories to both the (failed) Restoration Agreement
| and the (successful) Settlement Agreement.
|
| I think TFA treats the most serious and well-founded
| objection very sensitively, toward the end:
|
| > I find myself holding two realities in mind that seem
| hardly able, these days, to share the same space. The
| first is that the dams have amounted to an ongoing
| assault on Indigenous communities and rights, and on the
| many fish that move between fresh water and the sea;
| removing the barriers will right historical wrongs. The
| second is that the identities of many people here--their
| memories, ways of life, worldviews, sense of purpose,
| idea of home--are bound up in the dammed landscape and
| even the dams themselves.
|
| This is the tension - once the competing economic and
| ecological interests are satisfied, the emotional
| interests remain. A landscape has to change, and a life-
| way it's supported will no long be possible in that
| place. That's unambiguously awful for people and families
| than enjoyed that landscape and life-way in the ~century
| since the dams were built. But their right to enjoy that
| landscape unchanged is not absolute; their loss has to be
| situated within the larger balance of costs and benefits
| of the project.
| thrance wrote:
| I have a guy in my family who worked to remove dams over a small
| tributary river of the Seine, in Normandy, France. It took him
| several years to remove the 300+ dams, the oldest ones being
| easily 150 years old. The very first year after his work was
| completed the salmons came back.
|
| Now he works in the environmental police, and is often called to
| handle cetaceans getting lost in the Seine delta. People freak
| out because it is an unusual sight nowadays, but he told me this
| is just a return to how things were. They are stories of dolphins
| swimming as far back as Paris in the past centuries.
|
| I guess this means we're doing something right, I hope one day
| we'll be rid of this poisonous brown opaque water flowing through
| our cities. I really hope one day to be able to see this "clear
| water" my grandpa told me he learned to swim in.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I do too - thank you so much to your relative for their
| important work.
|
| Sadly, it seems like things are mostly going in the opposite
| direction
| ambicapter wrote:
| Very clear water is dead-er than turbid water. Very clear water
| means nothing is living in it.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That depends on a lot of things. There are lots of clear
| mountain streams with all kinds of things living in them, and
| not all brown streams are brown for the same reason.
| thrance wrote:
| I've seen crystal clear lakes in the Alps teaming with life -
| aquatic and amphibious. But I don't think that's what my late
| grandfather meant.
|
| I think he was talking about _less_ turbid water than it is
| today. I don 't think I could see my hand if I were to ever
| plunge it in the Seine, not that I'm foolish enough to try.
| EasyMark wrote:
| This is only tangential but with more solar and nuclear, more and
| more projects like this will become possible.
| ph4 wrote:
| I'm lucky enough to have a salmon-bearing stream on my property
| here in the northwest. They are an extremely inspiring species to
| watch through their lifecycle. Tenacious.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Growing up, I'd watch the run coming through the Ballard Locks.
| Phenomenal to see.
| jibbit wrote:
| for the past few years i've been watching the salmon return to a
| spot in the uk they've not been to for over 200 years. i had no
| idea growing up there that these were salmon spawning grounds,
| then some wiers were removed. such a wonderful thing to see. i
| don't think it's memory!
| ximus wrote:
| Here in coastal British Columbia, it's the removal of ocean fish
| farms that has sent the dwindling numbers of pink salmon soaring
| again!
| 7e wrote:
| Hopefully the Snake river is next.
| 9front wrote:
| All these dams on the Klamath river did have fish ladders where
| the salmon could go upstream and spawn. Removing the dams just
| increased the number of fish swimming upstream. Some of the fish
| ladders had glass walls and people could watch the fish going up
| & down the ladder.
| kristjansson wrote:
| I don't think that's accurate. The remaining dams have ladders,
| but the lowermost dams had no (or inadequate) ladders, hence
| the total absence of salmon from the upper Klamath.
|
| > Although the Bureau of Reclamation's Link River Dam and
| PacifiCorp's Keno Dam currently have fish ladders that will
| pass anadromous fish, none of PacifiCorp's Four Facilities
| (i.e., Iron Gate, Copco 1, Copco 2, and J.C Boyle dams and
| associated structures) were constructed with adequate fish
| ladders and, as a result, anadromous fish have been blocked
| from accessing the upper reaches of the Klamath Basin for close
| to a century.
|
| N.B. Keno and Link River are _not_ being removed.
|
| https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/habitat-conservati...
| SalmonSnarker wrote:
| This is factually incorrect.
|
| From the 2013 department of the interior report discussing dam
| removal "Klamath Dam Removal Overview Report for the Secretary
| of the Interior: An assessment of science and technical
| information":
|
| > In particular, the Klamath Tribes of the upper basin have
| experienced their 92nd year (period starting with initial dam
| construction) without access to salmon and have continued to
| limit their harvest of suckers to only ceremonial use for the
| 25th consecutive year because of exceptionally low numbers and
| ESA protection.
| sxcurry wrote:
| This is completely incorrect.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| I wish the environmentalists would make up their minds.
|
| Either they want clean power from hydroelectric dams or the
| don't.
| habinero wrote:
| Well, if you looked into the subject at all, you'd learn that
| these dams are obsolete and don't generate much, if any,
| hydropower.
|
| They were usually put in place before we had a power grid.
| notadoc wrote:
| Hydropower is the only true renewable green energy that we have.
| It's ironic that dam removal is so popular with people who claim
| to care about green energy and the environment.
| arh68 wrote:
| FYI the podcast Gastropod did a really good episode on the dams &
| the salmon
|
| [1] https://gastropod.com/bringing-salmon-home-the-story-of-
| the-...
| MstWntd wrote:
| salmon have the right to return.. but humans don't?..
| watermelon..
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