What I Know to Be True

A look back at one Election Day afternoon.

The White Salmon River below the Condit Dam site on November 5, 2024.

On Election Day, I spent a couple of hours on the banks of the White Salmon River, not far from where I live in southern Washington state. Friends who work for the state and tribal fisheries agencies had organized an afternoon river cleanup (“Elect to do something positive!”) and I was glad for a distraction from the news.

We met near the site of the Condit Dam, whose demolition in late 2011 was, at the time, the largest dam removal in the nation. After the breaching of the 125-foot-tall structure, nearly a century’s worth of accumulated (and quite stinky) sediment — some 2.4 million cubic yards — washed downstream.

Since then, coho salmon and steelhead trout have returned to their upstream spawning grounds, and rafters and kayakers have flocked to the newly accessible sections of the river. But restoration didn’t end with demolition: the riverbanks exposed by the reservoir’s draining had to be revegetated, as did downstream stretches scoured by the release of water and sediment.

Last Tuesday, our job was to pick up the weed barrier left behind by the contractors who had done some of that tree planting. It was hardly urgent work — the black nylon weed barrier had been in place for so long that it had sprouted ferns and fungi, and the trees seemed to be doing fine despite it. But it had been on the minds of the cleanup organizers, and they were delighted to see it finally come out of the river canyon.

The afternoon was gray and damp, but we soon worked up a sweat, plunging into the blackberries in search of our quarry. The half-buried sheets of weed barrier came loose with rewarding rips, and we could imagine the young trees breathing a little more easily. When our industrial trash bags were nearly overflowing, we lugged them back to the road and bid one another goodbye, streaked with mud and grinning with simple satisfaction.

Had the election results turned out differently, I might be looking back on the afternoon as a metaphor for broader kinds of recovery and restoration. But as it was, victory went to the campaign that distorted the past, sold a fantasy about the future, and abused the facts at every turn.

So I’ll skip the metaphor-making and tell you what I know to be true: The lessons that engineers, ecologists, and river advocates learned during the demolition of the Condit Dam were later applied to the removal of the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams from the Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. That accumulated knowledge, in turn, informed this year’s removal of four dams from the Klamath River in southern Oregon and northern California, an epic undertaking that freed some 400 miles of salmon habitat.

On October 16, just three weeks before Election Day, biologists from the Klamath Tribes and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife spotted a Chinook salmon swimming upstream from all four Klamath dam sites — the first salmon seen in that part of the basin in more than a hundred years.

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Conservation at Work

Not long ago I wrote about Project 2025, the right-wing plan to “dismantle the administrative state” during a second Trump administration. We don’t know how much of that agenda the incoming administration will attempt to enact, but as

Jonathan P. Thompson

at

The Land Desk

reports, many conservation initiatives of the Biden administration are in serious danger.

I don’t have to tell you that right now, the outlook for conservation is bleak on many levels. I do continue to believe that conservation works, and can keep working through the most hostile of times. If you work in conservation in any capacity, you know it’s possible for people of different beliefs, opinions, and backgrounds to unite on behalf of the places they love and depend on. In the months and years to come, that literal common ground will be more important than ever.

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I’ll be back soon with more conservation news. This week, I appreciated

Oliver Burkeman

’s advice to double down on reality,

Jason Bittel

’s reminder to fill the bird feeders, and this no-nonsense conversation between two smart people you’ve probably heard of.