TOW #3

Save Money, Save Salmon, Save Mike: Free the Snake

Steve Hawley

The Cleanest Line (Blog by Patagonia)

            The Snake River is dying, and Hawley is charging four with the crime. The killers are four dams choking the life out of this vital artery to ecosystems across the northwest. Hawley is an environmental journalist who himself lives along the Columbia River in Oregon. He is helping to raise awareness about the removal of these dams: Ice Harbor, Little Goose, Lower Monumental and Lower Granite Dams. The idea of removing a dam is relatively new to the American public so to convince his reader that these are very real killers he intros with a narrative about an Orca named Mike. The reader learns that the number of little Orcas that Mike babysits has been declining due to a lack of Chinook salmon, their main food source. The salmon spawn in small tributaries to the Snake thousands of miles inland. Once they are big enough they travel to the ocean, and every year they make the journey back upstream to spawn the next generation. The only problem, the four dams blocking their journey. These dams are also responsible for turning a once swift flowing river into “a deadly heat sink.” The water temperature rises beyond what the salmon can survive, and beyond what the law allows. Hawley then places in pictures of several salmon that fell victim to this deadly combination. Finally he rams his point home with a powerful statistic, “80% of the Salmon run are dead or dying.” To conclude his argument Hawley paints a picture of what the region could look like with the snake free flowing. He writes, “Doing so would grant unfettered access to 5,500 miles of heat resistant high-elevation salmon-bearing streams, the arteries and veins of 4.4 million acres of wilderness habitat in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.” This issue is one that is ongoing but anyone who reads this article will be convinced to sign the petition to remove the dams, there is a link to this conveniently placed at the bottom of the article.