DamNation (2014) Movie Script

Play one of the best new FPS shooters,

search Steam for PROJECT WARLOCK

[CRICKETS CHIRPING]

ROOSEVELT: This morning,

I came...

...I saw...

and I was conquered,

as everyone would be who

sees for the first time

this great feat of mankind.

Ten years ago the place

where we are gathered

was an unpeopled,

forbidding desert.

In the bottom of the gloomy

canyon whose precipitous walls

rose to height of more

than a thousand feet,

flowed a turbulent,

dangerous river.

We are here to celebrate

the completion

of the greatest

dam in the world,

rising 726 feet above

the bedrock of the river

and altering the geography

of a whole region.

The people of the

United States are proud.

With the exception of the few

who are narrow-visioned.

This great dam won

universal approval.

This is an engineering victory

of the first order.

Another great achievement

of American resourcefulness,

American skill and

American determination.

These are... this is

the tape from, uh...

Recently taped them

at Hetch Hetchy, left it,

and then just kept

them after the Elwha.

But, yeah...

[CHUCKLES]

A little quieter compared to this.

You know?

Go for it. But do it

bigger and better.

Definitely do it

bigger and better.

Don't, you know,

it's like, great,

25 years ago we did a

couple painted cracks on dams.

Passé, it's old, been done.

Take it a step further.

Just something, you know,

something really impressive.

I don't know what

that'd be, but...

come up with something.

[CHUCKLES]

MAN: Inspiration can be

a pretty dangerous thing.

Mikal's advice haunted me for

months after we interviewed him.

What sort of lunatic

rappels off a 200-foot dam

with a paint bucket, alone

in the middle of the night,

just to make a statement?

Anyway, I'm getting

way ahead of myself.

We'll get back to that.

My name's Ben, by the way.

I'll be your narrator.

It was kind of embarrassing

how little I knew about dams

when I started

working on this film.

I used to sneak inside

their overflow tunnels

once in awhile, to take photos

of my friends skateboarding.

So the extent of my knowledge

about dams mostly had to do

with how to avoid getting arrested

while crawling inside them.

Dams don't just blend in as part

of the landscape to me anymore.

Knowing what I know now,

it's impossible for me

to look at dams the same way

I did a few years ago.

Or even rivers for that matter.

Dams and hydropower represent

a pivotal part of US history.

There's no denying that.

But just like any other

resource development in the US,

we took it too far.

MAN: There are 75,000

dams over three feet high

in the United States.

That's the equivalent of building one

everyday since Thomas Jefferson.

Was the president

of the United States.

BEN: Dams have been a common part of

the American landscape for centuries.

Most early communities

were established

on the banks of rivers

so dams could be built

to divert river flows to

water wheels to run machinery.

Around the time Edison

had the light bulb dialed in,

the first hydroelectric powers was being

generated on the US side of Niagara Falls.

At one point, nearly half the country's

power was being fed by hydropower alone.

As America's dependency

on electricity grew,

new dams were

being built so fast

that the engineering technology

struggled to keep up.

One of the worst disasters

in US history occurred in 1889

when Pennsylvania South Fork

Dam failed with no warning.

The city of Johnstown was leveled

with 20 million tons of water,

taking 2,200 lives.

The flood is still referred to

as a natural disaster,

despite the fact that there's

really nothing natural

about impounding a river behind

a poorly constructed wall.

In the late 1800s, the government

was faced with a tough choice

when they began to realize that every

major fishery in the country was at risk.

Either start regulating the impact of

harvest pollution and dams on wild fish,

or mitigate that loss by

trading nature for science.

The answer was the national

fish hatchery system.

In 1902, the Reclamation Act

was passed by Congress

to promote the settlement

of the West

through the development

of irrigation projects

to support small family farms.

This well intentioned mission

devolved into

the Bureau of Reclamation,

whose short-sided projects began

a legacy of resource abuse.

Transporting and impounding

absurd amounts of water

to support unsustainable desert agriculture

and sprawling urban development.

ROOSEVELT: The mighty

waters of the Colorado,

were running unused to the sea.

Today we translate them

into a great

national possession.

BEN: In 1913, a seven-year

environmental battle,

led by the legendary

Sierra Club founder, John Muir,

ended in vain, when Congress gave the

green light to flood a national park.

Yosemite's stunning Hetch

Hetchy Valley was dammed

to provide water storage

for the city of San Francisco.

On March 12th, 1928,

12 hours after

a safety inspection by its

engineer William Mulholland,

California's St. Francis Dam

broke free from its foundation,

sending a wall of LA's water

supply plowing downstream.

Mulholland was cleared

of any wrongdoing, but

felt personally responsible

for dam's failure.

"I envy the dead," said

Mulholland at a court hearing.

"Don't blame anyone else. If there was an

error in human judgment, I was the human."

During the Great Depression,

Reclamation began the two most

ambitious engineering

efforts in US history:

The Hoover Dam on the border

of Arizona and Nevada

and the Grand Coulee Dam

in eastern Washington.

Both projects created

thousands of coveted jobs,

and were proudly embraced by the

public as national treasures.

By the time Coulee's

generators went online,

the US hydropower's system was feeding

an insatiable demand for electricity

to build airplanes, ships

and bombs for World War II.

If the era of dams had a Golden

Age, it was the following 20 years.

The Army Corps of Engineers,

the Bureau of Reclamation

and the Tennessee

Valley Authority,

were the government's

dream team.

If it flowed, it was dammed.

Any river left unharnessed

was considered a dangerous

torrent with wasted potential.

Thirty thousand private and federal dams

were completed between 1950 and 1970.

By that point, the Yellowstone

was one of very few

unauthored watersheds

left in the nation.

When the Bureau of Reclamation began running

out of ideal locations to build dams,

shit starting getting weird.

Massive dams were proposed

in Grand Canyon National Park

and Utah's Dinosaur

National Monument.

Led by environmentalist David Brower,

the Sierra Club worked quickly

to rally a massive outcry

of public disapproval.

But while Brower's attention

was focused elsewhere,

Reclamation's new secret weapon was quietly

flooding a little known national treasure

with very little opposition.

MAN: If he'd had known how

beautiful that area was,

he would've fought it

tooth and nail.

Brower now says that was the

biggest mistake he's every made.

BEN: In 1973, the Endangered Species Act

was set into motion by President Nixon.

A bold move to protect endangered

species from extinction

as a consequence

of economic development.

And dam contributing

to the demise of a species,

could now be held

accountable by law.

In 1976, the Bureau of Reclamation

set up a claims office

in eastern Idaho to Divvy out

$300 million

to the communities in the flood path

of their newly completed Teton Dam.

As its reservoir filled

for the very first time,

the 300-foot earthen dam started

to liquefy and cave away,

taking 11 lives downstream.

During an interview with

the High Country News in 1995,

Clinton appointed, Bureau of

Reclamation commissioner Dan Beard

stated that, "The Bureau's

future isn't in dams.

The era of dams is over."

In 1997, the 162-year-old

Edwards Dam,

on Maine's Kennebec River,

became the first major

dam removal in US history.

River conservation

organization, American Rivers,

declared 2011,

"The Year of the River,"

as multiple dam removal

projects began,

including the largest in US history,

on Washington's Elwha River,

in Olympic National Park.

WOMAN: We are here today to say, "Free that

beautiful Elwha River, let her run free."

Uh... We're here to say,

"Welcome back," to the salmon.

We want you to live free, again.

There are a grand total

in that pool over there,

someone counted them yesterday,

73 salmon. Not 72, not 74.

I love people with fisheries and wildlife,

"There are exactly 73, governor."

[CROWD LAUGHING]

So, to those we say, "We want 73,000 more.

Welcome back, come on back."

That's what this day

is all about.

See a lot of people don't realize how

deep this... really deep this is.

Until you get right here

to the edge and you look over.

Yeah, I mean it was... you know it was

kinda known that today was the last day

of our final operations

up here on the dam.

It was... yeah,

a little reflective.

MAN: You come into a plant,

and as you learn to operate

and spend time with them,

you learn to listen to certain

sounds that are not normal,

certain vibrations

that are not typical.

But this machine,

for as many years as its ran,

we would block load it and

she'd just run and run smooth.

I think she'd just kept on

runnin' for years and years.

June 1st was a big day, that was hard...

I'll be honest with you.

To shut down two perfectly good

running power plants, it wasn't easy.

We, as a country right now, are

infatuated with tearing things down.

It's not just an enterprise

to blow something up

and build something

new and grander.

Uh, I mean, we're

removing these for good.

And we're not just taking dams out but

we're having to relocate families.

And they're losing their jobs.

Yeah, I have... I probably have

some personal feelings towards...

...especially being

a hydropower guy.

I think there's a very

intentional movement,

by various groups in our country

to remove every dam.

There's not doubt about that.

We're all anxious to see,

was this thing really worth it?

Was is worth the $370 million to

the American taxpayer to do this?

Did it really make a difference?

And if in ten or 20 years down

the road we look back and say,

"Nothing really

changed that much,"

then I think we're all going to

come to some similar conclusions.

And only times going to tell is if

that's going to be true or not.

MAN: What's your gut say?

YANCY: What's my gut say?

Uh, I just assume

not say anything.

[CHUCKLES]

INTERVIEWER: That says a lot.

I'm not running

for politics, buddy.

I made a statement about

taking out Elwha Dam

in my first months in office.

And it caused a lot of trouble.

The president...

President Clinton

took me aside and said,

"Bruce, what's all this talk

about removing dams?"

MAN: When I first moved to the

state of Washington in 1991,

I was told, "Gotta get involved

with the Elwha Dam removal project!

It's gonna happen any year now."

So, 20 years later,

it's actually happening.

The dams, both of them,

were illegal to start with,

because of existing legislation,

which stated essentially that

any dam built, had to have

passage for migrating salmon.

All the species of wild fish

that have ever live in Elwha

are still there,

biologists know that.

MONTGOMERY: Adult Snook Salmon

still beating their head

against the bottom of the dam,

A century later,

they're still trying

to get upstream, into

Olympic National Park.

MAN: Taking a dam out and

opening up a watershed,

reconnecting it with the fish that were

there for hundreds of thousands of years,

it's a very powerful experience.

MAN: There's three things

that come to mind:

Hope, humility and happiness.

The hope of recovery

in a lot of these places,

the humility when you go to

places like southwest Alaska,

um, and other places

where you see the abundance.

A just a basic spiritual happiness

that you can't find in...

I can't find in

a lot of other things.

MAN: It was the elders that

kept the memory alive.

It was the elders that

passed that knowledge,

the knowledge of this

river in its origin.

They don't forget.

They don't move on.

They remember and they persistently

seek restoration of what was once.

WOMAN: It's an answer to

our ancestor's prayers.

And I'm just grateful that we're able

to see it happen in our lifetime.

[SNIFFLES]

So, that's what we're doing,

we're saying thank you

for making sure that the fish

come back and sustain the people.

MAN: The people of

the lower Elwha,

they entered into

a treaty in 1855

that gave the word

of the United States,

that they would be able to

continue their way of life,

and to live off the

abundant resources

of that free-flowing river.

Although the US Constitution

says that treaties are

the supreme law of the land,

the people of the lower

Elwha saw only injustice

for about 100 years.

But there's a healing now,

because that is changing.

All of Indian country

is here in spirit,

and their eyes are focused on

the people of the lower Elwha.

[SINGING]

[MACHINE RATTLING]

DUNCAN: "Where had

they come from?

The answer sounds

like a fairy tale.

The far reaches of the sea.

How had they arrived?

Another fairy tale.

By swimming against one of the

most powerful rivers on Earth,

past eight deadly dams all

the way up from the Pacific.

Why had they made such an

insane journey? Another wonder.

These colored stones and clear

currents so high and far

from the sea,

once gave them life.

So they'd become

mountain climbers.

Literal mountain climbers, though

they possess no legs, hooves, feet,

They'd climb the Rockies to the pebbles

of their berth by swimming home,

at the certain

cost of their lives,

in order to create

tiny silver offspring."

I just want to welcome

you folks to Grand Coulee Dam.

This is the largest producer of

hydroelectricity in North America,

and the largest concrete

structure in North America.

For many years it was

the largest in the world.

Two-hundred-fifty-thousand

gallons of water a second

going through each

of the big penstocks,

and when it's

really cranking good,

it can actually vibrate

through the bedrock,

you can sometimes feel it

clear across the river.

So you just really know

there's a lot of power there.

There are those that would take out every

dam just to save a couple of salmon.

There are those that think the

Native Americans got a raw deal.

Some of them, of course, would like to go

back and have their native salmon runs

and live off the land.

But things progress...

[CHUCKLES]

The Elwha, the Condit,

they were old dams,

obsolete in terms of efficiency,

so if we want to

selectively take out

some of those older,

smaller dams,

not really a problem there.

We can do that,

restore some fisheries,

but this dam, I can't

conceive of anybody

really, seriously,

wanting to take this dam out.

MONTGOMERY: A dam, for salmon,

essentially is, lack of access.

Their basic life history requires the

juvenile fish to go out to the ocean,

and the adult fish to come back

to their spawning stream.

So, anything that blocks

a river, like a dam does,

is end of story in terms of

their ability to access

part of the world they need

to complete their life cycle.

BEN: Some people still define

the Pacific Northwest region

as anywhere salmon can swim.

It's a romantic thing to say,

but that would mean

the territory has been

cut in half by dams.

At one point, the Columbian

Snake River, shown here in red,

were the most productive wild

salmon fisheries in the lower 48.

Now the runs hover around

8% of their former glory.

Every fish that passes this

window at Bonneville Dam,

has to find and negotiate an

elaborate passage to move upstream.

The only chance for their

offspring to get to the ocean

is if the dams are spilling water,

but that equates to wasted power.

So you'll commonly see juvenile

fish being transported in barges

and trucks downstream,

past the dams.

Tens of thousands of now

endangered Snake River Sockeye

used to make the 900-mile

journey to spawn

in Idaho's Redfish Lake.

In 1992, only one fish made

it home past all eight dams.

If you equate the number

of Snake River Sockeye

that have returned

in the 20 years since,

to the amount of money

spent on recovery efforts,

it comes to $9,000 per fish.

The rivers are run

like machines.

Every aspect of their flow

is controlled by computers

in a Portland office.

During spring runoff,

when the rivers are cranking,

there's actually a surplus

of energy in the grid at times,

leaving wind generated power with

nowhere to go and no one to pay for it.

Seeing thousands of wind

turbines generating wind power

in the Columbia Gorge with no impact

on salmon runs and water quality,

definitely raises the

question as to how

hydropower could be

marketed as green energy.

One things for sure though, the pro-dam

crowd seems a little threatened by it.

It's like Beanie Babies,

the fad of Beanie Babies.

Everybody had to

have Beanie Babies.

Well, wind is a fad,

everybody has to have wind.

And then you buy

all of these Beanie Babies

and you load up the shelf

and you got all of these

Beanie Babies and

what are they good for?

Well, not much.

And that's just the same

as the wind, it's just a fad.

BEN: It's really hard to have

a balanced conversation

on the subject of

dams versus salmon.

When the most outspoken pro-dam

politicians in the country

refused all of our

requests for interviews.

Well, one of them reluctantly let us in, and

then not so reluctantly asked us to leave.

I can't say I really blame these

guys for not wanting to talk to us.

But I couldn't help but wonder what

their rhetoric would sound like.

Lucky for us, we heard they

were throwing a little party

to introduce a bill that would

prohibit federal funding

from ever being used

for dam removal,

or the study or dam removal,

unless explicitly

authorized by Congress.

MAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman,

thank for your leadership

on this issue.

Thank you, especially for holding

this hearing to examine and expose

The continuing drive

of the environmental left

to destroy our nations

systems of dams.

Some people seem to have forgotten that

before the era of dam construction,

the endless cycle of withering

droughts and violent floods,

constantly plagued

our watersheds.

Our dams tamed these environmentally

devastating events.

They turned deserts into oasis,

and laid the foundation

for a century of growth

and prosperity

for the American West.

But over the last

few decades, radical

and retrograde ideology

has seized our public policy.

It springs from the bizarre

notion that Mother Earth

must be restored to her

pristine pre-historic condition

even if it means restoring

the human population

to its pristine

pre-historic condition.

They're not satisfied with merely

blocking construction of new dams,

they're not seeking to destroy

our existing facilities.

We'll be required to

stretch and ration

every drop of water

and every wad of electricity

in their bleak and stifling

and dimly lit homes.

Homes in which gravel has replaced green

lawns and toilets constantly back up.

To me, these glaring hypocrisies

destroy their credibility

and reveal an unabashedly

nihilistic agenda.

This is the kind

of lunacy we are facing.

As you deal with these people,

you begin to realize

we are literally dealing with the

lunatic fringe of our society,

and they are in charge of our

public policy on these issues

because we let them.

We're not going

to let them anymore.

BEN: As tempting as it was to stay and

high-five all our new pro-dam friends,

there was a place just a few miles

away that I wanted to visit.

Just 57 years ago at this spot

on the Columbia River,

the Army Corps of Engineers

committed today

what would be called an act

of cultural genocide.

DUNCAN: As Sherman Alexie, a

Spokane Coeur d'Alene Indian says,

"Salmon are the Eucharist

of the tribes."

The Eucharist, like,

the blood and body of Christ,

it's that serious a symbol.

And to run the dams in a way

that wipes out their culture,

their spirituality

and their revenue,

is like there being

a federal bureaucracy

that removes the cattle

from ranches and tells cowboys

that they're doing them a favor.

WOMAN: This is Celilo Falls.

The age old fishing grounds

of the Columbia River Indians.

Here is a fisherman

swinging his net.

Gathering fish

for the salmon feast

given to welcome the spring.

MAN: And my dad woke me

up and it was dark yet.

"Come on, son, let's go,

the fish are coming."

Took me outside the tent,

he said "Listen."

It sounded like a thousand people

with an oar beating on the water.

It was salmon

coming up the river.

WOMAN: The Celilo Falls

was the, you know,

the grandest rendezvous

place for our people,

and plateau tribes, in general.

It mattered not whether you was

Yakama, Nespers, Umatilla, Cayuse...

Whatever you were,

didn't matter.

You was a part of it.

This mist and the roar of that

water is just...

I think about it right now

and I can hear it.

That's one of my great things

that... in my memories.

When I think about it,

I can actually hear it.

MAN: This is the first, and

unfortunately the last time,

that we will ever have

a film of this ceremony.

As you will see,

the great Dalles dam,

which is being built

several miles below here,

will soon back up

over these falls.

They will cover the great fishing

grounds, and the way of life

that Indians have had here

will disappear forever.

CROW: Celilo Falls was gone.

So how do you think I felt?

I knew what was there,

and I knew what they done.

Sometimes I get out and I look

over that place and...

...I can still see where some things

should be and they're not there no more.

The wind has changed...

...because of the flat surfaces

coming up the Columbia.

The temperatures

of the waters have changed.

The dead water makes it harder

for the fish to get up and down.

And now all it is, is a big

body of water, is all it is.

It means nothing to me.

All it means

is what they took away.

What these dams have done,

they completely tore

my country apart.

This is not the same country

as it was that we remember.

BEN: Dating back more than 10,000

years, Celilo was one of the oldest,

continuously inhabited

communities in North America

until it was flooded in 1957.

At one point,

the Army Corps of Engineers

offered to lower the water

backed up behind the Dalles Dam

long enough for the tribes to see

the falls again, just for a day.

There was a resounding

"no" from elders

that they could not live through

seeing them flooded again.

There were some elders that

have never even been back there

because it was so devastating, like

a death is what they called it.

Like a funeral, and they could

not go through it again.

BEN: Just upstream from Celilo, where

the Snake River meets the Columbia,

you'll find what many agree,

are the most ill-conceived

and environmentally

destructive dams in America.

Fed by 23 major tributaries,

the Snake River was once

the gateway to 5,500 miles

of pristine wild fish habitat

in Idaho alone.

Before lower Snake dams were built by the

Army Corps of Engineers in the '60s,

with the stated purpose

of flood control irrigation,

navigation, recreation

and hydropower,

combined, the dams only generate

about 4% of the regions energy.

These are run of river dams, which means

they provide little to no water storage.

That also means they're physically

incapable of flood control,

and it cancels out

their need for irrigation.

The main purpose of all four

dams was river navigation,

so a giant system of locks allows barges

to haul goods up and downstream to port..

It's hard to ignore

the simple fact that there's

a perfectly good railroad,

spanning the length

of the shipping corridor

from Lewiston to Portland.

If area farmers continue

a recent progression

towards shipping

their grain by rail,

It'll be hard to deny that

barging is unnecessary.

The lower Snake is technically

open to the public for recreation,

but I'd heard stories

of boaters being harassed

for simply trying

to paddle downstream.

I wanted to see first hand if

there was any truth to that

so I managed to talk my friend

Travis into one of

the worst ideas I've ever had.

But I'll get back

to that in a minute.

In the meantime, I want to

introduce you to this fella,

who randomly walked up

to the mic at a public meeting

and managed to simultaneously end his

career and blow every mind in the room.

I'm Jim Waddell, I'm not sure

I have a question but,

I wanna tell you something.

I'm from the Army

Corps of Engineers...

From hearing all this stuff

about the lower Snake dams,

and here I am, I know.

I probably know better,

as a civil engineer,

better than anyone in this

country about those dams,

and given what I knew, I just

couldn't sit there any longer.

And I'm going to get fired for

what I'm about to tell you here...

[CROWD LAUGHING AND CHEERING]

...but it's time.

Those dams are a travesty.

They always have been,

from the day that Congress first

authorized those, it's been a shame.

Part of what I did

was to manage and lead

the lower Snake

feasibility study.

BEN: In 1995, the Army Corps

was forced to address

the environmental impact

of the lower Snake dams

when the Snake River sockeye

was listed as endangered.

Their answer was the $35 million

lower Snake feasibility study.

WADDELL: I read the thing,

I worked on this thing,

and based on that, you know, I believed

those dams needed to come out.

On the Snake River, for the Snake River

salmon, it's four dams too many.

I mean, the taxpayers,

the people

in Washington and Oregon,

are not getting a good deal

out of those dams.

They're losing fish, and the

economics are not helping them.

So, anyway, it comes time

for a decision,

the colonel sits down with

each one of us separately.

And I read the first paragraph.

And basically what it says is,

that my recommendation,

based on this document,

was that we should pursue professional

authorization to bridge the dams.

BEN: Travis checked out

the Army Corps website

and found a friendly

little page that detailed

how to pass through

the Snake River lock system,

if you're in

a non-motorized craft.

This is where

my terrible idea was born.

I wanted to see what

the Army Corps had once built

as some sort

of recreational utopia.

Everyone we spoke to in Lewiston confirmed

that it was a seriously bad idea.

Even this piece of art seemed

like some sort of bad omen,

as if every canoe in the state had been

retired as a memorial to a lost river.

Our plan was to kayak

through all four locks,

from Lewiston, Idaho

to Pasco, Washington,

where our truck was parked

about 100 miles away.

It seemed almost wrong to call this

seemingly dead body of water a river.

Usually, if you stop paddling on a

river, you still move downstream.

Here, not so much.

Day one sucked.

Usually, when it's 100 degree out, you

just look for a tree to sit under,

but they were all under water.

I was feeling pretty grumpy when

Travis turned the camera on me.

I think he wanted me to admit that my

idea was a legend among bad ideas,

but I wasn't ready to give him

the pleasure of knowing that.

My nerves were wearing on me

as we approached the dam,

mainly because

I'm a pessimist, but also

because I can't swim

for shit and I kept imagining

getting sucked through a turbine and

pureed like am out-migrating salmon.

There was hardly anybody in the district

that would even talk to me anymore.

Anybody that thinks we

should breach these dams,

is obviously a communist

and doesn't belong, you know,

to be working around here, so I've been

branded as not loyal to the organization.

I kinda feel like

I failed at my job,

because here I was

in charge of this study,

and in spite of my best efforts, I

let $35 million worth of research

end up ignored.

As a public servant, that's our

job, to make hard decisions.

I happened to end up with

someone that didn't have

the fortitude or the strength to take

that decision and go forward with it.

MAN: I think we can have

a win-win situation.

Remove those dams, save the

taxpayer money, improve a habitat,

put more dollars back

in this community

because people will come here

to use this river.

And not only is it important

to the ecosystem, it's amazing.

Just amazing that they come 900

miles into the Snake River system.

And it'd be a lot of teardrops

of joy to see that

river running again.

DUNCAN: It's the largest

possible salmon recovery venture

of which humanity is capable.

Would be simply the removal

of those four dams.

Nobody's ever heard of them.

Nobody's ever been there.

It has to become

a national issue.

BEN: The Snake River

is a public waterway.

Our tax dollars pay to maintain

these locks and these dams.

The lower Snake feasibility

study was ignored,

and Jim Waddell's recommendation

to breach the dams was removed.

Despite hundreds of millions

a year, not one of the four

endangered Snake River salmon

species has been delisted.

DUNCAN: There's a great good here

that belongs to the American people,

that's being stolen

from the American people

by a very small corrupt branch

of the federal government.

BEN: The Army Corps website

said to pull a cord

to speak with a log master

upon arrival,

but we couldn't

find it anywhere.

The last thing I wanted to do

was get out of my kayak,

but I knew our window was

about to close any minute.

I found a couple workers that

told me how to find the cord,

but also warn me

that security was on the way.

Right as I was about to pull

the elusive cord,

we made some new friends.

Hey, how's it going?

Not too bad...

Yeah.

Why not?

[MAN ON RADIO INDISTINCT]

[ARGUING INDISTINCT]

I think we should get

the sheriff to come down.

Don't you?

BEN: And just like that,

I was off the hook.

Travis had come up

with an idea worse than mine.

Despite the depressing reality

of the situation,

I couldn't stop laughing as two police

cars and Army Corps security truck

were trying to figure out how to pull

over two kayaks from a nearby road.

One of the more excited cops

deleted the video

of the conversation

you're about to hear,

but he didn't notice

the fuzzy microphone

sticking out of my life jacket.

[OFFICER]

BEN: The more the layers

peeled off this story,

the deeper I wanted to go.

There's one particularly

divisive issue

when it comes to dams that no

one seems to want to talk about

and that's fish hatcheries.

But before we tackle that beast,

I think it's important

to have a little appreciation

for one of the species that

deserves our respect.

DUNCAN: You cannot have a

creature come in from the ocean

and enter the extreme

state of vulnerability

that is spawning

in shallow water.

Unless the people in that watershed

agree to greet this wild creature

with great compassion

and sensitivity.

BEN: I think most people have

heard of a rainbow trout

or had one wiggle out

of their hands at some point.

Burt few have had the honor and

privilege of meeting a Steelhead

These highly respected

sea run rainbows,

have been severely

impacted by West Coast dams,

and eliminated entirely

from some watersheds.

It's not uncommon for a fly

fisherman to go weeks,

or even a season, without

feeling a pull of a Steelhead

but their devotion to these storied

creatures seems to fuel them.

There's a uniquely cold

stretch of water in Oregon,

where a pod of these wild steel head have

gathered for ages to rest before spawning.

These particular fish have

a special friend named Lee

who lives about 30 feet away.

Lee is their guardian,

and he's kept notes on

everything that happens

in and around the river,

for nearly 12 hours a day,

for six months a year,

for more than 13 years.

LEE: This pool is known to a lot of

local people as the "dynamite hole"

because of the two, possibly

three, humanly generations

when dynamite

was readily available,

and no one else was up here.

And it was used in this pool,

possibly as much as two,

sometimes three times a year.

And, of course, for every

dynamiting, there are

probably 20 or 30 snaggings

or nettings or you name it.

To mess with fish that

have passed through the

gauntlet that these

fish have gone through,

after they're up here and home free,

just seems like it's ridiculous to me.

One of the things that never

ceases to amaze me is,

how curious these fish

are about everything.

I think the curiosity that

I see possibly represents

their feelings of vulnerability,

of being in this pool.

Which is, compared to the

Pacific Ocean, a puddle.

And they sometimes respond,

idiosyncratically, to people.

Some people put these fish

in a conniption fit.

Some people have very little

effect on them whatsoever,

and I'd be willing

to be that these fish

have as fine an appreciation

of what's going on

around this pool as I do and perhaps

finer, probably finer, in a lot of ways.

You know the things that have influenced

me in life besides blind accident,

are things of great amusement.

One of the more amusing stories I

read about Steelhead fly fishing

was by Gary Snyder,

and he said something like,

"Well, we started fly fishing on

the Russian River for Steelhead

Then we started taking

the points off our hooks.

Then we started taking

the flies off our hooks

and finally we just

decided to go swimming.

And that's... there's something

very amusing about that,

but very meaningful

and true, too.

I think I needed something

to open my eyes

to the beauty of the North Umpqua and

these emblematic fish that run her.

It would be nice to think

that these fish know me,

because I've been watching

them and their parents now

for 13 years but I think that I would

just be playing a game with myself.

Having Parkinson's has made me,

to a certain degree,

more aware of the fact that this

will have to come to an end,

perhaps sooner than I otherwise

would have liked it to.

It's wonderful to have an

opportunity to do something

as positive as this is,

and as simple as this is.

That is a great gift to me.

Well, I sometimes wonder

what the final day will be

like for me here.

I think that someone

will come along

and continue

to stay with these fish.

Because one thing is clear:

It's too easy to get here

for there not to be

a human presence here at all

times from this point on.

And there will be.

I'm confident of that.

Wild fish are the real deal.

We still have them, thank God.

And hopefully we always will.

The great beauty of wild fish

is we don't have to do

a goddamn thing for them except

leave them the hell alone.

WOMAN: Listen up! Since they've been

put through the chemical bath...

...they are not fit for human consumption.

So we can't eat them.

They are going to be processed

into fish fertilizer,

like that stuff that maybe

your folks put on the garden.

You dump it out, it's really gross looking.

It's super stinky, it makes stuff grow.

GIRL: They're big.

WOMAN: They are big!

GIRL

WOMAN: No, no, no...

That's not why we kill them.

BEN: Just like their wild

cousins, hatchery salmon

sacrifice themselves for the next

generation by returning home to spawn.

But for these Columbia River

hatchery fish,

home is a government-run factory

where they're beaten to death

and artificially spawn

to create a very expensive

illusion of a salmon run.

MONTGOMERY: Historically,

hatcheries have been used

as a way to justify

trying to rebuild fish runs

without actually dealing

with the root causes

of their decline.

Sort of habitat change over

fishing and dam construction.

It's a lot easier, basically,

to adopt the philosophy of,

"Oh, we'll just make more fish."

So I call it

a type of a whack theory

where the question is how many

fish do people want to whack?

And we'll try to produce those

and bring them back.

But that isn't the same

as saving the salmon.

BEN: Bonneville power rate

pairs are saddled with

an $800 million a year burden

to fund the Columbia

hatchery system.

This is now the largest

fishing wildlife program

in the United States.

YOST: We're spending a lot of

money trying to get it right,

but it's a business operation,

and it's a big business.

BEN: Hatchery fish tend

to suck at life and equate

to a bad return on investment

for a handful of reasons.

And I don't think you have to be a

fish biologist to understand why.

If you're raised in a concrete

pool with no predators,

where delicious brown pellets

mysteriously rain down from the sky,

chances are you'll be pretty

naive when you're flushed

out of the tube

into the real world.

MONTGOMERY: If you took

a bunch of suburban kids

and dropped them off in the

middle of the Congo Jungle

and told them to walk

to the coast,

they're going to be

not very well-suited

to survive well in that habitat.

MAN: They release millions

and millions of smelts.

Very, very few of them

come back. Very few.

They're no different than

industrial agriculture.

It's a disaster in the end.

So it is true I was a critic

of the BPA's fish programs

and now I operate

BPA's fish programs.

We have hatchery legal

obligations to provide

hatchery production

to support harvest.

So the question is how do we do

that in the smartest possible way

so we're not

impairing wild fish?

CROW: That's an age old

question we continue to address

and try to resolve is where is

that balance between providing

hatchery stock that can

be fished and harvested

without harming the native

population fish that are there.

If you load up a stream

with lots of hatchery fish

the wild fish that are still

in it can be out competed.

If you look at, say,

the rivers New England,

the fish farm escapees

and hatchery fish

outnumber the wild fish in their

own rivers 100-to-1 or so.

Anybody outnumbered 100-to-1 is going

to have a hard time holding on.

If we keep piling hatchery fish on top

of these salmon recovery efforts,

we're crippling our chances

to really recover these systems.

And the second problem

is they tend to breed

with the wild fish that are

within that watershed

and that's shown to reduce their

ability to produce offspring.

The wild fish are genetically

diverse whereas a hatchery clone,

it's a bunch of first cousins

fucking first cousins.

So you end up with

a bunch of badeeps.

They're immediately being

inbred out of existence.

It really is like trying to replace

Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart

with Yanni, Yanni and Yanni.

No diversity.

There is sort of this deep

psychological need or desire

to control nature

and I think dams

and hatcheries

are the same things.

BEN: The whole purpose

of the $300 million Elwha Dam

removal project was

to restore wild fish runs.

But instead of letting things

happen naturally,

16 million went to the Elwha

Klallam tribe to build a new

fish hatchery and start pumping the Elwha

full of manufactured salmon and Steelhead.

The one common element is to build

the dam you gotta put a hatchery in.

To take it out,

we gotta put a hatchery in.

Makes you kind of wonder

what the real purpose behind

the desire for hatcheries are,

and if there's other reasons

why they tend to be

very popular

than the good of the fish.

I don't like to openly oppose something

that the tribe has a right to do...

...but in this case I feel

like they're making a mistake.

MAN: We're here to celebrate the largest

dam removal project in US history.

An extraordinary opportunity

to watch more than 100 miles

of pristine wild salmon habitat

return to its natural state

as the Elwha reconnects

with the sea for the first time

in nearly a century.

The wild salmon of

the Pacific Ring of Fire,

have evolved to repopulate

themselves in watersheds

devastated by volcanic eruptions,

earthquakes, glaciers, landslides.

They're been doing it successfully

for millions of years.

But because we've somehow

lost our faith in Mother Nature,

we're about to start releasing

inbred, out of basin hatchery stocks

into this

newly restored habitat.

Despite overwhelming evidence showing

the presence of hatchery fish

works as a powerful detriment

to wild salmon recovery,

we insist, once again,

on helping the natural process.

My wish that is that we could

somehow find the patience

and the faith to let Mother Nature

do what she has always done.

Thank you for your time.

[APPLAUSE]

MAN: What do you

think of people

characterizing Floyd Dominy

as an enemy of the environment?

Bulldozer in front of you

paving everything.

How do you feel about that?

I've changed

the environment. Yes.

But I've changed it

for the benefit of man.

BEN: It would be wrong to make

a film about dams in the US

and leave out the story

of Glen Canyon.

In the archeology profession,

there's a very unromantic term

used when the sole purpose

of the job is to document

cultural treasures before they are

flooded by a dam. They call it salvage.

MAN: It was the biggest

single salvage project

up to that point in

American history.

It was the most thorough thing of

its kind ever done at the time.

I think by the end of 1958

when that picture was taken

where we're all standing there

we all had a pretty good idea

that this was really something

very special.

DOMINY: Glen Canyon Dam was

authorized in April of 1956.

Colorado's Storage Project Act.

We didn't have to relocate any railroads.

We didn't have to relocate any highways.

We didn't have to

build the barrier, dikes,

around any little towns. There was

nothing there. Nothing there.

BEN: Did you ever

meet Floyd Dominy?

Oh, there we go. Yeah.

No, I never met him. I'd have cut

his balls off if I'd have met him.

Or I'd have somebody else do it.

BEN: Deceptively called a

lake, Glen Canyon now rests

under the second largest reservoir

in the country that flooded it.

Glen Canyon Dam was essentially a bank

account for the Bureau of Reclamation,

built to generate power that

would fund other projects

and provide water to cool and

nearby coal fire power plant.

An estimated 45 million tons of sediment

is trapped behind the dam annually,

starving the Grand Canyon's

ecosystem downstream.

Every year as Lake Powell

evaporates under the desert sun

and seeps into

the porous sandstone,

8% of the Colorado

River's flow disappears,

one of many factors that

contribute to the river

commonly drying up before it

reaches the gulf of California.

When construction began in

1957, two archeology teams

began a five year push

to document more than

250 culturally significant

sites in lower Glen Canyon.

At the same time, a handful

of devoted river runners

began the process of saying

goodbye to the place no one knew.

The gates were going to close

and we had to at least be

finished with what was

going to be flooded.

It's going to go under but at

least we're going to salvage it

so we'll have the stuff

and the records and the data

so we can write books about it and

we can make museum displays about it

and we can have a dam.

So we can run around

on our boats. It's progress.

Two guys and me,

it seemed to be a pattern.

One of them old enough to

almost be my father and Tad,

an old friend that I'd known

since I was in high school,

and one's a photographer

and the other one knows

the river very well, Frank.

Just friends.

None of this hanky panky.

Nobody's trying to get laid

and nobody's... we're just all

enchanted by what's around us.

BEN: Why were you initially

afraid of it?

FOWLER: Because I didn't know how to swim.

Because I'd never run a motorboat.

Because I'd never

camped out in my life.

Once you get through being

afraid of the country,

it was a magical place.

Forgotten canyon.

That was the high point,

I think.

The people who walked away

about 1,300. 1,310, maybe.

They left the ashes

in the fireplace.

They left great big pots

sitting on the surface

with food remains still in them.

There was a ladder that still

went down into the Kiva,

into the ceremonial chamber.

They had just walked away.

1,000 years ago.

Nobody's been here since.

That doesn't happen very often.

LEE: Well, I actually hear

speaking in the wind sometimes.

You go around the corner, well, everybody

hears a whistle here and there, but no...

I heard more than whistles.

And I said, there's something

queer about this place.

Maybe it's scary.

At first it was.

And then I thought, no,

I think there's just something

here that's supposed

to be part of me.

Hundred-and-twenty-five side canyons,

every one of them different.

Every one of them with

a personality of its own.

We would go around a corner

and spread out before us

would be this incredible site that

A: Nobody had ever seen before.

B: Nobody had touched it.

C: It was utterly

an incredibly beautiful,

everything was in the right

positions,

all the colors were perfect.

All the senses came

just flashing out.

I could hear better,

I could feel better.

I could speak better,

everything just amplified.

BEN: What was it like to walk

naked through Glen Canyon?

[CHUCKLES]

Well, I'm sorry, but I can

hardly explain that.

It was just absolutely the most

natural thing in the world.

And this one I keep to myself.

I never let this one out.

I might decide to let

you guys have it.

You know, I never dream

about it.

It's because it's on my mind

all day long, every day.

There's no...

I don't need to dream about it.

I think about it all the time.

What was lost?

[GASPS] Eden.

I don't think Eden could have

touched Glen Canyon.

DOMINY: We flooded out the

rattlesnakes and the prairie dogs

and a few deer

and a beaver or two.

That's all that was flooded out

when we... and a lot of beauty.

But we created

a lot more beauty.

And we made it available,

which it wasn't before.

We haven't destroyed the world.

We've made it habitable

for a lot more people.

A young man not long ago

said to me he said,

"Are you a hero or a villain

based on your record as

Commissioner of Reclamation?"

I said, "I think I'm a hero or

should be considered it by you

because you wouldn't be here if it

weren't for the development of the West

DamNation (2014) - full transcript