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I was reading about a dam demolition in Washington a while back and the bit that really helped me wrap my head around it was this:

Salmon are one of the primary pipelines to transfer calories from the ocean inland.

Those calories—by that I mean a shorthand for "nutrition"—naturally get washed from land out to sea by stuff dying in rivers, rainfall, etc. Without some engine that cycles that material back into inland areas, you don't have a functioning cyclic sustainable ecosystem.

Salmon get eaten by bears whose poop feeds plants that are eaten by herbivores. An incredible amount of the natural world in salmon areas depends on this pipeline running. When you stop the salmon, you stop the entire circulatory system.

That’s an impressive fact. I would have guessed birds would do most of that work.

The birds probably help a lot too, particularly eating/spreading the salmon scraps the bears leave behind.

IIRC there's entire forest ecosystems that evolved to be fertilized by hunted salmon.

https://web.uvic.ca/~reimlab/salmonforest.html

Salmon are also the mainstay protein for the Yurok tribe. No salmon, no tribe, was their recent statement on the matter.

Edit: Sorry, wrong tribal name, it's the Yurok here at the mouth of the Klamath.

I’ve been making this case here in BC since the BC Hydro company began pushing hard for a new large dam in Northern BC.

It’s remarkable how well hydro was greenwashed.

People think I’m an idiot when I saw we should generate power another way. They’re incredulous. How could a dam even cause environmental damage? It’s such a limited scope. We have ways of allowing fish to spawn past the dam. No big deal.

Here we have environmentalists who are pro hydro and anti-nuclear. It’s surreal.

It's depressing that a modern country like Canada would even consider building a major dam anymore :-(

If you think that's bad, wait until you here about what the Canadian government wants to do with the vast taiga forests.

My (unscientific) observation is that some Canadians get stuck in a frontier mentality, kind of thinking that the resources and resilience of their huge and sparsely populated landmass is inexhaustible. Especially with forestry, they do stuff all the time that would never fly in the US.

Forestry is a disaster here. Especially when you consider how integral those forests are to our water cycle. Deforestation has direct and significant impacts on local and global cycles.

As models become more detailed we only discover more ways this matters. It’s unsettling to see here in western Canada. Knowing we’re doing things like cutting trees to turn into pellet stock to get burned in the UK… and we justify it as “it’s not like those trees were valuable as timber”. No, they were valuable for capturing moisture, encouraging rain, and keeping our watersheds working.

What’s the plan for the taiga?

Another thing I’ve been considering is that we take this position because the bleak reality is that our rate of resource extraction is not scalable, but it’s the only thing that has ever allowed Canada to become relatively wealthy. We are not good at producing things of value. We do it, but not nearly as much as we should.

If we pull back on extraction, we can expect to live poorer lives unless we can participate in the global economy in a way in which we create things of value rather than just mine, deforest, frack, drill, and so on at huge scales.

The major dam in Northern BC kind of makes sense in the sense that they've already got 2 major dams on that river already, but it poisons everything. It's not just salmon, it's methylmercury accumulation in the fish in all the rivers in the surrounding area, it's high levels of methane release as trees decay for a hundred plus years in anaerobic environments because they didn't clear the forest before flooding the area that's not Williston lake. Blocking of sedimentation makes it so the rest of the river is less actually habitable for spawning fish as well, so double whammy on that front, since not only is the sediment blocked, the water is still flowing, eroding what's left.

I actually thought it made sense for a few years at first, but you’re right. The massive list of significant externalities rapidly makes it seem like it isn’t worth it.

Worth noting too is that the push for more energy was actually generated in large part by resource extraction industry such as fracking, so the megawatts generated would be going towards further generation of high-carbon and otherwise environmentally destructive energy generation.

I’m not kidding myself, I know BC is in a rough spot in terms of meaningful GDP growth and outside of real estate, things like this are going to make a significant impact on the bottom line. I know modern life requires a lot of energy.

It’s so disheartening to see our province race to the bottom constantly. We’ve got opportunities to be a model province, to set an example, invest in our kids and future generations through new industries and cleaner energy generation. We consistently choose not to. We lean on hydro like a crutch and increasingly turn to natural gas as well. Our kids will resent us for it, theirs will too, and the hole we’re digging will take that much longer for them to climb out of.

I think a weird irony about BC is that we’re surrounded by some of the most overtly stunning and beautiful landscapes in the world, but we’re bizarrely content to destroy them and remain ignorant of their ecologies and how critical they are for our collective well-being. You’d think we’d praise the land here for what it has given us, but… No, even with tourism being such a large industry with incredible growth potential, we behave as though nature is an endless faucet of wealth generation.

Dams produce huge amounts of methane when organic materials in the dam shore line get exposed to high and low water.

Oregon hires some cool economists. Josh Lehner, here in Bend is just full of interesting information about the state. The Oregon econ blog is good reading and not technical or anything https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/

I think it's pretty clear from the comments that the hackernewses are simply assigning zero value to the fish. Which ironically aligns them with the big wealthy interests of decades long past: the rich farmers who advocated for building these dams.

Its the brainworms asking, "What do I get out of this?".

Folks have been tricked into thinking that things can/should only exist if they serve some productive force.

I guess that is a point of view, but even from that perspective you can eat the fish.

Right, fisheries is one of the big industries in the US, not to mention that HN also whinges about overfishing in other articles

> Which ironically aligns them with the big wealthy interests

What is ironic about that do you ever read comments on this site?

Every downstream effect depends on a river.

Just FYI, you are shadowbanned, Daniel. Most of your comments show up as dead.

>So please don't do the hackernews reflexive contrarian thing and be all "well look at those idiots don't they see we need every bit of green hydro power that exists?" because the real analysis being doing is years worth of sophisticated measurement and modeling. You haven't somehow outsmarted that with your off the cuff observation.

You can't fight religion with logical analysis.