The largest dam removal in history stirs hopes of restoring tribes' way of life | Hacker News Reader

The largest dam removal in history stirs hopes of restoring tribes' way of life

latimes.com

27 pointsPaulHoule58 comments

Why is it good to restore the tribes' way of life rather than have them catch up and adapt?

This would be the restoration of some aspects of the old way of life. Nobody really wants to go back to the old ways, living cold and hunting with wooden weapons. This is about the restoration of some older cycles, not an abandonment of the modern world.

Because letting people do what they want is usually better than "having them" do something.

Dam removal is practiced across the world to bring rivers back to life. This happens in England as well. It prevents the accumulation of agricultural runoff, and increases fish habitat. This is an environmental project that benefits everyone except the few people who had "lakeside" property on the artificial dam reservoir.

I think there is often a bias that when one hears "tribe" they assume that someone is living as a stone age hunter gatherer. This is not the case. There are a lot of people who live within social organizational structures that are referred to as tribes but who live in Los Angeles, are crypto-bros or one's doctor.

That members of tribes are part of what we call "modern" society is not to say that they do not have traditions. Everyone has traditions. One only needs to travel a very small amount to realize that they do not live outside of culture. They realize this because they can see that other peoples' cultures are different than what they are used to. One's entire notion of being "nontraditional" may be demonstrably drawn from their own particular cultural traditions.

In general, most people I know, all else being equal, feel like people having traditions that they may choose to celebrate without restriction is mostly positive. Like, telling kids from the a quasi-Christian European tradition that they can't have Christmas anymore seems wrong. If the kids complain, it seems weird to say "catch up and adapt".

Ok, so in this the case of the article there is a river. So there is a natural resource involved. At some point there were some people living along a river and then other people came in and imposed something on them that was supposedly for the good of society. What is good for society isn't always about the maximum amount of electricity one can produce. Sometimes it is about compassion. Being a more compassionate society seems like a more important goal to me than being the society with the highest energy output, not that energy isn't very very important. Indigenous people often, though not always, feel that changes to their life ways were foisted on them. There are changes that they like (chocolate ice cream) and there are changes they feel it was unfair or cruel to have to make (not being able to speak their own language even at home). Just like a Christian, Italian or Bostonian might have their idiosyncratic ways of doing things that make them feel connected to their family and community, indigenous people do too. That does not make them primitive. It seems reasonable and kinder if a society cares about these traditions and is not dismissive of them. It makes sense that when society decides whether it is good or bad to have a damn that it is not just a question of electrical output but compassion to the people affected.

You'll probably get a bunch of responses about colonization, but it is a good question.

In Alaska it is even more of an issue. There are lots of hidden costs related to AK Natives and others living in remote villages accessible only by plane or snowmachine, such as state and federal subsidies for airports, etc. Try googling "Alaska bypass mail" and go down that rabbit hole.

There may be good reasons for all that cost, such as letting Alaska natives keep some heritage, keeping sovereign claim over remote lands, etc., but it does deserve a conversation about what it is costing to have them out there versus living on the road system at least. I think it's one of those "let sleeping dogs lie" sort of thing.

“Catch up and adapt” has some serious colonialist connotations. This isn’t an objective statement.

European newcomers also catch up and adapt all the time. It's not like they're living the way they did in 1910s or 1960s.

It's disingenous to suggest that indigenous tribes should have some fixed set of behaviors. They have their culture, but cultures evolve and it would be weird if you forced them to have the averaged lifestyle of their tribe (but possibly the one none of their own ancestors had) and speak "their" language, in an averaged dialect that none of their actual ancestors spoke.

It's disingenuous to suggest that if the tribe tries to restore a river ecosystem that some other party is trying to force a lifestyle on them.

I do not disagree with that. No reasons to have old, deteriorating, ecologically questionable dams around.

It is an objective statement. In fact it is empirical. Those that are left behind die. How can it be anymore objective?

There is obviously a subjective value statement implying one way of life is preferential to another. It’s like when people say those in rural areas need to just move into cities because the economy of scale and “modern” jobs.

Also, “those left behind die” is a bit of a strawman. I don’t think anyone is saying they need to revert to stone-age societies, or give up modern medicine, etc. And I’m the end, we all die so it really comes down to living the life one wants to live.

This is ridiculous. Those that adopted the gun annihilated those that didn't. No one cares about the losers way of life.

Well, there’s a lot of criticisms of the “guns, germs, and steel” hypothesis. Many of the sources used feel like it’s an oversimplification, which you seem to simplify even further.

Society is complex and deserves some more nuance than you give it. A might is right ideology misses an awful lot in terms of what humans value.

Imagine if we applied the same logic to white people when projects like rural electrification bills were debated.

Shitty logic, this tribe have electricity and want to restore the health of their river. Removing this dam is progress. They aren't being held back, they're moving forward. Complaining about this is idiotic. Do you people like dead rivers? Dead rivers are supposed to be something people accept and move on from, instead of problems to be fixed? What the hell.

My response was about the logic of "help catch up and adapt" is a colonialist dogwhistle, not about the specifics of what was being argued.

Tribesmen are also U.S. citizens, which means the federal government has as much responsibility for their welfare as yours. Which makes it a question worth thinking about. What is best for their welfare? I certainly don't know, but it doesn't seem disingenuous and baldly colonialist to wonder if "restoring their way of life" is automatically the most desirable. It might be traditional, but maybe it also props up old power structures and perpetuates low standards of living.

I'm stepping into a minefield, I'm sure.

The Federal government is responsible for establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

It is NOT responsible for standing en loco parentis for adult American citizens.

me: What is best for their welfare?

you: promoting the general welfare

I don’t understand what we disagree on.

Promoting the welfare of the population in general does not encompass paternalistically "deciding what's best for" a group of people.

It's the difference between a manager going out of their way to give you the tools to succeed and going out of their way to micromanage you, decide "what's good for you" in the workplace, and Goddammit why didn't you fill out your time tracker?

It’s in the Taxing and Spending Clause, it’s not as broad as to give powers to “do whatever we want as long as we can tie it to the welfare of a group.” The closest clause to that is the commerce clause.

Removing the dam is best for their welfare and the welfare of the river ecosystem, that's why they've fought for it. Or do you think you know better than them?

The only thing I think I know is not to blindly trust powerful voices advocating for a return to traditional values; they aren’t always acting in the best interests of the group.

I favor the dam removal and I hope the fish recover. But I still find your straight-line thinking unsettling.

Of everything read in this thread, this is really what you find unsettling? Not the anti-indigenous claims that have been repeated for hundreds of years, how we know better than them, being repeated here again?

> The only thing I think I know is not to blindly trust powerful voices advocating for a return to traditional values;

Stop being disingenuous, they're trying to save a river ecosystem, not legalize wife beating.

> the federal [US] government has as much responsibility for their welfare as yours [any other US citizen's].

You could argue that is colonialist though. It's a sailed ship obviously, but it is essentially the same as my (British) ancestors going to India and 'improving' her with tea plantations and railways, 'civilising' her, etc., isn't it?

India were going to eventually cover itself with railroads and monoculture plantations in any case (who didn't?), so I don't see why we cannot argue in good faith whether the British arrival was beneficial or deleterious. It would require scientific rigor instead of either one of nationalisms, though.

I think it's true India would've developed without Britain (isn't the alternative certainly colonialist?) - but that doesn't mean imposing things, even if we somehow know they're exactly the same things as would've been decided on anyway, isn't colonialism.

In fact it's maybe the height of 'we know best' to take over saying 'just trust us you were about to decide this anyway'!

I'm not sure it is dramatically different from people in London imposing railroads on the English countryside.

It's colonialism all the way down and the apparent ironic fact that British still cannot get out of other nations' hair while they now peddle the colonialism narratives.

They cannot keep away from be interminged in countries' affairs while lecturing the "natives" about the colonialism, whose narratives also come from London and are as unnatural in their new habitat as these tea plantations in India were.

We will see some real colonialism understanding when the UK disengages from world affairs and behaves like an ordinary 50 million strong country like Argentine or Vietnam. That did not happen yet, so you can stop feeling bad because of India 200 years ago and get a contemporary reality (and privilege) check.

Case of point, The Guardian has all kinds of Opinions about Russia and Palestine. Why don't they take most interest of the affairs of N1 9GU?

The Constitution says for the “general welfare” (ie for the greater good, so it may go against your point) and it’s related specifically to taxation.

What's best for their welfare? Just ask them...

Exactly. It is time to evolve. Move forward.

I am glad you asked that here on Hacker News. To begin with you pose an intere

Sounds like electricity is going to get more expensive, and salmon cheaper. I'm glad California is pro solar, that helps a lot.

As the article states, the three dams produced less than 2% of the electricity of that utility. It won't have any meaningful impact. Unfortunately your salmon will likely remain farmed salmon..

As an environmentalist myself, the destruction of hydro-electric dams is low-IQ environmentalism.

Hydro is green, renewable energy with solid baseline capacity. The environmental benefits of a lake/reservoir far exceed the benefits of a river. The “environment” is more than just the unidimensional needs of a single species (salmon), and the ignorance on display every time hydro comes up in the “environmentalist community” would be astounding if it wasn’t so routine.

Not that it matters, because every dam we tear down will accelerate the carbonization of the atmosphere and acidification of the oceans your precious salmon need to live in anyways.

It’s hard to not be conspiratorial when clean, reliable energy like nuclear and hydro are demonized. Especially with ridiculous headlines like “restoring a tribe’s way of life”. Like really, how will their “way of life” be restored when the carbon-triggered methane runaway happens and turns the entire region into a desert?

Will this particular dam alone lead to this outcome? No. But decades of inmates running the asylum certainly will.

The power output of dams like these is negligible. The Grand Coulee Dam they are not. Besides, they were reaching EOL. It would be homicidally negligent to leave such aging dams in a very earthquake-prone area.

The damn that was removed generated 27MW. California has nearly 40,000MW of solar power. Los Angeles alone has 650MW of solar.

How many MW did those panels make at night when the river was still flowing?

It's silly to simply compare nominal power outputs. Different generation sources have different characteristics. If you support removing hydro you better support constructing battery storage with you wallet because just adding more solar panels does not fill the same niche

> How many MW did those panels make at night when the river was still flowing?

Probably similar to the dam’s output during some of California’s multi-year severe drought.

Hydro can be variable too.

But crucially, probably decoupled in their variability.

If GP's numbers are correct I don't think I even need a napkin to say solar + battery is more cost effective.

If this was true we wouldn't have any dams, the market would see to it pretty quickly.

It's not, at least not yet.

We wouldn't have any new dams, or do significant work on them, maybe.

However there's one approved for Scotland (Coire Glas) to do 30GWh of storage, generating 1.5GW. UK wide total storage capacity currently 24GWh apparently, so it absolutely competes.

Maybe this one just wasn't cost effective to modernise/repair, the geography would never allow much, or cheaper to start from scratch, or something.

They make bigger diesel generators than that. There’s cogen systems that are bigger.

27MW is, in the context of American or even Californian power, roughly 0

> As an environmentalist myself, the destruction of hydro-electric dams is low-IQ environmentalism.

Are modern environmental standards the result of low-IQ environmentalism? Because TFA buried the lede, and you, the self-proclaimed environmentalist are attacking "low-IQ environmentalism" for what's ultimately just a pragmatic business decision:

  > The Portland-based utility - part of billionaire Warren Buffett’s 
  > conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway - agreed to remove the aging dams after
  > determining it would be less expensive than trying to bring them up to 
  > current environmental standards.

It just so happens the tribes are celebrating the removal and restoration of their traditional way of living, so I guess we should blame them for it.

The dam is at the end of its useful life. The real reason of it being torn down is that it is more cost effective than refurbishing it.

This is probably the most depressing part about hydro. A lot of it is old and the environmental damage is done. So now everywhere in the US is being faced with either expensive refurbishments, loss of generation capacity, or the potential for yet another "this dam broke down and flooded a city" story.

I'm not really for adding new hydro, but removing old hydro feels like such a waste.

The US is addicted to kicking the can down the road in terms of deferred maintenance on so much infrastructure.

>Hydro is green, renewable energy with solid baseline capacity.

It's also the most dangerous, by an absurd margin. Dam collapses have killed more people than every other power generation source combined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Chernobyl was peanuts compared to this.

It’s important to understand that dams also provide other aspects besides power generation. Many areas rely on them for flood plain management, irrigation etc. so it may be disingenuous to consider all of the negatives as a consequence of hydro power (meaning its not a great comparison)

Wild Salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest are on track for extinction, in no small part due to the loss of habitat from dams.

Also due to chemicals in car tires which eventually washes off the roads and into streams, rivers, oceans.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/03/tire-related-chem...

I don't feel like it is unintelligent ("low-IQ") to believe that there are meaningful environmental impacts to hydro-electric dams. Recognizing that hydro-electric may cause more harm than good in some cases seems like a position that is based on evidence. Below I linked to an article. It may not be the very best article but it is one that someone can find with just a brief internet search of "environmental impacts of hydroelectric dams". It cites reliable sources and carefully performed studies. It discusses attempts to measure the costs and benefits of building hydro-electric infrastructure:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-022-00018-9

That article is not at all against hydro-electric but it does present the idea that a hydro-electric strategy should be informed by a variety of factors and may not always be a good choice. If it is not always a good choice to build a dam, it seems very reasonable to suspect that it may not have always been a good choice in the past, either.

> The environmental benefits of a lake/reservoir far exceed the benefits of a river.

I don't understand why, if preserving species diversity, for instance, is one goal of environmental policy, how one could simply say that one type of habitat is strictly better than another. That seems to be contrary to everything I've ever heard about sustainable ecosystems and species diversity. I'm not an expert.

I'm not an activist, myself, but I'm very close to indigenous and environmental activists who are concerned about the impacts of dams in the Western Amazonian region. Salmon are never considered all that relevant there. Why do you think that all environmentalists who fight dams only care about salmon?

Hydrodams ruin rivers. From the removal of sand, algea, fish, etc.

If you were an environmentalist talking about low-IQ issues you would be better off complaining that nuclear was ruined by misguided environmentalists and extreme-regulation.

Agreed- the anti-nuclear and anti-density environmentalists are basically fossil fuel maximalists.

This is a great project though

No one is demonizing hydro here. You don't know what you're talking about. The environmental benefits of dam removal far exceed the hydro generation capacity in all the cases where people actually decided to remove a dam. Most removed dams don't generate hydro anymore, and some never did. They were remnants one wants to deal with the expense of removing.

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