It's time to remove the four dams on the lower Snake River

Four dams on the lower Snake River in the Pacific Northwest have pushed wild salmon to near extinction. These four dams do not produce that much energy, they can be removed without damaging the river too much, but the Feds stuck with the dams are good dogma pushed through a plan that did not involve removing the dams. However, a federal judge found the federal salmon recovery plan for the Columbia and Snake Rivers illegal and returned it to the Bush administration for revision.

Background:
When Lewis and Clark explored the Pacific Northwest in the early 1800s, nearly 16 million salmon filled the Columbia and Snake Rivers - so many that the explorers thought it would be possible to walk across the river on their backs. Snake River salmon are the longest migrating salmon in the world, making an astounding journey nearly 900 miles to the ocean and later returning upstream to spawn in the tributaries where they were born.

But since four dams were built on the lower Snake River between 1961 and 1975, wild salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest have declined by 90% and as few as 7,000 remain. By some estimates, certain salmon species may be extinct by as early as 2016.

The Federal Salmon Plan, developed during the Clinton administration, makes use of a variety of small protection measures, but the plan falls short of removing the dams, which scientists think is the best way to recover the salmon. As part of this plan, fish are trucked or barged around the dams at taxpayers' expense. Despite spending $3.3 billion on such efforts over the past 20 years, salmon populations have not increased.

For the first two years of the plan's existence, only 30 percent of the required steps were taken, despite more than $800 million in federal spending. Finding that the federal plan would likely never be implemented, the District Court of Oregon ruled it invalid in May 2003, giving federal agencies one year to draft a new plan that will actually restore healthy salmon runs.

Please take a moment to ask the Bush administration to implement the most scientifically credible and economically sensible salmon restoration measure - removal of the four lower Snake River dams. Then ask your family and friends to help by forwarding this URL to them.

To take action, click on this link or paste it into your web browser:
http://pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=407&id4=ES