Isn't it About Time We Worked Together On Our Rivers?

A fascinating story came out of Los Angeles recently about how the US is moving from the 20th Century era of building dams on rivers to a 21st Century model of tearing them down.

This is particularly true in the Pacific Northwest where mountainous terrain and abundant rivers combined to spur the growth of multiple dams on many rivers in the last century.

Most of the dams were built to provide irrigation water to neighboring farms, but there was a price to pay for them. They killed thousands of fish that were migrating upstream but couldn’t navigate the dams’ concrete walls.

Now, under pressure from environmentalists, governments, and changing economies – most of the farms are now small hobby farms – local authorities are tearing those fish-killing dams down. They’ve found it’s cheaper to pump water from the rivers than to dam them

Lessons for BC

Obviously any resemblance to the situation in BC is purely intentional.  Certainly, we use dams more for power generation than irrigation, and our era of building big fish killing dams ended decades ago.

But the principles remain the same and our responses should be similar.

I’m not saying we should tear down dams – we don’t have that many of them – but we should consider more closely the concept of multiple uses for our rivers.

This means understanding how a river can be used for ALL purposes – fisheries, small-scale power production, recreation. pure aesthetics – instead of the one-decision-rules-all methodology the endlessly warring factions here seem to subscribe to.

Too many special interest groups – protectionist and development – believe that their way is the only way, whether that be some bygone status quo, or complete transformation and change.

And so as a result, instead of collaborating they play political games to advance their causes and stymie the "opposition".

Down South they had wars as well, but the combined efforts of enough people forced them to work together.

Maybe it’s time we did the same here in BC. Let's force these groups to get together and do what's right, not only for the rivers, but for all of us who live here.