Two people have died and three others are injured following a confrontation between indigenous peoples and loggers of an endangered tree in Panama.
The conflict began began on March 30, when a group of Wounaan attempted to burn logging equipment that was being used by a group of loggers working for Maderera company to cut Cocobolo timber, a type of rosewood that’s prized around the world.
The endangered hardwood is often used to make gun grips, knife handles, police batons, high-end billiard cues, marine equipment, chess pieces and various musical instruments (marimbas, clarinets, xylophones, acoustic guitars). It is also sought after in China for use in furniture.
Details of the attack are still limited, but according to recent testimony, one of the loggers began firing a weapon at the Wounaan leader Aquilino Opúa was gravely injured during the attack.
The injured leader, it was said, walked through the mountains for at least an hour before making it back to his community, where he soon passed on. The enraged community quickly mobilized to confront the loggers. Upon their arrival, a second melee followed, which resulted in the death of Ezequiel Batista, one of the tractor drivers.
At least three other Wounaan were injured during the two confrontations.
Prior to these events, Wounaan leaders had issued a statement and ultimatum, giving the Panamanian government until April 19 to issue collective titles to their lands as guaranteed by Law 72 of 2008. They also demanded the complete removal of all settlers in the Chiman zone (who had already clashed with the Wounaan on two other occasions this year) and the end of all indiscriminate logging in the area.
“We demand the government to remove the settlers of our land and take responsibility for what happens, because we are willing to defend our land with blood,” said Edilberto Dogirama, president of the Embera-Wounaan General Congress.
Panama’s National Environmental Authority (ANAM) had then suspended all logging permits for two weeks to avoid any conflicts in the region. It had also ordered an eviction of all persons involved in the timber industry.
At least one logging group–that is, company–did not comply with the official order.
Javier Tejeira, Deputy Minister of Government, yesterday said that Police carried out a weekend raid to evict the remaining loggers.
An inquiry into these events is currently ongoing. So far, no arrests have been made.
Less than a year after being pulled off the Endangered Species Act (ESA), gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the western U.S. are facing an onslaught of hunting. The hunting season for wolves has just closed in Montana with 160 individuals killed, around 75 percent of 220-wolf kill quota for the state. In neighboring Idaho, where 318 wolves have been killed so far by hunters and trappers, the season extends until June. In other states—Oregon, Washington, California, and Utah—wolf hunting is not currently allowed, and the species is still under federal protection in Wyoming.
In Idaho fourteen wolves were also killed by the government using helicopters in a bid to prop up elk herds. Legislators in the state are also mulling a recent proposal to allow aerial hunting and the use of live bait to kill wolves that have harassed livestock or pets. Republican and sheep rancher Jeff Siddoway, who introduced the legislation, said he would have no problem using his dog as live bait.
Wolves are hugely controversial in the region: ranchers point to them as a cause for livestock mortalities, while hunters blame them for a decline in elk. Biologists, however, say the elk decline may be due to a combination of drought, hunting by people, and the return of wolves. By nature wolves prey on young, old, and weak animals, and likely have little overall impact on a healthy herd.
In fact, a recent study study in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains found that wolves were not a primary driver behind elk mortalities. Examining 36 elk calf kills, the study determined that mountain lions were responsible for thirteen (36 percent), black bears killed four (11 percent), wolves also killed four (11 percent), five died of natural causes (13 percent), and ten mortalities were due to unknown causes (27 percent).
However, as top predators, wolves have a big impact on elk and other prey’s behavior, which results in massive implications for the health of an ecosystem. Long-term studies in Yellowstone National Park have recorded notable changes since the return of wolves after a 70-year absence. The findings have shown that wolves are key to a healthy, diverse ecosystem.
Research has found that by keeping elk on the run and in hiding, wolves protect plants and trees that had long been over-browsed, saving some species from local extinction. The presence of wolves allowed trees to grow up along rivers for the first time in decades in Yellostone, protecting against erosion and cooling rivers through shade. In turn, the riverside trees allowed for the return of beavers, which had nearly vanished from Yellowstone. Through dam-building beavers created new habitat for fish. With more trees and shrub cover, songbird populations rose. Scavengers from bear to ravens were aided by wolf-kills. In all, biodiversity and wildlife abundance blossomed.
Less than 2,000 wolves are currently found in seven states of the western U.S., the bulk of them in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. California has only one. By contrast 3,000 wolves are found in northern Minnesota alone.
On August 27, 2009, Dan Cincotta, a fisheries biologist with West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources, was conducting a routine inventory of Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. He was accompanied by a consultant and an environmental engineer from the state’s largest coal and gas company, Consol Energy, which operates a coalmine, Blacksville #2, just outside of Wana, West Virginia. Cincotta was supposed to do electro-fish surveys, whereby the fish are temporarily stunned in order to assess populations, and to take a series of conductivity readings – a basic measure of how much salt is dissolved in water.
When his first reading measured 20,000 micro siemens per centimeter squared (µS/cm), Cincotta thought his equipment was broken; he had never seen readings above 5,000. The Consol consultant took her own reading in the same location but farther from the riverbank. It registered 40,000 µS/cm. Still in disbelief, Cincotta says, “we wandered upstream and found [Consol’s mining] discharge. And in the discharge alone, straight out of the pipe our equipment registered over 50,000 µS/cm,” roughly the equivalent of seawater. Untreated acid mine discharges typically have conductance values of between 1,000 and 1,500 µS/cm.
The following day, a Friday, Cincotta sent an email to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) field office in West Virginia alerting them to the extraordinarily high conductivity levels. Then, over the weekend, the reports of dead fish began. During the next month about 22,000 fish washed ashore (some estimates say as many as 65,000 died). At least 14 species of freshwater mussels – the river’s entire population – were destroyed, wiping out nearly every aquatic species along a 35-mile stretch of Dunkard Creek. “That’s the ultimate tragedy,” says Frank Jernejcic, a fisheries biologist with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. “Fish will come back, we can get the fish back. The mussels are a generational thing.”
The scene was horrific: Many of the fish were bleeding from the gills and covered in mucous; mud puppies, a kind of gilled salamander that lives underwater, had tried to escape by crawling onto nearby rocks; three-foot long muskies washed up along the riverbanks. The die-off marked one of the worst ecological disasters in the region’s history.
“Unless you have actually seen a fish kill, it’s one of the most devastating things that you can imagine,” says Verna Presley, a retired teacher who lives on the creek. “Because you don’t think of the sound of a stream until it’s dead and it’s just the eeriest silence that you can imagine. Everything right down to the insects was killed.”
A nearly three-month-long investigation by state and federal regulators eventually tied the kill to an invasive algae species known as golden algae (Prymnesium parvum). Yet golden algae offered only a partial explanation for the disaster. It may have been the immediate reason for the kill, but it wasn’t the underlying cause. The algae itself cannot survive in freshwater; it thrives only in marine-like environments. Somehow, a freshwater, inland ecosystem had become saline enough for the algae to grow and multiply.
How did this Appalachian stream become so salty? There is no single answer, no smoking gun. The contaminated water might have come from acid mine drainage discharges – outflow of wastewater from nearby coalmines, which has been occurring for decades. It might also be tied to natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a relatively new industry in the region. Or perhaps it was a toxic cocktail of both.
The complexity of the disaster has allowed the company most likely responsible for destroying the stream, Consol Energy, to deny wrongdoing. “Working with renowned biologists, Consol Energy determined its operations were not the cause” of the fish kill, the company said in a 2010 press release. Still, Consol recently reached an agreement with the EPA to pay $5.5 million in civil penalties and construct a brine water treatment plant by 2013.
The EPA and state regulatory agencies have concluded that acid mine drainage from Consul’s coalmine led to the algae bloom. But many area residents, some local conservation officers, and the lead EPA investigator on the case have cast doubt on that assumption. They believe the stresses of coal bed methane extraction and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the Marcellus Shale also contributed to the stream’s worsening condition. They argue that acid mine drainage alone doesn’t explain the changes that occurred in the stream’s composition and that illegal dumping of wastewater and water withdrawals from Dunkard Creek must have played some part in the algae bloom.
“Because you don’t think of the sound of a stream until it’s dead and it’s just the eeriest silence that you can imagine. Everything right down to the insects was killed.”
The fish kill at Dunkard Creek points to a systemic threat that could jeopardize the watersheds of an entire region. As unconventional shale gas production expands throughout the Northeast (conservative estimates are that 60,000 wells will be drilled in Pennsylvania alone over the next two decades) its rivers and streams may be forced to absorb increasingly large volumes of exceptionally salty water – water ten to twenty times more saline than seawater. “Produced water,” as it is referred to by the industry, is a mix of fracking chemicals, water, and dissolved shale formation solids; it represents the largest volume byproduct of oil and gas exploration and production in the United States.
Pennsylvania officials, at least, seem to recognize that improper disposal of produced water would lead to an environmental and public health fiasco. State regulators recently said that municipal treatment plants would no longer be permitted to accept Marcellus Shale wastewater, a major policy reversal. What the state plans to do with the billions of gallons of wastewater created during the drilling process remains unclear.
Dunkard Creek snakes along the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border and eventually empties into the Monongahela River, which flows north to Pittsburgh. The creek was long considered one of the most diverse streams in the Monongahela watershed. Known for its muskellunge fishing, it also supported an unusually rich population of freshwater mussels. The area is also dotted with coalmines, many of which discharge acid drainage directly into the creek and its tributaries. Massive underground mine pools must be continuously pumped either by the companies that own them or, if they’ve been abandoned, by the state. Billions of gallons of treated wastewater are discharged into the Monongahela River basin annually.
In recent years, coal bed methane extraction – the absorption of natural gas from coal seams – along with natural gas hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale have placed further stresses on the river in the form of water withdrawals and wastewater disposal. In Greene County, through which Dunkard Creek runs, more than 250 natural gas wells have been drilled in just a few years. Consol, the largest producer of coal from underground mines in the United States, has described the fossil fuel-rich area as “the continental US equivalent of Prudhoe Bay.” Like Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the region has begun to experience the impacts of large-scale industrial development and resource extraction.
A month after the fish kill, state and federal officials pointed to acid mine drainage – Consol had been discharging the waste directly into Dunkard Creek for decades – as the cause of the algae bloom and fish kill. Found worldwide in estuarine waters, golden algae was first reported in the United States, in Texas, in 1985. Since then it has killed more than 12 million fish in Texas and has slowly spread to several other river basins. The algae responds to certain stressed environments by releasing a toxin that ruptures the tissue cells in the mouths and gills of fish, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to suffocate – hence the desperate attempts of the fish and mudpuppies to escape the river. Until the Dunkard Creek fish kill, however, the algae had never been detected north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“When the fish kill first happened, we in the research community got a lot of calls,” says Jeanne VanBriesen, director of the Center for Water Quality at Carnegie Mellon University. “‘Who do you know who knows anything about golden algae?’ And we all said the same thing: ‘In Pennsylvania why would anyone know anything about golden algae? You have to go to Texas or Florida because it hadn’t been seen here.’” Golden algae has now been found in several waterways in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
How the algae ended up in Dunkard Creek may never be known. Dr. David Hambright, a professor of zoology at the University of Oklahoma, has analyzed samples of golden algae from Dunkard Creek and is investigating the phylogenetic relationships between different strains. “It’s never going to be possible to say, okay, it was a bucket of water on the back of a drilling truck from South Texas,” he told me. “It was very likely wind borne.” Hambright isn’t surprised that the algae has been found in Dunkard Creek. “What’s surprising,” he says, “is that they would find the habitat in which they could live.” But they did. In the case of Dunkard Creek, unusually high levels of dissolved solids, nutrient-rich water, and low flows created a kind of perfect storm for the algae’s growth.
Early assessments of the kill pointed to fracking wastewater as the source of the river’s high levels of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) – a rough measure of salts and minerals dissolved in water. “The elevated levels of TDS and chlorides in the creek indicates oil- and gas-drilling wastewater,” West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) spokeswoman Kathy Cosco said at the time. However, water samples taken later showed that the dominant ion in Dunkard Creek around the time of the kill was sulfate, which is typical of acid mine drainage, and not chloride (although chloride levels were also abnormally high) commonly found in fracking wastewater.
This led the Pennsylvania and West Virginia environmental agencies to conclude that the high conductivity levels that caused the algal bloom were largely the result of acid mine drainage. “There’s no evidence at this point – nor do I think there will be – that any of the problems in Dunkard Creek were related to the oil and gas industry,” says Pennsylvania DEP Southwest Regional Director Ron Schwartz. “There were a lot of different causes for it, but that wasn’t one of them,” he says. Scott Mandirola, director of West Virginia DEP’s Division of Water and Waste Management, agrees. “The Dunkard issue is mine water,” he says. “We investigated this thing from top to bottom and everything we’ve got points to the mining discharges.”
But Consol denies that it is at fault and, as part of its agreement with the EPA, has not admitted liability for the kill. “We do not believe the discharge from our mining operations caused the fish kill,” says Joe Cerenzia, PR director for the company. He points out that Consol has operated the mine for 30 years without incident. “It was the algae that did [it].” The company’s rationale – that it had discharged acid mine drainage into Dunkard Creek for 30 years without any problems – raises more questions than it answers. What, then, changed the river’s composition?
In emails obtained by The New York Times under a Freedom of Information Act request, Lou Reynolds, the lead EPA biologist on the case, wrote: “Mine discharges from those deep mines shouldn’t differ a lot from the normal mining constituents. Something has changed in the mine pools.”
The difference, many local residents speculate, was wastewater from natural gas and coal bed methane extraction. The Marcellus Shale is a sedimentary rock formation that was deposited more than 350 million years ago in a shallow inland sea. These ancient rocks contain chlorides that dissolve during the process of hydraulic fracturing. Abnormally high chloride readings in Dunkard Creek could have come from improper disposal of produced water, residents say.
In 2005 Consol Energy formed a subsidiary, CNX Gas, which specializes in coal bed methane extraction and natural gas drilling. That same year it applied for a permit to operate the Morris Run injection well – part of the abandoned Blacksville #1 coalmine – to dispose of wastewater from coal bed methane extraction. The Morris Run borehole is on the Pennsylvania side of the river, just upstream from the Blacksville #2 mine in West Virginia. CNX’s permit required the company to secure the area with a fence and monitor the cumulative volume of water injected into the well.
An EPA inspection in August 2008 found that the company was violating several provisions of the permit application. Then, in the spring of 2010, one of Consol’s primary contractors, Allan’s Waste Water Service, a wastewater hauling company, was charged with multiple counts of illegally dumping toxic waste, including Marcellus Shale-produced wastewater. According to a grand jury presentment, drivers for the company testified that they dumped drilling wastewater into the Morris Run borehole and into several tributaries of Dunkard Creek. “Drivers testified that Allan’s Waste Water was responsible for receiving, transporting, and disposing of production water from gas wells owned and operated by CNX,” the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office noted. “According to the drivers, during the summer of 2007, CNX’s gas wells began to generate more production water than Allan’s Waste Water was capable of handling. As a result, [company owner] Shipman showed the drivers how to leave open the gas well valves and ordered them to discharge production water into the ground and/or into the nearby waterways,” including Dunkard Creek.
Before the fish kill there was a steady stream of traffic on the narrow dirt road that leads up to the borehole, local residents say. “It was 24/7 trucks going up the road to the borehole,” says Verna Presley, who lives nearby. “They even constructed areas off of the road so that one truck could pull over and another one could get past.”
Martin Niverth, who was Greene County Conservation Commissioner at the time, says that he received numerous phone calls from people living in the area complaining about the traffic on the road to the underground injection well. “There’s trucks coming and going. Well, that kind of volume, you know, what does that tell you? I know what it tells me. You know that you have Marcellus dumping going on down there.” Even Mandirola of the West Virginia DEP concurs: “A lot of Marcellus wastewater went down in that hole,” he says. “There is a separation between those two mines,” says Mandirola. “But there is seepage through the wall. I don’t think anybody really knows how much seepage is occurring, but the Morris Run borehole is right at the edge of that division.”
Presley also says that the haulers were withdrawing water from the river, presumably for use in fracking operations, which require millions of gallons of freshwater per well. “They were pumping so much out of Dunkard Creek that they just put their hoses into the water and left them there for the next truck to come and hook up and pull it out,” she says. “We literally watched the stream go down about 12 inches prior to the fish kill.”
USGS data from further downstream shows a steep decline in river flows during that period. “The decrease in flows at the end of August does look suspect,” Clinton Hittle, a hydrologist with the USGS, wrote in an email.
Niverth, whose first job was at the Blacksville #2 mine loading coal, believes that the unregulated injection of Marcellus wastewater into the Morris Run borehole, illegal dumping, and water withdrawals all contributed to the fish kill. “I fished that stream for years and years,” Niverth says, “and that’s why some of us are still very skeptical, because those mines operated for years. … Then right when the Marcellus comes in this happens. Why?”
Several months before the fish kill, the EPA was in the process of drafting a consent order to address Consol’s security violations at the injection well. But after the fish die-off the company decided to plug and abandon the well. It was still fined the maximum penalty of $157,000 for failing to secure the site, but the underground injection well was never officially linked to the kill.
Dan Cincotta, the biologist who first recorded unusually high conductivity readings on Dunkard Creek, says that salinity levels in rivers and streams in Pennsylvania and West Virginia are a growing concern. Over the last 30 years he’s sampled thousands of streams and conducted several statewide surveys. “All the streams around are much higher in conductivity than they used to be,” he says. Shale gas extraction will likely just add to the problem. Last year the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia released preliminary data from one of the few studies to look at the impact of shale gas drilling on rivers and streams. They found that TDS levels were significantly higher and biodiversity indicators reduced in streams exposed to high-density gas drilling. At the same time, billions of gallons of acid mine drainage must be disposed of annually.
“We’re at the assimilative capacity of the river,” says David Argent, a fisheries biologist at the California University of Pennsylvania who has conducted surveys on the Monongahela. “In other words, you can’t dilute any more in the Monongahela. It doesn’t matter what it is – if it’s Marcellus, if it’s mining, if it’s sewage, if it’s treated sewage, if it’s untreated sewage, we’re there. And I think it’s just a matter of what is it that’s going to tip the scale now and push us over the edge.”
In 2008, TDS levels on the Monongahela were twice as high as the historical maximum since record keeping began in the 1960s, including a period during which the river supported little or no aquatic life. That summer, during a period of low flows, there were reports of foul smelling drinking water and malfunctioning dishwashers in a residential neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh. The DEP issued an advisory warning suggesting that residents drink bottled water (the Monongahela is a source of drinking water for about one million people) and later determined that nine sewage treatment plants were discharging large volumes of Marcellus Shale-produced water into the river. An internal EPA memo obtained by The New York Times described the incident as “one of the largest failures in US history to supply clean drinking water to the public.”
One year later, the high TDS and chloride levels that led to the Dunkard Creek fish kill were detected on the Monongahela, more than 40 miles downstream, in Elizabeth, PA. “I think that was kind of the alarm cry that we needed,” Argent says. “Because I think at that point people really started to question, you know, what’s going on with the water.”
Editor’s note: This year’s biannual Biodiversity COP was in Cali, Colombia, a country with the dubious distinction of topping the list of the number of environmental activists killed by a country in both 2022 (60) and 2023 (79) and will probably have that dubious honor this year with a continuingly rising number of (115) as of November 7th.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — While music played in Bogotá’s streets and a sense of victory filled the air after a long protest, Ana Graciela received a new appointment on her calendar: the funeral of Carlos Andrés Ascué Tumbo.
Nicknamed Lobo (meaning “wolf” in Spanish), the esteemed Indigenous guardian and educational coordinator was killed Aug. 29, while his fellow guardians, the Kiwe Thegnas (or Indigenous Guard of Cauca) were protesting for better security in Cauca, Colombia. The region has increasingly become dangerous with incursions by illegal armed groups.
“The situation is tough. Women and children are being killed [almost] every day,” said Ana Graciela Tombé, coordinator of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca.
The Bogotá protest gathered more than 4,000 people, in what is known as a minga in the Andean tradition, against escalating violence in the region. After eight days, on Aug. 28, the Indigenous communities succeeded in getting President Gustavo Petro to sign a new decree, the Economic and Environmental Territorial Authority, which grants Indigenous territories greater autonomy to take judicial action against violence within their lands.
But the sentiment is bittersweet for the Indigenous Nasa and Misak activists in Ana’s homeland of Cauca, particularly in Pueblo Nuevo, a nationally recognized Indigenous territory (resguardo). They’ve lost a dear leader and role model, impassioned with protecting their ancestral territory, forests and youth from illegal armed groups.
Labeled the deadliest country for environmental defenders in 2023, Carlos, 30, was the 115th social leader killed in Colombia this year, according to the Development and Peace Institute, Indepaz.
Although the police investigation into his death is still underway, members of his community say they believe Carlos was the latest victim of armed groups and drug traffickers the Nasa people have struggled with for more than 40 years. Mongabay spoke with these members of the community, including Carlos’ family and friends, to gather more information on his life and killing that received little attention in the media.
One of Carlos’ close friends leans on the coffin. Image by Tony Kirby.Musicians play Carlos’ favorite music. Image by Tony Kirby.
Pueblo Nuevo is located in the central mountain range of the Andes in the Cauca department, which today has become a hub for drug trafficking and illicit plant cultivation. This is due to its proximity to drug trafficking routes to ship drugs to international markets, the absence of state presence and the remoteness of the mountains.
The loss of Carlos is both physical and spiritual, a close friend of Carlos, Naer Guegia Sekcue, told Monagaby. He left behind a void in the lives of his family which they are trying to fill with love, Naer said, and the community and guardians feel like they lost a part of their rebellion against armed groups.
The ‘Wolf’
Carlos was a member of the Indigenous Guard since his childhood. The children’s section of the Guard is called semillas, meaning “seeds,” for how they’ll fruit into the next generation of leaders protecting their territory.
He met his wife, Lina Daknis, through mutual friends at university. Lina, though not of Indigenous heritage, said she fell in love with his rebellious spirit, devotion and commitment to Indigenous rights. When Lina became pregnant, the couple decided to raise their daughter in the Indigenous reserve, Pueblo Nuevo.
For many in this Indigenous community, their lands and forests are far more than mere sustenance; they hold deep traditional and spiritual significance. Among the Nasa people, one significant ritual involves burying the umbilical cord under stones of a sacred fire (tulpa), symbolically tying them to their ancestral territories. According to the sources Mongabay spoke to, they consider that the lands and forests do not belong to them but are a loan from their children they are entrusted to protect.
Carlos was fully dedicated to this Indigenous Guard, Lina said.
Many days, he would get up in the middle of the night to patrol the territory. While facing well-equipped armed groups, the Indigenous Guard remained unarmed. They carry a ceremonial wooden baton, adorned with green and white strings as symbols of Indigenous identity. Carlos was particularly outspoken against illegal armed groups and coca cultivation. Faced with their invasions and deforestation on their territory, the Guard also took on the role of environmental defenders.
Coca cultivation, as done by armed groups to produce cocaine, not only impacts lives, but also the environment. The traditionally sacred crop is now tied to violence and degradation in the region.
According to Colombia’s Ministry of Justice, 48% of cultivation is concentrated in special management areas, including national parks, collective territories and forest reserves. Between 2022 and 2023, coca cultivation caused the deforestation of 11,829 hectares (29,200 acres) of forested land, according to the latest report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This deforestation increased by 10% in 2023 and threatens biodiversity, placing more than 50 species at risk of extinction, the Ministry of Justice stated at the COP16 U.N. biodiversity conference.
In one instance, Carlos and the Guard destroyed coca plants, took photos and uploaded videos to social media. Shortly after, his family began receiving threats from anonymous people on social media, warning Carlos to be careful. Lina now said she believes these threats came from dissident groups profiting from coca cultivation.
Pueblo Nuevo is located in the central mountain range of the Andes in the Cauca department, which today has become a hub for drug trafficking and illicit plant cultivation. Image by Tony Kirby.
In Cauca, several dissident groups are active, including Estado Central Mayor and the Dagoberto Ramos Front. These factions emerged following the 2016 peace agreement and consist of former FARC guerrillas who either rejected or abandoned the reintegration process. Law enforcement say their presence poses a persistent threat. Most recently, in May, a police station in Caldono was attacked, with local authorities suspecting the involvement of the Dagoberto Ramos Front.
Despite the danger, Carlos never stopped his work.
“I told him to leave the Guard, to go to another country, that they would kill him,” said his mother, Diana Tumbo. “But he didn’t leave us nor the Guard.”
Carlos’ mother calls for the unity of the people in the fight against violence. Image by Tony Kirby.
The seeds of tomorrow
The road to the Carlos’ home is surrounded by peaceful landscapes: small villages, chicken restaurants and hand-built huts. But the graffiti on walls — “FARC EP” (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, People’s Army) and “ELN Presente” (National Liberation Army, Present) — are stark reminders of the violence. Despite the peace agreement signed between the FARC and the Colombian government in 2016, violence has resurged in Cauca.
Carlos saw the armed groups as a destructive force to youth by recruiting minors.
According to the annual report of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, armed groups forcibly recruited at least 71 Indigenous children in 2023. Oveimar Tenorio, leader of the Indigenous Guard, said the armed groups no longer have the political ideology that once defined the FARC. Instead, their attacks on the Indigenous Guard are driven by profit and control of drug routes.
“We are an obstacle for them,” he told Mongabay.
The graffiti reads “FARC – EP,” which stands for “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army.” An man sits on a bench in a square in Jamundí, Colombia. For decades, violence has been a part of daily life for Colombians. Image by Tony Kirby.
Carlos became an educational coordinator, supporting teachers with Indigenous knowledge programs and organized workshops for the schools in the Sath Tama Kiwe Indigenous Territory. He believed in educating youth not just with academic knowledge, but with a sense of pride in their Indigenous heritage and the need to protect their land, Naer said.
Carlos encouraged the young people not to feel ashamed of being Indigenous, but instead to learn from their own culture. He always carried a book by Manuel Quintín Lame, a historical Indigenous Nasa leader from Cauca who defended Indigenous autonomy in the early 20th century.
But Carlos’ approach was one of tenderness; he was always listening to his students and fighting for a better future for the youth. “He was convinced that real change started from the bottom up, through children and the youth,” Naer said.
People show support for Carlos, demanding justice for him. Image by Tony Kirby.
Murder of the ‘Wolf’
His friends and family said Carlos’ actions made him a target.
On Aug. 29, 2024, Carlos went down to the village of Pescador, Caldono, to pick up his daughter from swimming lessons. It was a peaceful moment: mother, father and daughter having a family meal at a small restaurant. Afterward, Carlos went to refuel his motorbike at the gas station.
Suddenly, a stranger approached his wife in the restaurant, she said, asking, ‘Are you the woman who is with the man with the long hair? Something has happened, but I can’t say what.’
Carlos Andrés Ascué Tumbo of the Andes Mountains was shot in the head.
The Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca quickly blamed “criminal structures” linked to dissident FARC groups, particularly the Jaime Martínez and Dagoberto Ramos factions. However, the police investigation is ongoing, and the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Office of the Attorney General), which is overseeing the case, has not shared details with the public or Mongabay.
Mongabay approached Fiscalía General de la Nación and local authorities for comment but did not receive one by the time of publication.
Sept. 1, in a small village perched on a hillside, marked the date of Carlos’ funeral. Fellow members of the Indigenous Guard, wearing blue vests and carrying their batons, lined the dusty roads. They formed a solemn procession from Carlos’ house down to the cemetery with about 1,000 people walking around them through Pueblo Nuevo.
“We want to show our strength,” said Karen Julian, a university student in Cauca who didn’t know Carlos personally but felt compelled to attend his funeral. Along with others, she boarded a brightly painted chiva bus to Carlos’ home village, where he was laid to rest.
Members of the Indigenous Guard, carrying batons, line the streets of Pueblo Nuevo, accompanying Carlos on his final journey to his grave. Image by Tony Kirby.
Children holding flowers led the way of the procession, followed by a cross and then the coffin. A woman rang the church bell and people chanted the slogan to resist armed groups: “Until when? Until forever!”
At the covered sports field at the center of the village, the funeral transformed into a political rally. “I will not allow another young person to die!” Carlos’ mother shouted to the audience. “I demand justice.” She spoke of her worries for her granddaughter, Carlos’ daughter, who stills had many plans with her father. She called on the community to stand united against the violence that has taken so many lives.
As Carlos’ coffin was lowered into the ground, the crowd began to swell, pressing in tightly with his 6-year-old daughter at the front row of the mass. All were watching as the coffin reached its final destination.
“Carlos’ death was not in vain,” Naer said. “The youth understand that they must follow his path. The younger generations will continue preserving the Indigenous traditions while defending our territories and rights.”
The last look: Carlos’ daughter watches her father before he is buried, while his parents cry beside the coffin. Image by Tony Kirby.
Banner image: Carlos’ fellow guardians carry his coffin; they fought shoulder to shoulder to protect the Indigenous territories against illegal armed groups. Image by Tony Kirby.
KLAMATH, CALIFORNIA—Brook M. Thompson was just 7 years old when she witnessed an apocalypse.
“A day after our world renewal ceremony, we saw all these fish lined up on the shores, just rotting in piles,” says Thompson, a Yurok tribal member who is also Karuk and living in present-day Northern California. “This is something that’s never happened in our oral history, since time immemorial.”
During the 2002 fish kill in the Klamath River, an estimated 30,000 to 70,000 salmon died when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation diverted water to farms instead of letting it flow downstream. This catastrophic event catalyzed a movement to remove four dams that had choked the river for nearly a century.
Now, that decades-long tribal-led movement has finally come to fruition. As of Oct. 5, the four lower Klamath hydroelectric dams have been fully removed from the river, freeing 676 kilometers (420 miles) of the river and its tributaries. This is the largest dam-removal project in history.
“This has been 20-plus years in the making, my entire life, and why I went to university, why I’m doing the degrees I’m doing now,” says Thompson, who is an artist, a restoration engineer for the Yurok Tribe and pursuing a Ph.D. in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“I feel amazing,” Thompson tells Mongabay at the annual Yurok Salmon Festival in Klamath, California, in late August, just weeks before the river was freed. “I feel like the weight of all that concrete is lifted off my shoulders.”
A river dammed
The Klamath River stretches 423 km (263 mi) from its headwaters in southern Oregon to the Pacific Ocean just south of Crescent City, California. It was once the third-largest salmon-producing river in the contiguous U.S., sustaining tribes for centuries and later also supporting a thriving recreational and commercial fishing industry.
Six Klamath River dams were built by the California Oregon Power Company (now Portland, Oregon-based electric company PacifiCorp) in the 20th century. The four lower dams, built to generate hydroelectric power, were Copco No. 1, completed in 1918, followed by Copco No. 2 in 1925, the J.C. Boyle Dam in 1958, and Iron Gate Dam in 1964.
At the time, they were seen as marvels of engineering and progress, promising cheap electricity to fuel the region’s growth. Together, these four dams could generate 163 megawatts of electricity, enough to power roughly 70,000 homes and drive development in the remote territory.
However, the dams came at a tremendous cost to the river’s ecosystem and the Karuk, Yurok, Shasta, Klamath and Modoc tribes who have depended on its salmon since time immemorial.
In the decades after dam construction, the river’s once-thriving ecosystem began to collapse and salmon populations plummeted. In 1997, coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) in the Klamath were listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The life cycle of salmon is tied to the free flow of rivers. These fish are born in freshwater streams and migrate to the ocean, where they spend most of their adult lives, and then return to their natal streams to spawn and die. This journey, which can span thousands of miles, is crucial for the genetic diversity and resilience of salmon populations.
Dams disrupt this natural cycle by blocking access to spawning habitat, altering water temperatures, and degrading water quality. On the Klamath, salmon lost hundreds of miles of habitat. Worldwide, not just salmon, but many other migratory fish species such as trout, herring, eels and sea lamprey are blocked by dams.
Dead salmon floating in the Klamath River in 2002. An estimated 70,000 salmon died when PacifiCorp withheld water behind the Iron Gate Dam, sending it to farms instead of letting it flow downstream. Photo from Salmon kill photo archive.Ron Reed, a traditional Karuk fisherman and cultural fire practitioner uses a dip net to fish for salmon on the Klamath river in Karuk territory. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay
“The dams were like a blockage in the river’s arteries. They stopped the flow of life, not just for the fish, but for our people too,” Ron Reed, a traditional Karuk fisherman and cultural fire practitioner, tells Mongabay. He recalls the stark decline in fish populations during his lifetime.
“As I grew up, the fish catching down here became almost nonexistent. At some points I was catching maybe 100 fish in a year,” Reed says. “At the time the Karuk Tribe had more than 3,000 members. That’s not enough for anything. Not even everybody gets a bite.”
Commercial and recreational fishing also took a hit over the years. “Back in the mid-1900s, the Klamath River was known as the single most revered fly-fishing river in California,” Mark Rockwell, vice president of conservation for the Montana-based NGO Fly Fishers International, which supported the dam removal efforts, said in a statement. “Fly fishers came from all over the U.S. and other countries to experience the historic fishery. All that was lost because of the dams and the damage & disease they brought to the river.”
For the tribes, the impact of the dams went beyond fish. The dams created large reservoirs that flooded ancestral lands and cultural sites, particularly village sites and important ceremonial areas of the Shasta Indian Nation in the upper Klamath.
Reed also shared memories of the dangers posed by the dams farther downstream in Karuk territory. “When I was growing up, we were not allowed to go to the river. Before Iron Gate Dam was put up [to control flows from the Copco dams] you had that surge when they made electricity and that fluctuation was up to 3 feet,” he said. “We were losing people along the river. There are stories of our people drowning.”
The movement to undam the Klamath
The fight to remove the four lower Klamath dams began in earnest in the early 2000s, led by the Yurok, Karuk and Klamath tribes. After the 2002 fish kill made national news, the campaign to remove the dams grew beyond a local issue into a national movement supported by environmental NGOs and pro-fishing groups in California and beyond, such as American Rivers, Ridges to Riffles Conservation Group, California Trout, Save California Salmon, and the Native Fish Society.
In 2004, Tribal members and their allies traveled to Scotland to protest Scottish Power, which owned the dams at the time. The Scottish people rallied in support of the protesters, and in 2005 Scottish Power transferred ownership back to PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy. Protesters then took their message to shareholder meetings in Omaha, Nebraska.
Those in favor of dam removal argued that dams had been catastrophic for the ecosystem. The lower dams provided no irrigation, drinking water or flood control. Electricity from the dams did not go directly to local residents but was channeled into the Pacific power grid, which powers homes as far north as Vancouver, British Colombia, and as far south as Baja California. And finally, it would cost more to bring the dams up to modern standards than to remove them.
On the other hand, residents of the Copco community stood to lose the Copco Reservoir, a lake used for recreation and a tourism draw for the area. Others feared loss of energy and water quality problems. The campaign to remove the Klamath dams faced numerous challenges, including entrenched economic interests, local opposition, and complex regulatory hurdles.
Dam removal advocates overcame these obstacles through persistent grassroots organizing, alliances between tribes and environmental groups, and media campaigns that brought national attention to the scientific evidence about the dams’ negative impacts on salmon populations and water quality.
But what really made a difference was proving that removing the dams would cost less than fixing them up.
PacifiCorp and its parent company, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, initially resisted removal, but gradually shifted their stance as the financial and regulatory landscape changed. The turning point came when advocates demonstrated that removal could cap PacifiCorp’s liability and potentially save ratepayers money in the long term.
In 2016, after much negotiation, PacifiCorp agreed to transfer the dams to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC), a nonprofit organization created specifically to take ownership of the dams and oversee their removal. By agreeing to transfer the dams to KRRC, PacifiCorp found a way to get rid of money-losing properties while avoiding uncertain future costs and risks.
In 2022, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the plan, paving the way for the largest-ever dam removal and river restoration project not just in the U.S., but in the world.
Ultimately, dam removal and river restoration came with a price tag of approximately $450 million, funded through a combination of surcharges on PacifiCorp customers and California state bond money. Although Pacificorp hasn’t provided an official cost estimate, they have said it would have cost a great deal more to keep the dams operating safely.
Removing mountains of concrete and earth
Removing four massive dams is no small feat. The process involved years of planning, environmental impact studies, and complex engineering work.
“Removing a dam is like performing open-heart surgery on the landscape,” says Dan Chase, a fisheries biologist with Resource Environmental Solutions (RES), the company contracted to handle the restoration work. “You have to be incredibly careful and precise, or you risk causing more harm than good.”
The physical removal of the dams began in mid-2023 and concluded in October 2024. It was a carefully orchestrated process that involved slowly draining reservoirs, demolishing concrete structures, scooping away the earthen dams, and managing the release of decades of accumulated sediment.
The removal of the dams occurred in a staggered sequence, beginning with the smallest dam and progressing to the larger ones. Copco 2, the smallest, was the first to be fully removed, with the process completed in October 2023.
This was followed by the initiation of drawdown (the controlled release of water) for the large reservoirs behind the three remaining dams, Iron Gate, J.C. Boyle and Copco 1, in January 2024.
The first step was to breach the dam (either with explosives or using existing openings) and lower the water level in the reservoir behind it. This was done gradually to minimize erosion and downstream damage. Contractors used special water tunnels and diversions to control water release.
Dam removal underway on the Iron Gate dam on Aug 15, 2024. Contractors diverted water during the removal process. Drone image by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Ren Brownell, the public information officer for KRRC, describes the day she watched the waters of the Iron Gate reservoir, tinged electric green from toxic algal blooms, drain in just 17 hours.
“It was like watching 10,000 years of geology in a matter of a week. [The sediment] washed away and eventually the Klamath River was revealed,” Brownell, who grew up in the area, tells Mongabay. “I end up looking back on that period as one of my favorite times on the project, because I got to watch a river come back to life and just reveal itself.”
Decades worth of sediment had accumulated behind the dams, most of which was washed downstream by the draining of the reservoirs. Although the river was extra muddy and turbid after each dam removal, experts view this as a positive sign of the ecosystem reclaiming its natural state.
The historic path of the Klamath river reemerges after the Iron Gate dam was removed and the reservoir drained. Native plants can be seen along the, planted by crews after the reservoir was drained. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
With the water levels lowered, heavy machinery moved in to begin breaking apart the concrete structures. Kiewit, the contractor KRRC hired to complete the deconstruction elements of the project, used hydraulic hammers, explosives, and other specialized equipment to demolish the dams, piece by piece.
According to KRRC, the concrete was buried onsite and the earthen material was returned to nearby areas, ideally where it had been originally removed from to build the dams. Hazardous materials were hauled offsite to appropriate facilities and metals were recycled.
Restoring an ecosystem
RES, who is overseeing restoration, now faces the monumental task of restoring the river channel and the 890 hectares (2,200 acres) of land that were once submerged beneath reservoirs.
“It’s not enough to just take out the dams,” says Chase, the RES fish biologist. “We need to help jump-start the ecosystem’s recovery.”
This effort began years before the dams were removed. In 2019, crews of primarily Yurok tribal members began a massive effort to gather seeds from native plants in the surrounding areas, including oak trees, poppies and various grasses.
“We had crews out collecting native seeds, with close to 100 different species collected from the area that we then took to commercial nurseries to grow and harvest and grow out again to the point where we’re now in the neighborhood of 17 to 19 billion native seeds,” says David Meurer, director of community affairs for RES.
A combination of hand seeding and helicopter seeding occurred at all three major reservoir footprints: Copco 1, Iron Gate and J.C. Boyle. (The smaller Copco 2 dam had impounded just a narrow, rocky area that only needed to be reshaped, according to RES.) The first round of seeding served to stabilize the sediment and improve soil. RES says this was a success, though there have been some challenges and surprises, including some rogue horses.
“We did not expect a huge and ever-increasing herd of horses who obviously are going to prefer our forage, which is green and lush, to what they saw in the surrounding hillside,” Meurer says. To address this unwanted grazing, RES is installing a rather long and costly fence around the planted areas.
As the dams came down, crews also began restoring the natural river channel. RES worked with a Yurok construction company to help direct the stream back toward its historic alignment. The team is still fine-tuning the river’s path, using plane-mounted lidar laser imaging to map and guide their work.
Free-roaming horses graze on restoration plantings along the Klamath river. Before dam removal, this area was submerged by the Iron Gate reservoir. The piles of logs shown here will be placed along the river to guide the river path and create habitat. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay
The return of the salmon
Down a gravel road in Northern California, through a thicket of willow trees, around big boulders, and over smooth cobbles, is the place the Karuk Tribe calls the center of the world. A massive wedge of stone, a mini-mountain, stands guard over a section of the Klamath River rife with riffles and rapids.
On the river’s edge, Reed sits atop a massive boulder, praying. A white bird traces slow circles overhead. It’s later summer, a season of ceremony for the tribes. The world renewal ceremony is tied to the upstream migration of salmon.
Reed, a tribal elder, hops spryly across boulders to the base of a small rapid. With practiced movements, he swoops the end of a traditional dip net, a 15-foot loop of willow tree branch with a net at the end, into the whitewater.
Karuk Tribal citizens Ron Reed and Sonny Mitchell catch the first fall chinook salmon of the on the Klamath river in late August. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Within seconds, a fat salmon thrashes in the net. Reed and Sonny Mitchell Jr., a Karuk fisheries technician, let out shouts of celebration. This was the first fall Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) of the season. They carry the fish back to a congratulatory crew and carefully clean it in a trickle of fresh water.
“We’re eating well tonight,” Mitchell says.
Because of their cultural and economic status, restoration efforts cater largely to the needs of the fish. As the physical landscape transforms post-dam removal, eyes are on the river’s iconic salmon.
“We’re already seeing positive changes,” Toz Soto, fisheries program manager for the Karuk Tribe, said, just weeks before the dam removal was complete. “Water temperatures are more natural, sediment is moving downstream as it should, and we expect fish to start to explore areas they haven’t been able to reach in generations.”
This expectation has already become a reality. According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, “On October 16, a fall-run Chinook salmon was identified by ODFW’s fish biologists in a tributary to the Klamath River above the former J.C. Boyle Dam, becoming the first anadromous fish to return to the Klamath Basin in Oregon since 1912 when the first of four hydroelectric dams was constructed, blocking migration.”
And a post by Swiftwater films, the official documentary crew for the project stated, “The first chinook salmon in over 60 years are officially spawning above the former Iron Gate dam on the Klamath, just two weeks after construction wrapped on dam removal…The fish are bright, strong and beautiful. What an incredible few days and a testament to the resilience of salmon.”
Sonny Mitchell Jr., a Karuk fisheries technician, holds the first fall chinook salmon of the year caught by the tribe. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
To improve salmon habitat, the RES team is adding structures to the river and its tributaries, such as fallen trees, to create pools and riffles the salmon require for spawning. They’re also installing what they call “beaver dam analogs,” structures of wood or rock pounded in along streams to slow the water down and catch sediment.
The removal of the Klamath dams will help many types of fish, says Shari Witmore, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who is studying salmon and other fish in the river, told Mongabay. The coho salmon, which are threatened with extinction, will gain about 122 km (76 mi) of river to live in. The project might also bring back spring Chinook salmon, which used to be common in the upper river but have nearly disappeared.
“What we’ve seen in other dam removals is that it takes about three to four [salmon] generations for salmon populations to become sustainable,” Witmore says. “And so for Chinook salmon, that’s 15 to 20 years, and for coho salmon, that’s six to 12 years.”
Pacific lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus), another culturally important species for the tribes, and steelhead (O. mykiss irideus) will gain access to an additional 644 km (400 mi) of river. These fish can swim in faster-moving water than salmon. With more places to live and breed, all these fish species should have a better chance of survival.
And, of course, the whole ecosystem will benefit, says Chase of RES. “We have northwestern pond turtle. We have freshwater mussels. There’s beaver out there. We’ve been seeing river otter foraging … it goes on and on.”
Yurok tribal members and others fish at the mouth of the Klamath River. Commercial salmon fishing was suspended this year due to low numbers, but scientists predict salmon populations will rebound in about a decade. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Tribal knowledge and collaboration
The restoration of the Klamath River has been aided by tribal knowledge, sometimes referred to as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) or, as Reed calls it, “place-based Indigenous science.”
“Certainly, the place-based knowledge component has been vital to us,” Chase says. “Thinking about the species of plants to use, where they’re occurring on the landscape, what species are culturally significant and important that need to be included. That’s been an element of refining and improving our restoration work.”
On the fisheries side, Chase says, the tribes have shared an immense amount of information with the RES team on how fish move through the landscape, the habitats they use, and the ways the different life stages respond to various environmental factors.
One example is related to off-channel habitats, places off the main river stem where fish can go in the winters when stream flow is faster and in the warm summer when cover and food are critical. Tribal knowledge about how to create and enhance these features, and how fish interact with them, has helped RES to restore historic salmon habitats.
Healing rivers, healing people
“The decline of salmon has been linked to higher rates of diabetes and heart disease in our communities,” says Thompson, the Karuk and Yurok restoration engineer and Ph.D. student. “Their return is quite literally a matter of life and death for us.”
The removal of the Klamath dams is a step toward healing historical wounds inflicted on the Native American tribes of the region through decades of genocide and colonialism, according to Thompson and Reed.
However, the fight to remove the dams has taken a toll on those involved. Reed speaks candidly about the mental health challenges he and others have faced during the long struggle.
“I almost lost my family. You’re gone trying to fix the world. I’m going to Scotland. I’m going to wherever, whenever, however. It’s hustle, hustle, hustle. Meanwhile, my wife’s home with six children.” Eventually, he says, “I broke down, suffered depression … I just happened to have a good, strong family that allowed me to kind of come out of it.”
Reed and hundreds of others persevered. “We’re not just fighting for ourselves,” Reed says. “We’re fighting for our children, our grandchildren, and the salmon themselves.”
“These salmon were taken care of by my ancestors, who I had never met and never had contact with myself,” Thompson says. “The salmon are like love letters sent into the future where the love and effort put into the salmon were done so that I could have a good and healthy life.”
Challenges remain
For the Klamath region, the challenges are far from over. Climate change, wildfires, and the legacy of more than a century of colonialism and ecological disruption still pose significant threats.
“There’s been so much degradation over the last 100-plus years from agriculture, forestry, water diversion and grazing,” says Mark Buettner, director of the Klamath Tribe’s Ambodat Department, which is responsible for aquatic resource management in the Upper Klamath Basin.
There are still two smaller dams in the upper Klamath River in Oregon: the Keno and Link River dams. These aren’t hydropower dams, unlike the four that were removed; they provide flood control and water for agriculture, and there’s currently no plan to remove them.
“I want to emphasize that we’re happy that salmon will be back, but we’re not really ready for them,” Buettner adds. “Sure, the fish have free access to the upper basin, but the upper basin habitats aren’t optimal. Young fish could be diverted into irrigation diversions. The Keno dam needs a new fish ladder.”
As I pass through Karuk territory in late August, traveling west toward the ocean, the air is heavy with smoke and fire crews pass regularly in their trucks, serving as a stark reminder of the work that still lies ahead. This includes addressing more than 150 years of colonial fire suppression practices, Reed says.
A sign warns of high fire risk near the Klamath river in late August 2024. More than a century of colonial fire suppression practices, along with climate change has made fires more frequent and severe in the U.S. West. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.As the Klamath River flows by, a wildfire burns in the distance, near Orleans, California on August 18, 2024. This is was just one of many fires burning in the region that day. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
“When settlers first arrived in the Klamath region of what is now Northern California, they found forests with enormous trees, wooden homes and structures, acorn orchards, abundant plants, berries, fish, wildlife and clean water. All of it was made possible by Indigenous peoples’ frequent use of fire on the landscape,” Russel Attebery, chair of the Karuk Tribe, writes in a opinion piece for news outlet CalMatters. “California is not just fire-adapted, it is fire dependent.”
However, these controlled or cultural burns were outlawed in 1850 and are still “unjustly criminalized,” Attebery writes. The lack of prescribed burns, coupled with warmer and drier conditions from climate change, has led to more severe and frequent wildfires.
Wildfires are taking a toll on the Klamath River. Debris flow from last year’s McKinney Fire killed thousands of fish. Fires can heat up the river, making it too warm for cold-water fish like salmon. They also send silt and ash into the water, which can choke fish and smother their eggs. Sometimes, the erosion from fires even changes the river’s path. The ecosystem evolved with fire, but not at the frequency and severity of modern fires.
Reed and other traditional fire practitioners are being asked by academics and fire-management agencies to advise on traditional burning practices, and restore balance.
The irony of Native peoples being asked to consult on how to restore the land that was stolen from them isn’t lost on Reed. “I think we’re leading the nation with teaching cultural fire, through a faith-based process and hopefully this co-production of knowledge,” he says. But, he adds, “it’s kind of like, OK, they took our gold, they took our timber, they took everything, and they’re still taking our knowledge.”
Karuk Tribal members Ron Reed and Sonny Mitchell in “the center of the world” by the Klamath River. The air is smokey from nearby forest fires. As a cultural fire practitioner, Reed has been asked to teach and share traditional knowledge in academia and with government agencies but says Indigenous people are seldom justly compensated for their knowledge. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
A cautionary tale
Many of the people I speak to cast the story of the Klamath dams as one of hope, but also as a cautionary tale for regions around the world considering large-scale dam projects.
While dams can provide benefits such as hydropower and water storage, they also levy significant environmental and social costs. Moreover, all dams have a finite lifespan, and their eventual removal is an expensive and complex process that planners often ignore.
“Dams were never meant to be pyramids,” says Ann Willis, California director of the NGO American Rivers. “They’re just infrastructure, and eventually, infrastructure ages. You can either be proactive about repairing, retrofitting or removing it, or you can deal with the far greater costs of a catastrophic failure after it happens. But there’s no question that one day it will fail.”
In many parts of the world, large dam projects are still being proposed and constructed. The lessons from the Klamath suggest these projects should be approached with caution, with full consideration given to long-term environmental and social impacts, as well as the inevitable costs of decommissioning at the end of the dam’s lifespan.
Site of the J.C. Boyle dam in Oregon after dam removal. Drone photo by Mongabay.
“No single agency is responsible for removing a dam, and [there’s] no requirement for dam owners to save funds for its removal,” Willis says. “The process of removing obsolete, disintegrating dams can take decades while people navigate a web of bureaucracy and look for funding. As time goes on, the risk of failure increases, which is incredibly dangerous as most dams would cause significant loss of human life and economic damage if they failed.”
As of February 2024, more than 2,000 dams have been removed across the U.S., most of them in the past 25 years, according to American Rivers. But more than 92,000 remain standing. Willis says she hopes the success of the Klamath dams’ removal and restoration project can serve as a blueprint for similar efforts around the world.
“The Klamath is significant not only because it is the biggest dam removal and river restoration effort in history, but because it shows that we can work towards righting historic wrongs and make big, bold dreams a reality for our rivers and communities,” Willis says. “Dam removal is the best way to bring a river back to life.”
Ren Brownell, public information officer for Klamath River Renewal Corporation, stands over the Copco 1 dam removal site. KRRC was formed to oversee the dam removal process. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
‘Anything is possible now’
Amid the world’s tallest trees, where the Klamath River meets the Pacific Ocean, the annual Yurok Salmon Festival is in full swing when I arrive. On the main street, outside the Yurok Tribal Headquarters in the town of Klamath, California, dozens of booths are selling arts and crafts. There’s music, dancing, games, and a palpable sense of joy in the air.
But something’s missing this year: The salmon. Due to low numbers, both tribal and commercial fishing have been suspended this year.
Despite this absence, attendees express hope and a sense that change is coming. “We are delighted about the dam removal and hope for the return of the salmon,” says Yurok artist Paula Carrol. “We are salmon people. Without salmon, who are we?”
“This is still a celebration,” Thompson says, “and anything is possible now.”
A parade rolls through the town of Klamath, California during the annual Yurok Salmon Festival. This year, there was no salmon. Still, many attendees were hopeful for the salmons’ renewal post dam removal. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.
