The Founding Fish by John McPhee Page B

insufficiently satisfying that hydroelectric-power turbines spare the atmosphere by reducing the burning of fuels—a standpoint I had first attempted to describe nearly thirty-five years before:

    In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something—as conservation problems go—that is disproportionately and metaphysically sinister. The outermost circle of the Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people—and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. The implications of the dam exceed its true level in the scale of environmental catastrophes. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam. The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force, and possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers. Humiliating nature, a dam is evil—placed and solid.

    During the energy crisis of 1973 and thereabout, the conservationists kept their viewpoint somewhat muffled while small-scale hydroelectric enterprises blossomed by the hundreds at small existing dams and helped meet a national need. By 1986, though, long lines at gas stations were in long-term memory and the environmental movement made a literal breakthrough on dams. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which had before then
been instructed to promote unequivocally the development of hydroelectric dams, was now instructed, by an amended Federal Power Act, to give “equal consideration” to wildlife, recreation, environmental quality, and related factors when renewing licenses or granting new ones. At Edwards Dam, in Augusta, Maine, for example, ocean fish coming upriver to spawn—such as Atlantic sturgeon, Atlantic salmon, and American shad—had received essentially no consideration for sixteen decades: they could not get past the fall line to their historical birthing grounds above the dam. Disturbed by the plight of American shad in another New England river, in 1849, Henry David Thoreau described them “patiently, almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the Corporation with its dam. Poor shad! where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate?” Thoreau would have been thrilled to know that the answer to his questions would one day be handed down by a federal agency called FERC.
    Prodded by activists’ lawyers, the commission soon developed what amounted to a retroactive statement of environmental impact. Edwards Dam had been making electricity since 1913—lately, 3.5 megawatts, scarcely enough to light the warehouse at L.L. Bean. The license was up for renewal. Since “needed and appropriate” fishways would cost three times as much as removing the dam—and the power it produced was hardly a redeeming factor—the commission ordered the Edwards Manufacturing Company to shut down its turbines, deconstruct the dam, and restore to a natural, free-flowing state the public waterway the company had used for profit.
    This was the first big dam in a major river to be ordered out of existence by the federal government while the owner was left holding a wet application. In a national way, the Tree-Free Parking Lot was full of people who hoped for more, manifestly including
Rebecca Wodder and Margaret Bowman, of American Rivers, who would afterward raise glasses of champagne in celebration of “the new era of dam removal”; Amos Eno, of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation; Todd Ambs, of the River Alliance of