Is This the Beginning of the End for Damming America's Big Rivers?

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted July 2, 2007.

Usually shareholders meetings don't include traditional Native American salmon bakes and intertribal healing dances. But at the recent shareholders meeting for Berkshire Hathaway -- owned by investment icon Warren Buffett -- Omaha, Neb., got a taste of native culture -- all the way from the Pacific Northwest.

Yet the tribes -- the Karuk, Yurok, and Hoopa of California, and the Klamath Tribes of Oregon -- weren't there to sing Buffett's praises like most of the attendees. They were there to introduce people to threatened native cultures and let Buffett know he made a really bad investment a few years back when his subsidiary Mid-American Energy Holdings bought power company PacifiCorp.

By doing so, Buffett, who is known as one of the world's savviest investors, landed himself in the middle of a social justice and environmental conflagration. While Buffett's investments are making many millionaires, his company is impoverishing the people of the Klamath Basin in Southern Oregon and Northern California who depend on a now ailing Klamath River for their livelihoods and cultural traditions.

The tribal members, who are part of a coalition of native tribes, environmentalists and fishermen, were at the shareholders meeting to pressure PacifiCorp to help save near endangered salmon populations by removing four hydropower dams on the Klamath River, which snakes from the central Oregon-California border, out to the Pacific Ocean, 20 miles south of Crescent City.

The dams are blocking fish passage to necessary spawning grounds and water trapped behind them creates a bath tub affect, heating up the river and causing toxic algae blooms that threaten the health of salmon populations, which tribal members depend on for food and fishermen depend on to make a living. Today 90 percent of the members of the once resource-rich tribes like the Karuk are living below the poverty line, and downstream fishermen have seen their income fall by up to 90 percent in recent years.

If the dams come down, it would be the biggest dam removal project in U.S. history and would revitalize one of the country's best salmon rivers and one of the region's last subsistence economies.

The prospect used to be a big "if," but lately the coalition has been gaining momentum and is backed by local, state and federal agencies. They even have environmental advocate Robert Kennedy Jr. and top lawyer Joe Cotchett (who is currently representing Valerie Plame in her suit against the Bush administration).

The coalition believes they are solidly in the right in terms of environmental concerns, social justice and even economics. All they really need is for the power company to see the light -- and they are hoping Warren Buffett can be the spark.

"We have been hoping Warren will realize these dams are a bad investment and realize that they are causing disease and poverty all over the north coast and southern Oregon," said Regina Chichizola of the organization Klamath River Keeper. "We are hoping that he will realize that if he is going to be a philanthropist, trying to solve issues of disease and poverty in third-world countries that these dams are causing the same issues that he is trying to fight in other places."

A river, a culture threatened

As a massive Omaha arena was filled with 27,000 shareholders, Warren Buffett took questions from the crowd -- an adoring crowd -- of people made wealthy by his business decisions. "Everyone basically stood up and talked about how wonderful he was and how they were going to name their first born son Warren," said Craig Tucker who works for the Karuk Tribe and attended the shareholders meeting.

But then Ronnie Pellegrini of Eureka, Calif., stood up and told Buffett how her family, who fish for Pacific salmon, lost 90 percent of their income last year because the fishery was virtually closed for 700 miles of coast line.

And Windy George of the Hoopa Tribe stood up with five girls dressed in Brush Dance regalia, a traditional healing dance, and asked Buffett to meet with the tribes to understand what the loss of salmon means to the native people.

"We felt like it would be inappropriate to show up and lay all the blame at the feet of Warren Buffett, because he has this massive empire and this is a tiny piece of it," said Tucker. "Our intent was for him to know about the Klamath River, know where it was, and that the dams that he owns are having a devastating impact on people's lives, and it is in his own self-interest to do the right thing."

See more stories tagged with: water, salmon, dams, klamath

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Environment! Sign up now »