Damming Debates

Hydropower has long defined the Northwest. Massive dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers electrify cities, fuel industrial growth, and help create one of the lowest-carbon electricity systems in the United States. Yet those same structures also flooded Indigenous homelands, transformed river ecosystems, and helped drive the region’s iconic salmon toward collapse. Damming Debates examines this profound dilemma at the heart of the region’s energy future.Blending fieldwork, interviews, and historical research, Nik Janos follows the people shaping the hydropower debate—dam operators, policymakers, tribal leaders, environmental advocates, farmers, and river communities—as they wrestle with competing visions. The conflict is often framed as “dams versus fish,” but beneath that slogan lies deeper questions about climate responsibility, tribal sovereignty, economic livelihoods, and the meaning of environmental restoration.Hydropower embodies a central paradox of the clean-energy transition: infrastructure that produces abundant low-carbon electricity can simultaneously perpetuate ecological damage and colonial extraction. In the Northwest, debates about dam removal, salmon recovery, and energy reliability reveal how difficult it is to reconcile climate urgency with justice and ecological repair.Clear, nuanced, and grounded in voices from across the region, Damming Debates offers an essential guide to a consequential environmental crossroads—and to the broader challenge of building a just energy transition.