Dam breaching to become on-line confrontation
Commentary by PAT MURPHY
How times have changed with the Internet.
In days before television, town hall meetings were community
centerpieces, where people flocked to hear politicians thrash out civic issues. Then town
hall debates came to the television tube, and citizens could stay at home to watch
proceedings. Now, the Internet is a successor to what our great-grandparents relied on to
inform themselves.
Pull up a chair in front of the computer beginning Dec. 8 for a weekly,
two-hour forum from noon until 2 p.m. local time between experts on whether and how to
rescue the vanishing stocks of salmon.
The Environmental News Network http://www.enn.com
is bringing together representatives of some 20 groups to argue what has become a sizzler
in political controversy in the Northwest—whether to breach four lower Snake River
dams built in the Great Depression more than 50 years ago.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I write stories occasionally for
ENN, but am not involved in this on-line forum.)
What's so appealing about this sort of on-line confrontation is that
all the gigabytes and kilobytes hurled back and forth will be stripped of any rowdy
shouting and grandiloquent verbal theatrics into which debates often sink.
The dam-breaching opponents and proponents will have to argue their
cases by punching out verbiage on PC keyboards.
And those of us who’ve been following this controversy can save
hard copies from the electronic debate, then determine whether pro and con arguments have
changed minds.
Although states in the Northwest are more directly involved in this
flap, the principles and principals involved are paramount in environmental showdowns
throughout the nation—environmentalists, sportsmen and Native Americans lined up
against politicians and industrial groups.
If the dams are breached, there’ll be economic consequences: the
cost of hydroelectric power will inch up, several thousand jobs at Lewiston, which is the
Pacific Coast’s largest inland port, may be lost; breaching the dams will cost about
$1 billion.
But most biologists believe that unless dams are breached, and the
salmon can return to spawning grounds, they’ll be forever lost.
Consider the staggering statistics.
When Meriwether Rogers and William Clark explored the Northwest between
1804 and 1806, the Snake River was teeming with salmon—perhaps two million adults
going upstream each year. Last year, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game estimated a
drastic decline—less than 10,000.
Stripped of all the technical gibberish, the question is basic: Are
salmon more important than dams?
Pat Murphy is the retired publisher of the Arizona Republic and a
former radio commentator.
