When the Salmon Run Dry is a documentary made by KIRO News in the 1990s about the effects of dams in the Pacific Northwest on the lives of salmon. This documentary discusses a lot of things beginning with what happens when a salmon reaches the dam? So the dam thought about how the salmon returning from the ocean to lay eggs in fresh water would get back, as they built fish ladders for this, but they didn’t think about the young salmon who needed to get from the freshwater rivers to the ocean once their bodies matured. These 5-12 month old baby salmon have a genetic marker in them that tells them when it is time to migrate down to the ocean because their bodies can no longer survive in the freshwater environment, but the issue is that they are still immature and not strong enough to survive going through the dams huge rushes of water, so when they try to travel through these dams towards the ocean they are killed by rushing waters. The documentary estimates that each dam on the Columbia river kills about 15% of these migrating fish, which is a lot of fish considering there are over 20 dams just on the Columbia alone, not to mention dams located on other Washington and Oregon rivers. This killing of salmon with dams has lead to the pink sockeye salmon to be put on the endangered species list and the documentary theorizes that the other couple types of native salmon may follow soon.
The sociological impact of this is great because it has a lot of conflict with the good that dams are doing for the people in the Northwest communities, but it has negative effects on the salmon that will eventually have negative effects on the communities. Beginning with the dams, obviously they keep the production of electricity clean and inexpensive, but they also have huge amounts of things that are terrible for the communities of people that live near them. With many Northwest dams the people who were living on the rivers they were built on were pushed off of their land by the government so that these dams could exists, I know that in my own hometown of Wenatchee Native Americans in the region were pushed off of their lands when the dam was built because the space was about to be flooded by the new water track the dam created, a couple years ago when the dam was shut down the land where the Native Americans used to live was dry and you could just walk around on the top layer of dirt and easily find artifacts and remnants of the old Native American settlement. The issue of salmon also has negative effects on Native Americans in the Northwest region because many ceremonies are performed around the salmon and if these dams keep depleting the population it’s going to become more and more difficult for these Native Americans to perform these celebrations and rituals that center around the salmon. The creation of dams and the recklessness of their existence and operation in relation to the salmon population have had severe negative effects on the populations of regions, especially the Native American population that had historically already suffered from environmental projects created by the National and State governments.
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Brenna Sociology 107 