Customer Reviews

A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Although the author probably is personally opposed to the dams on the Columbia, his vivid and respectful profiles of the different users of the river (the slackwater barge operator, the Indian tribe that lost its source of food when the river was dammed, the irrigation farmer, the windsurfing yuppie, the father and son who work on the Hanford cleanup) make us understand that no matter how this tricky issue is resolved, there will be a human cost. His recollection of growing up in Moses Lake, a town which owes its prosperity to the dams, adds even more credibility to his account.

Harden's device of telling the story in stages, as a trip down the river, is unobtrusive and keeps things interesting. This book will make you think and it will also treat you to some gorgeous descriptions of the Columbia.

I grew up in the Tri-Cities and spent the first 19 years of my life living just blocks away from the Columbia River and there was a lot of information told in this book that I never knew. Harden does a wonderful job of relating the history of the Columbia River and the effects that the many dams built on the river had on the land, the people, the nation, and the economy. I thoroughly enjoyed his story and felt he handled well the many issues important to preservationists, politicians, and farmers.

I recommend this to anyone who lives in the state of Washington and is interested in man's permanent effects on this land.

Once in a great while a book comes along that is so beautifully written, with stories so well told, that the subject matter seems secondary to the writer's ability to sustain interest. For me, with little interest in the northwest (I've been there twice), this was such a book. It is from Harden's exceptional skill as a writer and narrator of stories that the Columbia River suddenly became of great interest as I turned his pages.

"A River Lost" tells the story and history of the Columbia River and the environmental, economic and aesthetic impact of daming that river in the first half of the last century. Especially interesting are the stories and points of view of those who work and live on its shores, the fate of the native indians who have lived in the region for hundreds of years and the differences in culture between the Starbucks yuppies west of the Cascades and the blue collar workers so dependant on the water and its billions in federally subsidized benefits to the east.

Highly praised in reviews by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, the Village Voice, The Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly, it is a great read for the information, for the writing, for a piece of American history.

When this book was written the current water, fish, and power crisis was in its infancy. This book foretold the inevitable conflict that now threatens the economy of the entire region. The documentation of the wasteful use of water by irrigators to grow crops that are unprofitable with a system paid for by taxpayers and electric ratepayers should be mandatory reading for all Northwesterners. If BPA fails and electric rates skyrocket the reasons are all spelled out here. Those who want to frame the debate as "fish versus Power" will find in the pages of this book that in actuality the real contest is between power generation and irrigation. My 16 years as a water resource planner for the Department of the Interior made me want to say "right on" with every page I read.

The author has done his homework, but allowed his personal PC-ness to strangle his conclusions. He is quick and mighty to blame the "Republican Congress" for what he perceives to be current failure, while he completely and naively fails to see, and never reports, that it was 50+ years of Democrats who "did it "!! It was, never the less, a good read with many clever and poignant word pictures.

A River Lost is about much more that just a book about the making of the Columbia River into a barge friendly irrigation system. Harden weaves autobiography, tales of everyday life, unchecked government power, the dynamic tension between the urban and rural in the Pacific Northwest. The book reveals the how the River washes over and changes, some would say corrodes, everything it touches. The heart of the book is more the river as it describes the unintended consequences that flows from good intentions and how affluence changes the political landscape from a focus on jobs to concern about the quality of life. The book should be read not as a conclusive picture of what has happened to the Columbia but as a starting point for further exploration.

The book has two weaknesses. The first is that it ignores the changes brought in the region's ecosystem when the salmon runs ceased in the upper Columbia. Millions of pounds of salmon were food not just for the Indians but for a variety of wildlife. A few words about what those changes have meant to the region's biota would have helped the reader to understand that far more than Indians were affected. The second weakness is when Harden brings contemporary politics into a tale of written with a historic perspective. Harden pointedly blames Republicans for stopping what he sees as beneficial change but puts no emphasis on how Democrats designed, sold and implemented the dams and irrigation as an beneficial scheme of social engineering. The book would have been stronger had that part been omitted. Neither party can claim to be on the side of the Gods when it comes to the Columbia.

That said, the book filled in gaps in my knowledge although, as a native Portlander a decade older than the author, I well remember the controversy over the flooding of Celilo Falls with the construction of The Dalles Dam and at being shocked in the late 1950s by the reported rise in the river's water temperature caused by cooling Hanford's reactors. Anyone buying the book today would do well to see what has been happening since the mid-1990s. And if salmon is your focus don't miss the PBS program Salmon: Running the Gauntlet at [...]

Once in a great while a book comes along that is so beautifully written, with stories so well told, that the subject matter seems secondary to the writer's ability to sustain interest. For me, with little interest in the northwest (I've been there twice), this was such a book. It is from Harden's exceptional skill as a writer and narrator of stories that the Columbia River suddenly became of great interest as I turned his pages.

"A River Lost" tells the story and history of the Columbia River and the environmental, economic and aesthetic impact of daming that river in the first half of the last century. Especially interesting are the stories and points of view of those who work and live on its shores, the fate of the native indians who have lived in the region for hundreds of years and the differences in culture between the Starbucks yuppies east of the Cascades and the blue collar workers so dependant on the water and its billions in federally subsidized benefits to the west.

Highly praised in reviews by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, the Village Voice, The Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly, it is a great read for the information, for the writing, for a piece of American history.

This journalistic narrative, written when Blain Harden returned to his Columbia River Basin hometown during a mid-1990s sabbatical from the Washington Post, summarizes the history of the massive U.S. Government funded hydroelectric, irrigation and nuclear energy development of the Columbia River system in eastern Washington and adjacent parts of Idaho and Oregon. Harden's approach is a well crafted, articulate chronology of events interspersed among interviews with then-still-living civil engineers and workers who built the dams (including the author's father), self-described redneck barge crews, American Indians, irrigator farmers, nuclear engineers, supposed "downwind" victims of nuclear engineers, wildlife management officials and environmental activists. Oddly, he never interviews any significant politician, and he describes the actions of civil service engineers and bureaucrats as if they built this multi-billion dollar project over forty years on their own fanatic authority, sort of like renegade CIA agents supposedly taking over a jungle-clad third world country without anyone telling them to.

The gist of A River Lost is that beginning in 1933 and ending in the 1970s, Federal and quasi-Federal agencies, acting under the direction of six presidents, converted one of the world's largest and wildest rivers into an all-but-completely tamed series of lakes behind hydroelectric dams. The result is a massive amount of inexpensive electricity, irrigation for more than 500,000 acres of farmland, an economical means to transport commodities from an interior desert toward Asian markets and, totally unplanned by its originators, a means to produce plutonium for atomic bombs that ended World War II and armed the U.S. in the Cold War. The most negative side effect was the virtual destruction of the Columbia's unimaginably immense migrating salmon population along with a traumatically negative impact on remnant groups of American Indians dependent on the salmon for sustenance and culture.

Harden makes a pretty good case that farmers and industries who benefited from the Columbia River industrialization only repaid a small fraction of the cost, Indians were not consulted, respected or compensated, billions of dollars were lost on an ill-conceived nuclear power project and there's been a lot of environmental damage, primarily to salmon and other fish populations, as well as possible damage to human health. As unpleasant as it may be for some of the "bad guys" in this saga to acknowledge I think the basic story is accurate. But as for Harden's exposé of unfairness, corruption, self dealing and unforeseen or unconsidered negative impacts... and from a government program!... how shocking!

Well, not really. A similar narrative could be constructed about virtually every large-scale government economic development and social engineering project since the 1930s: other river development schemes, so-called urban renewal, interstate highways, War on Poverty, public education system, etc., etc., etc. All of those programs have winners, losers and, typically, unintended, unacknowledged or uncompensated environmental, health or social costs. Such is the nature of government programs, but nobody seems able to resist them.

To me the most interesting aspect of this book is how Harden characterizes, or declines to characterize, the political affiliation of key players.

The initial Grande Coulee project and its unthinking destruction of salmon runs and Indian culture in the name of New Deal progress, and later the atomic city at Hanford, all occurred under President Franklin Roosevelt. Harden tells us that after WWII the remainder of the dam building, salmon and Indian destruction, sweetheart deals for farmers, barge operators, electrical utilities, et al, were driven through Congress, no matter who was president, by two powerful Washington senators, Magnuson and Jackson. The two senators were each in office about 40 years, and Harden refers to them ten times, asserting they abetted much sweetheart dealing, environmental damage and so forth. But Harden doesn't identify Roosevelt, Magnuson or Jackson as Democrats.

Then, with all the dams built, all the subsidies enshrined, all the salmon dying and Magnuson and Jackson gone from the scene, an environmentalist-led "Salmon War" heats up in the early 1980s. That's when newly elected Washington Senator Gorton appears in the same paragraph where Harden refers to "evil... political games" and - finally! - Harden fearlessly dares put a name to regressive forces that refuse to right wrongs wrought by half a century of dam, irrigation and atomic energy programs. We learn Senator Gorton is a... a... a... Republican!!!!! And when Gorton reappears in the story Harden tells us once again, in case we missed it, that Gorton is (still!) a Republican.

Things get worse again for salmon because, as Harden tells it, a mean Republican is elected to replace a nice Democrat as governor of neighboring Idaho. Apparently it's no problem, because its unmentioned by Harden, that Democrats almost always governed much larger Washington where most of the salmon's problem is located. Anyway, we learn that although Democrats controlled congress for about 56 of the first 60 years of the Columbia River development things only become hopeless for the fish when, just before Harden completes the book, Republicans take control of Congress in 1994. Did I mention Harden is a Washington Post reporter?

My own postscript is that in the ten years since Harden wrote A River Lost irrigators' fortunes declined as foreign producers undercut even their subsidized costs. The aluminum industry imploded. Communities Harden characterizes as terminally whitebread are increasingly dominated by Mexican immigrants. The Colville Indians who lost prime fishing grounds to Grand Coulee Dam now benefit from its cheap electricity because they own the largest lumber processing mill in Okanogan County as well as three well-lit casinos in the Columbia Basin. And some Eastern Washington counties now spend more on fish habitat restoration than human health care.

A River Lost has excellent sketch maps throughout each section that help place people and events. There are nine pages of footnotes and sources and thirteen pages of index. But as far as I can tell there's no mention to which political party Franklin Roosevelt, the guy who started the whole thing, belonged.

Living just 80 miles south of the Columbia, Harden's book gave me an easy, detailed account of the history of the Columbia and the effects of electricity v. the life of beautiful salmon. Although Harden often blames locals for the decline in salmon, and at other times, the government, I found it to be a fair look at both sides of the story. Harden's forte is taking a Paul Harvey approach, telling the rest of the story behind the Columbia River. A great review of the pros and cons of hydroelectrics and the effects it has on not just the West Coast, but the whole nation. I learned that there is a hell of a lot of politics being played on the water. By the way, don't eat salmon, it tastes disgusting.

A fair and even handed book that looks at the human, social, and environmental costs of damming the Columbia river. Harden gives us insight into the thinking an motivation of all parties involved in the management of the Columbia, including the government, farmers, bargers, Indians, environmental activists, windsurfers, and "eviros" living West of the Cascades