if you think about the way a river works in a landscape it essentially functions as the circulatory system it drains the waste products off of the land and that sediment is the stuff that basically structures habitats in rivers and then once it gets to the coast it builds beaches it creates the offshore environments that flow of material is incredibly important technologically and building dams disrupts that but there's another aspect rivers in terms of flow back upstream that most people don't tend to think about and in the northwest that's greatly mediated by salmon because when salmon leave their native streams are little fish when they come back a couple years later they're huge they put on like 90 percent 95 percent of their body mass in the marine environment and what that essentially means is that a large fish run the kind of fish runs we had historically in the northwest you can view as a nitrogen pump that's basically scavenging food out of the oceans and bringing it back on land feeds the bugs the trees and the forests they feed the Eagles they feed the Bears essentially fertilizing their own world anything that blocks a river like a dam does limit their access to part of the world that they need to complete their lifecycle the four dams in the Snake River in the upper reaches of the columbia basin or a clear overshoot and they are in my judgment largely responsible for the destruction salmon runs but the weaves to see all the way up into the Rocky Mountains Idaho the Snake River Basin holds today the largest intact remaining set of pristine salmon habitat left in the lower 48 we're talking over five thousand miles of stream habitat in central Idaho alone if we took out the four lower Snake River dams salmon and steelhead would have access back into all those areas there should not be four dams on the lower Snake River choking out the most important wildest salmon refuge left 5,500 miles of high elevation streams more resistance to global warming than any other water shed if the salmon runs were restored that would be the jumping-off point to this  unbelievable wilderness Nexus that is really one of the most beautiful places in the world temps change the habitat when you disturb the habitat it can be detrimental to the native fishes and beneficial to non-native fishes the river is no longer a river it's a lake and the lakes are full of predators that liked nothing better than to eat a nice young salmon smoked the Pacific Northwest right now according to The Oregonian newspaper spends a billion dollars a year on salmon recovery and they're not getting very much for it there are study after study now that are showing that hatcheries present on a river reduce the survival of the wild fish the primary purpose for these dams always was transportation it was to make Lewiston Idaho a seaport the only reason it's just slightly cheaper to send weight down the river rather than putting it on the railroad which runs right along in the record is because of the subsidies given the fiscal condition in this country the budget issues now's the time simply to remove that subsidy but and you'll find the wheat growers doing very well a dam is a means to an end and we've got it the other way around now we look at them as in states they built they're there they're going to stay there forever and their intent was to increase the economic output of a region in the country and so when they stop doing that they're no longer viable a lot of the work that we've done on the economics and cost shows that if you keep the dams the national economy is losing at least 150 million dollars a year these four dams are really expensive to operate in a minute they diverge from that end state that you're after the other look down is just it's big we need another tool here is it wind energy is it solar panel it's look at this as a means not an end the beautiful thing about salmon is that if you look at their history they're incredibly resilient if you give them half a chance they can come back when you remove the dam and the river becomes a river again the complexity begins to reappear there's a ripple effect of restoration that moves all the way through the river basin on Western remove the lower Snake River dams is one of the big jewels embedded in the holy grail of salmon recovery this would be the biggest watershed restoration in North America not on earth if we did this it's the largest possible salmon recovery venture of which humanity is capable would be simply the removal of those four dams you