RIVERS, REMOVAL, AND RESILIENCY
TRAVIS RUMMEL ON FILMING DAMNATION
By Malcolm Johnson
In the summer of 2012, a few months after the removal of the Elwha Dam on Washington's Elwha River was completed, Nature reported that salmon and steelhead were spawning in tributaries that had been "inaccessible for over 100 years." A year later, biologists were mapping hundreds of spawning redds upstream of the former dam site. It's a story that shows dam removal can work—the damage we've done can be slowly undone, if we can only summon the will and wisdom to give fish a fighting chance. Travis Rummel, who co-produced DamNation with Matt Stoecker and co-directed with Ben Knight, shared some of his thoughts on dams and rivers shortly after the film's premiere this spring at SXSW, where it won the Audience Award in the Documentary Spotlight category.
ON DAM REMOVAL
“It doesn't happen quickly. For the Elwha specifically, it took over 30 years of people working to actually get it to happen. That was the largest dam removal I know of in the world that's ever been undertaken, so it's not like you can just go in and consult the textbook and say, ‘This is how we do it.’ The Matilija Dam in California was approved for removal in 2000, and there was money allocated for it from Congress, but then the Army Corps came in and couldn't figure out how to deal with the sediment that had backed up behind it, and it's languished for the last 14 years. It's all so nuanced to the specific environment— how you do the deconstruction and how you deal with the effects. It takes a lot of time, money, and study. Yvon Chouinard made a great point at the premiere, which was that if companies were required to set aside enough money to remove these dams at the end of their useful lives, nobody would build them in the first place. They're kind of just left there for the taxpayer to come in and clean up.”
ON RIVERS AND CULTURE
“Ben Knight and I did a film [Red Gold] in Bristol Bay, Alaska, which is one of the last big strongholds of wild salmon. The fish are such an important icon to the Native people up there, and it's incredible to see four generations of a family out harvesting fish. At that time of year, everyone stops what they're doing in the rest of their lives and they come together to celebrate the fish. It's kind of the last pillar of culture up there. I think the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has suffered by not having access to that part of their culture for the last hundred years. So as you see in DamNation, it's a huge thing for them just to have access to the salmon fishery and to have much of the river reconnected to the ocean again.”
ON RESILIENCY
“We were at the former Condit Dam site, on the White Salmon River [in Washington], with all of these nonprofit stakeholders who had fought for a decade or more to get the dam out. To be filming them as they were kayaking and rafting through there was really powerful. It's towards the end of DamNation, and you can see how awe-inspired people were to be on the river. You can't even really tell there was a dam there just one year before. The resiliency of nature is really impressive—these structures have been blocking the rivers for 100 years, and as soon as they're gone, sediment is getting flushed out and fish are moving up above the dam. It was really encouraging to see that dam removal can work.”
ON SMALL DAMS
“I think it'll be a long time before the Hoover Dam or Glen Canyon Dam or some of the mainstem dams on the Columbia River are going to come out. But we're just trying to get people to re-examine each dam in its own right. A 3-foot dam and a 700-foot dam have almost the same ecological impact, as far as stopping sediment and keeping migratory fish from being able to go up into habitat they need for their life cycle.
ON GETTING INVOLVED
“We're doing a national campaign to petition the White House to remove the four lower Snake River dams. There's an online petition and cards in Patagonia stores, or you can text DAM to 91990. That will bring attention to those dams, and we're also trying to raise awareness of the proposed Susitna Dam in Alaska. But what we hope to happen is just for people to get involved and work on a local level to restore watersheds. It doesn't have to be some big act on a national level—if there's a derelict dam in your backyard and you can work with a grassroots nonprofit to create some movement to get rid of it, that's the bigger goal for us. We just want people to think critically about the issue. When you have an idea of what a healthy river looks like, you might value that more than a shitty old dam.”
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