·program of nuclear power plant construction lost its steam. A fear of energy shortages became, almost overnight, an equally challenging electricity surplus. A precarious balance was struck between the power interests and the people and institutions committed to preserving what was left of the natural resources in the Columbia River Basin. A political balance was struck, too. Congress required that decisions regarding the federal hydroelectric power system be made in a public forum. They reasoned that energy plans for the next twenty years and a program to make some restitution for the damage done to fish and wildlife by that hydroelectric system should be the task of an informed Northwest populace. As a result, the Pacific Northwest, by one definition, is run by a somewhat top-heavy consensus. The Power Planning Council does make final decisions about the development of the Northwest's electric energy and the coordinated restoration of fish and wildlife in the basin, but only after weeks of public meetings on each issue, and consultations with the major players: Bonneville, the basin's Indian tribes, the utilities, ratepayer groups and others. The RAIN series, "Northwest Power Play," covered much of the electric energy part of this story, but the quieter half, the enormous task of "protecting, mitigating and enhancing" fish and wildlife in the basin went largely unreported. This undertaking, known as the Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program, is already the biggest project to restore a natural resource ever attempted on the planet. It might also be the single largest exercise of bioregional planning going on anywhere. Over the next twenty years Northwest electric ratepayers can expect to invest an estimated $750 million to bring back the once abundant salmon and steelhead .trout in the river (a resource that at one time meant jobs March/April 1985 RAIN Page 21 for 24,000 Northwesterners), the fish above the dams that do not migrate to the sea, and other wildlife whose habitat was flooded or otherwise destroyed by hydroelectric developments in the basin. The combined programs recommended by the council.amount to less than four percent of the annual budget of the Bonneville Power Administration (allocations for WPPSS nuclear power plants come to about 45 percent of Bonneville's budget). Systemic Management You would have thought Congress read ecology texts for the way they mandated the Columbia's restoration project. As much as possible, they urged,.treat the Columbia River and her tributaries as a "system." This single word could put a stop to the kind of piecemeal activity that had gone on in the basin for years. Work at one dam must now be integrated with everything else going on to improve fish survival along the river. Each piece of the puzzle has a place in the overall program. The program itself grew out of a year of taking recommendations from fish and vyildlife agencies, Indian tribes, utilities, federal agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers and the Forest Service, and many others. These recommendations were compared, consolidated, and organized by application (i.e., upstream migration, downstream migration, and so forth-see following article). The Council staff reviewed each one, made some suggestions to complement the assembled mass of 10,000 pages of ideas, comments, and testimonies, argued against some, and eventually emerged with the program. Probably the most significant indication of the council's success is that no one sued anyone during the process. Like a second marriage, the coming together of tribes and utilities, the Corps of Engineers and local anglers, Rock Island Dam, oldest dam on the Columbia (Photo by Carlotta Collette)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz