Help bring down four Snake River dams!
Salmon fatten on the bounty of the sea, then return to their birth rivers, where they are the building blocks of forest ecosystems. Rivers are the highways that deliver them home. But the Columbia and Snake River Basin has been transformed by more than 200 dams. For nearly two decades, a growing constituency of fishermen, farmers, business leaders, brave politicians and conservation groups like Save Our Wild Salmon have been backing a modest proposal: Take out four dams on the lower Snake. Just four dams.
“There used to be this huge biomass of chinook salmon in the ocean, produced by all the rivers of the Pacific Coast,” said Ken Balcomb, the director for the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island in Puget Sound. “We’re down to less than ten percent of historic abundance, and climate change will make it worse. But there’s a lot of intact habitat left on the Snake. It’s our best shot. I think any reasonable biologist will tell you to tear out the dams.”
Join Patagonia and Save Our Wild Salmon in urging the Obama Administration to change course and remove the four lower Snake River dams. Sign the petition to value conservation over construction!
Save Our Wild Salmon is a nationwide coalition of conservation organizations, commercial and sportsfishing associations, businesses, river groups, and taxpayer advocates working collectively to restore self-sustaining, abundant, and harvestable populations of wild salmon and steelhead to rivers, streams and oceans of the Pacific Salmon states.