'Anything that can be built can be taken down': The largest dam removal in US history is complete – what happens next?

The Klamath River is free of four huge dams for the first time in generations. But for the Yurok tribe, the river's restoration is only just beginning – starting with 18 billion seeds.

Brook Thompson has been fishing on the Klamath River ever since she could stand up in a boat. To Thompson and her family, who are part of the Karuk and Yurok tribes from northern California, fishing is second nature. "The river was our grocery store," the 28-year-old explains. That was until a catastrophic fish die off happened in 2002.

"It changed everything," Thompson remembers. "We'd always had plenty of food up until then. As a seven-year-old, the salmon were almost as big as me, and I saw thousands of their bodies piled up on the shoreline, I smelled their rotting flesh. It was apocalyptic."

The Yurok Reservation sits on the final 44 miles (71km) of the Klamath River before it meets the Pacific Ocean – a remote strip of land where there is one convenience store attached to the local gas station. Pre-contact, their territory spanned more than one million acres (400,000 hectares). The tribe relies on the river and the land for sustenance. And in the oral history of the Yurok tribe, which extends back thousands of years, there was no record of anything like this ever happening before.

"Since time immemorial, nothing like this had ever happened to us. A whole generation of salmon died on that one day," says Thompson. Low water flow from the Iron Gate Dam, one of four on the lower Klamath River, was found to be a "substantial causative factor", a report from the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program found.

See also As removal of dams frees Klamath River, California tribes see hope of saving salmon

Via Fix the News

A69. Deux opposants chutent d'un arbre sur la Cal'arbre, un troisième interpellé.

Les pompiers ont pris en charge les deux blessés qui ont été transportés vers l'hôpital. A ce stade, leur état de santé est inconnu. Sur les réseaux sociaux, un soutien aux écureuils fait état de leur mise sur "civière" et ils étaient "conscients" lors de leur prise en charge.
Un troisième opposant, lui aussi installé dans la cabane de "l'Atosc'arbre", a été descendu par les militaires de la CNAMO et interpellé.
Vendredi dernier, lors de l'évacuation de la Cal'arbre par les 200 gendarmes déployés pour l'opération, un jeune homme avait déjà chuté de la forteresse en palette érigée à l'entrée de la ZAD.
Transportés par les secours, ce dernier a été opéré dans la semaine de 6 fractures. "J'ai frôlé la mort", a-t-il témoigné dans un communiqué transmis jeudi 5 septembre.
Des blessures, dans un territoire toujours marqué par la mort de Rémi Fraisse, sur la ZAD de Sivens, il a bientôt 10 ans.

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