Why the entire world now depends on the Columbia River

On the 25^th anniversary of his seminal book, A River Lost, Blaine Harden is still explaining life on the Columbia

By Chuck Thompson. September 30, 2021. It’s been two and a half decades since the publication of Blaine Harden’s A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia. Since that time Seattle has lost its NBA team, the White Salmon River has lost the Condit Dam and Oregon seems ready to lose half its territory to Idaho.

That last one may be an exaggeration. But it’s not unrealistic to say Harden’s 1996 book has stood the test of time as the must-read contemporary explanation of how one of the world’s mightiest rivers was transformed into a series of slack water reservoirs created by hydroelectric dams. (Published in 1995, Richard White’s more esoteric The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River is a compelling peer to Harden’s classic.)

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To mark its anniversary, Columbia Insight recently met with Harden—via Zoom, which the author would use to make a surprising point—to get his recollections of writing A River Lost and his thoughts about changes that have taken place along the river in the years since he did.

Columbia Insight: Is the book you ended up writing the book you set out to write?

Blaine Harden: No. As I say in the book I didn’t understand why it was even possible to live where I lived when I grew up in Moses Lake, Washington. I knew there was irrigation but I didn’t know who paid for it. I didn’t know why it was there.

And I didn’t know that the people who benefitted from it would end up hating the federal government who gave them this enormous present. I didn’t really understand what the book was going to say until I finished the reporting.

CI: What explains that distrust of a government that’s done so much to increase prosperity in places that benefit directly from the dams?

BH: There’s this deep populist resentment toward the federal government that’s still in the east side of Oregon and Washington. It exists in spite of overwhelming evidence that life itself there is not really possible as they know it without massive gifts of other peoples’ money redistributed through the federal government.

And then Hanford is this place that basically made the triggers for death for the entire planet and did it in a very, very messy, secretive and deceptive way, and then stopped doing that. And then has spent hundreds of billions of dollars cleaning up the mess. All of which has made for a terrific economy for the Tri-Cities [Washington], which continues to elect members of Congress who hate the federal government.

CI: Once you finished the book did you have a sense of what an enduring benchmark it was going to be?

BH: No, I didn’t know that. I’m delighted you think that’s true.

CI: You aren’t aware of the reverence in which a lot of people hold this book?

BH: I guess so. I don’t know for sure. The thing is this story, my father, his family and his life was completely saved by federal money spent on the Columbia River. As for my extended family on the Harden side, we went from being failed farmers to being middle class people with kids who go to college. It was all because of a massive federal investment in the Columbia River Basin.

The dams, the Grand Coulee being the biggest one, but my father also worked at Wanapum Dam, which was a Grant County PUD dam. But he also worked at Hanford for many years, which was pure federal money. During those years he was a welder with the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union, and he was making the equivalent of what a lawyer makes. We had a late-model car in the garage and we weren’t at risk of going broke and moving on, which was the history of my family.

CI: Would you agree the east-west political divide across the Cascades has gotten more ferocious in the 25 years since you wrote the book?

BH: I don’t think it’s gotten more ferocious. When this book came out I went back to Moses Lake and gave a talk at Immanuel Lutheran Church, which was our family’s church. … While I was giving the talk farmers, irrigators, who were angry about what the book said about irrigation policy, had driven up in front of the church in a tractor with a big sign in a trailer that said, “Don’t buy books by liars!”

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CI: What was their objection to your book?

BH: There was terrific anger then at the idea that federal money had been spent in huge quantities to distribute a lot of wealth to a relatively few number of mostly white, upper-middle class irrigators. And that was, in fact, the truth.

Over the years those irrigators had very smartly figured out how to make the federal government pay for more and more of the cost of their electricity and water to farm. It was a really good story of government intentions being twisted by very smart and focused farmers. And they hated to see that story made public.

CI: As part of your research you traveled down the river on barges. Have you got fond memories of those experiences?

BH: It was really exciting and fun and there was an adventure element to it. I had taken a riverboat on the Congo River when I was in Africa, and it was the most important part of my first book. So I knew the power of a river story to engage and hold the reader’s attention. The plot of the book is a trip down the river.

CI: Did you hear from any of those barge guys after the book came out?

BH: I didn’t hear from them. But I was scrupulously honest. I had incredibly detailed notes on every word that is in that book. So I did not misrepresent them in any way.

CI: It’s kind of startling now to read several guys effectively say, “Let the salmon go extinct. What’s the big deal about a bunch of fish?”

BH: That was a prevailing sentiment among many of the people I talked to in eastern Washington. Because they didn’t eat salmon. It’s a little bit too expensive. They didn’t catch them. And so they just saw them as a hindrance to the God-given right to have a machine river, which gave them a livelihood, gave them cheap electricity, gave them cheap water.

CI: Has all the messaging about the importance of salmon changed minds?

BH: I think it has. Things have changed somewhat. There’s a society-wide understanding of the price that the tribes in the Columbia Basin paid for this whole business. Racism toward tribal people is much less tolerated. But it was deep and pervasive when I did that book.

CI: What’s been the biggest change on the Columbia River since you wrote the book?

BH: The biggest change is that real power over management of the river has shifted from the power boys, the people like the Bonneville Power Administration and utilities and members of Congress who reported to them, people like Larry Craig of Idaho in the old days. It’s shifted to a coalition of tribes, fish biologists and businesses that are interested in power from the big dams, but that are also interested in lots of other things.

CI: Those interests being …

BH: I’m talking about the trillion-dollar companies in Seattle now. There are two of them, two of the biggest corporations in the history of mankind—Microsoft and Amazon—and their influence and interest in a carbon-neural future for their own business purposes really has changed where political power lies in a seismic way.

CI: How does that shift in power impact daily life along the river?

BH: Those big companies, including Google and other big server farmers, they have a big interest in extracting cheap electricity from the Columbia River because they have server farms up and down the river.

The services they provide to their global consumer base makes everyone having a conversation like we’re having on Zoom a stakeholder in the damming of the Columbia River. It quite literally is probably powering this conversation. In that way the enormous power that comes from the Columbia River has insinuated itself into almost everyone’s life in the United States and around the world.

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CI: Were you surprised when a Republican congressman, Mike Simpson from Idaho, came out in favor of breaching the Snake River dams?

BH: I wasn’t surprised because I think that not all Republicans are stupid. And if you look at what really matters to the future of Idaho those dams don’t contribute all that much. A cold, dollars-and-cents analysis would suggest there’s money to be made and fish to be saved and constituents to be served by removing those dams. If you represent the state of Idaho it’s logical, so I was very pleased to hear it.

CI: Why aren’t those dollars-and-cents arguments about dams more persuasive?

BH: The politics of red and blue, particularly in eastern Washington and eastern Oregon, make people irrational in the way they talk about those dams. As though there’s something patriotic about those hunks of concrete and removing them would be a socialist scheme. That’s the way it’s perceived.

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CI: Environmentally speaking, have things gotten worse or better on the Columbia River since you wrote A River Lost?

BH: I think things have gotten a lot better. Particularly for the people who were the most victimized, the tribes. They have real power now. They have real power under the law. Down in the depths of the bureaucracy the tribes help make decisions and they have benefitted from that. A lot of them made a comeback in terms of wealth and social indicators, the quality of life.

CI: Of the six books you’ve written what makes A River Lost special?

BH: I say in the introduction this book is really the story of my family. But it’s a lament, too, for the things that have gone wrong. It’s that personal aspect that makes it meaningful to me.

CI: Is it fair to say people around the region are becoming more intellectually and spiritually disconnected from the Columbia River than ever before?

BH: I agree with that. Part of it is a failure of public school education in the Pacific Northwest where you really don’t know why you’re here. Or how it was possible for this incredible economy to come here and flower like it did. And the river has a lot to do with it. I don’t think it’s taught very well. And it should be.

Chuck Thompson is the editor of Columbia Insight.

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