… When Copco, the company, first started damming the Klamath, bringing hydroelectric power to a remote corner of California was a higher priority for government and industry than the passage of fish up and down from the river’s headwaters in southern Oregon to the sea. Today, scientists count damming alongside overfishing, hatcheries, degraded habitat, and climate change as the biggest blows to what were once the third-largest salmon runs in the lower 48 states. Dam proponents also ignored Native American rights and interests. Their projects’ reservoirs flooded homelands of the Shasta people, so utterly dispossessing them that they are not currently a federally recognized tribe. … Two small towns are most directly affected: Hornbrook, just downstream from Iron Gate Dam, has a population of 650 if you include the surrounding district; the cottage community of Copco Lake, on the Copco reservoir, has 120 residents, not all of them full-time.  … There’s perennial conflict over how much Klamath water should go to agriculture and other uses and how much to fish. But that battle is centered upstream, in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where a pair of dams will remain standing.

– Written by J.B. MacKinnon, journalist and author of The Day the World Stops Shopping.