At a conference on irrigation in 1893, John Wesley Powell, second director of the newly formed United States Geological Survey, prophetically remarked, “Gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.” Powell was calling attention to something that Indigenous inhabitants of western North America have known for thousands of years: Outside the rainy Pacific Northwest coast, the American West lacks adequate water to support either agriculture or people. This has become abundantly clear in the current era of climate change and drought.
Despite this fact, Euro-American settlers have continued to migrate to the region and to attempt to alter the land and water to their benefit, at the expense of the land’s original inhabitants and the ecosystems that have supported them for millennia. One legacy of this manifest destiny has been the construction of 92,000 dams in the United States, almost 20,000 of which are large dams located in western states. The peak of this dam construction occurred between 1950 and 1980. During this period, more than 40,000 dams were built across the country, primarily for hydropower and irrigation.
Since the removal of two dams on the Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula beginning in September 2011, an era of dam removal appears to be in its early stages. Four more dams on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and Northern California were removed in 2023 and 2024—the largest dam removal in history (see “When stagnant waters become fresh,” December 2023). The effort is driven and led by Indigenous tribes and their allies as a means of restoring their traditional lands and lifeways. As such it serves as a primary example of restorative justice.
