OPINION: Swept away by the Eklutna

Ten years ago, I dove into the Eklutna River and was swept away.

I spent the past decade fixing this badly broken river, driven by a vision of abundant salmon in our backyard. With many others, we took the first big step in 2017 by demolishing the Lower Eklutna River dam. That turned out to be the easy part. The hard part has been swimming a political whirlpool of water, power and salmon.

Lifebuoys came from unexpected directions. The Anchorage Assembly has repeatedly and vigorously endorsed the vision of a restored Eklutna River. Residents of Southcentral Alaska voiced overwhelming support for fixing the river. Native organizations, sportsmen, politicians, and prominent Alaska foundations have all cheered our work to put Humpty-Dumpty back on the wall.

We are on the verge of a decision that will determine the fate of the Eklutna River for the next 35 years. Later this month, the power companies will finalize a plan to mitigate the impacts of hydropower development on salmon. Alaskans face a choice between hope and abundance on one hand, and fear and scarcity on the other.

The Eklutna story is the story of Alaska. In the headlong rush to settle the Last Frontier, early settlers acted boldly and sometimes carelessly. The young and growing city of Anchorage needed electricity in the 1920s, so they took it from the Eklutna River. Salmon and Alaska Natives were everywhere. Who would notice a few more or less?

How do we know when we have gone too far? When we begin to lose the things that make Alaska special.

Today, we newcomers are carving a modern world out of the Alaska wilderness. Now, who can tell the difference between Wasilla and Walla Walla, Anchorage and Austin, or Fairbanks and Fresno? We’ve got Krispy Kreme, Olive Garden, and a three-week run of Hamilton just like everywhere else. We still have one thing that the rest of the world doesn’t: wild salmon.

Alaskans don’t agree on much, but we agree on salmon. We share the satisfaction of a full net, a full freezer and a full grill. Salmon are a foundational value for our bank accounts, bears and bald eagles.

There are signs that we have gone too far for salmon. The Yukon River is a salmon disaster. King salmon are in trouble across Alaska, especially in Upper Cook Inlet. We hear salmon rumblings from Southeast and the Alaska Peninsula.

Which brings us back to Eklutna. The easy thing, the cheap thing, would be to shrug and let the Eklutna salmon slip away. The hard thing, is to have salmon, and civilization, requires us to get creative. We have many more ways to make and save electricity now than we did in 1920. Micro-hydro, battery storage, solar and wind, high-efficiency heat pumps, networked grid dispatch, and smart home energy monitors provide a suite of tools that could displace the power generated at Eklutna. We no longer need to kill salmon just to turn the lights on.

One day, I was walking the Eklutna River where it passes under the Glenn Highway. I will never forget the electric shock of seeing a large brown bear fishing in the muddy trickle. I stood paralyzed between four lanes of rush-hour traffic above me and 400 pounds of fur in front of me. Where else but Alaska could this happen?

I dove into the Eklutna River a decade ago because I believed then, and still believe now, that Alaska can have both civilization and wildness. We can have the cars overhead and the bear fishing down below. In that way, Alaska can be a model for the rest of the world.

We Alaskans run toward challenges. Anyone can do the easy thing, but Alaskans try the hard thing. We imagine a better world and we work for it. We still have more salmon than anywhere else in the world because we didn’t dam our rivers. The Eklutna River was an exception to that rule, and salmon paid the price. We should learn from that mistake, fix the mistake, and avoid repeating it.

Brad Meiklejohn is senior Alaska representative for The Conservation Fund. He led efforts for the removal of the Lower Eklutna River dam.

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