The call to let rivers flow free in their natural state is gaining momentum across the globe, with Indigenous communities raising concerns on the obstruction of rivers causing long-term damages and losses to ecosystems and the biological diversity.
By Salam Rajesh
For Yurok tribal member and attorney Amy Bowers Cordalis, the last phase of removal of dams from Klamath River on Wednesday last week was the most memorable and emotional chapter in her two decades of fight to free the river from man-made obstacles and let it flow free once more, ensuring the return of the Chinook Salmon in their natural habitat after losing their traditional spawning grounds for more than a century.
Freeing Klamath River from all man-made barriers is the largest story on dam removal across the United States in this century, setting an example for other nations across the globe on why it is important to let rivers flow free to ensure life continues on its natural flow without humans playing God.
Russell Attebery, Chairman of the Karuk Tribe asserts that restoring hundreds of miles of spawning grounds and improving water quality will help support the return of the salmon, a healthy, sustainable food source for several tribal nations.
The salmon fish is not just an ecologically important species in America’s wilderness but also holds cultural and spiritual significance for the several Indigenous tribes in the region. The Klamath River was once the third-largest salmon-producing river on America’s West Coast. The construction of dams by PacifiCorp between 1918 and 1962 to generate electricity disrupted the salmon’s lifecycle, decreasing their population to the point of extinction in the wild.
While hydroelectric power is considered clean and renewable, the ecological damage caused by large dams has increasingly led to their removal, particularly in the western United States. Currently, there are spates of dam removal happening in different countries on the basis of damages to the natural ecosystems, biodiversity loss and species decline, loss of livelihoods for millions of people, and inducing drastic changes in the geophysical, ecological, social, cultural and economic conditions of nations and peoples.
The story of Cordalis’ successful fight to restore Klamath River to its natural condition reflects strongly on the decades-long demand of local communities in India’s Manipur State to let Manipur River flow free by removing the man-made structure Ithai Barrage, commissioned in 1983, which has been reasonably quoted as the prime reason for obstructing the traditional passage of several migratory fish species that used to spawn upstream in water bodies within the Manipur River Basin.
This singular man-made structure had entirely changed the ecological and hydrological profile of several wetlands and traditional waters in the central Manipur valley areas, of which Loktak Ramsar site is a classic example, while causing biodiversity loss and species decline including the loss of migratory fish species like Cirrhinus reba, Labeo bata and Osteobrama belangeri that had severely impacted the food security and livelihoods of wetland dependent local communities settled within the Manipur River Basin.
“You could almost hear the river crying – I am free, I am free”, says an emotionally-charged Cordalis who took up the fight to free Klamath River in 2002 when she witnessed thousands of salmon die in the river due to a bacterial outbreak caused by low and warm temperatures.
The removal of dams from Klamath River is part of a nationwide movement in the United States to restore rivers to their natural flows and to revive river ecosystems. The advocacy group American Rivers says that more than 2000 dams have been removed in the United States during the last 25 years – which is a major lesson-learning process for nations and peoples opposing dams in their own regions.
The freeing of Klamath River from dams comes in sharp contrast to the Government of Manipur’s recent assertion that it is re-thinking on bringing back the fairly controversial 1500 megawatt capacity Tipaimukh Hydroelectric Multipurpose Project with a mega-dam component at the confluence of the Barak and Tuivai rivers along the Pherzwal-Tamenglong district interjection.
While the Indigenous Zeliangrong tribes in Tamenglong district outrightly rejected the proposal and called for letting the Barak River flow free without any physical obstructions in its natural flow, the Bangladeshi Government had objected to the curtailing of water flow in the country by the proposed mega dam in Manipur along Barak River which is a major tributary of the Meghna River in Bangladesh.
While the controversy on the proposed Tipaimukh Dam revolved around the upper and lower riparian countries’ conflicting interests and concerns, the conflicting interests on Ithai Barrage had witnessed continued protests from local communities on several factors of which extensive agricultural crop and fish crop loss by frequent flooding induced by the barrage, and species decline inducing impact on food security and livelihoods, has been major issues in these past four decades since the commissioning of the barrage in 1983.
Local community organization like the Loktak Project Affected Areas Farmers and Land Owners Association had time and again called upon the Government of Manipur to redress the grievances of local people in Imphal West, Thoubal and Kakching districts residing in low lying areas adjacent to Loktak Wetland complex on the continuous impact of Ithai Barrage causing loss and damage to their fish farms and agricultural crops.
Like the salmon fish which is integral to the social and cultural lives of the Indigenous tribes in western America, the migratory Khabag fish (Cirrhinus reba), Ngaton (Labeo bata) and Pengba fish (Osteobrama belangeri) are integral to the social and cultural lives of the Indigenous Meitei communities settled in the Manipur floodplains. The loss of highly nutritious food fishes had tremendously impacted the lives and economies of the Indigenous Meitei people.
For the Indigenous Zeliangrong tribes in Tamenglong district the obstruction of the free flow of Barak River in a future time stands to impact negatively on their land, natural heritage, and their social and cultural lives.
The International Rivers’ report ‘Rights of Rivers’ (2020) stressed that ‘Rivers have become a central focus in the Rights of Nature. Globally, river systems are under extreme pressure. Many of the world’s rivers suffer from extraordinary over-exploitation – through extraction, pollution, damming, alteration of natural flow regimes, and loss of water quality, and changes to riverine ecosystems, habitats and watersheds. As a result, freshwater vertebrate species are declining more than twice as fast as land-based and marine vertebrates’.
Among several landmark judgments globally in favor of rivers, the City of Nauta’s judiciary in Peru recently ruled that the Marañón River, one of the country’s most significant rivers and water sources and the first source of the Amazon, has an intrinsic value and is recognized as a Subject of Rights, thus legally recognizing the right of the river to exist, the right to its ecological flow, the right of its restoration, the right to be free of pollution, the right to exercise its essential functions with the ecosystem, and the right of representation.
The call to let rivers flow free in their natural state is gaining momentum across the globe, with Indigenous communities raising concerns on the obstruction of rivers causing long-term damages and losses to ecosystems and the biological diversity, thus defeating the purpose of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and the thrust on achieving the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.