Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities Back to Life by Tara Lohan
Join Tara Lohan, environmental journalist and Bend resident, to discuss Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life, publishing October 14th.
Tickets for this event are $5 general admission or book purchase. Links for tickets are at the bottom of the page.
Free-flowing rivers in the United States are an endangered species. We’ve dammed and diverted almost every major river, straightening curves and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals, pushing many to the brink. Now a heartening new movement is helping to demolish harmful or obsolete structures, restoring new life to rivers and communities that depend on them. In doing so, it offers a pathway to undoing environmental harm to nature—and to ourselves.
In Undammed, environmental journalist Tara Lohan takes a clear-eyed look at the unexpected benefits of dam removal after centuries of dam-building. In helping to restore rivers, she argues, we’re protecting our own communities by improving water quality, enhancing public safety, and boosting fish populations that feed people and restore rights for Native American Tribes. Lohan chronicles the removal effort of four dams on the Klamath River in northern California and southern Oregon, the largest dam-removal and river-restoration project in the world. In the Northwest, she walks readers through the politically heated debate over potential removal of dams on the Lower Snake River in Washington to help restore salmon and orcas. In other efforts across the country, she shows why removing deadbeat and small dams can have big impacts and is helping drive action beyond our borders. In Europe, where river barriers occur almost every half-mile, the US movement is spurring a rival effort to restore natural flow to rivers degraded by obstructions.
Tara Lohan is an environmental journalist who has been writing about the confluence of water, energy, and biodiversity for nearly two decades. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The American Prospect, Grist, Salon, High Country News, and The Revelator. She’s the editor of two books on the global water crisis, Water Matters and Water Consciousness. She holds a master’s degree in literary nonfiction and lives in Bend, Oregon.