Stewardship. People of the region are joining with tribes and pushing to add "Ecosystem-based Function" as a primary purpose of the Columbia River Treaty. The that will include fish passage at Grand Coulee Dam to the Columbia River Treaty as 3rd primary purpose co-equal with the 1964 Treaty's existing two purposes, hydropower and flood risk management. (Credit: columbiarivergorge.info)
State Department "Town Hall" on Columbia River Future
The United States and Canada are negotiating the Columbia River Treaty.
We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to help protect and restore the Columbia River. On September 6, the U.S. State Department took public input in Portland at the Bonneville Power Administration.
Click here to read Messages for the State Department and full details of the Town Hall as a pdf
Senator Patty Murray:
Deal Keeps Politics Out of Columbia River System Operations
Sep 10 2018
(Washington, D.C.) – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) released the following statement:
Righting historic wrongs.
On June 14, 1940, 10,000 indigenous people from throughout the Northwest gather at Kettle Falls for the "Ceremony of Tears" to mourn the loss of ancestral fishing grounds soon to be flooded by Grand Coulee dam. (Credit: UW Special Collections)
The Columbia: Machine or River?
The United States and Canada have begun negotiating the future of the Columbia River and the Treaty that governs management of the "Great River of the West." Tribes and First have been excluded from the negotiating teams. (For full map, click on Columbia Basin Fish Passage Barriers) Map credit: CRITFC
Water is life: Columbia River, Salish Sea
The world watched as mother orca Talequah carried her dead baby for 17 days and 1,000 miles. Orcas in Puget Sound depend on Columbia River salmon, and are starving to death. We must take action.
(photo: Michael Weis / Center for Wale Research via AP)
Orca: connecting fate of Salish Sea to the Columbia/Snake River, opening the "Cascade Curtain"
Courtesy of Columbia Institute for Water Policy