MENDING THE NET
Great article (“After the Floods,” August 2024). Community Alliance with Family Farms has been fighting for years to reform the farm safety net as climate disasters intensify and inequities persist. CAFF has had some success, like $17.9 million preserved last month in the state budget, but there’s still so much work to be done.
@famfarms on X (formerly known as Twitter)
WE’RE THE PROBLEM
Ruxandra Guidi did a nice job of bringing together terms and perspectives of climate change in “After despair comes repair” (August 2024). Personally, my vote is for “Anthropocene,” a well-used term that says it all. It’s us. Definitely. This wouldn’t be happening without us humans and our perpetual capital growth model, which literally encourages population growth to constantly increase the number of customers who spend money on stuff. In just the last century and a half, we’ve managed to overrun our own planet, driven largely by this greed at the corporate level, squeezing out wildlife in the process.
Julie Smith
Golden, Colorado
CHEAPSKATE UTILITIES, DEADBEAT DAMS
Thank you for daylighting the liability reduction tactics of our utilities here in the West (“Electrical utilities don’t want to get burned,” July 2024).
Electric utilities often seek to reduce the financial risk exposure for aging hydropower dams, just as they do for the impacts of wildfires caused by transmission lines.
In California, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) recently attempted to offload 22 hydropower projects, including 62 powerhouses, 97 reservoirs, 72 diversions, 167 dams and 400 miles of water conveyance systems, on to a nascent subsidiary. These projects carry billions of dollars in estimated deferred maintenance costs and significant liability should a dam or spillway fail. If the conservation community had not raised the alarm, PG&E might have been allowed to transfer responsibility to an entity with an uncertain ability to fund necessary maintenance — and been rewarded by Wall Street for doing it.
Meanwhile, an increasing amount of cheap solar energy is making small baseload hydroplants less economically viable. As that hydropower infrastructure continues to deteriorate and energy market economics are reshuffled, we find ourselves at a critical point in history where the public can decide that the impacts to our rivers — and the risks to downstream communities — are too great. We need to insist that lawmakers and regulators hold utilities accountable for the risks they have created and not allow the costs of these deadbeat dams to be borne by the rate-paying public.
Clinton Begley
Executive director, American Whitewater
MEETING A GENUIS
I’m mad because I have a bachelor’s in fine arts in photography from the University of New Mexico, and this is the first time I heard about Louis Carlos Bernal, “The Father of Chicano Art Photography” (July 2024). I’ve been cheated. Love his work!
Amanda Page on Instagram
WHY SITES BITES
Theo Whitcomb’s article about Sites Reservoir in Northern California minimized opposition to the dam (“In an era of dam removal, California is building more,”July 2024). Setting aside concerns about threatened species and the inundation of species-specific habitat that every dam creates, Sites is of concern because it is a wide shallow reservoir subject to nontypical evaporative loss. Sites will require a massive diversion of stored water from the Sacramento River for its initial fill. This requires the construction of several enormous dams and two 3,000-foot-long and 23-foot-wide tunnels for water to be pumped into and out of, to the tune of an estimated $4.4 billion.
Although the reservoir aims to capture large volumes of floodwater from major storms and store it as a buffer against drought, its startup and operations rob the river of water and harm grasslands habitat, salmon fisheries and overall river health. All this while increasing the state’s storage capacity by a mere 3.5%.
There is a reason a broad spectrum of environmentalists, sport fishing, Indigenous tribes and climate advocacy groups oppose Sites.
Roxanne Moger
Sacramento, California
KNOW YOUR HISTORY
I have lived in Olympia, Washington, which borders on the north with Lewis County, for 50 years. I usually look forward to my drive south on I-5 to see what the latest Hamilton Billboard says. It has been a bit boring and repetitive lately. I have even agreed with some past sentiments, such as skepticism about the Patriot Act. There was even the time the billboard proclaimed “Get us Out of Vietnam” for a few hours. Presumably it had read “Get us Out of the UN” the evening before.
I have picked up knowledge of the events of 1919 and the IWW from living next door to this community. “The Tragedy of Centralia” (June 2024) provided a depth of information of events and people in Centralia, past and present, which I found important to know as someone who lives nearby.
Cathy Wiggins
Olympia, Washington
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