Science Friday - Climate Future Exhibit | Oregon's Proposed Fish Vacuum

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

A Climate Change Exhibit Asks ‘What If We Get It Right?’Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and co-founder of the nonprofit Urban Ocean Lab, thinks a lot about the possible futures of our climate. Not just one ideal climate future, but a range of futures that could be better if we make some changes.She’s helped steer environmental policy, written books and articles on climate action, and co-hosted the podcast How To Save A Planet. And now she’s working with artists who are offering their own creative visions for how we could build a more sustainable society.The effort has culminated in Climate Futurism, a new exhibit Dr. Johnson curated at Pioneer Works, a museum and performing arts space in Brooklyn, New York. And one of the central questions it asks the viewer is, what if we get it right?SciFri producer D. Peterschmidt visited the exhibit and spoke to Dr. Johnson and one of the three featured artists, Erica Deeman, about food justice, reconnecting with nature, and why the exhibit is called Climate Futurism.Climate Futurism features new art from Erica Deeman, Denice Frohman, and Olalekan Jeyifous. It runs until December 10, 2023.How To Save Oregon’s Salmon? Maybe With A Giant Vacuum.To free salmon stuck behind dams in Oregon’s Willamette River Valley, here’s what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has in mind:Build a floating vacuum the size of a football field with enough pumps to suck up a small river. Capture tiny young salmon in the vacuum’s mouth and flush them into massive storage tanks. Then load the fish onto trucks, drive them downstream and dump them back into the water. An enormous fish collector like this costs up to $450 million, and nothing of its scale has ever been tested.The fish collectors are the biggest element of the Army Corps’ $1.9 billion plan to keep the salmon from going extinct.The Corps says its devices will work. A cheaper alternative — halting dam operations so fish can pass — would create widespread harm to hydroelectric customers, boaters and farmers, the agency contends.“Bottom line, we think what we have proposed will support sustainable, healthy fish populations over time,” Liza Wells, the deputy engineer for the Corps’ Portland district, said in a statement.But reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica casts doubt on the Corps’ assertions.Read more on sciencefriday.com.To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Imagine a vacuum the size of a football field. If you're a salmon in Oregon, you may get acquainted soon. It looks like a giant floating industrial building with fish tanks and plumbing. It's Wednesday, November 8th, but of course, today is Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Kathleen Davis. Oregon's Willamette River Valley has a whole bunch of dams, which have had a a huge negative impact on the population of wild salmon. The Army Corps of Engineers wants to use a giant vacuum to suck up salmon and transport

them down river. We will talk about that wild plan. But first, D. Peter Schmidt speaks with Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist who curated an exhibit about our possible climate futures. I talked to Ayanna, along with artist Erica Deeman, one of the exhibits three artists, about reconnecting with nature, food justice, and why the exhibit is called climate futurism. Ianna started by answering that question.

The question that I've been asking myself for a few years now is, what if we get it right? There's so much like apocalypse, doom in filmmaking, in social media, that I feel like we've lost the ability to imagine the future that we want. And so when I think of climate futurism, I think about, okay, we have basically all the climate solutions we need. What if we actually implemented them? And so with this show, I was glad to have the opportunity to engage with artists around these questions of what is the climate future we want to create? What should we take with us and what should we leave behind? My name is Erica Deeman. I am a visual artist and I am sharing work as part of this installation.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Erica lived in Seattle during 2021, which was the hottest summer on record for the city. She also had access to a garden there and was reminded of the farm her parents once had in Jamaica. But then as I researched more and went into my family's history and time in Jamaica, I was really inspired by what Jamaican farmers were doing with the land and with the acknowledgement of the change in the climate. Erica learned that Jamaica is experiencing declining rainfall due to climate change, which is forcing farmers to find new ways to tend to their crops.

Some have partnered with the UN on a program that uses water tanks to collect rainfall from roofs, allowing farmers to stock up on water during dry periods. It made her think about how this adaptability to climate change is connected to the adaptability of the black diaspora, faced with the historical loss of sovereignty amidst the backdrop of the Middle Passage and colonialism. For Erica, adaptability is a crucial component to Ianna's question. What if we get it right? seeds from England where I'm born and Jamaica sourced from black farmers in the US. And so I embedded these seeds into this plaster that I hand-painted. The result is about 500 of these seed-embedded

gypsum plaster shards suspended from the ceiling. The piece is called Give Us Back Our Bones. That history became really important to think about how we have got to this moment in time where the planet is changing its environment and how. that narrative fits into it. But also there is this distinct possibility, which I think Ayana is talking to, which is getting it right. And for me, the seeds kind of represent that possibility. In initially hearing Erica describe her work was that she was imagining this art installation as a portal, as a place where people could ponder their own histories and think about how they want to create the future and what they might have to all.

offer. Erica is joined by exhibits from poet Denise Froman and visual artist Ola Lake and Jaffus, who also weaved in their family's histories to consider possible futures with our changing climate in mind. In the program for the exhibition, Ianna writes that she wanted the show to jolt the viewer from a, quote, doomers resignation around climate change. I asked her what she meant by that, and she told me that she just doesn't think it's useful. Like, we don't get to give up on life on earth, She gestures wildly into the void. And I honestly just think that's really boring. What are you going to do?

Like sit on the couch and watch the world burn and melt around you? And so nothing about this show assumes that the future will be easy. But we literally have to make the future that we want to live in because the difference between one degree of warming and five degrees of warming is hundreds of millions of people's lives. So it actually does matter even if we get. get it partially right. And I guess that can sound incrementalist, but I think it's just realist. I'm not an optimist. I'm, you know, a scientist. I know what the scientific projections are. But I also know that all of those projections show very clearly that there is a range of possible futures. And so my work is trying to be a part of making sure we have one of the best possible futures. And I just feel

like there hasn't been enough discussion of what future we actually want, how we're going to like all get there and not leave some groups behind, the same groups that always get left behind. So this is also a show about justice because if we get there and leave poor people, communities of color, coastal communities, our diaspora's behind, then like that's not a future that I want. Ianna wasn't alone in thinking about justice as a part of our climate futures. All of the art and the exhibit tie in farming in some way and the power that comes from growing your own food.

As we were talking, Ayanna was reminded of a quote from the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. When you've got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned up for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to do. So the thought of like the black and Caribbean diaspora mashing up with food, and culture and regenerative agriculture, like, what if climate adaptation is beautiful, right? And so the words that I, you know, hold on to that are really the theme of my book of that same title, what if we get it right, are possibility and transformation. And that's kind of what I'm hoping that people take away from this show is the huge amount of possibility that exists and be gargantuan amount of transformation that needs to happen

to deal with climate change and create a climate futurism that actually works for real people. Climate Futurism at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York will be running until December 10th. For Science Friday, I'm Dee Petersman. Oregon's Willamette River Valley is home to 13 dams, which have the important job of making sure water is at the right place, at the right time.

but these dams have the unfortunate side effect of trapping salmon and preventing them from getting where they want to go. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has a novel solution for this problem that may seem surprising. A floating vacuum, the size of a football field, which will suck up the salmon, load them onto trucks, haul them down the river to be put back in. If your reaction to this plan is, Huh? Well, you're not alone. Joining me to talk about this is Tony Schick, reporter for Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica based in Portland. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hey, thank you so much for having me. This sounds a little bit wild. Let's start with the problem here. Of course, the fish want to go back up river and the dam is in the way. All of them, right? Well, the fish want to go downriver first, and they're in the way for that, too. So the fish are born in the streams up above the dam. and are trying to migrate downriver to the ocean, and the dam blocks their journey downriver,

and it blocks their journey upriver, too. They have been massive impediments, and they are what biologists cite as the dominant factor in driving several of these species to the endangered list. Wow, but the plan I described briefly seems, if I might coin a phrase, a little bit bananas here. Tell us of the details. This is really a giant fish vacuum. them? How big is this? Yeah. So that's not me being flippant when I describe it as a fish vacuum.

That's how the Corps of Engineers biologists described it to me. It looks like a giant floating industrial building with fish tanks and plumbing. And what it does is it uses pumps to create an inflow of water. And so it's sucking up water. And the idea is to create a big enough flow of water that the fish think, that's the current I'm supposed to follow downstream because these salmon are, you know, hardwired to make their way downstream and to follow a flowing current. That's part of the problem with having these reservoirs behind dams is like it's stagnant water. So it's preventing the salmon from their typical migration downstream. And so the idea is essentially to trick these fish into thinking, this is the way downstream. And then they get caught in these traps and then they're held in in tanks.

they're transported onto a truck, and then they are driven downstream around one dam or maybe multiple dams in some cases, and then releasing them back into the water. And then they would then capture the adult fish once they come back a few years later from the ocean. And that's something they've been doing for a while. Adult trapping hall, as they call it,

is fairly commonly used practice for these high-head dams, the dams that are very tall and very difficult to construct some sort of fish ladder that the fish can just swim past. Is this the easiest solution to this problem? I mean, it sounds like, you know, you're going to be stressing the fish and who knows what. All right, has this plane gotten the most traction? In short, it's not the most simple solution. There are other things you can do at a flood control dam,

which these dams are primarily used for flood control. They do have other uses, but they were primarily built for flood control. And what you can do there is you can open up the various gates in the dams. You can open up. They're called regulating outlets that you use to kind of regulate, you know, the height of the reservoir or the temperature or the flow. You can open those up and essentially drain the reservoir down to the level of those outlets so the fish can get through those outlets.

those outlets can safely pass fish, but they're normally at a depth that's way too deep for salmon to get to, because salmon are oriented to the surface. And so if you just drain those to the point where the salmon can find them, you can pass a lot of fish. And at some of these dams, at one in particular, they have experimented with draining the reservoir all the way basically to the creek bed, and they have a dam where it's configured in a way that it can kind of facilitate that.

and they've seen tremendous success with passing fish. And the core reports that they have seen a tenfold increase in the number of adult salmon coming back at that dam. It's called Fall Creek Dam because of draining the reservoir. And what that does is it flushes all of the fish downstream. They have like 99% successful passage. It also kind of restores temporarily at least, you know, river. conditions. And so you're getting rid of the reservoir temporarily. And so you don't have the reservoir conditions where invasive species like bass or northern pike minnow that really like those

warmer stagnant lakes, it's getting rid of a lot of those. And so the reservoir becomes not so perilous for salmon. Right. Well, if that works so well, why go to this kind of scale. I mean, it doesn't seem like this is going to be sustainable in the long run. Well, there are a couple of reasons. One is the Army Corps says they're operating kind of within a box that Congress has kind of designed for them in terms of how they can operate. So they have all of these uses authorized for the dams, storing water, hydropower, recreation. And if you're draining the reservoirs, that is sacrificing the water. those other uses. And Corps says that they're not able to do that or allowed to do that and

sacrifice all of these other uses because they are uses that Congress has authorized for them and until Congress says otherwise, it's what they're going to do. Yeah. What's the projection, though, for how many fish the Army Corps' project they'll save? So their projections are that these fish collectors can collect somewhere between 80 and 90 some percent of fish. And will this actually stop the possible extinction of the fish if you can get that? The core says so. There are a lot of people who are more skeptical of that. So at a couple of these locations where they're trying these fish collectors, it's going to result in two-way trapping hall, as I described.

You trap the juvenile fish, truck them downstream. You trap the adult fish, bring it back up. There was a review of this in 2017 by some researchers at University of the United States. of California Davis, where they examined this in the context of it being proposed for salmon in California. And they concluded that there is no such program that can be considered a success of this two-way trappin hall. They said any such program should proceed with extreme caution. Those are their words. And that in conclusion, they said it won't save salmon. It will merely prolong their path to extinction. Now, I will say the Corps biologist in the area, Greg Taylor, has been frank with me about the uncertainties involved in their plan.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to go back and look at how these structures performed in other locations to see that there's been some challenges. So what we can do, what we have done, is gone back and looked really hard at those designs and tried to incorporate every single thing we think can help a structure. at our site, collect fish in the most efficient way possible to be successful. Yeah, so these fish collectors have a really spotty track record. There are some that have been successful. There's one on the Clackamas River, which is also on the Llamat system owned by a private company that has been quite successful. The difference is that's a very small reservoir.

It doesn't fluctuate up and down like these flood control reservoirs do. and it also operates what's called run of river basically the water that comes in flows out they're not impounding lots of water behind the dams creating this stagnant like so they have all of these things going for them at this dam that the army corps will lambat dams don't have and they're aware of that so what's what's next for this plan is it still going strong can we expect an update so the Corps has to finalize its plan for Willamette River Salmon by the end of 2024 under a court order. And the next step is, has to get approved by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. And NOAA scientists said that they are confident in these fish collectors, that they believe that the Corps can improve on designs they've seen elsewhere and that they do have confidence that it will work.

Well, we'll check in and check back with you, Tony, okay? Thanks for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much. Take care. Tony Schick, reporter for Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica, based in Portland, Oregon. And that's all the time that we have for today. A lot of folks help make the show happen, including Annie Nero. Jason Rosenberg. Rasha Eriety. Shoshana Bucksbaum. And many more. Next time, we'll talk about how five elements tell the story of life. on our planet. I'm sci-fry producer Kathleen Davis. We will catch you then.