Is This the Beginning of the End for Damming America's Big Rivers?
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on July 2, 2007, Printed on July 2, 2007
Usually shareholders meetings don't include traditional Native American salmon bakes and intertribal healing dances. But at the recent shareholders meeting for Berkshire Hathaway -- owned by investment icon Warren Buffett -- Omaha, Neb., got a taste of native culture -- all the way from the Pacific Northwest.
Yet the tribes -- the Karuk, Yurok, and Hoopa of California, and the Klamath Tribes of Oregon -- weren't there to sing Buffett's praises like most of the attendees. They were there to introduce people to threatened native cultures and let Buffett know he made a really bad investment a few years back when his subsidiary Mid-American Energy Holdings bought power company PacifiCorp.
By doing so, Buffett, who is known as one of the world's savviest investors, landed himself in the middle of a social justice and environmental conflagration. While Buffett's investments are making many millionaires, his company is impoverishing the people of the Klamath Basin in Southern Oregon and Northern California who depend on a now ailing Klamath River for their livelihoods and cultural traditions.
The tribal members, who are part of a coalition of native tribes, environmentalists and fishermen, were at the shareholders meeting to pressure PacifiCorp to help save near endangered salmon populations by removing four hydropower dams on the Klamath River, which snakes from the central Oregon-California border, out to the Pacific Ocean, 20 miles south of Crescent City.
The dams are blocking fish passage to necessary spawning grounds and water trapped behind them creates a bath tub affect, heating up the river and causing toxic algae blooms that threaten the health of salmon populations, which tribal members depend on for food and fishermen depend on to make a living. Today 90 percent of the members of the once resource-rich tribes like the Karuk are living below the poverty line, and downstream fishermen have seen their income fall by up to 90 percent in recent years.
(Continued here.)
Posted on July 2, 2007, Printed on July 2, 2007
Usually shareholders meetings don't include traditional Native American salmon bakes and intertribal healing dances. But at the recent shareholders meeting for Berkshire Hathaway -- owned by investment icon Warren Buffett -- Omaha, Neb., got a taste of native culture -- all the way from the Pacific Northwest.
Yet the tribes -- the Karuk, Yurok, and Hoopa of California, and the Klamath Tribes of Oregon -- weren't there to sing Buffett's praises like most of the attendees. They were there to introduce people to threatened native cultures and let Buffett know he made a really bad investment a few years back when his subsidiary Mid-American Energy Holdings bought power company PacifiCorp.
By doing so, Buffett, who is known as one of the world's savviest investors, landed himself in the middle of a social justice and environmental conflagration. While Buffett's investments are making many millionaires, his company is impoverishing the people of the Klamath Basin in Southern Oregon and Northern California who depend on a now ailing Klamath River for their livelihoods and cultural traditions.
The tribal members, who are part of a coalition of native tribes, environmentalists and fishermen, were at the shareholders meeting to pressure PacifiCorp to help save near endangered salmon populations by removing four hydropower dams on the Klamath River, which snakes from the central Oregon-California border, out to the Pacific Ocean, 20 miles south of Crescent City.
The dams are blocking fish passage to necessary spawning grounds and water trapped behind them creates a bath tub affect, heating up the river and causing toxic algae blooms that threaten the health of salmon populations, which tribal members depend on for food and fishermen depend on to make a living. Today 90 percent of the members of the once resource-rich tribes like the Karuk are living below the poverty line, and downstream fishermen have seen their income fall by up to 90 percent in recent years.
(Continued here.)
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