Undammed: Amy Bowers Cordalis and the fight to free the Klamath | Patagonia Films
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- čas přidán 19. 03. 2024
- After witnessing a massive fish kill on her ancestral home waters, Yurok tribal attorney Amy Bowers Cordalis dedicated her life to reversing the generations-long destruction wrought by the Klamath River dams. Undammed follows her journey to free the Klamath, from testifying before Congress to passing down fishing traditions within her young family. Now that the Klamath dams are finally coming down, she remains confident that the future of her tribe is bright. “It’s not a test,” Bowers Cordalis says of the largest dam-removal project in US history. “It will work.”
Help restore the Klamath River by supporting Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group.
DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY: Shane Anderson
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Monika McClure, Alex Lowther, Nicholas Blixt
CREATIVE PRODUCER: Maya Craig
DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Maya Craig, Seth Hahn
ORIGINAL SCORE: William Ryan Fritch
EDITED BY: Will Miller, Shane Anderson
ASSISTANT EDITOR: Jesse Clark
ADDITIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY:
Shane Anderson, Derek Knowles, Josh Murphy, Edythe McNamee, Whitney Hassett, Jason Hartwick, Tyler Parker
SOUND: Daniel Smith
PROD COORD: Jessie Sears
PROD CONSULTANT: Ashley Bowers
SOUND MIX & DESIGN: Bijan Sharifi
GRAPHICS: Scott Hanshew
COLOR: James LeJeune
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About Patagonia:
At Patagonia, we appreciate that all life on earth is under threat of extinction. We’re using the resources we have-our business, our investments, our voice and our imaginations-to do something about it. - Jak na to + styl
We often forget that we're part of this land and not above it. If we take care of it, it'll take care of us. Let the waters flow!
Agree let the waters flow. But do it right. They created an environmental disaster. It won't be good for another 20 years because they decided to save money
LET IT FLOW!!!!!!
Just wait untill the next flood come......and Salmon can't swim on sand, drought are coming~
@@garymarshall3579 Just wait until the next illogical FUD comment...barely coherent.
Thank you, and well put. I'm a bit too emotional to say much on the dam removals, but it is glorious. 😊 all will be well 😊
What a fantastic spokesperson for your tribe you are, Amy. Thank you Patagonia for shining light on this worthwhile fight, its major victory, and the legacy this generation of Yurok created for the rest of us.
With tears running down my face I say "Thank You" for not giving up!!! All of us were indigenous at one time in our history. That awareness still rests deep in our hearts....for many, unaware, until we are reminded that we belong to Mother Earth and are stewarts to her needs. At that point our connection strengthens and we open to a way of life that embraces all creatures great and small and learn to live in harmony. Thanks again. Namaste'
The Yurok are such a resilient people, and the Klamath is such a beautiful and important river. Glad to see a large company using their platform to share things like this.
I met Raymond Mats in 1977.
Stayed up river, on his cabin, on the Klamath.
I was just a teenager of 19. Sure had fun.
As a twenty year Humboldt resident and lover of the river and KNF, it is too rad to see the Klamath possibly restored for us all to marvel in. ❤
Let’s remove the lower four Snake River dams next! So happy to see this progress.
Thank you to all of the tribes and people who fought hard for years to make this happen! Now onto the Columbia and Snake Rivers! Restore the land and our relationship to it, and restored lives and livelihoods will follow!
Blessings and strength! This was emotional. Dam removal is necessary for healthy waterways and healthy people. It needs to happen around the this wonderful Earth.
830000 dead salmon and counting....
@@jimbear3797 Smolts. Stop exaggerating. They can hatch more in a couple of weeks. The mature salmon that were in the river were tapped and are now in holding pens along side the river. Read more and post less.
@@johnkilty5091 perhaps you need to get out of the city and see what is going on out there
Meeting with New Zealand government today in/on our coastal waters to uphold our rights & obligations. Thank you Yurok Nation for tuning in to the beat of Creator, wholeness & harmony, water, life force itself 🙏🏼🐚💧🩵🌊🐟🐋♾️
Yes!!
Salmon aren’t native to New Zealand.
I hope by the time I am old we will all finally begin to collectively recognize and honor the generations of indigenous people from hundreds of tribes across north america who have risked their lives and their freedom to protect the land from exploitation and destruction.
I often wondered why we were told the story of "Chicken Little" when young. Anytime an effort is made to correct some of the wrongs we have inflicted on this planet, a cadre of naysayers comes out of the woodwork to condemn the efforts. Too often they have selfish, short term, motives. In a few short years when the restoration efforts bear fruit, and the rivers are productive again you will find none of them around. Stay on track and continue the quest as you have imagined it. I wish you good luck and success in your endeavors. I am watching similar efforts in the river valley where I grew up in Connecticut, where one of the most polluted rivers in the Northeast is finally receiving an ongoing effort to restore it. One more dam to go. My only regret is that I probably won't live to see it fully restored but take pleasure in knowing it is happening.
Thank you for having a vision of the future....
What a beautiful story of unimaginable resilience and fortitude that gives me hope. My tears of joy, my hope for the same fate for the snake river dam removal. Thank you for being a beacon of light and strength in such troubled times
At 78, I PRAY I live long enough to see the river return to at least a decent return run of healthy salmon.
Measure twice, cut once! Not enough foresight and considerations was put into the concept of dam building from the beginning. Thank you for your time and effort to seeing this mistake corrected.
What a beautiful film about such an amazing and historical event. Thank you!
for certain, this is the best commercial I've ever seen. I'm glad my adblocker was off.
Well done!!!
Respect.
Salmon are the cornerstone of species in this region. ❤
Amazing. Thanks a lot
Thank you🎉🎉🎉
Amazing work! Beautiful river. Free the fish!
Great work!
Great work on dam removal. I would love for y'all to reconsider if jet boats and nylon gill nets are "traditional" fishing practices.
Telling the local tribes how to fish is kinda like telling your boss how to run his company. Both are in poor form and will not be well received.
Very well done! Thank you.
It's seems destruction happens quickly and justice slowly!
Nice work ..
A beautiful film. Humans must look after nature and live as part of the ecosystem, not destroy it.
"The water knows where to go....."
Powerful.
👍🏼👊🏼🤙🏼
gives me hope
Hazah! Change is possible!
Appreciate the video as it does a good job of laying out the background
Go Strong Beautiful Lady 💪🙏
There is a lot of videos about dam removals. Can you do something about the estuary changes?
Amen.
bringing back to lifeeee! yiehooow! 🤙
I grew up in Klamath Falls and very eager and interested in how this affects Klamath Lake and hopefully turns it into a clean and not algae filled body of water.
We of the Pacific Northwest look to restore the Snake river salmon habitat with dam removal. Salmon are an icon of Washington state. Good work to all who have worked to free the Klamath including farmers/ranchers who understand the river's importance to fisheries and water quality.
We the knowledgeable of the Pacific Northwest look to the use of rational science rather than group "think" to restore watersheds and rivers. The problem is there are too many of you and not enough of us.
There are more of us, and we spend the dollars. No worries mate
POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!! Thank you....
Hopefully more rivers will be restored soon after they see how this restores the land
Love this!!! Congrats on all the hard work and perseverance!!
Celilo Falls next! Free the Columbia!
Let the damned salmon swim free!!
I live near the Klamath river and removing the dams the way they have has released arsenic and other heavy metals. Right now the local radio is telling people it's not safe to even swim in the Klamath river. No good deed goes unpunished. I'm glad they're being removed but I worry about it while it heals.
The way they removed the dams is atrocious!! They have killed this river
The high levels of organic sludge in the Klamath is fairly unique to this basin due to it's geochemistry and ecology. They were warned about the toxic sludge killing the salmon, but the political pressure from naive groups like patagonia over-rules actual science in our society. The fish are dying this year. If it keeps up for six years, there will be no more salmon as the runs will be depleted. All we can hope for now is all that sludge to destroy just one year of the river's biology instead of six.
The toxicity of the sediments built up behind the dams was known before the dams were removed and the timing of the dam removals were made accordingly. These toxic elements have been present in the Klamath drainage basin for thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of years but, prior to the dams being built, leached slowly into natural run-off, with the parts-per-million being well below toxicity levels to fish or other wildlife along or within the river. It was the damming of the river that created this toxic sludge build up in the first place. It was known and accepted as a price to pay for having foolishly dammed the river in the first place, without taking into account the consequences of such actions decades afterwards, that bringing down the dams would indeed create a toxic situation for all living things downstream. This river will heal itself, with or without human intervention, but rather massive human intervention is planned and is in fact already underway. Nature will flush the toxins out of the false lake beds, probably faster than most folks think. And yeah, it may not be safe to swim in the water for a while but please do not blame those who are trying so very hard, after fighting for so very long, to restore the river to it's once wild and untamed state. Blame rather those who built the dams so many decades ago, with no thought or consideration for what the consequences would be to the many lives, human included, would be decades after they, the decision makers, were gone. Nature always heals herself and she has healed many far worse wounds than this before.
@@loragunning5394 no good deed goes unpunished.
The siskiyou local radio is full of kooks and influenced by wealthy farming families who oppose it 😢
Ладно Apple и Yandex. А почему в моем турецком Spotify ее нет? Как Роспотреб до него добрался?
☮️
Netting the river basically bank to bank could be a major problem! And whomever has the tendency to ask if I am "first nation" stop. Use your brain. Use a rod and reel like the rest of us if you really care. Period. Yes, the dam removal is good.
We like to visit patagonia
There is a lot of very well backed political opposition to undamming. Agriculture and cities who promise their citizens unlimited cheap water.
Salmon is life
Free The Rivers!!
nice plug for 1000$ waders and 600$ boots. On the other hand grudens bibs for a mearlt 100$ that most fisherman wear. i get it but also i do not. Money is needed to stay alive and that what Patagonia is about, if they were not they would have a cheaper line for the everyday person but its exclusive. Welcome to yuppie trying to be hippies
I have no need to over pay either.
That’s really what you gathered from this video? Grow up
If you gill net large amounts of salmon before they can spawn, that will not help the population of the fish. I am so against the practice of netting on rivers. Kills many fish other than the target species. Seen it here in Michigan with the tribes .
Are you first nation native??
@@briankenyon1543Why is that relevant?
“Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” - Chief Seattle
Glad to see it! White Salmon, Elwha, and now Klamath...Columbia and Snake next?
Shouldn't forget about the good works being done on the East coast rivers too!
They are literally damming and creating barriers on all the Great Lakes tributaries for lamprey international Canada and the US
Sandy River too. Took out marmot Dam 9 years ago. Flows free to the ocean.
I just hope the dream still isn't to sell Yurok Salmon all over the world. Subsistence fishing is one thing, commercial fishing in the rivers will stifle recovery.
Either way I'm rooting for the Klamath, the fish and the tribe.
Exactly, what was Patagonia thinking by focusing the film on a fisherman who gill nets the Klamath for the very fish we are trying to support. Not to mention commercial fishing isn’t good for any fishery….period.
@@TiredAmerican247uhm.......they were thinking of native American rights and how their land, language and way of living was taken from them at gunpoint. Let me guess, you're vegan or some 💩 like that!
Agreed. I am all for saving the salmon and letting them live their natural lives without fishing of any kind by humans. Go vegan!
@@robertturner1308 vegans don’t do anything for conservation. Kick rocks with that vegan nonsense.
And it’s so many more than the Yurok, the Trinity and Hoopah have fought for the basin as the creator has called for them to do in the past and forever and this should be the legacy they demonstrate to the world and our country ❤️☸️🙇🏻♂️
You should stop using modern set nets
Amy are you related to Jaime Bowers by chance?
Bring back natural rivers.
The Truth will be revealed and the meek shall inherit this Earth.
I live near the Elwa.
Its all good folks.
Get rid of those fn dams.
Tell us about the spring chinook that still have failed to return to the elwah.
Win for all of us in the pacific North west. I am so sorry to tell you, The work is far from done. 1968 I learned about the of the other side. It was one heck of an interesting time. Not good just interesting !! No, I am not Santa
Thank the fish for giving it's life? I'm sure that's not what the fish would think....🤷🏻
Now if man could just fix the ocean and the climate and turn back time .
#freetherivers
Too funny, Plastic Gillnet across mouth of the river = Good / Dam=Bad 🤔😂🤣😂
Oh, you must be a first nations native huh?
I have no idea what you are talking about. I have driven past the mouth more than a hundred times since the late 60's. Never once saw a gillnet stretched across the mouth of the Klamath. Neither have you. You may have seen nets used, but not in the way you describe. White fishermen use the same nets. What's your problem?
@johnkilty5091 You poor, poor dumb soul....
I was there. I walked that river. I saw nothing but death I smelled nothing but death, . All because of greed. Salmon steelheand and silvers. All dead .
lies and more lies for the World Economic Forum~
830000 dead fish and counting
Damns are built generating clean power to many. How much pollution do you release by demolishing them?
2 sides to every story. Obvious which side this piece is on
The Klamath River is dead it's going to be decades before the River will heal.
Removing the dam caused another massive fish kill
The columbia, snake, Clearwater etc have amazing runs of large healthy fish unparalleled in the lower 48. Predators and mismanagement of them is a much larger problem for fish populations than any dam, farming, mining, or logging etc ever has been. The foreign fleets in the ocean, gill nets on the Klamath, otters, mergansers, seals are all unregulated and are direct killers of fish. Historically, natives trapped and managed predators not only for fur, but to help their food supply, in this case fish. Interestingly, the early 2000’s fish kill only occurred down river, miles below the dams. It did not seem to effect the trout and suckers upstream and has been rumored that it might have been poison. It only happened one time in known history and it seems fishy. The release of the muck behind the dams will no doubt have a much more lethal impact on the fish and all other river wildlife than anything we’ve experienced so far. I guess we’ll see
Seeing the larger picture is always a good thing , but most of these viewers will never get past their emotional reactions.
I am glad to see the Klamath restored for the sake of the animals. Hopefully all people will move to a vegan diet and let animals live. Overfishing and industrial farming of animals are unsustainable, inefficient, and cruel. I have been vegan for almost seven years now and it is a great diet/lifestyle. Hopefully even native people will adopt a vegan diet. It is the most ethical diet.
Why don’t you talk about all of the negatives. The deer and elk starving to death stuck in the sediment. How about the 800,000 salmon smolt that died? Wait until this years run of adult salmon die because if the silt in the water. You folks are utterly clueless to the reality of your feel good decisions. I grew up in the area and know many people seeing these consequences in real time.
Reality is not the friend of propaganda. They have been warned about the organic toxic sludge. Now they are trying to hide that story. Dead salmon tell no lies. It is interesting how propaganda and patagonia look similar on paper.
you should go up there now and see all the dead otters and the dead fish, all aquatic lives, birds, deer. They irresponsibly took the dams out. They could have done it right but they destroyed everything.
How would "done it right" have looked to you? Not trying to be combative, just curious. Remember, the decision to decommission the dams was made almost 15 years ago and the time since then has been spent trying to figure out the best and least harmful way to do that.
Dam is gone and gill nets come out. No fish left, no enforcement of fish taken. You can’t believe you will have more fish with such a smaller river flow. You will regret this decision!
You literally destroyed this river again. At what point you think letting all the water out in 3 days was a good idea ?!?!?!
Removing these dams are such a major loss of clean every. Sorry, I live by the snake. I'll take a reservoir over the windmills and solar any day. We have more population all the time and something has to give. A few salmon does not make up for all the other losses by removing the dams.
I recommend reading Cadillac Desert, the promise of cheap hydro power is a myth...more like government subsidized power and agriculture. Don't get me wrong, I like agriculture, but not agriculture in a desert!
You obviously haven't done even the smallest amount of research have you "biker" your yank dams haven't produced a viable energy output for a FKN long time.
There was no loss of clean energy, these dams were actually obsolete and would have cost far more to rehabilitate and bring up to federal minimum standards for power generation than building new, actually clean generation projects that reliably and safely produce more power cheaper, so that’s what they did.
In fact, hydro power got another subsidy here because the power companies essentially sold the dams to the state to avoid the cost of their removal, putting that huge (some estimates are $500 million) cost on the public and private coalitions, not the dam’s owner/operators.
Another reason there was no loss of clean energy because of the dam removals is because hydro power is not “clean”, it destroys rivers and river adjacent habitats, just like this one has been doing.
It wasn’t just a few salmon, it was repeated massive fish kills that essentially ended multiple salmon runs that in turn feed the upper river forests. The entire lower river would often be very toxic in summer….no swimming, no pets, sick wildlife, dead or sick fish…and algae stink.
What other losses are you referring to? These dams weren’t designed or used for flood control or irrigation.
Put the money that was wasted here on removing the dam into fish passageways and then you wouldn't have killed this entire run of fish, wells wouldn't be drying up putting 1000s of people without water, deer and elk wouldn't be dieing from being stuck in the muck, and you would have maintained the most reliable engery source this country has. Disgusting.
These dams were obsolete and would have cost far more to upgrade to minimum federal standards than they could earn back in their lifetime, so the company essentially sold them to California and the state is paying for the removal, letting the owners off the hook twice. They have already replaced the generation capacity with renewable sources.
Fish ladders are expensive and wouldn’t solve the water quality issues, these lakes were poorly designed bathtubs that turned into algae ponds in summer making the entire lower river toxic in summer.
There aren’t thousands of people living in the area, and only some have had well issues.
This was not a reliable energy source hydro power isn’t. It’s heavily subsidized, like here, or it would never be economically viable.
Funny, the county has declared a state of emergency because the river is now toxic and all the fish have died. Good job 👏 The Shasta Indians disagree with her assessment and they actually live where the dams were built. Not all the native tribes are for this.
It will be interesting to hear their perspective. Thanks for mentioning this.
Funny, the articles I've read interviewing the Shasta say just the opposite. Search for /klamath-oregon-dam-removal-shasta-indian-nation-native-american-indigenous-culture/ and you'll see.
@hopeofdawn So Dems like yourself believe the Dem media and algorithms? Lol😂 look at this comment section. The vast majority of the comments are negative, and they are all shoved down to the bottom...... You don't know anything based on a biased article.
Patagonia hates agriculture
The salmon were here first
Waaaaa waaaaa waaaaaaaa
I'm sorry. What do you mean by that??
If that's what you got out of this, then I don't know what to tell you
Clueless people say dumb things
Not interested in going back to live like native Americans. Dams provide a lot of power.
These ones really didn’t. Super minor on the OR grid.
❤