Ok, the title to this blog article may seem a bit euphoric, but, what the heck. One thing I’ve learned, the older I get, is that it is very important to drink in as much positive news as you can reliably get, just to keep from getting bogged down in the negative and then stewing in one’s seeming “helplessness”. I try not to buy into that, because after that, what’s left?

So, on to the ‘inspirational’ article. Dams, damn them! Humanity is in a titanic struggle right now, trying to generate enough energy to meet our needs. What are our needs? I guess we don’t entirely know that either, as we struggle to balance what we want with what we really ‘need’, and how to generate that energy in the least destructive way possible. The army corps of engineers has historically had a lot to do with water, through building dams, dikes and other water fortifications, lighthouses, coastal fortifications and harbor management. Dams, therefore, have taken their place in the list of ways that humanity generates energy. I think it is a bit difficult for some of us modern Americans to understand how the land has changed over the past three or four hundred years, especially with regard to water mangement, but change it has, sometimes for the good, and sometimes not. I know we still have water management issues, but things could be pretty interesting just one hundred years ago, with flooding killing many people, and relying on seasonal flows of water today, like in the past, would really change our modern lives. So, a lot of dams were built. They helped us, but they sure radically changed the environment and those wild beings trying to survive in the places after the dams were built. Many are coming to understand the radical, often negative, outcomes of dams, and are trying to do something to reverse this. For instance, the Salmon that historically have migrated up the Rhine for millenia, were stopped from doing so because of dams. Europeans decided to do something about this twenty years ago, and so the work began to clean up a very, very polluted river, and to remove the barriers that were preventing an ancient migration from taking its rightful place up the Rhine. Read on, for a little bit of encouraging news.

• Salmon of the Rhine