When We Win: Stories From the Frontlines of Ecological Resistance

This is a story about how sacred places, and sacred beings, remain protected through the work of people. Many who are still here, and some who have passed on. This is a story about what did not happen and how life remains. Change and struggle are often forgotten. Instead, there’s a glorification of “progress,” or the exploitation of Mother Earth, with fanfare and ribbon cutting. This is a celebration of the protection of Mother Earth, from the freedom of the Klamath River to the shores of Mole Lake and the fertile estuary of life known as Coos Bay in Oregon.

These are some stories of when we win.  

In 2024, four hydroelectric dams came down on the river, the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. All thanks to the work of tribes and communities. Now the Klamath River Restoration Project is the largest dam restoration project in U.S. history. The Klamath was once the third-largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast, with a river basin of 9.4 million acres. But dams kill salmon.

Beginning in 1918, the installation of massive dams turned the river into an industrial energy producer that provided hydroelectric power to the region. Much of the river’s water flow was diverted to agricultural irrigation, and over time the dams collected stores of sediment that would have flowed downriver, creating shallow reservoirs whose stagnant water was sensitive to heat when the weather warmed. Unable to swim upriver and reach their historic spawning grounds, choked by increasing water temperatures that brought toxic algal blooms, the salmon perished. 

A heartbreaking 70,000 salmon, along with thousands of other species, died in one 2002 disaster. That year, amid a drought that would be the West’s driest quarter-century in 1,200 years, the federal government had shut off water to Klamath farmers. Many filed for bankruptcy and abandoned their fields—others staged protests to release water. This caught the attention of Vice President Dick Cheney, who reportedly intervened to open the headgates just as salmon were starting to swim upstream to spawn. This drained the lower reaches of the Klamath to dangerous levels, forcing salmon to crowd into small pockets of water where they contracted gill rot disease, which thrives in warm temperatures. It was one of the worst die-offs in U.S. history.

The river people persisted

The loss of the salmon meant a loss of nutrients and life. But the people did not leave their river or end their dream. They eventually won through litigation, prayers, Earth Renewal ceremonies and endless negotiations with PacifiCorp, the owner of the four dams, and PacifiCorp’s parent company Berkshire Hathaway—owned by billionaire Warren Buffett.

In 2019, the Yurok passed a resolution granting the Klamath River legal personhood, making it the first river in North America to receive such rights under tribal law. The 2024 “Rights of the Heyhl-keek ‘We-roy (Klamath River) Ordinance” established and implemented those rights. It provided a legal framework, rooted in Yurok culture and indigenous law, to protect the river’s health, natural evolution and a stable environment free from pollution and human-caused climate change impacts. Today the Klamath Tribes hold the most senior water rights in the Klamath Basin, including the agricultural water rights of upstream farmers. 

Amy Bowers Cordalis, a member and attorney for the Yurok Tribe, talks about the deep transformation spiritually and emotionally: “I thought we were going to be the generation that witnessed the collapse and complete death of the river. But now we will be the generation that sees the rebirth and restoration of our ecosystem, our culture and lifeblood.” 

Decades of struggle, then joy and renewal

“It has been more successful than we ever imagined,” says Ren Brownell, spokesperson for the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, a nonprofit created to oversee and implement the dam removals. “There’s an incredible amount of joy.”

I spoke with 17-year-old Keeya Wiki about the first descent of the Klamath River by numerous youth in the Paddle Tribal Waters program. Keeya, who is Yurok and Māori, was one of 30 young folks who kayaked the river this year from the headwaters to the ocean, a journey that includes Class IV+ and Class V rapids.

Wiki’s family had been battling to restore the Klamath for decades. Native people have been “jailed, beaten and killed for fighting for this river,” she says. As she told a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, “We really do carry history and trauma on our backs.”

She reminds me of what it feels like when you protect something sacred. “Paddle Tribal Waters is completely changing this narrative from fear and anxiety to fun and smiles and giggles. We’re changing an entire generation’s story,” she tells me. “It’s like a deep breath where I can see the world how I want to see it and not be questioned for it. I’m my highest, happiest self on the river.”

Then came the land back. First, in 2024, 2,800 acres of land sacred to the Shasta Indian Nation that had been drowned under a reservoir was returned to them. Native seeds that were strewn along the bank reemerged. In June 2025, the Yurok Tribe, California’s largest federally recognized tribal nation, reclaimed 73 square miles of land—47,097 acres—along the eastern side of the lower Klamath River.

That’s the single largest “land back” in California history, the result of work by the Western Rivers Conservancy, California state agencies and the tribe. The 73 square miles of land is now solely owned and managed by the Yurok Tribe as the Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and Yurok Tribal Community Forest. Last fall, not long after the last of the four dams were demolished, Coho salmon, a threatened species and vital source of food for tribes that had plummeted by more than 90% compared to pre-dam numbers, were seen on the river for the first time in 100 years.

The tensions that once ignited between farmers and local tribes in the early 2000s are seeking healing as well. Four years ago, the Shasta and Scott rivers—two tributaries of the Klamath that host important spawning grounds—were given minimum flow regulations under an emergency drought declaration. This year in September, the California state legislature (along party lines) passed a bill that would preserve these flow regulations beyond their emergency rules to not only protect the continued restoration of the Klamath watershed, but also to provide clarity to farmers, fishers and tribal communities.

Take a breath.

Where there is still life

Coos tribal territory is a place where shellfish were once in huge abundance. Deep, brackish estuaries spill into the ocean on this stretch of the southwest Oregon Pacific Coast, where coves teem with fish, birds, whales, seals and more. Tall trees once stood here. The forests are small now, but the water remains. This is the place where the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw people are from. It is peaceful looking out on the bay, a long hook of complex channels and an ecosystem once threatened by the Jordan Cove Energy Project.

That proposed 230-mile Canadian pipeline project, and the plan to build an export terminal in the international port in Coos Bay, Oregon, did not happen, and it will not happen. 

Take a breath. And then another. 

Be grateful and listen to the birds, not the sound of a combustion engine, or an oil pipeline project. Take another breath. Sometimes silence is everything.

Like on the Klamath, the people fought hard. And they won. The Jordan Cove pipeline was a proposed 230-mile pipeline carrying 7.8 million metric tons of liquified natural gas each year to the Pacific Coast to then export it to China. That’s some explosive stuff. And it would have carried the dirtiest oil in the world into a complex estuary system.

That’s a bad idea. So bad, Pembina Pipeline, the Calgary, Alberta, company, had to receive exemptions from the federal government to trash ecosystems and potentially kill rare species and marine mammals. In 2019, the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency that is part of the Commerce Department, issued an “authorization to take marine mammals incidental to pile driving associated with construction of the Jordan Cove Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminal and ancillary projects.” What’s more, a special right-of-way designation for the pipeline by the Bureau of Land Management would have allowed the company to disrupt nesting and remove habitats for vulnerable species like the spotted owl, while the U.S. Forest Service proposed removing about 15 forest plan requirements, removing the company’s obligation to consider other rare species in the pipeline corridor.

That’s some ecologically violent action. And that’s in part why it didn’t happen. Oil destroys life. This pipeline along, with five others (the Keystone XL, Energy East, Northern Gateway, Sandpiper and Constitution pipelines) never happened, thanks to grassroots community groups who united with tribal nations in opposition. Although the Trump administration has moved to resuscitate some of these projects, resistance remains. 

After 14 years of opposition, on December 1, 2021, the state of Oregon finally declined permits for the Jordan Cove pipeline and export terminal. Pembina, the Calgary based corporation, pulled the permits and notified the federal agency that they would not continue. There was a lot of regulatory work, and a lot of community work.

And it was worth it. Today you can walk out on land around Jordon Cove and see the wild things there, to see life as it should be.

Enter the new administration: Word is that a startup company OA Partners filed a petition with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to retroactively revive the Jordan Cove LNG terminal project in Coos County, using President Donald Trump’s executive order to “unleash American energy” and speed up permitting for LNG export projects, to justify its request. OA Partners, based in Arizona, hopes to have the court waive Oregon’s state permitting requirements under the Clean Water Act.

Daniel E. Estrin, General Counsel for Waterkeeper Alliance, says: 

While these “David vs. Goliath” battles to protect our environment and climate from the fossil fuel industry often start with what feel like very long odds, we see time and again that when communities stand up and arm themselves with the law and science to fight for what’s right, we often beat those long odds.

These are expensive projects, and they are risky investments. The variables of putting together financing are subject to a lot of vagaries of markets, and these uncertainties are compounded by grassroots resistance, and more variables. All resistance costs money to the company, and the more resistance, the more uncertainty. That’s one of the major reasons why there is work to undermine our First Amendment rights by many states in order to fast-track energy projects. The more opposition, the more money spent to quell that opposition. We will see.

Where there is no mine

This past spring, I went to visit Mole Lake reservation near Crandon, Wisconsin, for a Cannabis Summit, where Robert Van Zile, Tribal Chairman of the Sokaogon Anishinaabe, pointed out a mine that never happened: the Exxon Crandon mine. That was a 28-year battle of the Sokaogon Anishinaabe against Rio Tinto, the largest mining corporation in the world. That’s to say, a big deposit of copper and zinc sulfides is located under and adjacent to Mole Lake, the heart of their territory and what is home to the last remaining wild rice bed on their land. That ore attracted the attention of nefarious mining and energy corporations—five in succession. 

Al Gedicks, a sociologist who worked with Van Zile and the tribe, put it this way:

The victory over the proposed metallic sulfide mine was significant not only because a grassroots group defeated what was the world’s largest energy company [Exxon] and the world’s largest mining company [in terms of market capitalization, BHP Billiton], it represented the emerging power of alliances between Native American tribes, environmentalists and sportfishing groups that later worked together to block other destructive projects.

“The mainstream political consensus at the time was that the mine was inevitable,” says Gedicks, “given the large size of the zinc-copper deposit, promised jobs and taxes as well as Exxon’s political influence in the state.”  

Sometimes the people and the wild rice win. In this case, after years of litigation, environmental challenges in federal court. In 2002 the Mole Lake Ojibwe and the Forest County Potawatomi tribes purchased the 5,000-acre Crandon mine property and mineral rights for $16.5 million. Land back ended that story. The land is now managed as a conservation area devoted to sustainable land-management practices, tribal cultural values and tourism suitable to this environmentally sensitive area. 

As I stood there with Van Zile and looked at the land, I did not hear the sound of a big truck rumbling nearby or a tree falling. I took a big breath, because sometimes we win. Remember that the dams are gone. Remember that.

Winona LaDukeMore by this author →