Flexible Concrete and the Imagined Valve

I was contacted recently by a reporter from Canada’s national newspaper, about a comment president-elect Donald Trump made during the campaign. Paraphrasing here: if the US needs water, there is a valve that can be turned. Water from Canada can come down here where it’s needed.

For those of you wondering….there is no valve.

Back in the 1960s, the West didn’t need political strongmen. It had concrete. This magical building block managed to transform the beautiful and naturally productive Columbia River into a practically fish-less engine of industry. Flood control provisions under the 1964 Columbia River Treaty secured Portland’s floodplain, allowing for hundreds of billions of dollars of prosperity: shipping terminals and an international airport, among other developments. Multiple dams in Canada were also staged to hold back water for hydro-electricity, to power factories, homes and businesses. If you are curious how that happened, my book A River Captured explains it.

This map of the Columbia basin (shaded in blue) shows the small area that is Canada’s geographic contribution to the whole. It cannot express the outsized role that the country’s annual accumulation of snow contributes to the whole, somewhat circular international system – close to 50%. Every drop of the water in this transboundary system is accounted for. The Indigenous tribes and nations have fought for decades, and successfully, to wring some of that water for salmon. I am grateful for their noble persistence.

Lately, I’ve been delving into the details of the 2024 Agreement in Principle for a Modernized Columbia River Treaty. It’s a clear, plainly written roadmap of potential healing for this greatly harmed river and its basin. It does not propose dam removal. Instead, it wants to make concrete more flexible.

How could that be possible?

The Agreement in Principle chips away at the lopsided inflexibility of the 1964 Treaty by allowing Canada to manage some of its copious water for its own interest. It trades some hydro-electric profits for “fish flows” – water releases timed to help the salmon get downstream, and back up. It gives me hope that values can continue to evolve, and that our trademark human selfishness can take a back seat to a greater empathy for those beings whose voices cannot be heard. I trust that we can act with more gratitude for the Earth’s water, so generous with its offerings over such a long time.

While I am no fan of mega-projects for the great harm they inflict, I am a big fan of cooperation. Cooperation involves listening, accepting compromise as a way of life, and creating agreements that are mildly dissatisfying for all parties involved, yet also grudgingly acceptable. The world we have created has no simple answers. No single valve that can be turned to solve the problems of one region, on the backs of another. That happened in 1964 with the Columbia River Treaty. The Agreement in Principle doesn’t want it to happen again.