Revisioning the lower Snake River

Graduate students with Washington State University (WSU) and University of Idaho unveiled their “Future Directions for the Snake River, Dams and Regional Transportation,” visions of a lower Snake River landscape without dams at the Sage Bakery in Lewiston, ID last week. 

Professor Jolie Kaytes’ Landscape Design class spent the semester meeting with stakeholders, touring and lower Snake River and consulting with experts to develop designs on how the lower Snake River could look in the future with agriculture, modern transportation and local communities thriving along a restored river.

The students this fall were the second group to imagine a future Snake River.  Last year’s class explored ideas for the Snake River waterfront in Clarkston/Lewiston.  Designs focused on reconnecting the historic downtown with the river, utilizing reclaimed riverfront lands for public markets, recreation, tourism and commerce. 

This year's designs were unveiled at an evening reception at Sage Bakery.  The students’ work will remain on the walls through the end of January 2011, in conjunction with a gallery of historic photos of the lower Snake River, showing what the river looked like before dams and could look like again.  

This year’s designs focused on the stretch of river from Pasco, WA to Central Ferry upstream from Little Goose dam.  Modern rail depots facilitating transport of crops and people, free-flowing river recreation, restored Native-American lands, and abundant salmon were featured.  Some designs focused on the values at stake and needs of farmers, local communities, and salmon-dependent communities, while another design suggested how the region can seize an opportunity for stakeholder dialogue to create a future that includes a restored river while meeting the needs of farmers, fishermen and local towns.

"The students’ projects address and reveal the complex relationships among organisms, locale, the built environment, ideologies, and time,” said Jolie Kaytes, the course instructor and associate professor of landscape architecture at WSU. “They employ design strategies that require us to broadly reflect on values, energy, edge, transport, recreation, farming, community, power, sustenance, soil, settlement, and salmon.

“Ultimately, the students’ projects challenge us to reexamine how we see and understand the region, to continually review, in the multiple senses of that word, the Snake River Basin and what it means
to be a citizen of this landscape,” she said.

Stop by and check out the students’ work.  Sage Bakery is located at 1303 Main Street in Lewiston.  Stay tuned for showings of the designs in Spokane, Seattle and other locations in 2011.   Designs from the previous class are available for viewing here at Working Snake River's website.

For more information go to: http://bit.ly/hYrl0h
And stay tuned for closer looks at these landscape designs soon...

Winds of Change are coming to the Lower Snake River Basin

Turbine Tower Truck, courtesy of PSE

Creating carbon-free energy, good jobs and healthy communities – and further diminishing the need for 4 dams on the lower Snake.

Puget Sound Energy (PSE), a Northwest-based power utility is in the midst of expanding its wind turbine facilities in the wind-rich lower Snake River drainage in southeast Washington State, just a stone’s throw (OK, a long throw) from the salmon-killing lower Snake River dams. Is it providence or merely coincidence?

PSE’s Lower Snake River Wind Project will build on existing nearby wind facilities, Hopkins Ridge and Marengo – expanding the Pacific Northwest’s truly clean energy by 343 MW.  In addition to the numerous benefits associated with increasing our supply of domestic, carbon-free, salmon-friendly energy, these projects also contribute significant benefits by creating short and long-term jobs locally, generating income for local landowners, and increasing local tax revenues – all things we need more of these days!

PSE reports on a number of these economic benefits from the Hopkins Ridge and Marengo wind facilities, which represent a combined 204 wind turbines with 367 megawatts (MW) of capacity.

PSE found that:
• Construction of these Columbia County wind facilities created $2.3 million annually in labor income
• Operation of these facilities contributes $3.5 million annually in labor income
• Construction of these facilities created 190 direct and indirect jobs
• Operation of these facilities created 55 direct and indirect jobs
• These facilities paid more than $900,000 in taxes in 2008, reducing the tax burden on individual property owners.

PSE also looked at the economic impact of wind on a per-MW basis, and found, for example, that operation of these facilities results in $10,000 in annual income per MW. The new Lower Snake Wild Project being installed as we speak will provide more of the same - Local Jobs. Income. Tax revenues. Carbon-free energy. No harm to salmon.

Northwest wind and other renewable sources of energy are no longer an energy source for the future. It’s here now. We are building it, using it in-region, and exporting it out of region. Unplugging ourselves from the energy of the lower Snake River dams and replacing their limited transportation and energy benefits with alternatives is feasible, affordable, and will provide long-term benefits for our region – healthy salmon populations, good jobs in energy, transportation and outdoor recreation, taxpayer savings, and restored habitat and parklands for hunting, fishing, hiking and boating along 140 miles of the lower Snake River.

WSU: Future directions for Snake River, dams envisioned

Little Goose Dam, a revision. Illustration by Stephen Ulman, courtesy WSU.

Little Goose Dam, current. Illustration by Stephen Ulman, courtesy WSU.

 

By Brian Clark, WSU College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences

PULLMAN - Landscape architecture, design and education graduate students from Washington State University and the University of Idaho will present their visions for the Lower Snake River Basin, Dec. 9-Jan. 31 at the Sage Baking Company, 1303 Main St., Lewiston. The opening reception will be 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 9.

Snake River reView showcases the design work of graduate students in the course “Cultural Interpretations of the Regional Landscape.” During the course, students studied the connections between people and place in the basin and the ways these connections are affected by and affect the Lower Snake River dams.

“The students’ projects address and reveal the complex relationships among organisms, locale, the built environment, ideologies and time,” said Jolie Kaytes, the course instructor and associate professor of landscape architecture at WSU. “They employ design strategies that require us to broadly reflect on values, energy, edge, transport, recreation, farming, community, power, sustenance, soil, settlement and salmon.

Read more from WSU Today.
Take a look at "Water Views" - lower Snake River revisioning designs from 2009-2010.