This is an excerpt from my review in "The Ormsby Review", bcbooklook.com.
Once upon a time there was a valley, wide and flat, flanked with snow capped mountains. A huge river slowed down here for 200 km and formed two narrow lakes. There were sandy beaches, sloughs and eddies where waterfowl nested, and rich alluvial soilwhere you could harvest a crop of hay before the late spring flood, and harvest another crop in late summer. a steam boat went up and down the lakes collecting frewsh cherries, peaches, apples and vegetables from Hamlets with names like Renata, Deer Park, Halcyon and Appledale. Kokanee salmon and bull trout spwanwwd in the deltas of the small streams cascading from the mountains. You could selectively log your fir, cedar and cottonwood, and on the slopes you could graze cattle.
But that valley is gone. The Arrow Lakes on the Columbia River between Castlegar and Revelstoke, BC re now behind the High Arrow Dam under a reservoir storing water to generate megawatts and provide flood control for farms and towns in Washington and Oregon.
"A River Captured" tells in fascinating detail the story of the Columbia River Treaty> We find out why virtually all of the Columbia River and Kootenay River became a series of reservoirs.
Pearkes toured the entire river system in search of human interest stories. She found tales of heartbreak and enormous courage, and of breathtakingly callous government high-handedness.
There are may stories of BC Hydro chiseling, threatening and bullying landowners to give up their land. The boast by Premier W.A.C Bennett that the province got "tens of millions of dollars" for 7.1 million acre feet of Arrow Lakes water storage rings hollow.
"No one in government cared about the people who lived here, who loved living here. No one was consulted," says Janet Spicer who still lives on the tiny unflooded portion of her father's farm.
The reservoir behind the Libby dam on the Montana segment of the Kootenay River backs up into Canada and carries the fatuous name of "Lake Koocanusa". Here, Pearkes meets with Stanley Triggs who photographed and documented the dispossession of prosperous ranchers. "I met the people as I recorded them," says Triggs, now in his 80s. "I documented a tremendous loss...They whittled those peole down to the bone. What they got paid for the land was criminal."
Nevertheless, "A River Captured" leaves one with hope that we can start looking at rivers as ecosystems rather than as machines. This is particularly relevant now that a large dam is under construction on British Columbia's Peace River, and people are being put off their farms to make way for the reservoir.
"Can we stop seeing the river [or nature in general] as a villain, and increase our resilience and adaptability to its natural rhythms? Aks Eileen Pearkes. I would suggest that we must.
"No one in govern
