ISC Fellow John Waldman co-authors NYT Op-Ed: “Let the River Run Wild”

Published in the September 7th edition of the New York Times:

“IF the Chesapeake Bay is America’s Estuary, then its largest tributary, the Susquehanna River, could arguably be called America’s River. But we certainly don’t treat it as a national treasure: This once magnificent watercourse, which runs through New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland toward the coast, is today an ecological disaster — largely thanks to fourhydroelectric dams, built along its lower reaches between 1904 and 1931.

An impending license renewal by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for two of these dams will lock in another half-century of measures woefully inadequate to remediating the dams’ environmental consequences. Instead, all four should be removed.

The Susquehanna’s 27,000-square-mile watershed was once home to remarkable runs of migratory fishes — and none more so than the American shad, a type of herring. In 1827, one net hauled in was said to have contained an astounding 15 million shad and river herring. A commercial fishing operation on the river stationed a sentry on a hillside to watch for the moving bulge in the waters that signaled another huge school approaching. Shad were such a mainstay of regional diets that traveling fishmongers would blow horns and shout “shad-o” to announce the availability of this delicacy.”

Click here to read the entire op-ed, co-authored by John Waldman, Karin E. Limburg and Amy Roe.