Tuesday, January 5, 2021

Four dams, the Kennebec River and the future of US Atlantic salmon in the balance

While the pandemic has been raging across the world, a high-stakes battle over the future of one of Maine's largest river systems has been playing out in an obscure federal online docket, one with the future of Atlantic salmon in the United States in the balance.

In this week's Maine Sunday Telegram I wrote about the relicensing battle over one of four dams on the lower Kennebec River that stand between salmon, shad, alewives and the pristine habitat of the Sandy River in Western Maine which, oddly enough, is where I learned to swim and spent a lot of my summers staying cool in as a kid. The struggle is between Brookfield Renewable, a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, the $100 billion Canadian venture capital firm, (which wants to do technical fixes to let the fish better pass the dams) and the state of Maine, conservationists, and recreational fishing interests (which want at least one and preferably two or three of the dams to be torn down.)

Details in the story.


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