The Klamath River is free of four huge dams for the first time in generations. But for the Yurok tribe, the river’s restoration is only just beginning – starting with 18 billion seeds.
Brook Thompson has been fishing on the Klamath River ever since she could stand up in a boat. To Thompson and her family, who are part of the Karuk and Yurok tribes from northern California, fishing is second nature. “The river was our grocery store,” the 28-year-old explains. That was until a catastrophic fish die off happened in 2002.
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The dams have long been a point of contention for the tribe, who have been campaigning for their removal since the 1990s. The river is the lifeblood for the Yuroks, and the salmon are family. “The death of salmon means the death of our entire way,” Thompson says. “Everyone is connected. Taking these dams down is a life-or-death situation for us.”
Finally, at the end of August 2024, after years of negotiating, and decades of activism, the last dam fell, reopening more than 400 miles (644km) of river, in what is the largest dam removal project in US history.
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Removing the dams is one thing, restoring the land is quite another," says Thompson, a civil engineer and part of the crew working on the restoration project – which is being managed by Resource Environmental Solutions, an ecological restoration company.
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Between 2018 and 2021 seed collection crews – many of whom are tribal elders – were hired to harvest native seeds, by hand, in preparation for the dam removal. They collected 98 species and around 2,000lbs (900kg) of seeds. The seeds were then dispatched to specialised nurseries, which propagated them en masse, and sent the seedlings to storage facilities where they were kept until the time came for them to be planted.
A total of 18 billion native seeds were propagated – more than 66,000lbs (30,000kg) worth – each species selected for a purpose: to retain sediment, to prepare the soil for other plants, for cultural uses, or to be a food source. Wheatgrass, yarrow, lupine and oak trees – an important cultural species for the Yuroks and a keystone species – to name a few.
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Seeds from trees and shrubs were also collected, which was a challenge during 2021 and 2022, particularly hot and dry years that exacerbated widespread wildfires.
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But Thompson isn’t hoping to return to the past – she’s looking firmly to the future.
“There’s almost a bit of a fallacy in thinking like it will be returned to what it used to be,” Thompson says. “But I think with traditional ecological knowledge, tribal-led initiatives and current academic understanding of the landscape so you can almost make it better.”