by Removing a dam to restore an ecosystem is never exciting or glamorous. It’s always a hard-fought slog of paperwork, meetings and most of all asking the public for their support.
It took two decades to begin the removal of the Elwha dam on the Olympic peninsula. It took almost as long to begin work for Condit dam in southern Washington as well.
And amidst this hard work, sometimes in the rarest of moments all that drudgery pays off and turns into one single very dramatic moment.
After a decade and a half of organizing efforts for the removal of Condit Dam there was one of those moments last Wednesday, October 26th 2011.
Please support the work of DERT and become a member of our organization so that we will also someday have the same kind of celebration.
Enclosed below are two videos… The first one is the demolition of the Condit Dam, the second one documents the decades of hard work citizen’s had to do to get it done.
Explosive Breach of Condit Dam from Andy Maser on Vimeo.
The Art of Dam Removal from Daniel Dancer on Vimeo.
NOTE: These videos are not visible in Internet Explorer due to Microsoft indifference. Please download a Mozilla Firefox of Chrome web browser if you want to see the everything on the web that you’ve been missign out on for years!
Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gate of hope. Not the gates of optimism, which are somewhat narrower, nor the stalwart, boring gates of common sense, nor the strident gates of self-righteousness, nor the tearful, flimsy garden gate of “everything’s gonna be alright”. But a very different and lonely place: the place of truth-telling about your own soul and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it might be and as it will be; the place from which you glimpse, not only struggle, but joy in the struggle. There we stand, beaconing and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see…
Parker Palmer meditation
Thanks Zena…I love this quote…its what it is!!! Sue