Author Opens Discussion On River’s Future

Blaine Harden views the taming of the Columbia River as a story of the Northwest divided against itself.

“You see it over and over,” said the author of “A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia.”

And so Harden, a Washington Post reporter who grew up in Moses Lake, wanted to help establish a common ground of understanding to help inform the debate about the river’s future. “There has been, in the past, a tendency to demonize those with opposing views,” he said.

Tempered by a native son’s firsthand knowledge of how harnessing the big river helped many in the Northwest prosper, he nonetheless offers an unflinching portrait of the staggering cost of that exploitation.

Harden will read from his book tonight at 7:30 at Auntie’s Bookstore in downtown Spokane.

“A River Lost” (Norton, $25) is, in part, a personal journey. The son of a welder who helped build the Grand Coulee Dam, Harden’s reporting helped him rediscover his regional roots.

“There are more than a few books that deal with the Columbia,” he said. “And there are some good ones. But nobody’s written this book.”

He said there’s a good chance his reading tonight will come partly from his book’s introduction. That section includes the following passage: “This book is about the destruction of the great river of the West by wellintentioned Americans whose lives embodied a pernicious contradiction. They prided themselves on selfreliance, yet depended on subsidies. They distrusted the federal government, yet allowed it to do as it pleased with the river and the land through which it flowed. As long as there was federal money, they did not mind that farmers wasted water, that dams pushed salmon to extinction, or that plutonium workers recklessly spilled radioactive gunk beside the river.”

And the future? “The solutions are not black and white,” said Harden.

But the way he sees it, the first step is everyone facing the truth about how things got to be the way they are.

, DataTimes