Undammed: The Klamath River STory

This is a solo passion project I worked on in my free time and released in collaboration with American Rivers. Over a decade of living on the West Coast has made me fascinated with water access and rivers and the many diverse and at times contentious communities that rely on this increasingly scarce resource. I did everything for this project from the research to interviewing, script writing and audio production.

The history of water in the West has been shaped by conflict, greed, and scarcity, but in a remote pocket of Southern Oregon and Northern California, a different Western water story is taking shape. The largest dam removal in history is on the verge of completion on the Klamath River. This moment is the result of a historic decades-long Tribally-led campaign to free the Klamath River and restore salmon and steelhead populations, which are core to Native traditions and foodways. This is a huge triumph. Today the river is a living thread that connects communities who each have their own version of the Klamath, and all of these communities will have to work together to reimagine what this watershed could look like as the river they all rely on transforms. In this podcast, we’ll follow that connective thread between the people and creatures that know the Klamath best to understand how they encounter this transformative moment and envision what the future might hold.