Tens of thousands of dams are scattered across America. Ranging from monumental walls to little earthen barriers, they are such an ingrained part of the American landscape that they that often go unnoticed. But the time has come to rethink the country’s dams.
That’s the message at the heart of “DamNation,” a Patagonia documentary made by Telluride filmmaking company Felt Soul Media that is coming to the Animas City Theatre on Thursday night. Filmmaker Ben Knight will be on hand to introduce it.
“DamNation” is a deep exploration of the country’s man-made marvels and the damage they do to rivers, landscapes, ecosystems and, ultimately, us. Through colorful characters, arresting cinematography, a touch of irreverence and a compelling history lesson, “DamNation” lays out an argument for reassessing America’s dams and removing the obsolete ones.
Rivers are like the human body’s arteries: When you plug them, you stop the flow of life. And for a long time in the U.S., dams were built without hesitation to power communities. But as the documentary points out, the conversation is changing; people are seeing the benefits of bringing them down.
There are more than 75,000 dams in the U.S. over three feet high. That’s enough for one to be built each day since Thomas Jefferson was president, said former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, a vocal dam critic.
Some of them are much larger than three feet high, such as Hoover, Glen Canyon and Grand Coulee dams. They’re controversial for some, especially people like Katie Lee, 95, a fiery folk-singer who was one of the fortunate few who experienced Glen Canyon before it was flooded in 1956 to create Lake Powell, the second-largest artificial reservoir in the U.S.
In the film, Lee shares incredible, intimate photos of her and her friends in the canyon and stories about what it was like to be in the magical canyon. Her passion for the lost canyon and disdain for the man in charge of the Glen Canyon Dam project – former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy – paints a vivid argument that officials unduly dammed up an Eden on Earth.
“An estimated 45 million tons of sediment is trapped behind (Glen Canyon Dam) annually, starving the Grand Canyon’s ecosystem downstream. Every year, as Lake Powell evaporates under the desert sun and seeps into the porous sandstone, 8 percent of the Colorado River’s flow disappears – one of the many factors that contribute to the river commonly drying up before it reaches the Gulf of California,” Knight says in the film.
It wouldn’t be a documentary about the downsides of dams without a nod to Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, a fictional account of eco-terrorists who fantasize about blowing up Glen Canyon. “DamNation” shows footage of an interview with Abbey, as well as his partners in the Earth First! activist group draping a large plastic crack down the middle of the dam’s face on March 21, 1981.
The cover of “DamNation” echoes those actions; it shows a scene from the film where artists/climbers paint a 160-foot dotted line down the face of abandoned Matilija Dam in Ventura County, California.
The filmmakers were there to document the process and leaked photos to the local press a few days later.
“No one believed it. They thought it was Photoshopped because it looked too perfect,” Knight said.
And it got people’s attention. The message in the art was clear: “Cut this thing down.”
Knight and Rummel, who founded Felt Soul Media, were approached by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard in early 2011 with a request to help make the film.
Their first instinct was to decline, Knight said. He didn’t know much about dams, and he and Rummel thought it would be too difficult a story to tell; but in the end, he said, they couldn’t say “no.” It was too great of an opportunity.
What Knight thought would be a year-and-a-half project turned out to be a three-year project. He and Rummel borrowed a friend’s van and drove 9,000 miles around the country searching for ways to humanize the issue of dams through compelling stories.
Turns out, they did their job.
Since its debut at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, Knight said, he’s had people with deep river connections approach him in tears, thanking him for making the film. He also said people “come up to us, and say, ‘I seriously never thought about that once in my life. I’ve driven by hundreds of dams and never given it any thought.’”
And that’s satisfying for Knight: That was the point, to get people to think about the often-ignored issue.
By the end of “DamNation,” viewers will see the two largest dam-removal projects in U.S. history, which occurred during the filming. Those projects were also part of the reason the film took three years to make.
“You can’t just start filming dam removal and not wait to see if the ecosystem rebounds, so we just had to be patient,” Knight said.
After the removal of the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River and the Elwha Dam on Elwha River (both in Washington state), which each had been standing for a century, nature prevailed. Fish that had been cut off from their spawning grounds are returning.
“Being there for there from the beginning, talking to the biologists, they didn’t even know if the fish would come back. I think everyone’s pretty blown away by how quickly these ecosystems have rebounded,” Knight said.
mhayden@durangoherald.com
If you go
“DamNation” will play at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. Thursday at the Animas City Theatre, 128 E. College Drive, with an introduction by filmmaker Ben Knight. Advance tickets are $10.
