Free-flowing rivers prevent the buildup of pollutants in habitats, deliver nutrients and sediment to estuaries, and are crucial to mitigating the effects of climate change, says Heather Crochetiere, a freshwater specialist at World Wildlife Fund Canada.

“Intact ecosystems are better able to adapt to changes in temperature and flow levels,” she says. “When rivers are barrier-free, they act as natural corridors for fish and other species to relocate to conditions that may be more suitable for their survival.”

Crochetiere and Lehner are among a growing number of experts who are calling into question the “cleanliness” of hydropower as an alternative to fossil fuel power generation. With some 3,700 hydropower projects either planned or already under construction worldwide, Lehner says it’s time to reignite the conversation over which renewable energy sources are best for people and the planet.  

“Our goal is not to say ‘Stop hydropower.’ In some places, there might be alternatives: solar power, wind,” says Lehner. “We just want to shed some light on the fact that hydropower isn’t perfect.”

The “people of the Nass River”

Andrea Reid is less equivocal. A fisheries scientist and citizen of the Nisga’a Nation, she doesn’t view hydropower as clean energy, given the documented tendency of projects to displace communities and do irreparable damage to ecosystems.

“In many cases, it has eroded the places [communities] used to call home,” she says. “They can’t even live in those places anymore because they’ve been flooded out.”

Reid’s research is focused on the Nass, Fraser and Skeena Rivers — B.C.’s most productive salmon-bearing rivers — and highlights the huge differences in the health of those watersheds.

The Fraser River, which has been dammed along a few of its tributaries and is therefore shallower in its lower reaches, now becomes a lot warmer in the summer compared to the Nass and the Skeena — a trend which is worsened by climate change. This can seriously jeopardize salmon, which are cold water animals, she says.

The Nass River, which flows southwest from the Coast Mountains to Nass Bay by the Pacific Ocean, remains one of B.C.’s last near-pristine river systems and is a fundamental part of the Nisga’a Nation’s identity.

“The word ‘Nass’ is actually a Tlingit word that means ‘guts’ because of its food capacity. The Nisga’a are the ‘people of the Nass River,’” says Reid. “It’s tied to our origin stories. There are water ceremonies that are practiced. There are ceremonies around the first salmon to return. It’s at the very core of everything.”

Last summer, Reid spoke with elders across B.C. about the significance of Pacific salmon. What they ended up sharing, however, went much deeper.

“It was about fish, but it was also about the river and people’s connection to it,” says Reid. “Some elders were brought to tears talking about how they used to be able to drink directly from the river, and now they never can. Some even feel compelled to wash their hands after they touch the river, concerned over what’s in the water.”

Reid says she understands the important role hydropower can play in supplying urban centres with an alternative to more polluting forms of energy, but that too often, projects are approved without a full understanding of their potential impact.

“They’re not assessed in terms of the environmental impacts of, if we add this dam to this system, and there are already five dams in that system, what that’s going to do to the totality of the environment,” she says.

Wild rivers are rivers that remain relatively unaffected by human activity. For the Kaska Dena people, who have lived along the Liard for thousands of years, it’s important that the Liard maintains this status.

In 2015, the Kaska Dena First Nations launched their Dane Nan Ye?? Da?h Land Guardian program, which aims to collect data on wildlife, address pollution concerns, and coordinate with hunters to protect significant cultural-use areas within their territory.

“We started the program just from complaints coming in: animals being poached, finding wasted meat, the influx of hunters,” says Tanya Ball, traditional knowledge coordinator and full-time Guardian with the community of Lower Post in northern B.C.

Last fall, WWF Canada and Living Lakes Canada helped the Kaska Guardians expand their project by starting a freshwater monitoring program on the Liard and some of its tributaries.

Part of the program included training in sampling benthic invertebrates: organisms that live in or on sediment at the bottom of freshwater bodies and are an indicator of a river’s health, Crochetiere says.

Living Lakes Canada led the training in benthic sampling with help from WWF Canada, who gave technical advice and helped the Guardians identify the exact sites they wanted to monitor.

Ball says they’ve since installed gauges that measure water levels in the Blue River and the Dease River, the latter of which drains into the Liard.

And while the Guardians are still waiting for the lab results from their benthic sampling, Ball says the species they found — such as caddisflies, which are sensitive to poor water quality — indicate the water isn’t polluted. The Guardians plan to do more invertebrate sampling this August.