The first of four dams on the Lower Snake River was to be breached in 2030, according to a schedule proposed by the late Mike Simpson, Republican representative from Idaho. In 2022, Simpson had put forward a bill designed to restore central Idaho salmon runs and compensate anyone damaged by the removal of the dams, a list that came to include farmers, recreationists, the cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix, and every user of electric power in the Pacific Northwest.

In the bill’s final form, the newly uncovered bottoms of the reservoirs were to be designated as a Riverine National Park, administered by the Northwest tribes. To compensate for the loss of electricity, a new nuclear power plant was to be built among the ruins of the Satsop plant abandoned by the Washington Public Power Supply System in 1983. Lewiston, Idaho would gain a new, dedicated rail line to take the Inland Empire’s wheat and forest products to the west coast.

Simpson’s bill lacked the votes to pass even in its early years. It was simply too expensive for a government trying to finance wars in Europe and Taiwan, fund the increasingly difficult search for new sources of oil and natural gas, supply housing to a generation of homeless young people, move heat refugees from the former states of Arizona and Nevada, and rebuild industries that had been lost when China nationalized all foreign investment.

The Nez Perce and Sho-Ban tribes as well as the Northwest sportfishing and conservation industries could be forgiven for thinking that the bill would have benefitted them, but during the summer of 2027, salmon began washing up on the beaches of Oregon and Washington. The Pacific Ocean had warmed enough that salmon couldn’t live below the 50th parallel. They died before they reached the mouth of the Columbia.

Bleaching events had destroyed the barrier reefs in Australia and Belize. Dead whales and dolphins floated among the waves during the world surfing championships in Portugal, cancelling the event. Snot-like algae covered the beaches of California, Washington, and Oregon, suffocating the life in tidal flats.

The oceans aside, the Columbia, Snake, and Salmon Rivers had become too warm for salmon to spawn in their waters. Temperatures in the upper reaches of rivers killed planted rainbow as soon as they splashed out of the fish trucks.

Conservationists still blamed the dams for the loss of the runs, but climate scientists pointed out that the oceans had absorbed 90% of the extra heat resulting from industrial civilization’s overproduction of CO2, and that they had reached their limit. Ocean life had become a polar phenomenon.

Floating nuclear-powered refrigeration plants were proposed for Northwest lakes and reservoirs. Physicists noted that whatever heat was taken from the water would end up in the atmosphere, creating heat islands that would add to the summer heat waves killing crops and people from Salt Lake to Seattle.

Nuclear power hadn’t been viable for some time anyway. Uranium, hoarded in decaying and leaky nuclear plants by the former members of the Russian Federation, was getting impossibly expensive, even with new mining booms in Canada and the desert southwest. New reactors were plagued with cost overruns and materials shortages. The European war had resulted in meltdowns and cooling-pond fires that had lethally contaminated large swathes of Eurasia, proving that nuclear power and war don’t mix.

Then the Sino-Australian Federation, the entity that had controlled the Antarctic continent since the disbandment of the United Nations, offered the Northwest tribes land and fishing rights on the newly flowing and salmon-stocked rivers on the Antarctic Peninsula. The tribes accepted, the majority moving into Antarctic high-rises and becoming Chinese citizens in the process.

Much had changed since 2022. Electricity, once taken for granted by anyone who flipped a switch in a dark house or turned on a tap for water or set their thermostat at seventy degrees on a hot day, became expensive and unreliable. China, after catastrophic floods had washed out the Three Gorges Dam and drowned fifty million people, shut down its coal-fired power plants and announced rationing of electricity and natural gas. A half-billion people died in the Shiite-Sunni war of 2026, not from the few nuclear weapons that had been detonated but from a lack of air conditioning due to the extensive use of electromagnetic pulse weapons. Those weapons had destroyed power plants, electrical grids, and any machine that used computer chips. Whole countries found themselves with 18th century technology and 21st century populations.

Large masses of people can’t live without food, refrigeration, sanitation, transportation, and communication. Populations in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey dropped by half in six months, and half again in another year.

Suddenly, electricity was revealed as the force behind civilization. Public opinion shifted in the direction of building more dams. Existing dams were raised and retrofitted for maximum power production. Hydroelectric facilities became the centers of pulse-protected mini-grids. New industrial cities—Bonneville, Greater Dalles, Ice Harbor, Monument, Granite, Upper John Day—rose up on land the United States had ceded to the Cascadia Federation after the water wars of 2025-26, when Washington and Oregon and Idaho had refused to allow water to be pumped from the Columbia into the Colorado River above the gritty wasteland that had been Lake Powell.

Through alternating floods and drought, the solidly built dams of the Pacific Northwest allowed the area to live through the climate changes of the early 21st century. Heavy winter rains blessed its drylands with more irrigation, not less, as CO2 rose to 500 ppm and much of the rest of North America endured year-round droughts.

Expanded reservoirs proved to be ideal habitats for tilapia and carp. The intermittent power of thousands of wind turbines and acres of solar panels pumped water upriver into the reservoirs, which acted like giant batteries, providing reliable hydroelectric power on demand.

The Cascadia Federation was one of the few places on earth with enough food and electricity to maintain universities, hospitals, factories, farms, and a salvage industry that mined landfills for their mineral and plastic content. Advances in battery technology and recycling efficiency allowed a spartan lifestyle, but one that might have been recognizable in the United States a century before, in the worst years of the 20th century’s Great Depression.

As in the Great Depression, public works projects were conceived as a way to keep people fed and civilized. Cold War plans to dam and build powerplants on rivers and tributaries drained by the Columbia were approved, and when resources could be found, acted upon.

Cascadia and the thawing island of Greenland were alone in increasing their hydroelectric capacity by 2030, a time when Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam had stopped producing any energy at all. Dunes marched through the empty avenues of Phoenix. The residents of Las Vegas moved to a casino city on Vancouver Island, newly purchased from the Canadian government by the Sino-Australians.

That a U.S. congressman had dared to suggest getting rid of functioning dams was seen as bad craziness, but people old enough to remember the United States as a wealthy country saw it as an indication of how unbelievably wealthy it had been.

It had used oil for recreation. It had supported a tourist industry. It had thought about destroying electricity that had already been bought and paid for. It had planned to breach dams in an effort to restore salmon runs, a move that assumed the salmon would bring with them the world from which they had vanished.

That world was gone forever, of course, and efforts to restore it were a kind of technological ghost dance, one that used salmon instead of buffalo. Removing the dams was ceremonial magic that would restore an America rich in oil, water, and temperatures that humans could live in. A free-flowing Snake River would bring back a world where artillery didn’t destroy nuclear reactors and pandemics didn’t destroy the possibility of close social ties. Salmon would return to an environment that didn’t feel like a locked car in a sunny Walmart parking lot on a hot day in July.

The tribes had signed treaties that gave them competing shares of a resource that didn’t exist, much as the states of the Colorado Compact had divvied up water that didn’t exist. It fell to Mike Simpson to explain that breaching the dams was not going to bring the salmon back. It was another instance where the tribes realized that their treaties had included promises that wouldn’t and couldn’t ever be fulfilled. Small wonder that so many of them accepted the Chinese offer of repatriation after twenty millennia, and small wonder that the ones who remained in what had once been salmon country took their frustrations out on a United States congressman whose state no longer recognized the United States. Simpson, like the salmon runs and the hopes they represented, did not survive the negotiations.

A small civilization exists along the Columbia and Snake Rivers in 2031. It has electricity, water, and farms for wheat, potatoes, and fish. Almost everyone has a backyard vegetable garden, and orchards are flourishing beside rivers and reservoirs. The Dalles Institute of Technology graduates a hundred electrical engineers every June. Most of them are members of the Native American Lightning Guild, a secret society of technicians which keeps the dams, windmills, and solar panels maintained and producing their megawatts. The tribes occupied the dams as soon as it became apparent the salmon weren’t coming back, and they’re still occupying them. They immediately began training their young people to run them.

Now, hydroelectricity lights the small decaying cities of Portland, Vancouver, Olympia, and Seattle and the newer cities centered around the dams. Hydroelectricity powers the farms, with their irrigation systems and battery-powered tractors and trucks. Hydroelectricity powers the universities where researchers try again and again to make fusion power practical, and labor to heal the wounds of the earth before they prove as fatal to humans as they have to so many other species.

“The salmon are gone, but we’re still here,” is what the Indians say when the topic of extinction comes up. They say it with sadness, but considering the many peoples that have perished completely, there’s room for pride in being able to survive in a world ever more hostile to life. “It was hard to give up the dream of returning the world to the way it was before the white people came,” says one tribal historian, on condition of anonymity. “But our young people are less damaged. It takes a certain amount of cultural violence to turn a young person’s gaze from the future to the past, no matter the history of their people.”

Cascadian civilization depends on a people that the United States had marginalized and tried to destroy. The Indians are giving white people a much better deal than white people gave them. They’re keeping the current running for everybody’s future, they say, and that’s potent magic in a world where the current has mostly stopped.