DamNation | movie | 2014 | Official Trailer - video Dailymotion

This powerful film odyssey across America explores the sea change in national attitude from pride in big dams as enginee | dG1fZTZUV01SY0x1TUk

Transcript

00:00I don't think FDR ever saw a dam that he didn't think should be built. It just

00:09really seemed like a great idea coming out of the Great Depression. Like all

00:13constructed things, dams have a finite lifetime. And a couple decades ago it was

00:18radical in terms of thinking that you could take a dam out. It was unthinkable.

00:22You know, go back 50 years, it was legitimately crazy talk. You know, the

00:26conversations changed. Taking a dam out and opening up a watershed, reconnecting

00:31it with the fish that were there for hundreds of thousands of years, I mean it

00:34gives you, I mean, hope. You can take half of the salmon fishery, eat it, and they'll

00:39keep replacing themselves. What kind of a species throws that away?

00:49We as a country right now are infatuated with tearing things down. Some people

00:56seem to have forgotten that before the era of dam construction, the endless cycle of

01:00withering droughts and violent floods constantly plagued our watersheds.

01:05You're asking some nasty questions when you ask about a free-flowing Snake River.

01:09It'd be a lot of teardrops of joy to see that river running again.

01:13There's a great good here that belongs to the American people that's being stolen by a

01:20very small, corrupt branch of the federal government.

01:24Yeah, I would advocate sabotage, subversion, as a last resort, in political means fail.

01:31Just because a dam has been sitting in a

02:00river for 200 years does not mean that it's going to stay there for the next 200.