Forests are burning. Glaciers are melting. Salmon are dying in heated reservoir water. The climate crisis is upon us. The past, including the dam-building era on the Columbia and its tributaries, constrain future options. When ethical conflicts arise in decision-making, ethical analysis is indicated. The One River, Ethics Matter conferences serves as an ethics consultation for a critically-ill river.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

From time immemorial, Indigenous people were inseparable from the river. Each year millions of salmon returned to spawning waters, renewing a great cycle of life. Salmon have meant nearly everything to indigenous people: sustenance and the sacred. All that would change.

 In 200+ years – a blink of an eye – forces of “Manifest Destiny” converged in the watershed. Intended or not, genocide was the outcome. First came smallpox, measles, and other infectious diseases. For salmon and people of the salmon, worst are the dams.

Dams have brought benefits notably hydropower, floodplain real estate, and irrigation. Dams have also transformed a river of life into channels of death, an organic machine. Dams block returning adult salmon while slack-water reservoirs kill young salmon migrating on spring freshets to the sea. Dams’ benefits have costs. Taxpayers and ratepayers pay. The river pays, too.

Salmon and indigenous people pay a price. Some salmon runs have paid the ultimate price for the dams: extinction. For indigenous people, dams and losing salmon contributed to poverty and disease, substance abuse disorders, depression and suicide. Like the salmon, many indigenous people have paid the ultimate price for the dams. Environmental health and human health are inseparable for people of the river.

To improve the quality of ethical decision-making

Canada’s truth and reconciliation process is underway even as past and current events haunt that nation: missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and the shallow graves of hundreds, perhaps thousands of indigenous youth who never returned home from residential schools. Canada has invited Indigenous Sovereigns to be part of Canada’s treaty negotiating team as observers.

For the United States, no national truth and reconciliation process with indigenous people has yet begun. The U.S. Department of State has yet to invite tribes to be part of the U.S. treaty negotiating team.

The OREM annual conference series is an ethics consultation process for improving the quality of ethical decision-making for the Columbia River. These conferences are interdisciplinary, each jointly hosted by an indigenous sovereign and an academic institution. OREM conferences alternate across the 49th parallel dividing the watershed between Canada and United States.

OREM brings together three processes in ethics:

1. tools used by hospital ethics consultants,
2. truth and reconciliation used in South Africa to heal that nation after apartheid, and
3. the international Columbia River Pastoral Letter.

OREM explores the ethical principles of Justice – righting historic wrongs, sharing equitably burdens and benefits in the watershed – and Stewardship.

OREM also recognizes the ethical principle of autonomy in treaty decision-making: the role of indigenous sovereigns to provide substituted judgment for salmon and the river. Ethical decision-making compels the U.S. and Canada to recognize indigenous sovereigns as surrogate decision-makers for river and salmon.

The One River, Ethics Matter conferences are facilitated by The Ethics & Treaty Project. Our work is hosted by the Columbia Institute for Water Policy and Sierra Club. We do not speak for indigenous sovereigns. For more on the Ethics & Treaty Project, click here