In August 1998, while buried in work on behalf of the endangered salmon of my region, the Pacific Northwest, I was driven to despair by the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between American politics and biological reality. Literally hundreds of species of flora and fauna — from orcas, otters, and eagles, to riparian cedar trees, salmonberries, and wildflowers — depend upon the living bodies and nitrogen-rich carcasses of the Pacific salmon for their survival. By itself, this fact makes salmon recovery efforts almost infinitely more important than the unbridled generation of hydroelectricity at such infamously deadly dams as the four on the Snake River. Yet Stalinesque federal energy policies entrenched since the Cold War, treacherously biased research by the National Marine Fisheries Service, and ceaseless lies by public figures such as Washington’s Senator Slade Gorton and Oregon’s ex-Senator Mark Hatfield (who, respectively, have called wild salmon expendable “remnant species,” and claimed that 80 percent of the Columbia and Snake Rivers’ salmon survive hydroelectric dams, when 99.7 percent of them do not) guarantee the continued unraveling of the tapestry of life.