​Here are facts you can use to build your own message.

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• Negotiating a settlement to breach the dams beginning this year in the litigation pending in Oregon in NWF v. NMFS could end the decades old litigation, and would recover Snake River salmon and steelhead, uphold indigenous people’s rights and culture, and help the Southern Resident Killer Whales avoid extinction.

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• The Snake River dams do not produce clean or green energy. That is a myth. The dams are destroying an ecosystem the size of Oregon and driving wild salmon and steelhead to extinction.

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• More than 80,000 tons of CO2 equivalent of methane gas is produced each year by the four Lower Snake River dam reservoirs. Breaching the dams will create a free flowing river and will put an immediate stop to these potent greenhouse gas emissions.

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• In the Columbia Basin, salmon and steelhead that must pass four dams in their migration to and from the ocean are surviving. Salmon and steelhead that must pass eight dams—the Snake River populations—are vanishing. The difference is the four lower Snake River dams.

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• A 2021 Nez Perce study reveals that 77% of Snake River spring/summer chinook salmon will be quasi-extinct, or presumed to have little chance of recovery, by 2025. The fish are out of time.

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• Lower Snake River dam breaching, along with other region-wide actions, must begin immediately. “Inaction will result in the catastrophic loss of the majority of Columbia River basin salmon and steelhead stocks.” (NOAA Fisheries, Draft—Rebuilding Interior Columbia Basin Salmon and Steelhead, July 11, 2022, p. 18.)

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• From insects to grizzly bears to Southern Resident Killer Whales, more than 130 species depend on the marine nutrients that wild salmon and steelhead provide.

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• “Perhaps the single greatest change in food availability for resident killer whales since the late 1800s has been the decline of salmon from the Columbia River basin.” (NOAA SRKW Recovery Plan Recovery Plan for Southern Resident Killer Whales, (Orcinus orca), National Marine Fisheries Service, Northwest Region, Seattle, Washington (January 2008), p. II-82.)

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• Breaching the dams will revitalize 140 miles of riparian areas and restore large expanses of currently degraded forests, which will reestablish vast carbon sinks needed to reduce the impacts of climate change.