A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia.

Blaine Harden W. W. Norton and Company, $25 By Phil Kelsihx

As an award-winning Washington Post reporter, Blaine Harden has spent much of the last decade chronicling the intense--and often bloody--tribal and ethnic conflicts of sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe.

Harden's boyhood home of Moses Lake, Washington, where he returned to write this book about the once-magnificent Columbia river, is certainly not Bosnia. But Harden's keen eyed his ability to get many of his subjects to drop their guards and articulate their prejudices and rationalizations--makes for a dismaying account of greed, short-sightedness, and natural catastrophe in the name of "progress."

Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark encountered a wild river of rushing cataracts and plentiful salmon. Salmon were the center of Native American fife, in terms of religion and culmo as well as diet. (Some anthropologists have put their annual per capita consumption at over 800 pounds. But the river, its fish, and the culture they spawned have become pale reflections of their former selves. Today, the Columbia is what Harden calls a "machine river," controlled and manipulated by more than a dozen major dams. The dams have transformed the river into a series of slow-moving (and now navigable) pools; Lewiston, Idaho, more than 400 miles from the Pacific, is now a major port city. Irrigation water from the Columbia and its tributanes have made the proverbial desert bloom with everything from world-famous red delicious apples to potatoes for 80 percent of the nation's french fries.

But at what price? The massive federal dam-building efforts certainly brought prosperity. Indeed, Harden's own father left a Depression-devastated farm in Montana to find well-paying work in the Pacific Northwest boom towns that sprang up around such structures as the Grand Coulee Dain. But through most of the Columbia River Basin, the salmon are either going or already gone, and an entire way of life with them. In one poignant scene, Harden describes an 86-year-old Native American elder, irate about being consigned to eating salmon from a can. Many salmon runs were squelched outright by high dams like Grand Coulee) that lacked fish ladders and thus closed off thousands of river miles to migrating salmon. A little less clear is what's causing the Northwest's remaining runs to plummet toward extinction. Is it the dams with their mighty turbines and long spillways? Diseases introduced by hatchery fish? Bad timber and farming practices that choke spawning streams with salt? Slow water that makes young salmon easy prey to predators? Or--as various irrigators, barge pilots, and civic boosters allege--is it simply too many seals or Native American poachers?

Harden doesn't even attempt an answer. His book focuses on character sketches, not science or history. Sometimes it works well. A local professor is a rare hero for risking his career to reveal the phony economics of further irrigation. Unfortunately, too many characters seem chosen for their willingness to share narrow-minded, even racist opinions. It's too easy, actually, to find echoes of Bosnia.

For Harden, it all adds up to a somewhat dark, resigned conclusion: The Columbia River system isn't going to be "undone" of its many dams and irrigation canals anytime soon, and it's likely the conflicts--and the blame game--will persist. Meanwhile, the barges will continue to ply the river, the agri-businesses will keep defending their subsidies, and the dams will continue to generate some of the world's cheapest electricity. And while the major beneficiaries continue to gain, what were once the most extraordinary salmon runs on the planet will likely continue their decline. Phil Keisling, a Monthly contributing editor, is Oregon's secretary of state.