But few people understand the impacts of unplanned growth on rivers. We have made great progress in cleaning up our rivers since the Clean Water Act was founded 25 years ago, but urban sprawl is threatening to reverse those gains. Following are the organization's top 10 endangered rivers for 1999. Dams on the Lower Snake River have brought salmon and steelhead to the brink of extinction. Since the early '70s, its fish populations have dropped by nearly 90 percent.
Many fish fall back through the hydropower turbines and are killed.
Scientists believe many fish that survive the journey to their spawning grounds are too exhausted to reproduce successfully. Every year we spend millions on bizarre schemes to try and save these fish and every year fewer and fewer return to spawn. By the end of 1999, the Clinton Administration will be required by law to produce a Snake River recovery plan, which must dictate removing a portion of four dams on the Lower Snake to let the river flow more naturally and enable fish to swim around the dams. Once one of the world's most dynamic rivers, the Missouri has been channelized into barge canals, blocked by dams, and cut off from its floodplain by levees. Now the river's few remaining wild sections are in trouble from stabilizing banks by lining them with rock, overgrazing fragile riversides, and disrupting the river's flow with dams.