Folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote these lyrics at a time when people had great expectations for technology and little appreciation for environmental protection.

The 28-year-old Dustbowler had been brought to Portland by the Bonneville Power Administration in 1941 to write some inspiring tunes about the dams being built to provide cheap power along the Columbia River's 800-mile course through Washington and Oregon.

More than six decades later, it's hard to recapture that sense of optimism.

The Columbia is still the throbbing artery that brings economic nourishment to our communities. But it's also sick, according to the legal briefs and scientific reports about salmon runs that fly every time dam operators want to pump more water to generate power, or port officials want to dredge the channel a few feet deeper to accommodate super-freighters.

On a recent family road trip from Portland to Banff, Canada, then west to Vancouver, we crossed the Columbia five times.

At Umatilla, the wide river flows between hills of scrub brush and irrigated crops. At Richland, Washington, it curves through the booming Tri-Cities area, subdivisions sprouting along its banks. Hundreds of miles north, at Golden, British Columbia, the river isn't much more than a mountain stream running cold and swift out of the Columbia Icefield in the Canadian Rockies. Back in Portland it rolls on past lumber yards and railroad sidings, grey-green and serene on its way to the sea.

This river is an awesome creature of our awe-inspiring landscape, all the more so when you consider the economic activity that churns along with it. More than 350,000 new cars are shipped on the river every year, along with 4.5 million tons of bulk minerals and 3 million tons of grain. Seven percent of river flow is diverted to irrigate crops. And 17 hydroelectric dams — 10 on the Columbia and seven on the lower Snake — provide fully one quarter of the power in the region.

Two of those dams — Hells Canyon in Oregon and Chief Joseph in Washington — are impassable to salmon. The other 15 don't make it easy for juvenile fish to get downstream to the Pacific or for mature ones to get back to spawn. When Woody Guthrie was doing PR for the BPA, 2.5 million salmon came up the river every year. Now, the number of wild salmon is under a million, and every year of low winter snowpack and bad river conditions further threatens the runs.

Some say the battle over the river's future is between economic interests: power, freight and crops versus salmon, watersheds and scenic beauty.

But it's not that simple. Without the jobs that are tied to freight, farming, timber and the like, there's no constituency for the salmon, clean water and scenery — and no money to pay for them, either. Spilling more river water past the dams would save salmon in the short term. But generating more electricity from hydroelectric and nuclear power could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, keep the glaciers from melting and save the salmon (not to mention tribal fisheries) from extinction in the long run.

Some of our choices are overflowing with complexity. Consider, for instance, the plan for a new Indian casino in Cascade Locks. As economic development goes, that's better for the river than smelters, dams or mills. But more cars coming from Portland means more greenhouse gas emissions, which could be reduced by using more ethanol and biodiesel, which would give Eastern Oregon farmers incentive to plant crops that can be made into biofuels. Their fields would produce higher yields with irrigation. Do we want farmers growing lots of alternative fuels to fight global warming, or do we want to leave more water in the river for fish? We may need to figure out how to do both.

The river's been here a long time. We've changed it profoundly in 60 years. We need to think broadly and long term to save it.

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Copyright 2005 Oregon Business magazine