Let Nature Do Its Thing

It's Wednesday, May twentieth. A story crossed my feed this week from Queensland, Australia, where a rancher named Christopher Rek invited engineers onto his property to tear down tidal gates that had been blocking seawater from his land for sixty years. Within months, juvenile barramundi were swimming through the restored waterways. An invasive grass species that had been choking out mangroves was eighty percent dead. The salt water did what no intervention program could. It just came back and fixed things. This caught my attention because it's part of a pattern happening across the world that nobody is really talking about as a single trend. Governments and communities are tearing down dams, ripping out highways, and dismantling infrastructure that previous generations spent fortunes building. And the results are consistently the same: ecosystems recover faster than anyone predicted, cities get healthier, and the most expensive thing turns out to be the thing we already built. The most ambitious infrastructure project of the next fifty years might be undoing the infrastructure we built in the last fifty. In 2024, four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and northern California were removed. It was the largest dam removal in American history, a five hundred million dollar project that opened up four hundred and twenty miles of habitat that had been blocked for over a century. The previous owner, PacifiCorp, agreed to remove the dams after determining it would be cheaper to tear them down than to upgrade them to meet current environmental standards. That's worth pausing on. The utility did the math and concluded that destruction was the better investment. The results were immediate. Within two months of the final dam being breached, salmon were swimming past the former dam sites and reaching spawning grounds they hadn't accessed since 1918. By the one-year anniversary, scientists had counted over 7,700 Chinook salmon crossing the former Iron Gate Dam site. Bald eagles returned. Beaver, otter, and osprey populations visibly increased. Water temperatures normalized for the first time in decades, because the reservoirs behind the dams had been artificially heating the water during spawning season. "The river came back to life almost instantly," one fisheries director said. The Klamath wasn't the first. The Elwha River dams in Washington state were removed between 2012 and 2014 after nearly a century. Salmon returned within months. A decade later, large numbers of fall Chinook are spawning in waters that had been blocked since the dams were built. In total, the United States removed a hundred and eight dams in 2024 alone, tying the record set in 2019. Over two thousand dams have been removed in the US in the past three decades. The pattern is the same every time. The dam was built to solve a real problem: flood control, irrigation, hydroelectric power. It worked. But it also severed river ecosystems that had connected inland habitats to the ocean for thousands of years. Fish couldn't migrate. Sediment couldn't flow. Water temperatures changed. The secondary effects accumulated for decades. When the dam comes down, the river doesn't need a restoration plan. It needs to be left alone. The water does the rest. Cities are doing the same thing with roads. In 2003, Seoul tore down the Cheonggye Expressway, an elevated highway that had buried a historic stream running through the center of the city. The highway had been built in 1968 as a symbol of economic modernization. By the early 2000s, it was a crumbling, congested eyesore that cut the city in half. The mayor, Lee Myung-bak, who later became president of South Korea, pushed the project through over fierce opposition. Critics predicted traffic chaos. What happened instead was that traffic redistributed, public transit ridership increased, and the area around the restored stream became one of the most desirable corridors in the city. Property values along the stream increased by three hundred percent. Species of fish, birds, and insects returned. Temperatures in the area dropped an average of 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit compared to the surrounding city. The highway had been making Seoul hotter, louder, and less livable, and nobody noticed until it was gone. San Francisco removed the Embarcadero Freeway after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged it. The city could have rebuilt it. Instead, they replaced it with a boulevard, a public plaza, and a waterfront promenade. Over a hundred acres of land that had been dominated by the elevated highway opened up. The predicted traffic catastrophe didn't happen. Neither did it happen when Milwaukee removed the Park East Freeway, or when Portland removed Harbor Drive, or when Rochester tore out its Inner Loop expressway. Rochester spent twenty two million dollars on removal and got two hundred and twenty nine million dollars in new development on the reclaimed land. The economics consistently favor removal over rebuilding. Maintaining a mile of urban freeway costs five hundred million to two billion dollars to rebuild and hundreds of thousands per lane-mile every year afterward. Replacing it with a boulevard costs a fraction of that. The savings can go to transit, housing, parks. The infrastructure that was supposed to connect cities was actually dividing them, and the cost of keeping it was higher than the cost of tearing it down. The contrarian question is fair: if removal works so well, why did we build all this stuff? The engineering wasn't wrong for its time. The Klamath dams provided hydroelectric power to hundreds of thousands of homes. The Cheonggye Expressway moved traffic through a rapidly growing Seoul. The Embarcadero Freeway connected San Francisco's waterfront to the Bay Bridge. The Queensland tidal gates protected cattle pasture from saltwater flooding. Each project solved a real problem with the best available technology and the best available understanding of how ecosystems worked. What changed was the understanding. When the Klamath dams were built in the early twentieth century, nobody tracked salmon migration patterns or measured the downstream effects of altered water temperatures. When urban freeways were built through American cities in the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant planning philosophy was that cars were the future and anything that slowed them down was an obstacle. The communities those highways displaced, overwhelmingly Black and low-income neighborhoods, were considered acceptable costs. When the tidal gates were installed in Queensland, mangrove ecosystems were treated as swamps to be drained, not as nurseries for fish and barriers against coastal erosion. The infrastructure was a bet that the benefits of control would outweigh the costs of disruption. For decades, the bet appeared to pay off. The power flowed. The cars moved. The pastures stayed dry. Then the secondary effects arrived: collapsed fisheries, fragmented cities, degraded coastlines, species loss. The costs were real but they accumulated slowly, over generations, and by the time they were visible, the infrastructure was part of the landscape. Tearing it down felt radical even when the math clearly favored it. That's the deeper lesson. The most dangerous infrastructure isn't the kind that fails. It's the kind that works just well enough for just long enough that nobody questions whether it should still be there. Christopher Rek, the Queensland rancher, said it simply: "I stole from nature by using all my cows and now it's time to give the land back and let nature do its thing." He spent sixty years benefiting from the tidal gates. Then he invited someone to tear them down. The barramundi came back within months. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Across the world, communities are tearing down dams, ripping out highways, and removing barriers that previous generations spent fortunes building. The Klamath River in Oregon saw 7,700 salmon return within a year of its dams being removed. Seoul tore down an expressway and property values tripled. Rochester spent twenty two million on highway removal and got two hundred and twenty nine million in development. Queensland removed tidal gates and juvenile fish returned within months. The pattern is consistent: ecosystems and cities recover faster than anyone expects when you remove the thing that was disrupting them. The infrastructure wasn't built by fools. It solved real problems with the knowledge available at the time. What changed was the understanding of what it cost. The most expensive thing in the landscape is often the thing that's already there. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.