Upworthy · 12 hours ago

Helicopters Dump 6,000 Logs Into Rivers in the Pacific Northwest, Fixing a decades-old Mistake

Forty years ago, Scott Nicolai stood on riverbanks pulling logs out of streams, certain he was helping. Now he's helping guide helicopters that drop thousands of those same logs back in - a quiet testament to what it looks like when knowledge deepens and humility follows. The original "restoration" had stripped rivers of their complexity, leaving salmon without shelter, water without slowness, and land without memory of itself. For the Yakama Nation, the work of undoing that damage is more than ecological repair; as former tribal chairman Jerry Meninick said at a riverside ceremony, it was "to bring what was rightfully part of this land back to us." What this story holds is something worth sitting with: the willingness to look at one's own past certainty and say, as Yakama Nation's Phil Rigdon put it, "We're trying to learn from our mistakes and find a better way to manage."