Upworthy · 2 hours ago

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

Forty years ago, a Yakama Nation habitat biologist named Scott Nicolai stood on riverbanks and pulled logs out of streams, certain he was helping. Now he's leading the effort to put them back - more than 6,000 of them, flown in by helicopter across 24 miles of rivers on the Yakama Reservation. The story of what happened in between is a quiet lesson in the limits of human certainty: what looked like clutter was actually architecture, the wood creating the cool, sheltered complexity that salmon and bull trout need to survive. "We're trying to learn from our mistakes and find a better way to manage," said Phil Rigdon, director of the Yakama Nation Department of Natural Resources - words that carry extra weight when the land in question is one a people have tended for generations. For tribal leaders, the helicopter drops were marked with ceremony and prayer, a moment former tribal chairman Jerry Meninick described simply: "to bring what was rightfully part of this land back to us."