The Columbia River

Rockies, has a length of 1,210 miles, and a fall, from source to mouth, of 2,560 feet. Its length within Canada is 465 miles and its fall to the border some 1,270 feet. Only about 15 per cent, of the whole Columbia watershed lies within Canada, but the Canadian portion provides about one-third of the water discharged into the Pacific at the river's mouth. The river is a major natural resource, particularly in terms of power, for both British Columbia and the Pacific North Western States. So much can be said with certainty; beyond that point, the problems of development stretch out into the mists of uncertainty, for even the total power potential of the watershed, beyond its present output of some 10 million h.p., must depend upon how political settlements permit the engineer to go to work. A boundary at the 49th parallel may have been a politically wise decision when it was made, but, because it divides the Columbia watershed arbitrarily between two sovereign states, it has left Canada and the United States, today, with a mutual problem of infinite complexity still unsolved. Trans-boundary streams, those rivers that rise in one country and flow through one or more others before they reach the sea, usually presents the riparian states with four sets of problems: navigation rights, fishing rights, irrigation rights and hydroelectric power development rights. Navigational and fishing activities do not normally affect the volume of a river's flow, although they may lead to some regulation of the rate of flow. Irrigation normally reduces the volume of water available downstream. Hydro-electric development normally does not affect ultimate volume but commonly changes the rate of flow. So far as the Columbia is concerned, navigation and fishing no longer directly impinge upon relations between this country and the United States. When United States authorities built the Grand Coulee Dam, in Washington, they ended both the run of salmon

Archaeology · Boundary (topology · Fishing · Flood myth · Geography · Habitat · Human settlement · Hydroelectricity · Hydrology (agriculture · Knot (papermaking · Political science · Pulp and paper industry · Riparian zone · Watershed · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History · Cuban History and Society · Ecology · Engineering · Geology · Law · Mathematics · Transboundary Water Resource Management