The Race to Save the American Landscape One Seed at a Time (2)

One day last January, close to two dozen people rose at dawn to hand-sow thousands of pounds of native plant species across vast swaths of sand, silt and clay that had emerged when the reservoirs behind four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Oregon were drained.

The Klamath once boasted the third-largest salmon population in the West. But the dams—built a century ago to provide power to a growing US Northwest—destroyed 90% of them by turning a cool, free-flowing river into a warm, stagnant reservoir thick with toxic algae. The Klamath Dam Removal project, at a cost of about $450 million, ...