Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. The author of four books, his new study of the Ken Curtis administration is due next year. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

News that The Nature Conservancy will purchase four Kennebec River dams to restore free-flowing water and Atlantic salmon habitat is certainly historic. Whether it merits celebration depends on variables not yet known.

The $168 million deal with the dams’ owner, Brookfield Renewable, announced Tuesday, is complex and, due to myriad federal regulations on decommissioning and numerous concerns about how dam removal will actually proceed, will not be consummated for years.

It’s a breathtaking prospect, to be sure: continuous fish passage from the ocean to the Kennebec’s confluence with the Sandy River at Norridgewock and its upstream salmon spawning grounds. While the removal of the Edwards Dam at Augusta in 1999 was significant, this is potentially bigger, perhaps on a scale with the cleanup of a heavily polluted river and the end of log drives in the 1970s.

Today it’s easy to forget the deplorable condition of Maine’s major rivers in the 1960s — the Kennebec, Saco, Presumpscot, Penobscot and Androscoggin — due mostly to paper and textile mill waste, but with municipal sewage contributing as well.

Maine’s Sen. Ed Muskie had gone to Washington vowing to end the stench and fumes, and the Clean Water Act amendments of 1972 were the result. Back home, Gov. Ken Curtis took concerted action that together with the federal effort cleansed the rivers far faster than anyone expected.

The log drives each spring on the Kennebec came to an end following a federal lawsuit filed by Howard Trotzky, later a state senator, that was controversial even among conservationists who feared an adverse ruling. The paper companies decided to pull out anyway, and the last drive was in 1976.

There was a simplicity and decisiveness to these developments. Today’s goals and benefits are not nearly as clear.

First there’s the hydroelectricity produced by the dams, about 6% of statewide capacity. This may be minimal to proponents of removal, but it’s still significant as global warming rises and our use of fossil fuels continues almost unabated — and as President Trump aims to accelerate petroleum drilling and even coal-burning, throwing climate change mitigation into reverse.

Then there’s the major industrial user of the middle Kennebec, the Somerset mill in Skowhegan now owned by Sappi. That was the newest and is now the last remaining unaltered mill among the behemoths that once ruled towns like Jay, Millinocket, Old Town, Lincoln and Brewer.

The mill, which with 780 workers is a major employer and has been considering expansion, depends on the impoundment at the Shawmut Dam downstream. The Brookfield sale contemplates a “technical solution” that will keep the mill running, though what the solution might be is hard to envision. The Nature Conservancy is allowing itself some wiggle room beyond full removal; let’s hope it works.

Then there’s the question of the salmon itself, an iconic migratory fish that gets the headlines, even though the shad — writer John McPhee calls it “the founding fish” — is more numerous and the giant Atlantic sturgeon more primeval and weird.

Though it’s not polite to mention, there’s still the serious damage to the best Sandy River salmon habitat in Phillips, dredged by the town on an emergency basis following December 2023 flooding that isolated residents and closed roads. The dredging got out of hand, “channelized” the river, bypassing the shallow braided streams and redds (salmon nests) vital to spawning. The Department of Environmental Protection has ordered restoration, but that too could take years.

The larger concern is whether Maine still offers prime salmon habitat. For decades, the focus was on the Penobscot, the last Maine river where catch-and-release fishing was legal, with the president presented a ceremonial fish at the White House — a practice begun in 1912 that ended in 1986.

But a highly touted Penobscot dam removal and fish passage project there, completed a decade ago, produced disappointing results, at least in numbers of returning salmon. If you want to fish for salmon, the Restigouche River in New Brunswick to the north is still your best bet.

Fisheries advocates believe the Kennebec and Sandy offer better prospects. But seemingly inexorable warming of the Gulf of Maine is pushing lobsters north and to greater depths, and far less numerous salmon — just 1,200 last year — could be caught in the same cycle.

Even with all the doubts and question marks, The Nature Conservancy initiative is worth at least two cheers. It represents hope for a better future, something in extremely short supply just now. And it’s part of a great Maine tradition to live off the land, but to live with it as well, respecting the forces of nature that represent a power far greater than our own.