Stories Sustain Us #47 – Healing Rivers: How Small Dam Removals Are Restoring Nature

Summary
In Stories Sustain Us E47, Jeremy Dietrich shares his journey from a childhood spent exploring nature to becoming an aquatic ecologist. He discusses his education, early career experiences, and the importance of fieldwork in understanding ecological impacts. Jeremy emphasizes the role of regulations in environmental protection and the collaborative efforts needed to balance human activity with ecological health. He highlights his current work on dam removal projects, showcasing nature's resilience and the potential for ecological recovery when given the opportunity. Jeremy emphasizes the importance of understanding sediment transport and habitat changes due to human interventions. The discussion culminates in a call to action for community involvement in restoration efforts, highlighting the potential for positive environmental change when people work together with nature.

About the Guest
Jeremy Dietrich is a principal aquatic ecologist with the New York State Water Resources Institute (WRI) at Cornell University specializing in stream ecology and studies involving aquatic macroinvertebrates. Jeremy's current work and research at WRI focuses on restoring stream connectivity through small dam removals and documenting the ecological benefits that dam removals-as a restoration strategy-provide to local aquatic habitats. These data allow resource managers to achieve restoration and action agenda goals while local dam removal provides tangible environmental benefits to stakeholders through improved uses of water resources.  Jeremy received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment (DNRE) at Cornell University. With 20 years of prior experience as both a DNRE ecologist and senior scientist at the environmental consulting firm Ichthyological Associates, LLC,  he has been involved in aquatic impact assessment studies regarding invasive species, hydropower relicensing settlements, industrial development, and stream restoration initiatives.

Show Notes
WRI website: https://cals.cornell.edu/water-resources-institute/

Takeaways
•Jeremy's childhood experiences in nature shaped his career path.
•His education focused on fisheries biology and aquatic ecology.
•Regulatory work involves collaboration with hydropower companies for ecological balance.
•Dam removal projects serve as real-time experiments in ecological recovery.
•Regulatory frameworks need to adapt to modern ecological understanding.
•Dams were built with economic incentives, often without understanding ecological impacts.
•Nature's resilience is evident in the recovery of ecosystems post-dam removal.
•Sediment transport is crucial for maintaining healthy aquatic habitats.
•Community involvement is essential for successful restoration projects.
•Restoration efforts can lead to improved water quality and ecological health.
•Public awareness of environmental issues is growing and is vital for change.

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Transcript

Steven 
When we build something, we often think about the benefits. The economy will boost, the power will generate, the progress will claim. But what if in doing so, we cut off the very lifelines of our ecosystems? And what if the path to repairing that damage wasn't just possible, but already underway? Hey everybody, I'm Steven Schauer and welcome back to Stories Sustain Us. The podcast where we explore the transformative power of human stories.

to create a more sustainable world. Today's episode is all about restoration, resilience, and the surprising ways nature rebounds when we give it a chance. My guest, Jeremy Dietrich, is someone who's seen this transformation firsthand. From field work in the Hudson River Valley to leading dam removal projects across New York State, Jeremy's career is a powerful example of what happens when science, community, and a deep respect for nature come together.

We'll explore how his early childhood spent in nature shaped his path as an ecologist, why aquatic ecosystems are key indicators of environmental health, and how collaboration with hydropower companies, local nonprofits, and everyday people can lead to healthier rivers, cleaner water, and stronger biodiversity. We'll also take a look back at how dams, originally built for economic reasons like ice production,

are now being reconsidered in light of their long-term ecological impacts. And you'll hear why understanding things like sediment transport and aquatic macroinvertebrates can actually lead to big changes for the health of our planet. Yes, we'll be talking about those tiny little bugs and streams and why they are really a big deal. Here's a more about Jeremy before we jump into this episode. Jeremy Dietrich,

is a principal aquatic ecologist with the New York State Water Resources Institute at Cornell University. His current work focuses on restoring stream connectivity through small dam removals and measuring their ecological benefits. With degrees from Cornell's Department of Natural Resources and the Environment and two decades of experience in ecological consulting and fisheries biology, Jeremy brings a rare mix of academic depth and hands-on insight. His work

helps resource managers turn restoration goals into real world action and helps communities reclaim their rivers for generations to come. So if you've ever wondered whether nature can truly bounce back or whether one person can make a difference in restoring what's been lost, this conversation is for you. So let's get into it here on Stories Sustain Us, where we are inspiring action through the power of storytelling.

Steven 
Good morning, Jeremy, how you doing?

Jeremy Dietrich 
Fine, Steven, how are you?

Steven 
I'm good. Thanks for being here with me this morning. Welcome to Stories Sustain Us. ⁓ I usually start out by reminding everybody I'm in Seattle. It's a rainy, chilly, cold morning, the Seattle morning, and you are in what part of the world today?

Jeremy Dietrich 
So I am in Ithaca, New York. It's equally rainy, although probably not as cold. ⁓

you know, at Cornell University, which is where the Water Resource Institute is housed.

Steven
Nice.

Perfect. Well, I know I want to jump into all the great work you're doing there at the Water Resource Institute, but first let's jump into your story. What's your story, Jeremy? Where did you grow up? What was life like for you? How did you ⁓ end up becoming an aquatic ecologist? What's your adventure?

Jeremy Dietrich 
Thank you.

Well, yeah, so I grew up in Western New York, Western New York State, kind of the southern tier. Early on, I was always, you know, like I suppose most kids, you know, always wanting to go outside, you know, playing, know, hiking, swimming, definitely kind of like a formative foundation. My grandparents had a

large country property and it was very much like the, you know, over the river and through the woods, you know, to grandmother's house. And so, you know, you know, every weekend, yeah, we're almost every week. Yeah. We try to go down there and they had a pond. so, ⁓ you know, that really kind of, you know, like I say, kind of set the foundation for my,

Steven 
Nice. Yeah. ⁓

Jeremy Dietrich 
Desire to be outdoors, like my appreciation for the environment, for the biological communities and how kind of piqued my interest of how these ecological communities are structured and their relationships and all the observations that you have as a child, obviously not having the broader theory of mind to like.

Steven 
Sure,

sure.

Jeremy Dietrich 
understand all the connections, but it's like it peaks all those interests. yeah, so that really was kind of set the trajectory. And then, you know, during

You ⁓

You know, through high school and as I was applying, you know, to colleges, um, you know, being that I did a lot of fishing, was like, I'm going to be a fisheries biologist, know, like specifically, you know? And so, um, I applied to, trying to think if I remember, I think I applied to like five schools, Cornell initially, Paul Smith's college, which is up in the head around next.

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
private school, ⁓ Unity College in Maine, ⁓ Moonshot to like Alaska Fairbanks and I think it's a Syracuse to ESF. and I got, I got accepted to all of them. and I ended up, so I kind of narrowed down to like Paul Smith for now, just for a number of like practical and logistical reasons.

⁓ And my mother went to her work at Cornell. you know, so she did work with ⁓ in the human ecology school, ⁓ like ⁓ nutritional ⁓ physiology, basically. she, you know, her research focused on actually how like

Steven 
Okay. What was her background? was she working on?

Okay.

Jeremy Dietrich 
exercise and nutrition influenced fitness outcomes, ⁓ kind of at the two ends of the spectrum. So for how fitness and nutrition of pregnant mothers influence the early health of a child is developing, but then also on the aging end of the spectrum, how fitness and particular fitness, but diet ⁓

influenced the path of aging in geriatric populations. So was kind of like the two ends. ⁓ So she went back to do some of her graduate work later when I was still in middle school, early middle school. So we actually moved to Ethicott for that in the mid-90s.

Steven 
Yeah, the geriatric aging. Yeah, she really did do the bookends. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
And so I ended up choosing Paul Smith initially because having gone to high school locally at Lansing, going to Cornell didn't really feel like much of a difference. Like, you know, just like I'm still at home, so to speak. ⁓ So I decided to go to Paul Smith's college ⁓ up in the Adirondacks region of New York state and

Steven 
Yeah.

Sure, sure.

Jeremy Dietrich 
⁓ you know, again, kind of initially it was, you know, like, that's pretty, you know, focused fisheries specific track. ⁓ but then the first, one of the first classes I took there that first fall semester was like a stream ecology class. you know, I was like,

casually aware, obviously of like stream processes, just being in the water. But that kind of really brought a greater attention to the aquatic invertebrates that are in the stream, the diversity, how they're integral to a lot of the trophic and food web.

Steven 
Sure sure.

Jeremy Dietrich 
patterns in the aquatic and like even riparian environment. ⁓ that kind of like pivoted slightly. I was like, this is actually interesting. It's not totally unrelated to fisheries in a sense. ⁓ But I think there was a bit of a mystique with the aquatic entomology or extreme ecology realm in that

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
superficially, if you're just looking at a stream, you don't see all that biological diversity in that biological organization. You got to turn over rocks. You got to actively investigate it. so, yeah, that really fascinated me. ⁓ The Streaming College professor, Paul Smith, Mike Brecklin, I think it was. ⁓ Yeah, so that was definitely a... It's like, OK, this is really what I want. Yeah, like, yeah.

Steven 
Right, right.

Yeah, I

can-

Jeremy Dietrich 
kind of focus on.

Steven 
that connection between

when you were a kid on your grandparents home, know, kicking over the rocks and in the pond and looking at, I'm sure, at least what I'm imagining is you as a child seeing those bugs and those, you know, benthic and everything and being fascinated by those. then, you know, a couple of decades later in undergrad, kind of rediscovering that, that interest that ties through your life there. At least that's, that's what I'm imagining is happening in your story. So I can.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Mm.

Steven 
see those connections that you said early on kind of formed your foundation for wanting to be outside and work in fisheries or work around water. And here you are peaked ⁓ by this ecology class. I can see those connections being made. that's awesome. That's awesome. ⁓

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah. So once I, you know, kind of through my first couple of years at, you know, Paul Smith and getting kind of some of the core kind of, you know, what do call it? Like, you know, what do they call it? Blanking that. Like your core baseline courses. Yeah. And then when I, so then right now, Paul Smith's four year school, but it was a two year school. ⁓

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
you know, in the early 2000s. So like I only had two years there. So then I decided to transfer to Cornell to finish my, you know, so I received an associates, a full associate's degree at Paul Smith's AAS degree. then, you know, transferred to Cornell to finish my bachelor's degree. And then since I had a lot of my core math, you know, grammar or whatever, you know,

Steven 
Sure.

Get your patches. Sure, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
types of basic ethics courses out of the way I could focus on the professional courses, so to speak, ⁓ at Cornell. ⁓ so then I kind of really was able to kind of delve more specifically into the taxonomy, like aquatic entomology and like

Steven
Yeah, so those upper division courses, right? Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Water resources, hydraulics, stream of call, a lot of the more specific property-based course that really gets you into the theory and how are these systems structured from a mechanistic perspective. ⁓ Bobby Karski, who is a professor here, taught quantum entomology and co-taught

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
And ⁓ so she was very much a mentor here. later years, undergrad, I TA'd for the course of the Stream Ecology course. that

And so actually the stream college courses, it's time to co-taught with my, who was my undergrad advisor, Mark, Mark Bain. And when, you know, when I finished as I was finished, well, you know, towards the end of my undergrad, I ended up, there was a project that Mark, Mark was overseeing in the lower Hudson Valley or lower Hudson estuary. ⁓

in and around New York Harbor looking at some of the ecological effects of the dredging efforts that were performed after the September 11 attacks ⁓ in New York Harbor ⁓ to, initially when it was a recovery, potentially recovery effort, they couldn't get.

Steven 
Mmm.

Mmm, wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, the river around that area was shut. Like they couldn't get big barges and certain size boats up to the shoreline, which is what they needed. So they did a lot of emergency dredging. ⁓ yeah, my understanding of kind of the regulatory background was essentially that, you know, given the nature of this, like we need to do this now. We know there are typical environmental reviews, but yeah, we.

Steven
Yeah.

Yeah, all that was suspended

Jeremy Dietrich 
We need to get survivors out and we

Steven 
and you just went, yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
can we will do an environmental post. So, so ⁓ Mark has. You know, long history of working in the Hudson and so, know, that's. So I was ⁓ brought on with. With that to ⁓ that kind of looked at both the.

Steven 
Yep. Right, right, right.

Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
the benthic invertebrates in the estuary. And ⁓ there's a fishery component as well. So I cocapped into an otter research, ⁓ otter trawler research vessel. So that was a two-year study. No, so I had finished my undergrad. So there's like four or five months post undergrad.

Steven 
Were you still in undergrad at that time or was it just right after? Just finished undergrad. Yeah. Wow. That's a big, yeah,

first kind of big real world job, so to speak, after your batch. That's a big.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, yeah, so there's

kind of, what's the, yeah, out of the fray and into the fire, except I'm trying to cap in the boat in New York Harbor and it's harrowing in and of itself.

Steven 
Wow.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Not to mention, you know, the

magnitude of why you were there, but, you know, and all of the emotions and everything that was going on in that time period on top of just the significance of the environmental work that you were being tasked with. That is a big first, ⁓ first big job. Wow. Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Mm.

Yeah, so

yeah, so I was involved. ⁓ mean, obviously, generally helping or assisting with. You know, the field efforts on the boat and we'd go down for about a week. ⁓ About a week a month. Do the fisheries on the the the benthic sampling go back to the lab here and I think I would do all the the benthic.

Steven 
Sure, sure.

Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
know, identifications with some of the other staff. That was my primary to kind of like process, you know, each month's benthic invertebrate samples. I can get that ID'd and enumerated before we went to the next month. yeah, so.

Steven 
Yeah. And just for folks who may not be.

Yeah.

Can I ask you real quick, Jeremy, just for the listener who may not be familiar with that term, the benthic invertebrates, just explain in kind of layman's ⁓ average person, what exactly does that mean? ⁓ Just so people can understand the story that you're telling. I know it is, but I'd rather hear what your description is for the average person when you say benthic invertebrates. What are you talking about exactly?

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, sure. So if you kind of if you in your mind, you take kind like a cross section of the aquatic environment, you have like surface organisms, surface organisms that kind of live in the broader water column. Those are probably preferred as pelagic near shore organisms that might go to the term littoral. But then, you know, organisms that

live within the bottom sediments or essentially sit on the bottom. That region is called the benthos. And so they're referred to as benthic organisms. So most, if you think of the crustaceans, snails, gastropods, mollusks, lot of aquatic worms are going to be in the sediment.

In the case of freshwater, a lot of the aquatic insect larvae are in amongst the rocks and flowing systems and brain systems. There's lots of crevices and whatnot at the bottom in the substrate that organisms use for refuge and such. ⁓ yeah, when we refer to benthic invertebrates, that's generally what we're

Yeah, referring to sometimes you might hear like benthic fisheries, that would be like flounder. ⁓ Sometimes they're called like ground fish. like, know, sea bass or, you know, rockfish type of fish that associated with the near bottom environment.

Steven 
Perfect.

Within your bottom.

Yeah. Perfect. Thanks for helping folks understand what you're talking about so they can follow the story. Sorry for the little sidebar there, but I thought it was important. So yeah, so you're doing this research on the Hudson after 9-11 and you're going out collecting samples and then going back to the lab to categorize what you're finding.

Jeremy Dietrich 
their willingness to be heard.

Steven 
And is this, that sounds like that was happening kind of on a monthly basis. ⁓ Is that, yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yes, yeah.

yeah, so we did that for, it was a two-year project. And then, yeah, and so we're, ⁓

Steven 
Well, yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, basically trying to assess like the rate of recovery of, know, because with the dredging effort, you know, effectively stripped about clean. And so, you know, so we had, I think it was four or five sites kind of within the dredging area and the four or five sites further up river that were not dredged. we had this, you know, compare. You know, what should the, that the community look like and.

Steven 
Yeah, you just scrape it all clean, right?

Jeremy Dietrich 
how soon over time will it begin to recover? so, you know, and there's a little bit of, I mean, we did find that, you know, within two years, was a great deal of recovery. Some of the deeper sites shifted, like, because now they're deeper, so they can alter the fish communities a little bit. But, yeah, but that overall,

Steven 
Yeah, it's a different habitat now.

Jeremy Dietrich
You know, the rate of colonization of these organisms, you know, the estuary with the tides, mean, things get ⁓ colonized, the new surfaces pretty quickly. so, ⁓ you know, conclusion was that, basically, you know, just let it, it, you know, let it alone, so to speak, let nature recover itself and you should, you know, you'll. ⁓

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich
You you return to a similar state that you, you know, that we didn't see any like.

I'd say like long-term like chronic issues from that. Again, as long as you don't disturb any further, so to speak. ⁓

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah. Didn't create like a,

you know, for lack of a better term, but like a desert kind of a situation where organisms didn't return to one patch or everything kind of, you know, as you were saying, nature kind of has this tendency to restore itself if we give it the opportunity to do so.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Right.

Yeah, yeah, so. ⁓ Yeah, so then I did that I worked also ⁓ as a. In part time. You know, also with a private consulting company, Ithological Associates. ⁓ That was more I've got free weekend here and there, or here's this project we need that we know we need somebody. Yeah, we know the person so.

I was also, I had that ⁓ work kind of in tandem with full-time Cornell scientists, research aid staff. And that was an interesting perspective because much of the Cornell work is

Steven 
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
you know, they're an academic based and you know, you're asking like broader research questions and trying to, ⁓ you know, identify like, you know, ecological mechanisms or, you know, how do you explain what, you know, processes that you're observing? ⁓ whereas the, you know, the, ⁓ the consulting work, we did a lot of work, ⁓ involved with like hydropower licensing, ⁓ efforts. So

Steven 
Hmm.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, ⁓ set up relicense, back relicensing settlement work. ⁓ So ⁓ part of that is assessing the fisheries and kind of ecological conditions around ⁓ hydropower, small hydropower ⁓ operations, kind of within New York and New England.

Steven 
Sure.

Jeremy Dietrich 
I was in Massachusetts and Connecticut on a couple of sites and I think Northern Pennsylvania. ⁓ So, and that was, you know, here's, it was a more pragmatic, I'd say like pragmatic approach of like, you know, how can you adapt?

You know operations to conform with, know, a given like regulatory environment, you know, work all the time. so, whereas, you know, again, Cornell was very kind of like theory based. This was like kind of a pragmatic, like on the ground, like this is what we have to work with. How can we, you know, here's our, you know, oh, we found, I mean, kind of a hypothetical example, but like, oh, we found this particular

Steven 
Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
species of concern, like it has passage requirements, how can we manipulate the spillway design that we can conform to, you know, so these organisms can say move from upstream downstream safely without going over a spillway and like smashing into a rock. you you didn't have as much of the...

Steven 
Right.

Right. Yeah. I appreciate you explaining that.

Yeah, just because I think regulatory, you know, staff who work on regulatory issues, I sometimes get the sense, get a bad rap that you're just out in the field trying to do gotchas and trying to, you know, catch people, you know, not following the regulatory requirements so that they can be punished. But, you know, what you described was

Jeremy Dietrich 
Mm-hmm.

Steven 
you know, was, working with these, you know, small power plant, organic companies, and I'm sure co-ops and other things that are, are trying to create power for people that we all need. ⁓ so you're not out there trying to, you know, do a gotcha. You're out there to try to work with them, to make sure that they're designing things and, and trying to, to meet the regulatory requirements so that the environment can be healthy and the power generation that is required can be met. I really appreciate you kind of taking time to explain that. Cause I think regulatory.

aspects of environmental protection often get a bad rap and folks like you are out there just trying to help, trying to make all the parties kind of come together to do what's best for all the parties. So thank you for explaining that because I think that's often misunderstood. Yeah, please.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, another little maybe anecdote on that too is like,

you as you mentioned, like the kind of maybe the bird's eye view of that is, yeah, it's like, it's all commercial. of course, you know, the certainly the corporate CEOs are in their high rise office somewhere or whatever. you know, what I think we're recognizing as well, the people that, you know, the local individuals of like a lot of these, in this case, like hydropower operations, you know, the employees of that.

Steven 
Sure.

Jeremy Dietrich 
you know, location. mean, they live locally, they want to catch walleye as much as the next person. And so it's like, if we can do something that's, know, it was not onerous, but, you know, was kind of an optimal way to, you know, allow the, you know, environmental functioning, but, you know, ⁓ so, and maintaining these kind of a...

Steven 
Yeah, yeah. Right, they want to do it right also.

Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
a balance to the ecology. that's, you know, like you say, they're not all, you know, whatever. Yeah. Bad people, so to speak. So.

Steven 
Yeah, great point.

Right. On all sides, everybody's trying to

do the right things. So yeah, thanks for pointing out to you that the folks you were working with were wanting to do it as best as possible. it's so yeah, it's regulations often just, you know, from my experience often get a bad rap and sometimes deserved. Sometimes they do get in the way and sometimes they get outdated and they need to be, you know, updated or removed from the books. And that's a really hard, hard thing to do in government once something

is on the books, it's hard to get it off the books, so to speak. But in general, folks like you and the people you're working with are trying to abide by the law that somebody else created, ⁓ but also trying to do what's best for all interested parties. So I think that's sometimes just, that's a part of this ⁓ story that goes untold sometimes. I appreciate you bringing that up.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, because another thing to just from the perspective is what most of the. The. The first licenses, yeah, I think like 30 to 50 year license spans and so, like, yeah, I think of. You know, these ⁓ operations. Yeah, last time they were licensed was like in the 60s and 70s and early 80s. Right? And so that environmental regulatory environment was very different than it is in 2010. So.

Steven 
Right.

Right, right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
It's like, okay, it's like a different world, so to speak. You've got to comply. How can we optimize the system to like, you guys can generate power in a meaningful way, reasonably economically, and you can allow the local.

Steven 
Yeah, how can we do as best we can? Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
you know, the fish communities or the other, you know, organisms of concern to try to survive. So.

Steven 
Yeah. Yeah. So that, that work it seemed like laid a pretty good ⁓ foundation then for you for the, you know, for the work you're kind of doing now with, with the state of New York's water resource Institute. were doing all this work earlier in your career, you know, looking at how to, know, cause hydropower is often used dams. So you're, you're, you're involved with dam work earlier in your career for regulatory.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yep.

Steven 
perspectives out of these operations to meet the federal regulatory ⁓ environmental commission, what they're told to do. now, jumping ahead a little bit in your career, what you're doing now with the water resource institutes, you're looking at outdated dams and outdated culverts and things that may not be needed any longer from a ⁓ human.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Mm-hmm.

Steven 
perspective, why they were put in 50, 60, 100, 150 years ago or whatever it may be. You're looking at how to remove those. Is that kind of that connection from your career path from working around dams to now trying to figure out how to remove dams? Does that make too big of a leap there or is that a connection that I'm seeing?

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, it definitely was like something that I kind of initially latched onto. yeah, so my work, being involved with this kind of barrier mitigation slash dam removal project with WRI started in 2016. I was a staff

There was a research associate in the Department of Natural Resources, which is just a separate department than, you know, biological and environmental engineering, which is where WRI is housed. I just finished my master's degree. So I went back. Went back, you know, to get my master's after a few years of working, both, you know, just strictly working.

Steven
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Basically, my master's degree was looking at how aquatic macroinvertebrate communities ⁓ respond to invasive species in wetland environments, which is probably another 40 minute topic. But the connection is that in Ferno Hall, the yard, natural resource building and

I had a, at the time, a postdoc kind of cross pass in the hall. so like, we've got this emerging project that I'm kind of looking at taking on. And there's a component of it that we're going to be doing like aquatic and macroverbal samples like in these streams around some of these potential sites for dam removal.

So me and my technician don't, we don't have the background in aquatic entomology or taxonomy. so they were like, oh, but you could probably ID these or side ID these so much faster than we would need to learn it essentially. So I...

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, so they so, you know, they're like, well, we'll go out and collect. We'll bring everything back to, um, you know, Ithaca and then, you know, you can do the IDs, you know, um, know, a couple of times a year, basically. So, you know, getting, just wrapping up my masters. Like I was like, I think, you know, continuing, you're kind of playing like doing like continuing like PhD work with it. Um, so.

Steven 
yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, in my mind, I remember saying like, ⁓ yeah, was debating. was like, well, I definitely don't want to manage the whole thing at this point. yeah, I could see like, yeah, if you're bringing, you know, handful of samples back, you know, a couple of times a year, like, you know, that I could make that work. the first early summer, 2016,

Steven 
Sure.

Jeremy Dietrich 
There were like four or five sites in the Hudson Valley region that is kind of like the pilot-esque area for this barrier mitigation effort funded by the Hudson River Estuary program within the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. ⁓

Yeah, so the initial couple of days going out, I like, you know, I'll go out with them to the sites that I know, make sure they're doing the correct methodology when they're collecting, everything's so that like, you know. ⁓

You know, doing it doing an appropriate like habitat assessment. So like if I see some differences, like I can, like, okay, this is why we might be seeing these as opposed to like just like a broad methodological error. So, so I went out, helped collect, like got to see the sites and, ⁓ like a month or two later.

Steven
Yeah.

Sure.

Jeremy Dietrich 
the postdoc ended up taking a faculty position and basically, you know, and leaving for that. And the principals at the time, yeah, my ⁓ supervisor, Pat Sullivan, who's a professor emeritus now in the department and the principals in DC and then WRI were like, ⁓ yeah, like, you know.

What are we going to do with this? I don't know. Everybody's looking at it. I can just give it to Jeremy. Okay, that sounds good. so I ended up like, yeah, kind of taking the reins of this, which initially I was like, this is exactly what I didn't want to do. But the, but the caveat and why I didn't just like, yeah, kind of heart stop was, ⁓ you know, as, as, as we kind of segued into this is like, you know, I have been on the, you know, on the

Steven 
So you're part-time occasionally helping here or there. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of got sucked into taking control of it.

Jeremy Dietrich 
private consulting side been involved with, you know, ecological sampling around, know, hydropower establishments, And seeing how, you know, they create different habitats and how can you, you know, it's like a game of mitigation as far as like, you know, effects and, and, obviously most hydropower establishments are obviously going away. So the, like the prospect of like having obviously smaller.

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
kind of mill dam size systems, but still you have this static, you know, this dam that's been in place for, you know, potentially hundreds of years. have this like static system and yeah, you know, even doing the hydropower work, you're like, wonder what would happen if we just took the dam out, you know, just kind of hypothetically, right? And so this was an opportunity to be like, Oh, can actually see what would happen if we take the dam. So that really

Steven 
Right, right.

Let's find out. Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, it really was of great interest to me, of both intellectually, like, oh, this is like a cool real world, real time, like long term experiment. And, you know, but also recognizing kind of this. Yeah. We've had this, you know, we've had these broad human anthropogenic impacts on the landscape, just as a human population for, you know, obviously a long time, thousands of years.

Steven
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
it's like, you know.

You know, the, the, the, kind of captured the.

the essence of recovery, of resilience of nature, right? So, you know, could do, you can like beat something down for 200 years and then, you know, take the dam out and three days later you have, you know, herring in a creek. You know, and it's, it's almost, I don't want say incomprehensible, but you're just like, you know, illustrating that type of like natural resilience.

Steven
Yeah.

See what happens. Yeah, yeah, that kind of connects to your...

Jeremy Dietrich 
⁓ is encouraging. It's like, ⁓ hope isn't all lost. mean, so much of the broader narrative about pollution and climate change and ⁓ microplastics. Well, yeah, you're just kind of inundated with gloom and doom, which I mean, not to...

Steven 
Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Bad news. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Minimize, you know, those concerns, but it's like, here's, you know, kind of a broader case study of like, you know, you know, things can get better if we implement the right strategies. And so. Yeah, and. Yeah, and so then I started to. You know, the first the first year, you know, can I establish five sites?

Steven 
Absolutely. Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, in the Hudson Valley ⁓ and then of New York and. ⁓

Steven 
Now these old mill dams you'd mentioned that, yeah, so five, so what, you know, when you're talking about a ⁓ mill dam, is that, you know, kind of something that's five feet, seven feet, 10 feet, you know, two feet, what kind of barriers ⁓ are you talking about at these five sites to help people understand the size of the dam that are being removed at these ⁓ projects?

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, so these are all old.

Yeah, so they're they vary, you know, generally like a small dam kind of categorically is, you know, usually less than I think 20 or 25 feet. I mean, from a regulatory perspective, most of what we're dealing with are, yeah, five to 12, 15. In some cases, you can see where like

Steven 
Okay.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, the maybe the original dam or fieldstone or was, you know, five or six feet, you know, probably like the early 1800s, you know, that filled up and then they built another five feet, another five feet. You know, it's things filled in. So there's a couple of dams we have that are on that 20 to 25 foot. generally, yeah, you know, eight to 12 feet on average.

Steven 
Yeah, yeah, the sediment came. Yeah, yeah.

sure that makes sense.

Jeremy Dietrich 
And, you know, most were like old kind of original water power mills, saw mills, grindstone mills. ⁓ Some were early like water supply, smaller, you know, hamlet-esque water supply reservoirs. ⁓ One was actually...

It's interesting to think about today. It was for ice ice production. So, you know, refrigeration in late 1800s, ice was a commodity. And, you know, if you lived on a lake, obviously you'd have like an economic, you know, level of economic activity in the winter that you could like saw your blocks of ice out of a lake. like if you didn't have it, if you just had a stream, you didn't have that laminar.

Steven 
Sure. Yeah, it is interesting for her talk about today. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
frozen surface in the winter, it's like, well, we can get into the ice market if we dam the stream and create our own little small pond, but it would still be, you know, so one of the sites was built specifically for ⁓ Brown's Pond Dam ⁓ on the Otterkill. And so I think it's Orange County, New York. And so that was for ice production. had a rail spur that came up and you could like saw the

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, the winner saw the block space, but on the rail car, that's a to New York City.

Steven 
send it to the big

city. ⁓ It's interesting how these pieces of history come together too, you know, talking about, you know, what life was, you know, how we were changing the landscape, you know, 200 years ago to our benefit. And now you're, you know, looking at how can we undo that. So that's, love those connections. Yeah. It's fascinating.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, so a lot

of these were put in. had ⁓ legitimate economic drivers and incentives at the time. was obviously the broader, kind of, early US, kind of colonial early US era ⁓ resources were thought to be unlimited, right?

Steven 
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, and you know...

Yeah, well

even up into the 20th century, not too long ago, right? Right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, it's like, oh yeah, we can put this dam up, you know, like

the shed can't get by, but all they can get by over on this stream, you know, or, you know, so, um, you know, and then, you know, they, you know, obviously that, that suite of, of homespun cottage industry, you know, um, became obsolete and, you know, but obviously the, you know, the dams remained and, um,

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
And again, you know...

You know, the prior levels of abundance, you know, people didn't notice like the trickling of decline, right? You know, of all sorts of especially migratory species. You know, and now we're obviously, you know, the last 30, 50 years recognizing, you know, you know, the effects of eels and shad and herring. so. ⁓

Steven 
Right, right.

So what are some of

the lessons that you've learned here with these five sites, with the removal of these structure and as you're talking now about how we understand differently these environmental patterns and these ecosystem patterns that 200 years ago wasn't that they were purposefully trying to hurt these systems. They just didn't have the knowledge or didn't think too much about it or thought that it would be fine. So now we know better and we're thinking differently about.

how we can live ⁓ in closer unity with our ecosystems that we share with other critters and creatures. ⁓ So you've gone through these five sites and fingers crossed nature can heal itself. What are you learning from how quickly can nature rebound as you remove some of these structures?

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, so it's encouraging. I will note, so that those, we had originally five sites, like in 2016, you know, we've since added, I think we're up to 12 or 13 now that we've collected modern data within the Hudson Valley, you know, between like, know, Peaksville and Albany. And in the last couple of years, we've moved to,

Steven 
Great.

Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
include sites with, in collaboration with the Great Lakes, our Great Lakes partnerships, you know, doing similar work in the Lake Ontario watershed now as well. So I've got couple of sites in the Little Salmon River Basin, north of Syracuse, one site on Oatka Creek, which is in the Genesee River Basin, south of Rochester. So

And, you know, so what we see is. ⁓

you know, with multiple use, so the kind of the broader monitoring strategies to collect, you know, a few years of pre removal data upstream downstream. you know, in these systems, you know, they were historically, you know, a free flowing stream you put in a dam, you create, you know, an upstream empowerment. You know, that fundamentally changes the, you know, the environment upstream.

know, downstream, it's still largely a flowing system. so, you know, you create this, you know, natural disconnect in the system, but you also create this like habitat disparity. You have another obviously very short distance, still over the dam, but you know, over the course of, you know, a hundred meters, you know, have like a stream community and then what's now like a ponded community. And, you know, again, over

Steven
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Dietrich 
many decades, know, these ponds, you know, because you're interrupting like the natural sediment transport, you know, from the watershed that's taking, you know, a gross of material largely from the headwaters and would normally transit it through the, you know, the stream network, you know, to the Delta or the mouth, you know, now that's only erupted and a lot of that's been captured, you know, and deposited in the impoundment. So that's going to fill up.

Steven 
The whole system sure right right

Right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Obviously over time, you're going to have weed growth come in as the water gets shallower. Obviously you cut down all the trees around where the apartment now is, so you get a lot more sunlight and solar loading into these systems. you increase the water temperature, often decrease dissolved oxygen. So you have fundamentally different sets of systems.

Steven 
direct sunlight. Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
And that, again, over time, like, degrades the water quality upstream. so, you know, create this because, you you've disconnected, like, again, a lot of the natural hydraulic and sediment transport, nutrient transport processes that, you know, organisms, stream organisms have, like, co-evolved with. ⁓

You kind of get this what we've seen over all of our pre removal sites, like multiple years of pre removal data is. You know, you get this. ⁓ Kind of status of like I'm calling like arrested impairment, so. ⁓ You know, often we see. You know the the bent the communities macroverbal communities and upstream. Yeah, or.

Steven 
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Dietrich 
much less diverse, much less biodiverse. You often now have poor benthic habitats, almost everything is kind of like silted in. anybody walk upstream in a silty, you lose your boot, the first step into the mud. So, you'll have often...

Steven 
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, anywhere from a third or less of the biodiversity, macroinvertebrate biodiversity upstream, then you do downstream. so, yeah, and of course the habitat, in-stream habitat is like all silt and there's nothing to push the silt out because the dam's blocking it. So like your habitat's consistently degraded benthic habitat. So you get this.

Steven 
the diversity, sure. It is kind of.

Right, right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
like a rusted impairment. like, you know, now we've got some of our original cohort sites from 2016 that I went back to, to 2023.

It's like these ecological metrics that we use, certain habitat, percent gravel, or ⁓ proportion of Mayflies, or species richness, or biological assessment profile score, which is like a one-off water quality score that the state uses, United States uses, DC uses, too. Kind of assigned water quality parameters to...

to sites, ⁓ they're all very, know, parallel water quality, so we're upstream, even though the downstream might be classified as like only like slightly impactor, in some cases like non-impacted. and you just see that.

Steven 
Yeah, okay, yeah, right.

Jeremy Dietrich
That status is I say, just consistent because you've eliminated the natural mechanism that would be able to correct it. ⁓

Steven 
that natural connectivity and flow and everything, right?

Right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, and so, you know, you're like, OK, if we have, you know, a barrier in place on these on these streams. ⁓ Yeah, and you want to improve, you you know, water quality or the aquatic connectivity or like ecological robustness of a reach. You know, you're not going to achieve that with the barrier in place. need to restore. Like the natural processes.

that keeps streams kind of like this perpetually dynamic system. mean, we've all, you know, especially after big floods, I mean, floods do a lot of damage obviously, but they're also important for the stream processes. like, know, we've, you know, people at Fish will, you know, it's like, ⁓ I came back and then there used to be a hole there and now it's not, you know, it's filled in and but now it's downstream, right? ⁓

Steven 
Yeah.

part of process, right?

Right, right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, so one site that actually I just had it wrote up a case study manuscript paper that'll be out in the ecosphere later this year, I think. It's been accepted. I'm just finalizing some of the documents to the publisher. So we have one site on the East Branch Wappeners Creek in Dutchess County, New York.

The site was like, chapponed. I think it was an old water supply, you know, for the local hamlet there. And so that was the first of our original cohort of sites. That was the first dam to come out. So we have, you know, a year of pre-removable data. And then it came out.

That was in 2016. came out in 2017 or like, well, late 2016. So 2017 was our first post removal year of data collection and monitoring. And then we did our monitoring for three consecutive, you know, 2017, 2018, 2019 afterwards.

Steven 
Yeah, data collection. Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, we looked at the aquatic invertebrate community. ⁓ I did an in-stream, like substrate in-stream habitat assessment. ⁓ And the other component is kind like a cross-sectional channel morphology survey. So we kind of take the elevation points across the channel so we can draw like a profile. And so. ⁓

Steven 
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
And so if you look at collectively that data across time, you see that. ⁓

You know, after the first year, 2017, ⁓ know, see a lot of these substrate that's behind the dam or clays and silt sands are relatively fine sediments ⁓ and fairly mobile ⁓ from a hydraulic standpoint. You know, it doesn't take a lot of erosive force to move those through the system. ⁓

Steven 
to move them downstream, sure.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, so once the dam came out, you see a lot of that, that those sediments emigrate. ⁓ Downstream, so, you know, they start to fill in like the old plunge pool below the dam. And then, you know, downstream of the dam, tend to have coarser. After many years, you have like a coarser set of substrates like boulders and large boulders and cobbles because kind of the opposite like mechanisms.

Steven 
Start moving down. Yeah, sure.

Sure, it's not getting that small sediment that... Right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, downstream of the dam, have a lot of those gravels and sands get eroded away just through the natural processes. But then, you know, they're not being replaced from upstream sources because, you know, the upstream sources are being blocked by the dam. so downstream of a dam, you know, you get like increasingly coarser big boulders, you know, and so, once the, you know, kind of add all those little, all those spaces.

Steven 
with the smaller sediment, right? Right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
amongst the larger particles now getting kind of filled in with all the stuff that was going upstream. then, you know, so it took, you know, most of that was flushed out in a year. And then you just had kind of an incremental, you know, as you get high water events or pulses.

You know, of the pulses more of that ⁓ stored sediment downstream. Then you all start to repopulate with upstream sources of gravels and smaller cobbles that are getting washed in and repopulating that channel reach. you start to normalize your broader habitat, your broader substrate ⁓ characteristics like.

Steven 
Yeah, starting that. ⁓

Yeah, those sediment transport processes are starting

to balance out.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, so those start to normalize. The upstream channel starts to erode back to what was the natural channel elevation. And what we found at Chep Honde is that after three years, by 2019, if you ran statistics against the

Steven 
Right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, the various macro-environmental population or ecological biometrics that, you know, there's no significant difference, you know, upstream or downstream for a lot of those metrics. yeah, and so like if you were to just, you know, show up in 2019 or 2020, and actually went back for seven years in 2022.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah, they all just kind of...

Jeremy Dietrich 
I'm sorry,

with the exception of kind of like the old dam walls that were just kind of, yeah, like the far, you know, abutment walls that were built into the hillside. You know, but other than that, like if you just looked at the stream, like you wouldn't even know there was a dam there for, you know, 80 years or whatever. So, and in the, you'll see in the PowerPoint, like the second, know, kind of like case study section, but there's a,

Steven 
Yeah.

some of the foundational, right, right.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, I've got two pictures, one from like a month or two after the dam came out in 2016 and then one in like 2023 in the same region. Like I say, you wouldn't, except for the relic of what's left of the dam, you could walk right by and not even know there was anything there. that's, think, again, is like kind of initially.

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
mentioned getting into this, like, that's kind of like, like, there's resilience and hope that like, oh, things aren't all lost. It's like, you know, that's, yeah, that's a pretty powerful kind of statement kind of from nature of just like, you can take this out and here you can restore the system. Even in, you know, 2024 with all the other things that, know, we've been doing broadly. know, but it's like, no, you nature is very resilient and

Yeah, there are opportunities to restore ecosystems and aquatic environments and improve aquatic connectivity. And yeah, you'll have a meaningful impact doing so.

Steven 
Yeah. Well, I love

that message that that in, in that's one of the reasons for this, that I started this show is because there is so much doom and gloom out there. And there is, there's a lot of doom and gloom. There's a lot of things that are not going the right direction. And it's not to ignore those things or minimize or downplay those things, but it's stories like yours and the work that you're doing there in New York that also need to be told and also need to be heard. ⁓ that

Jeremy Dietrich 
Thank

Steven 
as you pointed out, nature is resilient. If we ⁓ work with it as opposed to against it, we can help nature restore itself pretty quickly. In a matter of three years or seven years, these are pretty quick rebounds. And your story is not just unique to some of the rivers of New York. mean, this is happening.

Steven 
in other places around the world and with similar results, we're seeing that nature will return itself. And then humans, we have a role in helping that. I mean, we had a role in hurting it, degrading it, and we have a role to play that can help restore it. the speed at which nature can restore itself if we work with it as opposed to against it is through stories like yours demonstrating pretty quick. It can happen.

Jeremy Dietrich
Mm-hmm.

Steven 
pretty quickly. like you said, I share that optimism and that hope that if we collectively can start doing some of these things as you're demonstrating can be done. You know, we can turn this ⁓ ship around, so to speak. It doesn't have to be all of the doom and gloom ⁓ stories that we hear. So I'll share on our website the link you provided me. ⁓

to some of the study results so folks can kind of do a deep dive and see some of this information firsthand. And I'll use some of the images that you shared as well in that PowerPoint to help demonstrate. And ⁓ I can probably post that on the show notes as well so people can see the presentation also. ⁓ But really, thank you, Jeremy, for what you're doing and demonstrating.

the speed and ⁓ thoroughness of how nature can restore itself if we work with it. So I want to give you a moment. What's your call to action? Now that we're kind of into this story and people have heard your story of these dam removals and the benefits that they can have and...

We could continue talking for another couple hours about the benefits. There's way more than what we covered undoubtedly today about water quality benefits and other aspects of the work that you're doing. ⁓ But in the interest of time, ⁓ I want to move on to your call to action. I want to give you an opportunity to ask people to go do something to make a difference, make the world a better place. So what is it that you want folks to take away from?

Jeremy Dietrich 
in

Steven 
your story today and then go turn into action into their own life.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, so yeah, there's a number of ways that folks are interested in supporting aquatic connectivity and restoring some of these systems. I think, of course, the first kind of generally is, yeah, inform yourself of what stream restoration projects are occurring where you live or in your local community. ⁓

you know, that can be they can be, you know, affected or they can be implemented by, you know, obviously state, you know, departments or state agencies. Again, the here at WRI, we work with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. A lot of the money that we get from or that we that supports the these these efforts are from our environmental.

protection fund. You know, also, you know, we collaborate with a number of local non-profit groups. You know, we're in contact with like some of the folks like with Riverkeeper and American Rivers that help identify both, you know, kind of we'll call it dam removal sites. Often local nonprofits can work with.

Steven 
Sure, Great organizations. ⁓

Jeremy Dietrich 
you know, potential willing, you know, owners, you know, dams are usually, know, can be like municipally owned or privately owned. You know, sometimes it's, you know, the nonprofits can have a different kind of, I'll say, approach value than maybe a state agency and trying to, you know, engage with certain stakeholders about dam removals. So, you know, and often nonprofits.

Steven 
Sure.

Jeremy Dietrich 
um, you know, rely on volunteer efforts. if you, if you hear of, um, you know, through a local nonprofit about, you know, their efforts for, for game removal on chronic connectivity, you know, see if there's, you know, volunteer efforts. I mean, of course there's always like, you know, um, you know, sponsorship requests and such, you know, you could, can, uh, um, help financially, you know, with a project through a nonprofit, um,

Yeah, and there's a lot of work that goes into these removals. mean, you know, you just like blow them up, right? So, you know, there's, there's, you know, we obviously do kind of a formal monitoring protocol, but often increasingly there's like citizen science type opportunities that people can help with collecting data. You know, once the dam comes out, you know, there's a lot of exposed

Steven 
Right, right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, shoreline now that was formerly inundated. ⁓ Yeah, you can help with riparian restoration, like tree planting. It's been a lot of that press with respect to the big Klamath Dam. ⁓ You know, removal efforts there in the West Coast with replanting these vast now kind of defective floodplains and minimizing the soil erosion around the local soil erosion with those.

Steven 
Restoration. Sure.

Yeah, out here in the Pacific Northwest, yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
drawdown efforts. So, you know, that's something you could do actively in your local area. Another thing that's worth ⁓ acknowledging is ⁓ the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the federal bill that was passed, ⁓ was last year, two years ago, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

that appropriated ⁓ over 50 billion to broader water infrastructure projects, but included around 800 million for dam removals, removing outdated hazardous type dams. ⁓ I mean, there's a lot of chatter and stuff with local, the way the cost cutting measures are now with the federal government.

You know, you can, as a voter, you know, voice your support for, you know, that type of funding, you know, to be, you know, retained or continued to, you know, assist with, you know, the physical removals of lot of these dams that, so, yeah, I'd say those are the three, kind of three big kind of pillars of,

Steven 
Yeah.

Perfect.

Jeremy Dietrich 
you know, broader support for aquatic connectivity.

Steven 
Wonderful. Well, I echo all that. I couldn't agree more with those directions to folks. I hope folks are listening and take those to heart and take action on that as well. So now, Jeremy, we want to transition into kind of the last bit of the show. Every episode, I ask all my guests the same three questions. And we talk about hope. We end the show on what I...

I like to think of as an upbeat note. Sometimes our discussions are around hard subjects, You know, and in this episode, you know, talking about some of the choices us humans made, you know, a while back. So we're trying to correct those and restore the environments and there's, you know, challenges still ahead of us. So I want to end on thinking ⁓ hopeful thoughts for the future. So I want to ask you three questions about your...

Jeremy Dietrich 
choices as humans maybe, know,

Steven 
hopes for the future and hope kind of being defined as a mental state of mind, not an emotion, but ⁓ you can have a vision for a better future. You can have ⁓ some plan of action or steps to take to implement that vision of a better future. And you have a sense of agency that there's something you can do about it. You might not be able to do it by yourself. Most of time we can't. We gotta bring other people along on our vision. ⁓

and on the actions we need to take. ⁓ Well, you have a vision, there's some steps, and you have some agency to make a difference. So ⁓ three questions coming up. Don't think too hard about the answer. I'd love to get kind people's first kind of ⁓ heartfelt response to these questions. So the first question for you, Jeremy, is what's your vision for a better future? And can be for you personally or professionally or for the world. What's your vision for a better future?

Jeremy Dietrich 
better future. Yeah, I think that

You know, ⁓

I'm taking him.

I think one is,

You know, be informed of. Yeah, could have. An awareness around your kind of environmentally and how your. You know, individual actions.

Yeah, help contribute to outcomes, I guess, one way or the other, right? I know that's kind of a cliche thing. you know, so some things ⁓ that I do, for instance, it seems trivial, but like, instance, so I have.

You know, like a compost, right? Then as opposed to just throwing all the foodstuffs in the trash. so, I have a backyard where I can, I can, I can do that. But, you know, cumulatively it's like, okay, like, you know, there's a surprising amount of weight of like foodstuffs that, you throw away every day or weekly. so, you know, collectively that's less going into like a mainstream waste.

Steven 
Yeah, makes a difference.

Jeremy Dietrich 
stream and like

the weight of that, kind of from like a carbon balance perspective of transporting that waste, waste to the system. So it's like a small thing that kind of, you know, and ⁓

Steven 
Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, I'm optimistic that.

You know, there's a broader, there's, is, you know, a broader public awareness of like, the value of open spaces and environmental, ⁓ you know, resilience, you know, there's, you know, from like, say, know, like maintaining say, public, you know, public lands that we can go recreate to.

you know, trying to be involved like in some of local, know, volunteer for some kind of local cleanups and, you know, just things like that.

Again, might seem, you know, in their own think somewhat trivial, but if you build the economy scale around it, you know, can make some meaningful improvements and changes.

Steven 
Yeah,

yeah, all adds up. So let me ask you the second question then. So your vision for a better future is for folks to be better informed and about how, you know, their place in their environment and make better choices, even if they think it's a small choice, because these all add up to make a difference. So, and I think you kind of answered this second question already little bit, but to give you an opportunity to expand on that a little bit, why is that important to you that people are informed?

and are making these better choices. Why is that important? Why should anybody care about that?

Jeremy Dietrich 
mean, I think being informed, can, you know, and keeping yourself educated on the...

you know, the issues that...

you know, that are important to individuals. I think just being informed allows you to make a rational decision. Yeah, again, kind of in this, you know, of, was hyper social media-esque, clickbait environment, like, you know, people are throwing all sorts of...

you know, at you, right? it's sometimes the noise is, so to speak, can be overwhelming. But I think, you know, ⁓

Steven 
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, recognizing what attributes are important to you and knowing how they interrelate with ⁓ what your goals and objectives are. ⁓ Again, I think it allows you to be a ⁓

Yeah, rational stakeholder and the issues that are important to you. So, yeah, you may have.

You may disagree with other people about how you want, like maybe a certain management outcome or development outcome, but at least being informed, we'll articulate your rationale, somebody else can articulate their rationale. And then it's a discussion as opposed to just like an argument per se. It's like, OK, I see where you're coming from. Here's my point.

Steven 
Right, right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Generally, that's how you can achieve compromise, right? So I kind of go back to the work with kind of the private consulting side, but even within some of the scam removal ⁓ work. mean, you have individuals that are like, I live up here. I like the dam. And then, you're taking it away. mean, to a certain degree, everybody's change works, right?

Steven 
Yeah, I can find some common ground.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, to, ⁓ you know, there's one example where, ⁓ you know, they interacted with the local, you know, resident. Yeah. And it's like, you're thinking, you know, they're thinking of taking the dam out. Like, I don't know what the problem is. Like I walked by and it's like, I see fish, I see plants. It's like, it looks fine to me. What's the problem? Right. And so, ⁓ you know, but then it's like, well,

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Sure, but the plants are this invasive species. The fish are planted. They weren't native here. don't belong here. It may look like a big pond, but there's like six things growing invertebrates in there as opposed to 30. And so you still may want a pond for the sake of a pond. I like a pond. I want to fish for bass. I mean, that's totally rational.

Steven 
Right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
You know, at least now you're informing, okay, here's my trade offs. You know, I can accept them or I can say, okay, I can see this perspective. Maybe there's a, is there a middle ground or, or, okay, you know, if I take the dam out, you know, I can fish for, you know, shad instead of bass. I don't know. that something I want? But, but at least you can make that you, you, you, provide the capacity to allow people to make that.

Steven 
Yeah, you have a, right.

Right.

better choices.

Jeremy Dietrich 
those

decisions amongst themselves and then they don't feel railroaded into a opinion because they don't have a choice. So I think that having that dialogue and ensuring people know what the information is one way or the other is never bad.

Steven 
Right.

Perfect. All right. So last question then. Imagine the future you just described and for the reasons you described that we're living in this future and it's happening now. People are better informed now. are ⁓ conversations, even disagreements, but conversations that are intended to provide people accurate information from all different perspectives are happening and people are...

informed and making better choices and finding common ground with each other about their place in the environment and the choices we're making of how we interact ⁓ with that environment. All of that you described in the future is happening today, right now. How does that make you feel?

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, it's, you know, it's an optimistic feeling. You know, I think there's a lot of

You know, there's a lot of potential to to kind of, think, optimize. Yeah, how we society, you know, engage, you know, with. You know, interact with, you know, like, you know, in the environment and. You know, my. Like my family.

There's a lot of engineers in it. so I often can kind of say like, yeah, there's usually an engineering solution to most any environmental problem. So, you know, like, you know, you can think of, you know, I mean, I kind of mentioned hydropower earlier. I mean, yeah, it's like, okay, yes, you know, we need. Yeah, we need power, obviously, as a society. Yeah, it's got to be produced from the from the.

the company's perspective, you know, they, you know, they've got to make, you know, some, profit on it. have, you know, you know, maintain their, their operations, but yeah, can we, you know, you can implement certain spillway designs that mitigate, you know, like certain passage, you know, they can be fishways. can be, you know, you know, you can pulse water.

say, for instance, to improve base flows for spawning habitat or spawning time. So there's usually middle ground options that are available. And then again, the, yeah, and so for, yeah, and there obviously are barriers that we need, but for those that we don't, that are clearly,

Steven 
Yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
⁓ know, absolutely. have a huge opportunity to, ⁓ you know, restore those environments back to, you know, kind of maybe someone's of, of, of kind of their historic, historic greatness. I mean, you know, there's, actually I was going to look at the, I mean, there is, I got to bring up my, ⁓

Steven 
Yeah, more native, more natural, yeah.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, there's like, you know, just in the United States, over, you know, 90,000 dams, right? So, and again, you know, I don't think there's an unrealistic expectation that, we're going to turn back the clock to, you know, 1610 and, know, but it's like, you know, if, you know, if we can restore many sites,

Steven 
No, we don't want to do that either, right.

Jeremy Dietrich 
then, you know.

you know, that will, you know, really move kind of the, you know, environmental and ecological restoration initiatives, you know, further. Yeah, and, you know, and improve the wellbeing of local communities and, you know, open up recreational opportunities and, you know, improve kind of the quality of life issues, you know, in some of these sites that

Yeah, would otherwise be as a kind of statically arrested, absent some of these efforts, restoration efforts. ⁓

Steven 
Yeah.

Perfect. Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for your time today, for joining me on Story Sustainance. And thank you for sharing the great work that you're doing that's getting some spectacular results of restoring those ecosystems there in the state of New York. And thank you for sharing your vision for a better future. So it's one that I share with you. And hopefully we can all walk together towards that vision. So with that, I'll...

Jeremy Dietrich 
Thank

Steven 
⁓ encourage folks to check out the website to get more information about the work that you're doing as well and and follow your call to action to get involved in their local communities as well. So anything else you give you the last word and otherwise I want to thank you for being here. Thank you for being a guest on Story Sustain Us.

Jeremy Dietrich 
Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. It was enjoyable to ⁓ kind of provide my contacts to folks and let them know what we're doing here in New York to ⁓ improve kind of the river and riverscapes within New York. ⁓ So, ⁓ yeah, thank you. ⁓ yeah, folks can go to the New York State.

⁓ Water Resource Institute website. I do barrier removal, we have colleagues that we do things like clover resizing, water infrastructure, invasive species management, improve drinking water, ⁓ lead pipe removal type stuff for communities. ⁓ yeah, happy to, again, yeah.

Again, thank you and happy to follow up too if anybody has questions with the work that we do.

Steven 
Perfect. All right, Jeremy, well, I wish you all the best and look forward to seeing future reports of all the great work you're doing. We'll stay in touch. Take care.

Steven 
What an insightful conversation with Jeremy Dietrich. Today we learned how Jeremy's childhood experiences immersed in nature set him on a path toward becoming a leading aquatic ecologist. His work with the New York State Water Resources Institute is showing us that stream restoration through small dam removals and strategic infrastructure upgrades isn't just possible, it's powerful. We talked about how outdated dams and improperly installed culverts disrupt ecosystems,

degrade water quality and prevent fish and other aquatic organisms from reaching the habitats they need to survive. reminded us that nature wants to recover. And when we take steps to restore natural flows, remove barriers and reconnect fragmented streams, we're not just helping fish, we're improving water quality, reducing flood risks and creating healthier environments for all kinds of species, from birds to bugs to people.

What struck me the most was how Jeremy's work proves that big ecological winds don't always require big headline grabbing projects. While the massive Klamath River Dam removals, for example, are historic and critically important, Jeremy showed us that even small dam removals, right in our own communities, can yield measurable, meaningful results. And that's encouraging to me, and I hope it is to you too.

Look, we humans, we helped reshape these river systems over the last couple of centuries, often with very little understanding of what the ecological consequences would be. But now with greater knowledge and growing public awareness, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to reshape them again, this time in partnership with nature. If Jeremy's story inspired you like it did for me, here are a few things you can do. Learn more about dams and culverts in your own community.

Are there obsolete structures that might be candidates for removal or upgrade? Get involved with a local watershed group or nonprofit focused on stream restoration. Support policies that prioritize ecological resilience and fund nature-based infrastructure. Most importantly, talk about these issues. Raise awareness. Invite others to see what's possible when we give nature a chance to heal.

You can also support Stories Sustain Us if you're so inclined, which I would appreciate by subscribing on your favorite podcast platform, leaving a review or sharing this episode with friends, colleagues, or that one neighbor who just loves fly fishing. You can also visit storiessustainus.com to listen, watch, and learn more about our guests and their work. And I hope you'll join me again for our next episode.

Coming out on June 24th, when I'll be speaking with the inspiring educator and author behind the National Park Classroom, a book and teacher program packed with strategies, resources, and ideas for bringing America's best idea, our national park system, into classrooms across the country. You're not gonna wanna miss it. Catch the next episode of Stories Sustain Us on June 24th at storiessustainus.com.

wherever you listen to podcasts and on YouTube. Thanks so much as always for being here today. Keep listening, keep learning, and keep doing your part to make the world a better place. Until next time, I'm Steven Schauer. Please take care of yourself and each other. Take care.