At first “Arid Lands” comes on like a standard history of an interesting event: the moment when an area on the Columbia River near the town of Hanford was abruptly commandeered for a gigantic government project. The nature of the project was secret, but it turned out to be the development of plutonium for an atomic bomb.
That’s a great story, but the film gets even better after this history lesson. It explores the way the Hanford area has mutated through different phases in the years since the Manhattan Project changed everything.
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation displaced a couple of local towns and quite a few American Indians; it also brought thousands of workers to the area, to say nothing of massive quantities of nuclear waste.
In fact, the waste left behind is responsible for the current boom around Hanford and the Tri-Cities area. The U.S. government is spending $2 billion a year on the cleanup, and new settlements have been creeping out into once-uninhabited land.
Not that such makeovers are new: As the film points out, ever since the dams of the 1930s began to harness the rivers, these vast stretches of brown sagebrush have been transformed.
And so have the once-wild rivers, of course. An entire eco-system of salmon is now changed, and so you have the bizarre spectacle of the trucking and barging of salmon downriver to hasten their journey around the dams.
Irrigation created room for farmers and lately it has created room for vintners — the warm weather and stable water supply is ideal for grapes. The farmers seem to regard these Merlot-sipping newcomers with skepticism, but, hey, they all drink from the same well.
Filmmakers Grant Aaker and Josh Wallaert collected dozens of interviews with experts and locals, all with different points of view. Among the anecdotes is a man describing what it’s like to be on the controlled Columbia at night when it rises two feet in a few hours, the better to supply Portland with more electricity.
Another observer notes that the area itself is teeming with folks who regularly espouse anti-government views — without seeming to realize that the entire desert region owes its habitable existence to giant government projects, from the dams to the nuclear plant.
“Arid Lands” won the Best Film award at last year’s Local Sightings Film Festival at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum. It’s a valuable and (thanks in part to a cool song soundtrack) evocative addition to Northwest storytelling.
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