While we've been warning about the proposed folly of rebuilding the Scribner's Mill dam on the Crooked River, the Penobscot River Restoration Project (Go to the Project's website) has reached a milestone in its efforts to remove the Veazie Dam and the Great Works Dam and to decommission the Howland Dam many miles upstream and build a fish passageway around it. The Project, which involves the combined efforts of conservation groups, the Penobscot Indian Nation and various state and federal agencies, has succeeded in raising $25 million from a very wide pool of sources including governmental and private donors to purchase the dams from PPL Maine, the energy company. The feds kicked in $10 million in December, putting the fundraising effort over the top and setting the stage for the transfer of ownership. Additional funds are being raised from the same sources (and more, it is hoped) to perform the actual work of removing the two lower dams and bypassing the Howland Dam.

When completed, the project will return many miles of the Penobscot to the fish that once spawned there in great numbers, and go a long way toward bringing back the river that the ancestors of today's Penobscot Indian Nation knew. Perhaps the freeing of the river will at least partially restore the great spawning runs of the Atlantic salmon, striped bass, American shad and other anadromous species that called the river home for millennia until we humans took it over for short-term commercial gain.

The list of the project's supporters is long, and includes many conservation groups, sporting camps, outfitters, Trout Unlimited, the Penobscot Salmon Club and scores of other groups, associations, businesses and individuals who yearn for the sight of a free-running river and free-swimming populations of fish. Orvis promotes the project in its catalogs and website (Go to the Orvis website) promises to triple an individual's contribution with matching funds from Orvis and the National Fish and Wildlife Federation.

I know the economy is in the tank and gas prices are high and the specter of recession is threatening to rear its head. But the mighty Penobscot has been in not just a recession but a deep depression for a couple hundred years, and brother, if you can spare a dime (or a hundred bucks or a million) you might wish to toss it at the Penobscot River Restoration Project.