Officials from California, Oregon and the federal government have reached an agreement that would set the nation's largest ever dam removal project, on California's Klamath River, into action. The agreement — which leverages a dam delicensing process at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — would circumvent a Republican congressional blockade and set into motion a project that would see the Klamath's dams removed by 2020.

I sat atop an overbuilt picnic table in the damp shade of a large pine tree watching one angler after another fish the water beside me. Like a slow and silent time-lapse parade, over the span of an hour, the next fisherman took the position of the one before him, casting to the same water at the same angles — interchangeable, carbon copy approaches.