Ecosystem Values in Western River Basins
Speech by Angus Duncan, BEF Founder and President, in Driggs, Idaho, May 28, 2010I want to begin, if I may, with a quote from Wallace Stegner, a novelist and historian of the American west. Stegner's writing is deeply evocative of a sense of place, a quality that those of us who came of age in the western United States respond to intuitively. You may recognize your own landscape in his words.
"Aridity," Stegner wrote, "gives the west its character. It is aridity that gives the air its special dry clarity; aridity that puts brilliance in the light and polishes and enlarges the stars; aridity that leads the grasses to evolve as bunches rather than as turf; aridity that exposes the pigmentation of the raw earth and limits, almost eliminates, the color of chlorophyll; aridity that erodes the earth in cliffs and badlands rather than in softened and vegetated slopes. . .. In the attempt to compensate for nature's lacks we have remade whole sections of the western landscape. We have acted upon (it) with the force of a geological agent. But aridity still calls the tune, directs our tinkering, prevents the healing of our mistakes; and vast unwatered reaches still emphasize the contrast·between the desert and the sown. ... The primary unity of the American West is a shortage of water."
The American West is what Stegner called "the landscape of hope," and it was just this for tens of thousands of families who migrated westward in the 19th Century. They were searching for fertile new lands to replace the poorer farms they left behind. They found great sweeps of prairie and semi-desert, and set about building the canals and dams, the flooding and pumping and sprinkling systems that today exemplify irrigated American agriculture west of the 100th meridian of longitude.
In the 150 years since, western waters have been stored, shaped, channeled, drawn off, moved about from one place to another across the western landscape. The hydrographs of western water basins have been modified by our impulse to manipulate, reshape, and shift water from one place and time to another until parts of some river beds are dry by midsummer, while plains that used to bake rock-hard in the heat are now flooded and green, producing goods for world markets. Low gradient mountain valleys that once were beaver backwater and camas marsh have been drained and diked and planted with mint and alfalfa.
Snowmelts and spring floods that have defined millennia of aquatic biota in western watersheds define these very differently today. Their waters are now impounded and held for summer irrigating, or shifted forward into the following winter to meet electric power demands. Where waterfalls once tumbled and roared, slackwater pools behind dams are sluggish and warm.
Collectively, western watersheds describe what we can call the "development model" for the consumption and conservation of water and watersheds. Water supplies in these arid lands have been managed - and consumed -- on a presumption of abundance, even inexhaustibility.
The effects of direct consumption of water have been compounded by indirect consumption; not the physical withdrawal of water from streams but degrading of what's left: modifying water temperatures, chemistry, sediment loads, stream and riparian and upland structure, the timing of flows. The biological impacts of physical stream alterations are in turn compounded by direct harvest of species such as beaver and salmon. The long-term ecological services these species performed are eclipsed by their short-term commercial value.
National and western policies now call for redress of some of these effects; for the recovery of endangered species; for rehabilitation of watershed habitats. The emerging science of stream ecology teaches the significance of complexity, diversity and sufficiency in biological systems, and in the hydrology and topography of streams and adjacent lands. But development pressures on western waters have not eased despite water scarcity and over-allocation.
Climate effects will only raise the stakes.
Calls for environmental protection, 20 and 30 and 50 years ago, could be met in a fashion that seemed to satisfy all parties while demanding little sacrifice. Add to a wilderness area; extend a wild river; create irrigation storage upstream and fatten the allowable timber cut upslope; insert a fish hatchery to offset losses of natural habitat.
Here at the onset of the 21st century, easy solutions are more elusive. Most of the available watershed outside of wilderness areas is committed to logging, farming and other commercial uses. New demands pile up. And so we must divide up a shortage among existing and new demands, while at the same time we must seek givebacks from present users; not all the water, but enough to restore watersheds to sustainable levels of biological health and ecological integrity.
Can we do this with the tools available to us - the laws, agencies, institutions - that are legacies of the development model? Or are the tasks different enough that new river governance models and institutions must be devised?
[The Development Model: An Institutional Legacy]
The visible tools of the development model are prior appropriation, allowable cut, hydropower licensing, harvest allocation. Less direct but equally significant are land use and zoning laws, embedded investments in roads and power lines, subsidies and tax incentives . . . all these favor resource consumption over conservation.
Each of these tools is a pragmatic solution to a need, a place and a time. "Prior appropriation" of water rights emerged in California's 19th Century mining camps, where it allocated water among multiple claims, equitably and efficiently. When the problem is stated narrowly - how to distribute limited supplies of water, in some cases remote to the miners' claims, in a way that will be respected by all parties -- the tool fits the task. It's only later, when the statement of the problem is broadened to include preserving the biological health of the streams, that the pioneer solution becomes a barrier to solving the newly-stated problem.
The tool wasn't constructed to protect stream health. We shouldn't be surprised that it cannot do so.
This illustrates a fundamental mismatch . . . between human institutions geared to efficient consumption, and ecosystems existing in an equilibrium that may be disturbed from time to time, but that requires most of its parts most of the time. Human consumption can disrupt ecosystems by directly harvesting species, by simplifying genetic diversity to where species resilience is lost, by displacing species from essential habitat, by introducing competitors, or by so degrading the habitat that it can no longer sustain the species.
I propose to spend a few minutes on three of these status quo institutions and practices. These are "boundaries," legislating consumption" and "balance."
[Boundaries]
John Wesley Powell was an American explorer, government official and influential thinker of the late 19th century. Powell advised us, a century ago, to organize the west along "hydrographic basin" lines. But state and local boundaries were set instead to suit commercial and political interests. So upper river basins In the American west are now systematically divided from lower ones; and left banks from right. Rivers that should have been the unifying spines of States are their dividing lines instead.
Coherent management of watersheds, whether for efficient consumption or conservation, is hostage to these lines on maps. Water conserved in Oregon is withdrawn by an Idaho farmer across the Snake River. Lower Colorado River states jostle each other, the Upper Colorado states, and Mexico for increased shares of scarce streamflows. Discontinuities in management authority encourage parochial competitions to consume. The biggest consumer is rewarded with the biggest permanent share; while restraint is penalized with ... less.
Other lines divide watersheds. National forests are oriented to rldgelines, since that's where the harvestable timber is. So two or more National Forests may share jurisdiction in a single watershed with each other, with other Federal and State agencies, and with private holdings in stream bottoms governed by local land use laws.
We have even created a boundary line between surface and subsurface waters that allowed us to manage instream and riparian areas as though they were quite unattached to each other.
And there has come to be still another kind of possession of rivers: what we can call a "hydrocommons", that extends beyond the physical drainage to include all the users of a river basin's products. lnterbasin transfers of water -- most famously from Owens Valley in the Sierra Nevada to Los Angeles -- are the most explicit example of extra-basin claims established by usage.
Other transfers are less intuitive. Power generated on the Colorado River may be transmitted west to Los Angeles; or eastward, to Arizona and New Mexico. Wheat from North Dakota is trucked to Idaho, barged downriver to Portland and transshipped to Japan. These uses are new economic claims on the river basin. Because they place demands on river function, they may diminish the basis for life in one watershed, one ecosystem, in order to enrich life in another as surely as if the water itself had been transported.
Agency jurisdictions and missions can be fragmented and discontinuous, putting the integrity of ecosystems at risk. A watershed's uplands, its riparian areas, stream structure, hydrology and biotic integrity are a single integrated natural system. Disconnect enough parts and the whole unravels.
For human consumption, however, each product is best managed separately and targeted to a different purpose. Forest productivity is judged on a "delivered board-feet" basis. Fishery managers seek "maximum landed pounds" of salmon or "angler days". Hydropower requirements are best served by water held in reservoirs for periods of maximum electric demand, managed to meet electric load curves in cities hundreds of miles away. Irrigated agriculture benefits from water withdrawn and spread on fields. Each distorts the natural hydrograph.
Coordination of management goals and actions is difficult at best, even within a single user set. A Columbia River salmon bound for its spawning grounds high in the Wallowas may pass through more than a dozen different fish management authorities alone on its return from ocean to natal stream, and through still more land and water management regimes.
[Legislating Consumption]
The second tool of the status quo is the cumulative body of regulation and law that governs how, and how much of these ecosystems we consume.
Public policy for the last century has been designed to accelerate the development of the American west and the economic use of its natural capital. We have nourished and encouraged a distinctive culture with these mining, grazing, timber harvest and irrigation policies. Living wages have been produced for many, substantial wealth for a few, and enviable communities for all in which prosperous and rewarding lives can be lived.
Both the benefits to human communities and the costs to other biota are products of affirmative government policies to develop, and of subsidies and public investments to stimulate and support development. While nature may celebrate diversity, civilization values productivity, which in the short term generally means uniformity and homogeneity. A field of soybeans replaces the diverse flora and fauna of prairie grasslands; a tree-farm replaces a complex forest ecosystem. Stairstepping slackwater reservoirs substitute for a turbulent, free-flowing, springflooding western river.
In the 19th Century, government resource managers developed close client relationships with their business counterparts. The argument was that by serving a collective of private interests, the public interest is served. As these client relationships endure, they create a new status quo that resists pressure to change.
Subsidies are often just as firmly embedded, reinforcing the status quo, slow to change. The subsidies can be as transparent as land grants and loans. They can be more subtle: power-at-cost for irrigators and aluminum plants; or more subtle still, reservoirs that lift and carry water nearer an irrigator's fields, at no charge.
Forest Service auctions assume the harvest of trees, not their preservation as forest. The government denies grazing rights to low bidders who wish to leave the land ungrazed.
These agencies have conservation responsibilities, but their best tools are designed for extraction and consumption. They continue to rely on the Progressive Era definition of conservation as a tool to sustain maximum harvest indefinitely, not as a tool for protecting ecosystems.
[Balance]
The third, most contemporary - and arguably the most pernicious -- tool devised for the development model is the concept of "balance."
By the last quarter of the 20th century, America's conservation strategies were succeeding only in the narrow sense of stretching resources for harvest. They grew more trees; they did not protect forests. The emerging science of ecology took a different approach. It taught that species and their life support systems are interconnected in complex linkages and feedback loops; and that species survival was closely associated with species and habitat diversity.
Ecological science is generally accepted now as the best, the most useful, explanation of how biological systems work. But there is always lag time between a step forward in scientific understanding, and changes in human practices and institutions to conform. Hence the ambiguous middle ground that natural resource managers occupy today, variously expressed as "multiple use" of resources; as "balance" between human consumption and natural systems; as "equal" or "equitable" treatment for conservation of species and habitats.
Why not "balance" uses and users? What's wrong with this word in this context?
Quite a few things, as it turns out.
First, while ecosystems are familiar with concepts such as "competition" or "equilibrium," they do not understand "compromise". And in natural resource management, "balance" is usually code for "compromise." Unlike contests for budget shares or tax breaks, natural systems have thresholds that must be respected for species to survive. If summer stream temperatures are persistently at 80 degrees and fish mortality is pandemic above 68 degrees, splitting the difference at 74 does the fish little good.
Second, in such contests the status quo is the default outcome, unless a sufficient case for change can be made to political leaders. After two hundred years of intensive development of rivers and riverine habitat, the status quo is not in ecology's corner. Dams are famously immobile.
Third, if humans are the judge and jury, human needs will dominate. That's why species with commercial or aesthetic appeal to humans do better in these proceedings.
And human needs tend to focus one or two generations ahead at most. In contrast, natural cycles, and the consequences of human interference, can extend for dozens - or hundreds - of years beyond this near horizon. Species extinction may be the outcome of a housing project that is abandoned a hundred years hence . . . but the extinction is irretrievable.
Fourth, in forums of public policymaking, arguments and effects which are imprecise, hard to quantify, or remote in time, are valued less than the precise, the immediate, the quantifiable. Diffuse effects are, in economist's jargon, "discounted."
The benefits of an additional acre-foot of water withdrawn from a river are immediate, visible and tangible. Crops grow where crops did not before. Jobs and wealth are created. New income is spent. Secondary economic benefits ripple through the community.
By contrast, the benefits to the river ecosystem of leaving that water instream may not be clear for decades. They may be hard to disentangle from the other variables that comprise the biology and hydrology of a river. They may not materialize at all, being compromised by consumptive demands - fish harvest - elsewhere in the system.
At best, a management strategy based on "balanced' use gives resource managers ambiguous and conflicting signals. It places them in the middle of unwinnable conflicts between conservationists and economic interests. Some parties prosper in such circumstances, leveraging ambiguity with political or economic muscle. Most people - ranchers and farmers, environmentalists, forest managers, hydroelectric engineers -- are simply frustrated. Frustration fuels emotional debate, exaggerated arguments, demonizing of one's opposition. In the absence of cooperation and conscience, the river suffers.
There is a growing agreement across the West the development model needs to learn the lessons of ecosystem science. Water quantity and quality standards need to condition new water withdrawal rights; and to be linked to indicators of a stream's biological health. The integrity of stream function needs to condition riparian and upslope uses. Protecting species means protecting habitat, and a species habitat may mean more than the field adjacent, or even the feeding territory. Habitat protection for a migrating steelhead may mean intervening to protect stream temperature and turbidity miles above the spawning beds. Protecting estuary habitat may entail flow releases from dams hundreds of miles away.
The greatest weakness of ecosystem science -- its near-term imprecision - paradoxically may prove to be its greatest strength . . . if it forces us to confront the question of burden of proof. For now, that burden is carried by those who challenge the status quo users of the river; a burden to prove -- conclusively - that a species of concern is suffering unacceptable injury. But ecosystem science is rarely able to be so definitive or precise; there are simply too many variables and the time frames are too long. For that reason, and if the object is to protect the threshold conditions that support a river ecosystem, the burden of proof will have to be shifted.
Economic users of the river - irrigation, navigation, power generation, recreation - will need to demonstrate the margin of safety they are leaving to ecological needs. The more inconclusive the evidence, the more difficult the proof ... the greater the margin of error that must be left.
[Incremental Steps]
So what might be the elements of an ecosystem model? Can we take the ecological model as a "desired future condition", and see how it might shape and inform incremental change in watershed governance models? What kinds of changes would it favor?
Probably . . .
- changes that employ ecosystem science to describe those "threshold" conditions needed for species and habitat conservation;
- changes that give not equal but priority treatment to protecting those thresholds when they must compete against new - or existing - economic uses;
- changes that offer collaborative management and dispute resolution tools as alternatives to litigation;
- changes that consolidate agencies with overlapping missions, or integrate them through new "ecological district" strategies that are overlaid onto existing jurisdictional boundaries; changes that avoid locking in new consumptive watershed uses without a test of ecological effects; and changes to ensure that any such new rights remain conditional on new findings of science;
- changes that shape an intermediating role for ecosystem science and scientists in the decision-making process;
- And changes that transition and cushion traditional communities facing especially harsh or precipitous change from historical conditions.
There is a special poignancy to this rush of institutional change breaking over the mostly small and traditional communities of the American west - communities like those in the Lemhi, Asotin Creek, the Klamath Basin, the Rogue (where I grew up) and the Grande Ronde (where I learned my best lessons in watershed recovery). People there have at risk not only their livelihoods but also their way of life - a way that wraps around inherited values and family roots that often go back generations. These communities are being asked to re-examine values long and deeply held. Some will have to be modified, but we cannot ask that they be casually discarded. Change that finds a handhold within existing institutions and beliefs will be more easily accepted.
If we seek more than temporary fixes, then we must deal directly with practices, attitudes and beliefs that have an honorable history. Cattle were grazed in stream bottoms because that's where water was on the frontier. We have to understand the history from which these practices arise. Ours must be a critical, discriminating understanding but also a sympathetic one. We have to allow time for beliefs and institutions to catch up with the evidence.
This pace of change may seem glacially slow to many, as the Endangered Species candidate list grows longer.
But for many traditional communities, both the degree and the velocity of change are unprecedented and disorienting. And while these communities cannot dictate the tempo of change, they must see that they are able to influence it in fair and meaningful ways.
The fish will have to hang on, if they can, while we complete the process of cultural change in the communities, and in the legislatures and agencies that regulate the western economy and manage western resources. The tides and currents of history are inexorable but they don't need to destroy in order to build something better. When the push of change can be married to the pull of traditional values - of stewardship, say, and of communities making local choices locally, albeit informed by the world around them - then change can be at its most constructive, and least disorienting.
The great question, still and for the foreseeable future unanswered across these sublime and unforgiving western landscapes, is whether such change can occur fast enough for the fish and the watersheds, and slow enough for people.