Elements of Recovery: Love of Place Kindles Local Solutions to Nonpoint Erosion

When we first start wondering what our local rivers looked like before European influences changed their encircling watersheds, old-timers tell us that our streams were altogether different: The pools were deeper, the riverbank growth was thick and rank, the fishing was grand. If we are fortunate, we are able to find old maps, written descriptions, and photographs that can give us additional clues about these almost-forgotten conditions, for this information can point the way to actions that need to be taken to restore degraded watersheds.

Restoration is a controversial word for many people who are working to improve watershed health. Some think that where impervious surfaces comprise even as little as 10% of a watershed, the catchment’s streams and riparian wildlife habitats can never be healthy enough to sustain the most sensitive species dependent on them. Others are passionate that every act of rehabilitation—a logging road put to bed, a floodplain restored to its native state, a stormwater discharge point removed from a raveling fill slope—and each restorative act contribute to a more properly functioning and, ultimately, more sustainable environment. But regardless of their philosophical differences, most people who are involved in watershed work feel there is a lot of work to be done to achieve a sustainable equilibrium in the large or small watersheds where we live and make a living.

A great deal of the work of watershed restoration focuses on controlling nonpoint erosion by phasing-in new expectations and practices in some of the oldest and most ordinary land uses and activities that support civilization: agriculture, mining, ranching, forestry, and the design and construction of public works and urban places. Watershed groups have found that, in general, the best management practices (BMPs) are simple and straightforward; it’s the phasing in that requires all the hard work – in fact, a lifetime’s worth of continual efforts to reach out, educate, communicate, demonstrate, and help fund and implement new ways of doing things.

Home Is the Starting Place

For some, such as David Simpson, resident of the remote and beautiful Mattole River Valley of northern California’s rugged coastal King Range, the love of place turned out to be a sufficient vehicle for a life’s work of healing a watershed. Simpson found his way into the valley in the early 1970s, on the first wave of idealistic, back-to-the-land energy that ultimately resulted in the resettlement of rural northern California places that were losing population since midcentury. Simpson who, with his friend, Freeman House, was an instigator of the North American bioregional movement during the ’70s, opted to settle in the lush, alluvial Mattole Valley of California’s mythical “Lost Coast.” Here cold marine currents veer seaward from jutting Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point of the lower 48 states. A small, bright pocket of almost magical climate results, surrounded by the brooding coastal rain forest.

It did not take very long for the newcomers to learn that logging was the economic mainstay of the mostly privately owned uplands over much of the 304-mi.² watershed. In the 40 years between 1947 and 1987, describes Simpson, more than 90% of the forested land in the watershed was logged, leaving a legacy of hundreds of miles of abandoned skid trails and forest roads. The watershed, comprising a melange of geologically young sediments scraped off the continental shelf by the collision of continental plates and recycled into mountains by subduction and uplift, is unstable, prone to earthquakes, and receives in some places upward of 200 in. of rainfall a year.

Streams Reflect Upslope Practices
“It doesn’t take much to create a disturbance in such a delicately balanced system,” writes Freeman House in his preface to Elements of Recovery, a watershed inventory undertaken in 1987 by the local people. “The erosive power of water increases in proportion to the square of its volume. A midslope road poorly placed, or built on the cheap, or lazily maintained, or abandoned, can divert large volumes of water from one drainage to another, or onto a slope unarmored by large rock or tree roots. Some of the catastrophic events mapped here, the large landslides and gullies, appeared after a single storm and were the result of a single failed road.”

From Kings Peak at its 4,087-ft. elevation in the King Range, Honeydew Creek tumbles 3,727 ft. through rugged, forested mountains to the hamlet of Honeydew, about 10 mi. north, as the crow flies, from Kings Peak. From here, at an elevation of 360 ft., the mainstem meanders nearly at grade for a score of miles or more to its mouth just south of Cape Mendocino. Two major flood events just after the intense period of upland road building and logging precipitated widespread landslides and road failures, gullies, and washouts, and these contributed copious amounts of sediment to the low-gradient system. The mainstem pools filled, channels widened, long-stable alluvial terraces were rapidly eaten away by shifting channels, and rocks from which old men had dived as young boys were buried in sediments.

“Restoration became a proper avenue to make a life here,” says Simpson. He helped to form the Salmon Group in 1980 and the Mattole Restoration Council four years later in order to do something about these conditions because, in addition to the alarming physical changes on the Mattole River mainstem itself, the headwaters were in danger of losing significant West Coast habitat for steelhead trout and both Coho and Chinook salmon. The groups, among the first watershed organizations in California, undertook one of the earliest watershed assessments in the West, a rigorous inventory of 956 watershed erosional disturbances ambitiously titled Elements of Recovery: An Inventory of Upslope Sources of Sedimentation in the Mattole River Watershed, with Rehabilitation Prescriptions and Additional Information for Erosion Control Prioritization.

Inventory Pinpoints Problems
The inventory, prepared for the California Department of Fish and Game and published in 1989, documented dates of timber harvest or other land-disturbing activities, modes of road construction and drainage, and mechanisms for erosion or mass failure. It culminated in a strategy to prioritize restoration actions and gave generic prescriptions for specific rehabilitation needs in each tributary subwatershed. This information was intended to be accessible to landowners and residents who might be interested in erosion control and land-use practices to minimize erosion. But ironically, says Simpson, funding was not available at the time to address upslope sources of stream degradation. Money was available only for instream work. In the next decade, he points out, landscape-scale environmental planning became popular on the heels of President Clinton’s federal ecosystem management efforts and opened the door for upslope stabilization projects. But the required inventory protocols were different, which necessitated another round of information gathering.

The Mattole has not been alone in this experience. Other early grassroots efforts to address the nonpoint erosion sources of degraded local streams were also forced to struggle in back eddies, awaiting institutional readiness. As a consequence, many instream habitat enhancement projects were built in coastal and western mountain streams that continued to be jeopardized by problems not being addressed upslope. But in the Mattole Valley, a clear benefit derived from an early focus on stream conditions: Residents got hooked on fish.

Public Education Creates Support

Native Chinook salmon stocks in coastal streams south of the Mattole River watershed disappeared in the previous 30 years. “We knew the problems were systemic, deep, and extensive,” notes Simpson, “but we wanted to do something that would boost the odds while waiting for larger recovery. We realized we literally were holding the southern line of extinction.” So the groups initiated a hatchbox program, wherein residents could incubate salmon eggs, rear the alevins to fry, and release them in neighborhood streams. The locals also got involved in rescue rearing of smolts that were stranded in warm, shallow pools of the mainstem and unable to migrate out to the ocean. “This, of course, made us all very protective of our salmon,” Simpson remarks, “and also provided a small boost in the egg-to-fry survival rate.” The upshot is that residents became knowledgeable about the conditions that favor survival of salmon and, by extension, became more concerned and involved in controlling nonpoint erosion in the uplands.

The Starting Place: A Common Vision
A bit north, Humboldt State University students field-tested streambank stabilization and bioengineering techniques with a grant from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association’s Office of Appropriate Technology. The year was 1977 and the site was the watershed of Jacoby Creek, a thrice-logged small watershed in the unstable and intricately dissected Coast Ranges of northern California. The new bioengineering techniques would be effective in selected situations, the crew ultimately concluded, but even more effective would be some sort of watershed organization that would bring landowners and resource managers together to agree on common goals for resource use and protection. Without this, watershed restoration efforts easily could be thwarted by other watershed activities, or money could be thrown away on the wrong projects.

Twenty-three years later, “watershed management” is on everyone’s lips. Biotechnical engineering techniques have become almost mainstream, and watershed councils have become high-vis players in the intricate political networks of watershed stakeholders. In many instances, they are the keepers of information about watershed conditions, and money is beginning to flow to them for projects to restore, rehabilitate, or protect watershed functions and values.

A Steep Start-Up Curve
Start-up watershed groups wanting to embark on projects must first face the challenges of developing organizational structure; establishing business and meeting protocols; stratifying their watersheds and completing condition assessments; preparing plans for action; creating partnerships for funding, technical resources, and political support; and learning the arts of grant writing, contracting, and project management and monitoring, for starters. This is a tall order for most watershed groups, most of which rely heavily on volunteers and have little or no paid staff to carry out their burgeoning wish lists.

The Pacific Rivers Council (www.pacrivers.org) undertook a study, An Evaluation of Selected Watershed Councils in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, to learn what relationships exist between the organizational attributes of watershed councils and the effectiveness of their conservation actions. The researchers, Chuck Huntington and Sari Sommarstrom, found that better planning processes produced stronger conservation plans and projects with higher conservation values.

But it isn’t that easy to just jump into watershed restoration planning. The ability of a watershed group to stride out and get a lot of things done rests on a foundation of mutual trust and a shared vision among watershed stakeholders. According to Jay Mower, coordinator of the six-year-old Columbia Slough Watershed Council, young watershed groups “need to devote some time to being in the upstart modes of forming, storming, and norming before they can evolve to the levels at which they are performing and transforming.” And, he adds, they need money: to pay technical experts to complete elements of a watershed study; to purchase maps and aerial photos from the agencies; to put up a Web site and keep it fresh and full of data, links, and information useful to watershed stakeholders; and to manage the office, attend meetings, write grants, and develop fiscal partnerships. “Watershed councils need to increase their power to get a hold of money in order to get these things done,” he insists.

Mower is the only staff for the 40-person council of a 53-mi.² urban watershed, a low-elevation tributary to the lower Columbia River. The watershed, a relict backwater and high-flow channel on the floodplain of the sprawling mainstem, is protected by levees and densely developed. Pumping controls the flow in the relict slough. The watershed has a population of about 30,000 people, possesses both an international marine port and an international airport, and has three freeways, six golf courses, a transcontinental railroad, and an industrial sanctuary. It also contains the largest urban wetland in North America. Runoff from impervious surfaces and legacy contaminants from past practices are the watershed’s largest nonpoint-pollution concerns. The council does not lack for involved stakeholders; the slough is listed as water quality – limited under section 303(d) of the Water Quality Act and provides habitat for sensitive species. Government, businesses, nonprofits, schools, and the general public are invested in its recovery.

Councils Are Key Communicators

Given the enormous agenda for water-quality improvement in the Columbia Slough, the cost to address these needs, and the tiny budget of the council, “We have had to take a good look at our limitations and do as we’re able,” Mower notes. The council has decided to take on the role of the communicator in the watershed: to host events and tours, track things, keep the agencies in touch with what the others are doing, give feedback about government policies and programs, and be a gadfly to government and other stakeholders. It also can be a clear voice in public decision-making and provide leadership and diplomacy by staying above the fray and not taking sides. Such a presence can be a stabilizing force in settings where many jurisdictions overlap and knowingly or unknowingly adopt conflicting policies.

In its role as the primary watershed communicator, the council hosts the annual summer Regatta—a tour of the slough in small watercraft paddled by politicians, business people, teachers, neighbors, and children; a tour bristling with binoculars, spotting scopes, dipping nets, bird books, and taxonomic keys. The trip is both weird and wonderful, for in its transit by stormwater outfalls, under rumbling overpasses, and through quiet marshes where great blue herons startle out of the cattails with their huge, prehistoric wing beats, one’s attention is subtly directed to the notion of choice. Nature or culture? How can they coexist? By shining a light on this question, the council brings the issues of watershed quality to the awareness of people who can make a difference by the choices they make.

Consensus-Building Leads to Success
Southward, in the rugged Siskiyou Mountains that straddle the California-Oregon border, the Applegate River Watershed Council was conceived out of controversy between federal managers of the forested uplands and a diverse, rural public: ranchers, loggers, environmentalists, residents, and farmers of the pastoral, alluvial valley floor. At issue, according to Council Chairman Jack Shipley, was the question of single-use management practices in one of the most biologically, geologically, and botanically diverse landscapes in the country.

With a policy of being “inclusive, transparent, and without hidden agendas,” says Shipley, the council has emerged as a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done presence in a watershed where there is no primary governing entity. The council’s role is to develop solutions that can be implemented across jurisdictional boundaries, and it has become the primary project implementer in the 770-mi.² tributary to the 5,000-mi.² Rogue River Basin. It is the younger sibling of the equally strong Applegate Partnership, whose role is to share information and build consensus among stakeholders in the rural watershed.

The council’s office handles a large docket of projects, funded by a rich mix of in-kind donations and money from nonprofit, private, and government organizations. With an operating budget of about a half-million dollars a year, the council has a full-time administrator and a full-time monitoring coordinator. It puts out a newsletter and, in partnership with residents, has planted about 500,000 trees on private lands in both riparian and upland settings. It can boast of a solar-powered fish screen and served as the facilitator in issues of interjurisdictional policy. It is working with the agencies to integrate the requirements of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act to create an incentive-driven, watershedwide program focused on restoration of aquatic species. A landowner’s restoration manual is planned, offering techniques for evaluating conditions and options for improving them.

Unlike many other watershed groups, the Applegate Watershed Council has focused on an assortment of upland water-quality protection and conservation projects that range from improving a dirt road where chronic erosion was degrading salmon habitats, to installing a suite of BMPs in a stockyard located on a small stream. Perhaps one of its most significant successes is as a neighborhood communicator and educator in gaining the trust of 41 farmers to make a change from traditional flood irrigation to pump and sprinkler irrigation. In a region that experiences summer drought and corresponding low-flow conditions, this project removes two dams and eliminates evaporation and seepage losses incurred by the former diversion-and-flood system.

Community Is the Best Resource
Residents of the valley figure as the primary resources and experts in the council’s planning, project design, and implementation. “Restoration is a community process,” states Shipley, “and we’ve learned to look for expertise within our own community.” The council knows that community involvement comes from one-on-one communication, the ability to act on referrals and be flexible when opportunities arise, and “doing what you say you’re going to do,” he adds.

“Eventually we will have ecologically sound management across the landscape. Economic interests will not be the sole driver, and everything will function with this understanding.” Shipley pauses and notes that communities everywhere are starting to engage in conversations around all of these issues. “It takes time and patience. It is a slow process. Give us a thousand more years.”