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Rhetoric and Reality: Working it Out at the Landscape Level
Scientists trying to fill the gap between rhetoric and reality began critiquing the $1.5 billion CALFED ecosystem restoration plan in mid-October, mirroring efforts by scientists around the country to grapple with the inherent difficulties- and opportunities- in taking on restoration at the landscape level.
Manipulating nature on a broad canvas is not new- but doing it to restore rather than alter natural processes is. The question that keeps coming up is whether it's even possible to restore an entire ecosystem. With a number of caveats, the answer seems to be, "yeah, more or less." But it may not be possible in every case. The obvious problems are political and economic. Often these are so glaring that they obscure the intriguing scientific issues. But large-scale ecosystem restoration is more than conflicts with developers, power companies or farmers. It is the indicator species for a revolution in scientific thinking, a way of looking at the world that emphasizes systems instead of single factors. In fact, the most common problem is that as these unprecedented efforts get underway, scientists and bureaucrats tend to fall back on a laboratory-style approach of isolating one factor, rather than looking at the system as a whole. Not only is this more familiar ground scientifically, but it is often politically expedient.
But chaos and complexity theory, which developed in the 1980s, indicates that living systems can't be chopped into parts; one simple action can produce a cascade of effects so variegated they're almost impossible to break down. To approach restoration- even simple restoration- it is almost certainly more productive to deal with processes rather than single factors, scientists now say.
It's a tough transition, says Bill Halvorsen of the National Park Service, who has shifted his work to landscape-level ecology over the past ten years. "For the most part, I think that there's still an emphasis on, `Let's go after one factor and try to get that one factor straightened out,'" says Halvorsen. "It might be something like an introduced species, and we're saying, let's go get that out of there. We can understand single factor ecology rather than systems ecology. There's a lot of systems research, but not much implementation yet."
Scientists advising restoration projects around the country echo Halvorsen's criticism. But there are exceptions, projects that are ambitious enough to take on the interrelated elements that drive ecosystem processes. When the stars- and the federal funding- are in alignment, many scientists feel these projects have a chance. At the very least, they're confident that they're joining the right battle.
For instance, in the Everglades, work is already underway on a plan that scientists believe can result in the protection of a major portion of the ecosystem. CALFED's ecosystem restoration plan (see cover) may be even more ambitious. The $1.5 billion plan, which attacks everything from timber practices to grasses, is regarded as part of a new generation of truly comprehensive efforts to reweave the fabric of nature- at least that part of it where the thread hasn't irremediably frayed. Clearly, the CALFED project was driven by competing demands for water, so the issue of flows looms large, but the scientific advisory panel that convened to assess the restoration blueprint in early October was impressed by its embrace of the Bay-Delta's complexity.
"They'd like to get away from single species or single factor science and try to approach this thing as an ecosystem," says Michael Barbour, a plant ecologist at U.C. Davis. "This is enormously ambitious, probably the largest area to restore and rehabilitate, both geographically and economically."
Nevertheless, comments from Barbour and the other scientists on the CALFED advisory panel, which have not yet been formally released but were agreed upon in the October 8 meeting, reveal the tangled nature of the task. First, the scientists were disturbed at the proposal's confusion of the terms "restoration" and "rehabilitation." For instance, introduced species like striped bass are a major sportfishery in the Bay and Delta. The plan calls for enhancing these species, which doesn't qualify as restoration. Barbour and the others aren't necessarily telling officials it's a bad thing to pump up the striped bass, an effort that will help build support among sportsmen. But they are saying, let's make sure we recognize that this is rehabilitation, not restoration. Even if complete restoration- including extirpation of introduced species- were the goal, it wouldn't be possible, according to Dr. Jack McIntyre, another panel scientist and a salmonid expert from the Columbia River Basin who has worked extensively on watershed issues stretching from Oregon to Yellowstone to California.
"There's this document called the Delta-San Joaquin Atlas," says McIntyre. "It takes three and a half pages to list the exotic species of vertebrates and invertebrates in the Sacramento Delta. I had no idea there were this number of exotic critters. The fish list alone is nearly a page. They'll never get rid of them. The best they can hope for is to alter the ecosystem to the point where these fish don't do very well and it's more favorable for the natives."
McIntyre's comments show the kind of systemic approach that was urged by the panel. The second point they made was that the CALFED cooperators should simplify and focus the restoration effort. The development of conceptual models- which resemble flow charts- can help managers get the most bang for their buck. This is especially important in a plan as ambitious as CALFED's. "The system is complex," said Barbour, "but as people, there are only so many levers you can pull."
Third, the panel is pushing for independent scientific advisors to avoid conflicts of interest. "It's relied heavily on agency science," said Barbour. "It should not rely so heavily on agency and stakeholder input. We imagine scientific input might take the form of some sort of advisory body of scientists that would not meet occasionally, but would be available for continual consultation. The role of this body would be to facilitate the introduction of science to management."
Fourth, Barbour and the other scientists are urging CALFED to put in place a system for monitoring the accuracy of its conceptual models. This takes the restoration plan's adaptive management approach- the commonsense idea that you look at the effects of what you do as you go along and change the plan accordingly- one step further.
According to Barbour, officials were relieved that the science advisors didn't ask for detailed statistical models, which would have been far more labor-intensive. The reason for the emphasis on conceptual models, Barbour said, was to push the analysis toward an ecosystem approach rather than getting bogged down in small-scale number crunching.
If it weren't obvious already, the panel's call for establishing independent scientific oversight reveals the biggest barrier with large-scale ecosystem restoration- the fact that money and politics can paralyze the entire effort. That's exactly what's happened in the multi-state Columbia River Basin, according to McIntyre.
"The Northwest Power Planning Council started its restoration program in the early 1980s and it's spent $3 billion," says McIntyre. "Right now we have more fish on the endangered species list than we did when they started. That doesn't seem to say too much about how well we're able to do this sort of thing."
Although environmentalists focus on the issue of dams on the Columbia, Rick Williams, a Boise, Idaho consultant who serves on the scientific review team for the Northwest Power Planning Council, says the watershed was degraded almost a century ago by logging. At this point, though, the dams that line up along the enormous river like freight cars are proving to be the last straw for many of the region's anadromous fish. All of Idaho's anadromous fish are either listed as endangered or proposed for endangered or threatened status. Spring and fall chinook are endangered, sockeye salmon exist in only one location supported by a captive broodstock, the bull trout has just been listed as endangered, the redband trout is proposed for listing, the coho salmon is extinct, and the steelhead is proposed for threatened status.
"The further upstream you go, the more endangered the stocks," says Williams, adding that fragmented jurisdiction is one of major impediments to meaningful restoration in the watershed. "Nobody's really in charge. There are a whole bunch of people who have various authorities and responsibilities, but no one governing unit that can say, `The buck stops here,'" he says.
The problem is not just the morass of regulatory agencies- 52 in all- that have some say over the Columbia River watershed. It is even more specific than the classic Western water rights tangle. On the Columbia, the political influence of power companies is as ubiquitous as the dams that line the waterway. Power companies also dominate the economics of the Columbia Basin restoration effort. Of the $435 million annual restoration budget, half goes to the Bonneville Power Administration, which gets to charge for water that has been "lost" to fish restoration and is permitted to subtract loan payments for capital costs of dams. The result is that only $100 to $160 million is spent on restoration.
Even this sum isn't always spent effectively, says Williams. In the Columbia Basin, fisheries managers, including state officials, actually decide on which project gets funding. The result of that setup is that often the status quo- which consists of an antiquated reliance on technological fixes, such as hatchery breeding-takes precedence over managing for biodiversity. "We all operate by consensus, so we can dwindle things down to the lowest common denominator," says Williams.
Nevertheless, Williams and his colleagues released a report in 1996 called Upstream, which recommended cutting in half the John Day Dam's reservoir- the longest on the river at 79 miles. There is only one dam separating the John Day from the Hanford Reservation. Ironically, the former plutonium processing plant contains the last freeflowing healthy chinook habitat. "One of the points we try to make- and it sounds almost ludicrously commonsense- is that if you want to recover fish, you've got to give the fish more river," says Williams.
"We said we can improve salmon production a little bit by improving flows. But if people want a big gain, they had to be willing to talk about removing dams. Of course, everybody thought we were nuts. But now they're talking about it."
If the Columbia Basin restoration effort hasn't yet cracked the economic system that keeps the river down, the Everglades could be considered the counter-argument, indicating that ecosystem restoration on a large scale may indeed be possible. It's probably no coincidence that the problem in the Everglades is too much water, a concept that seems almost surreal to anyone who's worked on water problems in the arid American West.
The abundance of water causes its own problems in the Everglades- notably flood control releases during unusual storm events that interfere with bird nesting and breeding- but they may not be as intractable as those caused by aridity in the hardscrabble West. What also works in favor of the Everglades is the fact that so much of the ecosystem- 1,507,850 acres- is a national park and the park is 90% wilderness. In the case of the Everglades, a series of lawsuits also resulted in the political will to solve the problems caused by agriculture and development that were affecting the park.
Because of the relationship between the land north of the Everglades and the park, it was impossible to begin to solve the park's problems without looking beyond any single factor to problems of flood control, land use, and water quality. Almost $200 million in federal funds is being used to purchase land that is mostly in floodplains. A large program is underway to design systems using natural wetlands as stormwater treatment, according to Tom Armentano, chief of the biology resources branch of the South Florida Natural Resources Center of Everglades National Park.
While clearly it doesn't always work to throw money at a problem, restoration of Long Island Sound, which was one of the first estuary projects, is clearly hampered by lack of funding. With a budget of only $15 million since 1985, the estuary restoration project hasn't made it far past the research stage and is almost exclusively reliant on state and county funds for its work. While Clinton and Dole competed to see who could come up with more money for the Everglades in the last presidential election, the Long Island Sound, with its varied array of environments, from urban to rural marine, languished. The Chesapeake Bay, another early estuary recovery project, also seems to have suffered by being set up before some of the more progressive mechanisms of ecosystem restoration were in place. Outside scientists have criticized the Chesapeake project for failing to take on land-use issues and focusing too exclusively on water quality.
Political problems associated with restoration often eclipse scientific issues, but it sometimes appears that these two arenas are as closely related as the systems and processes of the ecosystem itself. Environmental restoration in the latter half of the twentieth century must take into account chaos and complexity, a way of understanding the world that is not confined to science. Chaos and complexity theory actually evolved out of the science of ecology. But as the ideas surrounding chaos and complexity evolved in the 1980s, restoration ecologists were faced with some disturbing problems. If there is no steady state- no baseline for nature- then what benchmark should restorationists aim for? Complexity theory tells us there are patterns in nature that are recognizable- at least using high-powered computers- but so complex that they baffle most traditional Cartesian scientific thinking. The political problems inherent in this uncertainty are obvious; people who favor business as usual have a good sound bite argument against doing anything.
But if these conundrums are approached with intellectual integrity, one is led to the conclusion that the chance to incorporate chaos and complexity into ecosystem restoration is drawing many of the country's top scientists to ecosystem restoration. Researchers now have a chance to restore processes rather than build a museum, to foster cycles of birth and death instead of working as a taxidermist.
In political terms, large-scale ecosystem restoration is a quiet revolution. For years, environmentalists and scientists have fantasized about a "Habitat Protection Act" as a more intellectually grounded basis for conservation efforts than the Endangered Species Act. Today, nobody believes that such an act would pass Congress. But the shift in emphasis from single species to habitat conservation is occurring in the natural course of things. Certainly, there are disadvantages to change occurring this way. It is scattershot; estuaries are getting more attention than deserts, farmland and prairie are still basically ignored. And change occurs slowly; the United States is still cut up on man-made instead of biological lines, with planning done by cities and counties while problems increasingly occur on the watershed level. Certainly managing with chaos and complexity theory in mind requires more tolerance of uncertainty by citizens. But at least there seems to be agreement in the scientific community that, as CALFED advisor Dr. Paul Angermeir said to the American Fisheries Society last August, "It takes a landscape to recover a species."
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