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Hope According to House
Freeman House wasn't clad in a tuxedo cozily sipping champagne when midnight struck on New Year's Eve 1982; he was up to his elbows in the chilly Mattole River wrestling a female chinook salmon.
House was one of a handful of activists working round the clock to keep the river's remaining salmon runs from disappearing forever. After timber companies stripped the old growth forests from the hillsides in the 1950s and 1960s, sediment and debris washed into the river, clogging the deep, clear pools favored by spawning salmon, and exacerbating floods, which washed away much of the riparian vegetation that shaded and cooled the river.
Cal Fish & Game had given up on the river's salmon, writes House in his 1999 book about the Mattole, Totem Salmon, but the wiry, sandy-haired activist and friends persevered, convincing the agency to let them remove up to 80,000 eggs per year from wild fish in order to raise them to fingerling stage for later release. The group has since released a half million young fish (the survival rate of the eggs to fry is eight times greater than what could be expected in a degraded river), and the fish are starting to come back. While the group started with a focus on salmon in the late 1970s, more recently it has expanded to include a politically savvy watershed council that is changing land management practices throughout the watershed. Although 200 miles from San Francisco Bay and the Delta, House shared some of the watershed restoration lessons he learned on the Mattole in a recent interview with ESTUARY.
The first was to find a common goal. Winding its way westerly and draining 300 square miles of the elusive Lost Coast, the Mattole (which means clear water to Native Americans) has always been home to diverse interests-ranchers, timber folks, fishers, and residents-who didn't often have much incentive to work together. The focus on saving fish allowed a discussion to begin, says House. But even if a river or stream no longer has fish runs, the same kind of effort can be generated around a frog or a songbird, he adds. And the watershed doesn't have to be huge to build a successful group. "The right scale is whatever works," says House.
Another lesson he learned is that restoration means more than repairing a damaged ecosystem. It means reconnecting people with the land, instilling in them a sense of place so strong they will fight to protect it - or to bring back a semblance of the richness of the past. On the Mattole, that meant not only helping salmon but also starting to heal a battle-worn landscape - by preserving the remaining ancient forests, restoring riparian vegetation, and changing damaging land-use practices.
But how can we reconnect people with a transformed landscape? House cites his younger self as a perfect example of our cultural disconnection from local nature, which he sees as the root of so many environmental problems. He graduated from high school in Walnut Creek without knowing anything about the three species of salmon that swam up the creek behind the school. House hopes to see the day when every California high school student graduates able to identify 100 native plants and animals. The Species and Community Profiles published by the S.F. Bay Joint Venture could be adapted for every grade level and taught in Bay Area public schools, he suggests. "The status of the salt marsh harvest mouse and Pacific halibut need to become as much a part of our everyday vocabulary as the batting averages of the Oakland A's." Grassroots efforts in hands-on restoration projects, water quality monitoring, or planning can also help bridge this lack of connection with place, says House, especially since U.S. EPA and Fish & Game monitoring protocols are increasingly available to nonprofits and volunteers.
Perhaps the most surprising lesson learned, reflects House, is to cultivate patience - for the time restoration can take and to see results, and for the amount of time it can take communities to change. It has been 20 years since that cold New Year's Eve when he wrestled the salmon to capture her eggs. During the first ten years he worked on the Mattole, as the number of fish in the river kept dropping, House wondered - not infrequently - whether he'd lost his mind. Today, fish numbers are back up and the river runs clear, and while no one can precisely attribute these changes to the midnight volunteers, House is convinced that without their intervention, the Mattole salmon would be extinct. What keeps him scratching his head is the amount of blind faith that sustained the group.
"I don't remember a single instance of anyone saying we should quit," recalls House. "Not one person said 'why should we do it?'" LOV
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