Restoration Category

The Kitsap Sun published a great article Saturday about road removal and other watershed restoration efforts in the Skokomish watershed in Washington.

The opening line in the article reads as follows:

    "The Skokomish River is sick, experts say, and intensive care is needed for any hope of recovery."

The article goes on to explain the kind of intensive care that's happening in the Skokomish, to the tune of nearly $5 million worth of needed restoration (with only a small portion of that money already raised).  The Skokomish Watershed Action Team (SWAT), a diverse coalitoin of agency staff, tribes, conservationists, land owners and others, has helped raise money for this much needed work, including some of the Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative funds that Wildlands CPR and others advocated for last year.   

The Kitsap story also talks about the cost of the current "Big Dig" contract that is happening right now.  Implied, but not specifically discussed, is the fact that projects such as this employ lots of people.  It would have been great if the Sun reporter had included some numbers highlighting how many people got good jobs working on this project.

Near the end of the article, the reporter talks about how stewardship contracting funds are being used to pay for some of the restoration in the watershed.  Stewardship contracting funds can be a great tool for funding restoration, but they don't work everywhere, since in many cases, the revenue generated from the stewardship sale is not enough to actually pay for the needed restoration.   

It's great to see a story in the paper that highlights how a cooperative effort to fix a damaged watershed is working, and working well.  Great job by the Skokomish Watershed Action Team, let's hope they're able to raise the rest of the funding they need to fully restore this watershed.

The June 24 NY Times featured an article called Follow the Silt about the science and complexities of stream restoration.

However, one important stream restoration tool that they failed to mention is road removal. Roads are a large contributor of stream sediment, both chronic and in catastrophic events. Wildlands CPR has been examining the benefits and impacts of road removal for several years, including our road removal monitoring program on the Clearwater National Forest.

A huge conservation victory was announced on June 30 - the plan for The Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Lands to purchase roughly 500 square miles of forested land in western Montana currently owned by Plum Creek Timber Company. These are extremely important lands for habitat connectivity and the Montana Legacy Project will ensure that almost all of these lands remain free of subdivision and home development. In fact, most of the land will end up in public ownership, erasing the legacy of the checkerboard landscape. However, what has not been mentioned much in the press around this issue is that these lands provide many restoration opportunities.

Wildlands CPR has been promoting watershed restoration through road removal in the Swan Valley of Montana for the last several years. The Swan is home to much of the land that will be purchased and is a critical area for wildlife, providing corridors for grizzly bears and important habitat for bull trout. As the Plum Creek lands are purchased and put into public ownership, we should be looking at road restoration opportunities, not only to improve the land's value as habitat, but also to provide high-wage, high-skill restoration jobs to the local communities. The Montana Legacy Project will be a huge benefit to our lands, our wildlife and our human communities.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the Government Accountability Office has begun a study to look at the pros and cons of moving the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Interior.

Apparently the Department of Interior was the Forest Service’s first home, though it was transferred to the Department of Agriculture in 1905 and has been there ever since, while the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and US Fish and Wildlife Service are all housed at Interior.  Some argue that all of the major public land management agencies should be under one roof, and there are merits to the argument, but questions as well.

There have been numerous past suggestions to move the agency out of Agriculture, though none have been successful to date.  According to a March 11 letter from the GAO to the Department of Interior, this current GAO study would address the following questions: 1) What options exist for consolidating the Forest Service into Interior? 2) What are the political strengths and weaknesses of each option? 3) What challenges exist to implementing these options and what are potential means for overcoming these challenges?

These questions may or may not get at the real natural resources problems of moving the agency from one department to another, as opposed to the political problems.  In addition, they don’t seem to directly address the fiscal costs or savings of moving the agency.

When some people think of Interior they think of the Park Service, and assume that moving the Forest Service over might result in management more akin to National Park management – generally protective regulations with an emphasis on recreation.  But the Bureau of Land Management is also in the Department of Interior.  And management at the BLM is very resource extraction heavy, especially when it comes to minerals.  The BLM actually has control over much mineral leasing on Forest Service lands as it is.  So while conservationists and recreationists might think about the National Park Service model if the Forest Service were to move, oil and gas companies are probably thinking about the BLM model, and salivating at the opportunity to even further streamline permitting processes for minerals, oil and gas extraction.

All that said, there is some logic to housing all of the natural resource agencies in one place.  If that were to happen, and the agency were to be moved, it would also provide opportunities for clarifying the purpose and mission of the Forest Service.  That’s a big can of worms to open, and one where conservationists might not have a lot of control over the outcome.  At this point, it looks like we’ll just have to wait and see what the GAO report says.

The economic benefits of restoration have been in the news quite a bit in the recent weeks.  The Missoulian has been running a series on the economic benefits of the removal of the Milltown Dam:

While mining's legacy has left Montana with more than its share of environmental messes, the state's residents have found ways to live with them, to make handsome profits cleaning them up, and even to promote them as tourist attractions. 

 

The same sentence holds true for the legacy of forestry in the state.  It has left a whole slew of environmental messes that have the potential to make significant contributions to the economy.  The State of Montana knows this, and is taking action to address all environmental restoration issues: 

The 2007 Montana Legislature approved $34 million for restoration projects, and allocated $200,000 to create an Office of Restoration Coordination at the state level. 

 

This position is to work on all sorts of restoration, not just those of dam removals and mine tailings.  And even if the current media attention is focused on the restoration of mines and their aftermaths, the fact that the media is focusing on restoration is important, as moving forward with a restoration economy will require the widespread support of the people.

The news about flooding in the Pacific Northwest was, unfortunately, all too familiar for the people living there, though the intensity of the storm was particularly bad this time around.  And as officials went out to assess the damage, the news started pouring in about how many roads and bridges were washed away by the storms.

But the news about flooding in the Pacific Northwest was also all too familiar for the similarity it has to the annual news about wildfires in the west.  Each year residents brace themselves for fire season, and all of the chaos that comes with it.

Why is it, then, that when most politicians debate forest management and restoration at the national level, they focus almost exclusively on logging to reduce fuels buildups?  While thinning, in certain situations, may reduce fire damage, it is only one component of a comprehensive approach to restoration.  Poorly maintained (or even unmaintained) forest roads cause profound impacts to water quality.  These problems are both chronic and episodic.  In other words, dirt roads deliver small to medium amounts of sediment to streams all the time, but when a storm comes through with heavy rains and flooding, the roads can blow out, delivering thousands of cubic yards of sediment to streams in an instant.  Fortunately a growing number of people in the Pacific Northwest understand these problems, including local land managers and politicians.  But such road failures occur all over the country, not just in the Pacific Northwest.

Many argue that there is a direct correlation between the amount of fuels (trees) on the ground, and the intensity of a wildfire, though there is a lot of conflicting data about which types of fuels are normal and which aren’t.  There is also a direct correlation between the number, status and condition of roads on the ground and the level of damage caused when a severe flood event occurs.  With a maintenance backlog of more than $5 billion nationally, the Forest Service has too many poorly maintained roads, sitting, like ticking time bombs, just waiting for the next big storm.

It would be really nice to see the national restoration debate treat the surfeit of poorly maintained, ecologically damaging forest roads the same way it treats the questionable surfeit of trees on national forests.  If we can put so much energy into trying to reduce the severity of fire by thinning trees from the national forests, can’t we put at least a percentage of that same energy, and federal funding, into reducing the severity of floods by removing unneeded, ecologically destructive roads from the landscape?

Investing in that kind of work will not only reduce the impacts from severe flood events, but it will provide high-wage, high-skill jobs to the very same people who build roads – excavator and bulldozer operators.  In addition, it will save a lot of money, because it’s a lot less expensive to reclaim a road before it fails, than to clean up the mess it causes after it fails.

While we certainly can’t fix all the roads tomorrow, the sooner we start the process, the better our watersheds will handle future floods.  And in this era of climate change and uncertainty, we should be investing heavily in comprehensive approaches to restoration to improve the resilience and condition of our watersheds.

There's a great blog posting today on New West about the emerging restoration economy.  The writer refers to a new report by Western Progress and Progressive States Network about the emerging restoration economy in the Rocky Mountain West.  A few months ago, we helped coordinate a panel about the economic benefits of road removal at Western Progress' "Pay Dirt" conference here in Missoula.  That conference was all about building a restoration economy and this report is a follow up to that conference.

But the blog posting is worth reading, too, because it has some great direct quotes from Montana's governor about his interest in restoration here in Montana.  It's nice to see high-level elected officials talking about how important, and reasonable, it is to invest in restoration on a large scale.  And Montana really is investing in restoration.  In 2007, the MT legislature appropriated $34 million new dollars for watershed restoration projects throughout the state. In addition, some of that funding went to create a new statewide office of restoration (housed in the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation), that will help prioritize restoration needs in the state.

An article in the November 26 Bellingham Herald highlights the Forest Service's ongoing road maintenance funding and policy challenges. The article quotes several members of Washington State's Congressional delegation as they respond to a letter from Mark Rey, Undersecretary of Agriculture, about management of the national forest road system. (The beginning of the Bellingham article talks about national parks roads, but Rey's letter is about national forest roads.)

The bottom line here is that the Forest Service does not have enough money to maintain their road system in Washington or nationally, and the road system is going into greater and greater "maintenance debt" every year. As explained on our Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative campaign site, and in the Bellingham Herald article, WA Congressman Norm Dicks has proposed (and the House passed) an increase in road maintenance and decommissioning funding of $65 million to the Forest Service. But the funding has yet be introduced in the Senate, so it still has a long way to go before being allocated. Even more significantly, this funding is just a drop in the bucket compared to the total needed nationally, yet it is only proposed as one time funding. The Forest Service needs to completely overhaul their road funding system to not only maintain needed roads, but to remove unneeded roads and restore that land back to natural conditions, thus reducing road maintenance costs over the long term, while protecting and restoring clean water and wildlife habitat.

In the previous blog post I discussed President Bush's threatened veto of a water bill that include $345 million for road removal/hydrologic restoration in the Everglades.

The President did veto the bill, and today, the congress overrode that veto. This is the first veto by this president that's been overridden by Congress. Everglades restoration and Hurricane Katrina cleanup were two of the reasons - and they're both good reasons.

We're looking forward to checking out that Everglades restoration once it's underway, and to seeing the Picayune Strand restored!

 

Update: The President did veto the bill, and the congress overrode that veto. This is the first veto by this president that's been overridden by Congress. Read more here.

It's been a pretty big year for federal proposals for restoration funding, but the question remains as to how many of those proposals will make it past President Bush's desk. Critical restoration in the Everglades is an unfortunate case in point, as described by the New York Times today.

The state/federal Everglades restoration project was adopted in 2000, and is described as the largest restoration project in the world. It's delicate crafting brought support from nearly all sectors in Florida - industry and conservationists; republicans and democrats. But in this war economy, raising money for restoration projects is no easy task. And while the state of Florida has invested billions, the Feds have not been particularly forthcoming with their share. Unfortunately, it appears that won't change any time soon, as the current appropriation for Everglades restoration is part of a massive water projects bill that is sitting on the President's desk awaiting a threatened veto.

We're pretty disappointed by the threatened veto for several reasons. First, as the largest restoration project in the country, and possibly in the world, this project is an icon for the nation. If we can't fulfill our promise to restore the Everglades, how many other restoration promises are going to be broken? Second, investing in restoration is an opportunity for this country to invest in green jobs that put people to work putting the land back together. In a country with a struggling economy, restoration makes good business and ecological sense. Third, and perhaps closest to home, the Everglades funding includes $375 million for hydrologic restoration of the Picayune Strand near Big Cypress National Preserve. A significant portion of this funding would go to remove roads from a 1960's scam residential development. The Nature Conservancy now owns the failed development and the roads, which are acting like dikes, must be removed to restore hydrological flow. This may be the largest appropriation for road removal ever proposed. The Picayune Strand area is 85 square miles, and the proposal also includes several other restoration projects in the area.

Perhaps Bush will change his mind and sign the bill. Regardless of what happens with this particular bill, it's time for public and private entities to begin building a green restoration economy by investing in projects like these.