Restoration: A Retrospective

Introduction
By Marlies Wierenga

For decades, the restoration of our degraded natural areas seemed to follow a particular paradigm – addressing issues singularly on a site-by-site basis. A property owner might have revegetated a streambank to improve water quality but a mile upstream, a dam might have completely altered the stream’s flow or a road may have been failing and delivering excess sediment or invasive knotweed may have been chocking out native plants for miles. As one problem was resolved, another became apparent, making the achievement of restoration goals akin to a carnival hall of mirrors – increasingly out of reach.

But slowly, people started talking to each other and an understanding of how the sum of the parts could add up to the whole began to emerge. The concept of watershed-wide  restoration developed and new partnerships allowed for ranchers, NGO’s, recreationists, federal and state agencies, and community members to pool resources and combine efforts on a grander scale. In addition, the work force changed – from tree harvesters to tree planters; from hydraulic engineers to hydrologic engineers; from road construction crews to road reclamation crews. The decades old paradigms were crumbling and shifting.

In this cover story, we explore areas where this shift has occurred and where we may still be stuck in the old paradigm. The unimaginable idea for dam removal is now a reality. Excessive and deteriorating roads in public lands are being reclaimed. Yet, changes in grazing still occur in the framework of the old model: site-by-site. In order to finally move beyond the hall of mirrors, we must continue to talk about what currently appears to be impossible and take on new expectations that transform our old rules and standards of practice into a reality that truly reaches whole watershed restoration goals.

-Marlies Wierenga is Wildlands CPR's WA/OR Field Coordinator
 

It’s Been a Long, Long Road
By Bethanie Walder

It’s 1996, and I’m standing in Redwood National Park, staring in awe as huge excavators operate with surgical precision to re-sculpt a road back into a naturally contoured hillside. The folks in Redwood had been doing this work for decades, slowly but surely returning logged and roaded lands to nature – restoring not just the aesthetic beauty of the place, but its ecological function as well.

The experts at Redwood State and National Parks are the progenitors of the entire field of road reclamation as a tool for watershed restoration. When they first started restoring landscapes in the 1970s, they focused largely on in-stream activities such as check dams and riparian planting to trap and control sediment. But the traps filled up and the sediment kept right on flowing. Eventually they realized that to control the sediment that was choking salmon-bearing streams, they would have to look upland, to where the sediment was generated. When they looked closely, it became clear that roads were the primary problem.

In partnership with the Nez Perce tribes, the Clearwater National Forest was a pioneer in road removal in the northern Rockies. Here, heavy equipment is put to work removing a road. Photo by Adam Switalski.
 

So people working in the Redwoods started removing those upland roads. They started with culvert crossings and eventually moved to full road re-contours. Sediment production into Redwood Creek and other rivers and streams dropped significantly – they were on to something. The concept of road removal for watershed restoration was born.

Road removal spent its infancy largely in northern California, but as the concept and techniques matured, the idea spread outside the region and outside the Park Service. And while it began as watershed restoration, wildlife biologists realized that removing roads was also beneficial for endangered species like grizzly bears, who need large, roadless lands to thrive. Over the past 20 years the Forest Service has gone from cautiously exploring road reclamation (sometimes because of court orders) to wholeheartedly embracing it. Since the idea became reality it has become a common practice on public and even some private industrial timber lands. Now, the biggest obstacles to implementing road reclamation are a lack of funding and, in some cases, local opposition (especially where road reclamation is court ordered). But local opposition has decreased substantially over time, in part because road reclamation provides high-wage jobs to local people, and as more people learn about the economic, ecological and social benefits, we’ll see support continue to grow.

The funding of road reclamation has changed dramatically as well, at least on Forest Service lands. Before the agency had funding specifically dedicated for road reclamation, they would use existing budgetary line items (e.g. using fisheries funding to benefit endangered salmon). In addition, many national forests received emergency money to deal with road failures after severe weather events. For example, the Forest Service used “Emergency Supplemental” funding to create and implement the Clearwater National Forest’s award-winning road reclamation program. That was later supplemented with millions in salmon-mitigation funding from the Bonneville Power Administration through the Clearwater’s partnership with the Nez Perce Tribe. Public-private partnerships have been created, enabling agencies to access funding from dozens of different state, federal and private philanthropic sources.

In 2007, Wildlands CPR and our partners at the Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative came together to advocate for a new Forest Service budget line item, the Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative (LRT). This program was initially funded at $40 million in fiscal year 2008, and has now received $225 million to date (with another $45 million just allocated for 2012). All LRT funds are dedicated to mitigating the effects of the national forest road system on water quality, including endangered fish habitat and municipal water supplies. Since the program’s inception, the Forest Service has removed 3,550 miles of roads with LRT funding, fixed nearly 800 culverts to restore fish passage, and performed critical maintenance on many other roads.

What happened between the mid-90s and 2008 to change the funding scenario? First, the Forest Service very publicly addressed the impacts of roads through the development of their roadless and long-term roads rules, which were adopted in early 2001. While the well-known roadless rule helped change the national agenda related to new wildland road construction, its quiet cousin, the long-term roads rule, helped change the agency agenda related to its existing road system. The Forest Service finally acknowledged they had more roads than they needed, or than they could afford to maintain. The long-term roads rule recommended undertaking a forest-by-forest analysis to determine an ecologically and fiscally sustainable minimum road system. The FS estimated that this minimum or “rightsized” road system would be 20-30% smaller than their existing system – obligating the reclamation of up to 120,000 miles of unneeded system roads, and thousands of non-system roads as well.

Until 2010, however, that long-term roads policy was just gathering dust. They are finally conducting the assessment, and expect, by September 2015, to have identified a fiscally and ecologically sustainable minimum road system on each national forest. This work is critical, because it will ensure that future funds dedicated to road reclamation are well-spent.

When road removal first started in the Redwood country, no one could have predicted that it would be adopted by multiple land management agencies as a critical tool for watershed restoration. But investment in this work yields enormous returns for people, fish and wildlife. While 20 years doesn’t seem like such a long time, the wildland road management world has changed profoundly – one can only imagine where the next 20 years will take us.

-Bethanie Walder is Wildlands CPR's Executive Director.


Dam Removal in the Pacific Northwest
By Thomas O’Keefe, American Whitewater

This past fall the National Park Service began chiseling away at Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams on the Elwha River. In a more dramatic display, PacifiCorp blasted a hole at the base of Condit Dam, draining the reservoir in an hour to restore a free-flowing White Salmon River. Both of these changes were decades in the making and began as “crazy ideas” by some passionate salmon and river advocates. But these river restoration efforts are part of a larger conversation that is happening regionally and nationally where the impacts of dams are evaluated relative to the benefits they provide.

A river without dams will always be healthier than one plugged up by walls of concrete, but our society depends on dams for drinking water that flows from our faucets, low-carbon hydropower energy that keeps our lights on, and irrigation water for farms that grow our food. At one time not so long ago, dams were thought by many to be permanent features on the landscape — it was only a handful of river advocates and geomorphologists who understood that dams and the reservoirs behind them have finite lives. The situation began to change in the 1990s, however, as dam owners began to critically evaluate the cost of bringing their dams up to modern environmental standards. While dams like the Elwha were able to ignore laws of a century ago designed to protect salmon populations, the listing of salmon under the Endangered Species Act and an honest discussion about what it would take for recovery put dam removal on the table in a serious way.  What began as a wild idea and dream of fans of Edward Abbey playing out Hayduke fantasies, became a business decision for dam owners. The simple fact was that the liability and cost of  modernizing dams like the Elwha and Condit — specifically providing salmon passage — greatly exceeded the value of the small amount of power they produced.

The dramatic removal of the Condit dam, on the White Salmon river. Photos courtesy of PacificCorp.


The same scenario has played out on other rivers in the region. Recent dam removals on the Hood River, Sandy River, and Rogue River in Oregon; Clark Fork River in Montana, Trout Creek in Washington; and Bear River in Idaho are all examples where the impacts of the dams were high relative to the services they were designed to provide. In all cases it took consistent and sustained pressure on the part of those who value and enjoy free-flowing rivers, but it was ultimately a realization by project owners that their dams were simply not economically viable. This is not to say all dams should be removed. In the majority of cases operations can be modernized — in several cases hydropower projects have increased generation efficiency, improving power production while improving instream flows and mitigating impacts. Hydropower projects like those on the Skagit, Pend Oreille, and Deschutes Rivers clearly have impacts but these rivers provide significant power output for major regional urban centers like Seattle and Portland and new agreements provide the revenue for meaningful mitigation measures that would not have been economically viable on low power dams like those on the Elwha or White Salmon.

Against this backdrop of success many have wondered what the future holds. The Klamath on the Oregon-California border is another great example of a hydropower project that produces very little electric power (just 78 MW for four massive dams) relative to its environmental impacts. It represents one of the more significant restoration opportunities in the Northwest. While building the support and political will to make the significant up-front investment in dam removal is a challenge, the long-term economic and societal benefits of a restored river are clear. The Snake River dams of Washington State impede access to some of the best spawning habitat in the entire region and it is clear that the long-term viability of Lewiston, Idaho as a seaport is  questionable. What has been lacking for this river is the forum and political leadership for a stakeholder process that brings everyone to the table for an honest discussion.

Dam removal is exciting and there are certainly more dams to be removed but the real lesson from the Elwha and White Salmon is that ambitious crazy ideas are possible. Challenging the status quo can be a long endeavor requiring a focused commitment, but these successes are an inspiration for what we can do when everyone sits down to work together on solutions.

— Thomas O’Keefe is the Pacific Northwest Stewardship Director for American Whitewater. Besides having a PhD in aquatic ecology and having completed research projects on topics such as the structural development of riparian forests along large floodplain rivers, Tom is an avid whitewater paddler and has traveled the globe in search of great rivers.


Grazing Reform: About to Happen?
By Mary O’Brien, Grand Canyon Trust

While the Forest Service has moved toward the watershed and landscape levels for much of its forest health, water development, and transportation planning in the last two decades, livestock grazing has largely been stuck in the ecologically and bureaucratically broken system of allotment-by-allotment annual management. Similarly, while multiple stakeholders have become regularly acknowledged in forest and transportation planning, livestock grazing has remained largely a closed shop between the Forest Service and livestock permittees. As one Utah Forest Supervisor put it in 2011, “We’re stuck in the 1950s with grazing.” This sentiment is shared by many in the agency, particularly among its fish and wildlife biologists, botanists, and ecologists; and many District Rangers and Supervisors. It can be a pretty dismal enterprise, trying to turn the USS Forest Service on management of the single most pervasive damaging use of any on the national forests.

This could change in a major way for the better in 2012, though. First, the long-time Director of Range in the Washington Office, who was less than interested in any grazing  management changes, retired in May 2011. The appointment of a new director is imminent, and if it is someone who is interested in moving grazing management into alignment with current Forest Service commitments on watersheds, climate change, and collaboration, the whole game could change.


Cows making themselves at home on the bank of the John Day river. Photo courtesy of Bureau of Land Management.

Second, the draft forest planning rule (due to be finalized around the beginning of 2012) is rife with references to collaboration. The agency will have to admit that collaboration on grazing  management has to mean more than leaning against the truck with permittees or taking threatening phone calls from rural county commissioners or congressional aides. Conservation groups, economists, hunters, anglers, hikers, bird watchers, scientists (to say nothing of the wildlife they represent) – all have valid places at the tables where decisions are made about the how many, wheres, whens, and whys of livestock.

Third, the Forest Service is admirably outspoken regarding the reality of climate change and the consequent need to increase resilience of the national forests, particularly with regard to water, one of its twin founding commitments (timber being the other). Livestock grazing does essentially nothing but exacerbate the scariest impacts of climate change, whether higher temperatures, deeper droughts, or more intense precipitation events on droughty, grazed slopes. The case can be made with overwhelming scientific literature that so many livestock impacts, e.g., bare ground; incised streams; weakened plants; depleted native diversity; the favoring of invasive, exotic weeds; generation of dust (e.g., dust on snow); and compromised wildlife habitat (e.g., for sagebrush- and riparian-dependent birds) simply make every bad climate scenario worse.

So far, any administrative changes to grazing have arisen largely via acre-by -acre, allotment-by-allotment or deal-by-deal congressional arrangements to end livestock grazing via third-party permit buyouts, as in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument and Owyhee Wilderness legislation. The Forest Service has had to revisit some of its grazing decisions via litigation, especially that brought by Western Watersheds, WildEarth Guardians, and Center for Biological Diversity. On the other hand, the Forest Service routinely fails to seriously consider alternatives for improved grazing management submitted by conservationists via National Environmental Policy Act processes. At some point the Forest Service needs to own grazing reform rather than just being kicked around on it.

And the Bureau of Land Management? Witness its 2011 decision to prevent scientists from including livestock grazing as a “change agent” in its development of rapid ecological assessments on BLM lands throughout the Western U.S. That’s akin to studying trends in U.S. obesity while excluding consideration of people’s diets.

Again, this all might change. Heretofore, such exclusion of grazing impacts has been agreed upon while leaning against the truck, but this time it became public (Wall Street Journal, NPR, et al.) via the science integrity policy the BLM had adopted (all federal agencies must adopt such policies by December 17, 2011). Thanks to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility for submitting a formal complaint under the policy, because the exclusion of grazing from BLM’s ecological assessments of its lands is now almost certainly doomed.

One of the more pervasive signs in the west. Photo courtesy of Bureau of Land Management.

On a bright note, conservationists have been able to gain some third-party voluntary grazing permit buyouts. These have allowed conservation buyers and organizations to pay a federal grazing permittee willing to give up their grazing and reallocate forage from livestock to wildlife and watersheds. Congress has enacted legislation that makes such waivers permanent on public land in and near the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon and several Wilderness Areas in the Owyhee Country of Idaho. Legislation is necessary to prevent the management agency from ever  reissuing the grazing permit, so a conservation funder is assured that their money is well spent. Congress is considering additional grazing permit buyout facilitation associated with proposed expansion of the Oregon Caves National Monument in Oregon and designation of several Wilderness Areas in central Idaho.

The Forest Service and BLM are similarly able to administratively allow for long-term or permanent rest for allotments via voluntary grazing permit exchanges with conservation buyers or retirements. This option could be utilized much more frequently than it has been in the past, and it would allow for far more varied management of our national public lands. Perhaps the best contribution conservationists can make at this point is documenting with photographs, data, and stories the visibly astonishing land values, ecosystem services, and simple beauty that are gained wherever livestock grazing management has been significantly altered or retired from public land parcels.

Get to the grazing decision table early and often; you belong there because the fish, wildlife, flowers, streams, springs, and meadows need you there.

— Mary O’Brien is Utah Forests Program Manager with the Grand Canyon Trust.