THE QUIET REVOLUTION TO RESTORE OUR AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS
By Bruce Babbitt

I would like to reflect upon our stewardship of aquatic landscapes: the rivers, lakes, and wetlands that link and nourish the watersheds we inhabit. It is the Nature Conservancy that has sounded the alarm, warning that our freshwater and wetland ecosystems are among the world's most imperiled. For example, one of its recent publications reports the startling news that roughly one third of all fish, two thirds of all crayfish, and three quarters of the bivalve freshwater mussels in America are rare or threatened with extinction.

After five years of first-hand experience with watersheds throughout the country, I share its sense of urgency. We cannot continue with piecemeal efforts. Instead we must undertake to restore entire watersheds, using new methods, creating partnerships, and calling for renewed public participation. We must undo and reverse ecological damage that has accumulated over the years.

To illustrate both the urgency of our task, and the possibility of success, I would like to discuss several large scale restoration efforts that we have begun in this administration and then relate them to efforts underway at many levels all over the country. For I believe that watershed restoration is a powerful new idea with the capacity to transform our relation to the lands and waters that sustain us.

This administration began in South Florida because it was the most visible and urgent of many impending watershed disasters. Everglades National Park was subsisting on life support in urgent need of attention. That life support system, consisting of a few small projects designed to pump more water through the desiccated hydrologic arteries of the park, was barely keeping the patient alive. With each passing year the natural monitors of the patient's health -- great flocks of wading birds, egrets, anhingas, storks, and herons -- had begun to flatline.

The Everglades were quite simply the victim of a long campaign to "drain the swamps" -- swamps that once poured their overflow waters south into the Everglades and Florida Bay. Draining the swamps was the engineering equivalent of the medieval practice of treating patients by bleeding them. And in the process of severing and bleeding these hydrologic arteries, they were draining the very life out of the Everglades.

Our strategy, to restore the Everglades ecosystem by reconnecting those hydrologic arteries, began by bringing all the Federal agencies together behind a common restoration plan. Our able co-leader is the Corps of Engineers, ironically a pioneer in the early efforts to de-water these same landscapes of South Florida. We soon learned, however, that for effective watershed restoration, we needed state and local partners. In 1994, the Florida legislature, at the urging of Governor Chiles, passed the Everglades Forever Act that created a $1,000-million fund to clean up the contaminated agricultural runoff that was causing much of that problem. The Florida commitment, backed by an outpouring of public support, prompted Congress to legislate support for the largest watershed restoration plan ever undertaken.

Our South Florida restoration effort still has a long way to go, but we have already learned some important watershed restoration rules that should apply all across the country:

• First, the most basic lesson is about the nature of water. Water doesn't stay still for very long. It is always in motion, from sky to land, across and through the land, out to sea, and back to sky in an endless cycle. And that means that you can't efficiently restore just one piece of a river; to fix any one part, you have to consider the whole watershed.

• Second, the only way you can fix a watershed is by creating partnerships -- between governments, between landowners large and small, among all the stakeholders on the watershed. Just as all parts of a watershed are related, so must all residents of that watershed be part of the restoration effort.

• Third, watershed restoration must be a visible process that captures and holds public attention. Every community values its native heritage and believes in its future. And they are ready to support bold restoration plans.

Large-scale, federal-state-local partnerships demonstrate the full potential of watershed restoration, especially its power to capture the public imagination. It can make allies of sworn enemies. It can produce funding out of nowhere. It can reverse harmful trends with such speed and to such a degree that may surprise us.

Consider the Central Valley of California, a basin of complex river systems that, on the East Coast, would extend from Massachusetts all the way down to South Carolina. The great campaign there was not "drain the swamps," but rather "water the desert." As that desert valley bloomed into vast tracts of irrigated agriculture, the rivers shriveled and dried up.

As rivers like the San Joaquin disappeared into irrigation canals, the great salmon runs that once reached into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains disappeared. Salt water began to invade the delta. Agricultural drainage laced with selenium killed and disfigured thousands of migratory birds at the Kesterson refuge. The water wars continued for half a century as Californians quarreled, unable to resolve the conflicts that divided urban water users to the south, farmers in the Central Valley, and fisheries advocates in the north.

The watershed restoration of California bears a striking parallel to that in Florida. First, the administration put the federal house in order. Then we joined together with state agencies, irrigation districts, farmers, environmentalists, and fishermen to negotiate a restoration framework -- known as the Bay Delta Accord. Coordinating our efforts, the legislature in Sacramento placed a restoration bond issue -- also $1,000 million -- on the ballot in 1996. In a year of austerity, tight budgets, and conservative fiscal policy it passed with ease. Armed with such strong public support we went together to the Congress, which in 1997 provided matching funds. The result was, again, a massive restoration program to bring California rivers and wetlands back to life by dedicating water to restore and maintain stream flows, re-watering wildlife refuges, moving levees back so that rivers could flow free across their natural flood plain, and screening irrigation canals to protect migrating fish.

That all sounds like a complicated and often messy political task. But it boils down to simple and timeless values. Thirty six centuries ago, Emperor Yu of China advised, "To protect your rivers, protect your mountains." That same rule applies today. To restore our aquatic species, let us look beyond the water's edge out onto the land that borders it. For the two are inseparable. What happens on that land inevitably is reflected in our streams and rivers:

• In the Pacific Northwest: To replenish trout, coho, chinook, and sockeye salmon we looked past the water's edge to create large connective forested buffers along banks of streams and tributaries in over five and a half million hectares.

• In Chesapeake Bay: To stop fish kills from a bacteria called pfiesteria, we are offering incentives to landowners to return the borders of their farms into buffers of native trees and vegetation that sop up fertilizers and animal waste before they can drain into river estuaries.

• In the Sierra, Rockies, and Appalachians: To replenish native aquatic species in a half million kilometers of streams, we match federal funds and land management experts with local private and nonprofit projects to restore the damaged mountains which bleed into them.

• In Western range lands: To bring back rare native trout and to protect the endangered willow flycatcher, we have joined cooperative range partnerships to modify livestock grazing rotations, build riparian fences, and replant willows and aspen, now yellowing in the sun.

Until very recently there was not much concern for effects of dams on our natural environment. Today, looking back on decades of one-dam-at-a-time river modification, we are coming to see the cumulative effects: The Colorado River no longer runs to the sea. Its great delta, about which Aldo Leopold wrote such moving essays, is now a vast dry salt flat. Celilo Falls, the most storied of all Indian ceremonial and fishing sites, has vanished beneath the placid reservoirs of the Columbia River. In the Sierra Nevada, the Truckee River was plugged to raise Lake Tahoe an extra 1.8 meters. Even in Yosemite National Park, John Muir's sacred "Cathedral," they dammed the Merced River at Mirror Lake in order to provide visitors with a better reflection of Half Dome.

Only now have we come to appreciate the systemic costs of building more than 75,000 dams in this country in this century alone. We pay these costs in many forms: The destruction of salmon runs in New England and the West; the crashing shad and herring runs of the Susquehanna River; the vanishing wetlands that sustain migratory birds in the Mississippi Flyway; beach erosion in the Grand Canyon; and lost nesting and gathering habitat of sandhill cranes and shorebirds along the Platte River in Nebraska.

For these reasons it is appropriate to think of dams as having a ledger with both benefits and environmental costs. And as part of watershed restoration efforts it is always appropriate to ask whether a given dam can be operated in a more river friendly mode.

The Grand Canyon is one place where we have asked that question and answered in the affirmative. Last year, the Bureau of Reclamation opened the gates and sent a huge surge of water, an artificial flood, crashing down through the Colorado River. The idea behind that was to mimic the natural spring flooding of the pre-dam river so as to stir sediment up and rebuild eroded beach habitat downstream in the Grand Canyon.

And on occasion a careful look at the ledger of costs and benefits may bring us to conclude that a dam should simply be removed.

In 1992, Congress authorized a study of the removal of two small 70-year-old dams at the mouth of the Elwha River. These dams blocked salmon runs of 300,000 from spawning up 112 kilometers into the heart of Olympic National Park. The Park Service, after careful study, has concluded that forgoing a small amount of energy in an area where electric power is now in surplus would be a small price to pay for restoring one of our great national parks to its pristine state, where the streams are again swarming with wild salmon, providing food and sustenance for bears, bald eagles, raptors, and, of course, for the human spirit.

In the final analysis, however, the restoration of our streams and watersheds lies in the hands of the communities of people who live and work on that watershed. And there are more and more examples of people coming together, gathering the stakeholder groups such as farmers, woodland owners, power companies, local industries, developers, and environmentalists to begin the process of looking first into their river, with fresh eyes in a different light, then following that water as it moves up through its tributaries and out across the landscape to ask: How do we restore a healthier watershed? What can we do to improve it?

President Clinton, in his State of the Union address, announced his intention to designate 10 American streams as National Heritage Rivers. His purpose is to recognize outstanding efforts by local communities who come together to reclaim their river heritage by restoring waterfronts, cleaning up rivers, protecting riparian zones, replenishing fisheries, and managing watersheds to maintain healthy waters.

By his Heritage Rivers initiative, President Clinton is reminding us that local communities and individual citizens are the moving spirit of watershed restoration. Americans are once again awakening to the connection between their communities and the natural environment. We are once again gathering by the waters, seeking renewal of land and spirit. All of our rivers are Heritage Rivers -- they flow through our lives and our history as surely as they flow from highland to tidewater. And in that process we are discovering that we have the power to forge a new and more respectful relation with God's creation.