Why more water for wildlife means more water for people.

by Jane Braxton Little

Jim Wilcox is sitting on a rock near a quarter-acre pond watching a pair of willow flycatchers flit in and out of the brush across the water. The 15-inch rainbow trout he spied a week ago does not flash on this summer morning, but Wilcox knows it’s down there somewhere beneath the surface.

He allows himself a small smile. Three years ago his pond-side perch was in the middle of a sagebrush field high in the headwaters of California’s Feather River, 170 miles northeast of Sacramento. Red Clover Creek trickled through in a braided network of rutted gullies.

A century of logging, road-building, and intensive overgrazing had reduced this and other meadows throughout the Sierra Nevada to baked and barren flats. Today the stream meanders through a meadow lush with native grasses and small ponds.

Photo by Jane Braxton Little (reprinted with permission)

Wilcox, a former logger, is part of a 25-year effort to restore all of the meadows within the upper Feather River basin, an area larger than Delaware. As program manager for the Feather River Coordinated Resource Management group, he works with ranchers, timber owners, anglers, and federal and state agency officials—anyone who shares an interest in improving the land and the water that cascades down to the Sacramento Valley and the delta that empties into San Francisco Bay. At a time when climate change is putting unprecedented pressure on water supplies, these mountain meadows may be a first step in preserving both the environment and the economy. Restoring them helps revitalize the watershed and wildlife, and it also helps sustain the downstream farms, ranches, towns, and cities that depend on the alpine water.

Water, after all, delivers most of the effects of global warming: melting icebergs, rising sea levels, lower stream flows, reduced snowpacks, and increased tropical storms. Throughout the American West, communities, cities, and entire state economies have relied on mountain snowpacks, which replenish the streams that feed water supplies. Now, as climate change is altering historic snowfall patterns, land managers are turning to meadows to help reduce the effects of a warming planet.

Nature’s Reservoirs

Mountain meadows store water, acting as natural reservoirs that hold back floodwaters. By slowing the heavy spring flows and releasing them gradually over the dry summer months, healthy watersheds can increase the quantity of water available downstream.

In California, where agriculture is the economic mainstay, the impacts of climate change could be devastating. The Sierra Nevada snowpack supplies two-thirds of the state’s water needs. The Sierra’s 22 major river systems nourish farms and orchards in California’s Central Valley, which produces

Photo by Jane Braxton Little (reprinted with permission)

8 percent of the nation’s crops. Over the last century, however, late spring runoff has declined 25 percent. Scientists predict even more dramatic reductions over the next 90 years, as global warming restricts snowfall to the highest elevations. The timing of peak snowmelt throughout the range is already earlier and could occur a full two weeks sooner by the end of the century, according to climate scientists.

Scientists and land managers are launching innovative plans to maximize the storage capacity of meadows throughout the Sierras, which stretch 400 miles along the state border with Nevada. The most ambitious project involves nearly 300,000 acres of floodplains, an area about 20 times the size of Manhattan. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit created by Congress, is providing $15 million and coordination for work in as many as 20 Sierra Nevada watersheds over the next 10 years. Along with restoring fish and wildlife habitat, their goal is to continue delivering fresh water to the rest of the state.

“Everyone agrees that California will have less snow and more rain in coming decades. There is no doubt that water is the crisis here and now,” says Timothy Male, the foundation’s director of wildlife and habitat conservation.

The diminishing snowpack is likely to provoke more skirmishes in the statewide water wars that pit the north against the south, farmers against environmentalists, and rural interests against urban. The underlying problem is a demand for water that has outgrown today’s supplies, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told The Los Angeles Times. California, he said, is “sitting on a ticking time bomb, and you better get your act together, because otherwise the bomb’s going to go off.”

Making Up for Lost Snowpack

The Feather River watershed lies at the northern end of the Sierra range among its lower peaks. The impacts of diminishing snowpacks will take their toll here first, says Wilcox, who has lived in these mountains since the 1970s. The effects on the quantity and timing of the downstream flow will be dramatic, he says. That puts even more pressure on restoring meadows in the watershed that provides more than 5 percent of California’s freshwater supply.

Wilcox wasn’t thinking about climate change when he began working with the Feather River alliance 25 years ago. The group’s focus was on the erosion that was choking the river. Instead of conventional dredging of reservoirs and riverbeds, a handful of local entrepreneurs decided to try reducing the sediment buildup where it began: upstream in the tributary creeks and meadows.

In 1985, just before winter closed the roads, they built four small U-shaped rock and gravel dams in Red Clover Creek, 60 miles above a series of hydroelectric dams owned by Pacific Gas & Electric Company. The dams were designed to slow the water flow and trap in-stream sediment. That winter tested the experiment. The 20 inches of rain that fell in five days washed out century-old bridges and roads. To nearly everyone’s surprise, the dams not only survived; they also held back their share of sediment.

Emboldened by that success, the small coalition of county officials and businessmen expanded to include ranchers, environmentalists, and state and federal officials. Although many of them had been at odds over land management issues, they realized they could only heal the watershed if they cooperated. Wilcox had been a firsthand witness to stream dredging and other practices harmful to ranchlands and forests. A man more at home in a pickup truck than an office, he was eager to be a part of reversing the damage. “I believe in watershed restoration. It has always been in my bones,” he says. And that became the Feather River coalition’s goal: restoring entire meadows along with the creeks flowing through them.

Among the methods they have pioneered is a low-tech procedure known as “pond and plug.” Crews with heavy equipment dig several of the channels wider and deeper, creating small ponds. They use the excavated dirt to fill the remaining gullies back to the original ground level. Along Red Clover Creek, the groundwater began rising almost immediately after the crews finished plugging the channels. By the following spring the ponds were flush with the water that would otherwise have raced downstream in late winter. Above and below the pond where Wilcox sits, the creek has found its way across the meadow in a natural, meandering channel.

The Feather River group has completed 66 restoration projects, which include 3,900 acres of meadow and

44 miles of stream. Since the work began, the data from a series of permanent monitoring stations show that the flow out of restored meadows is greater and lasts longer into the summer. Water temperatures have dropped despite an increase in average air temperatures, and stream turbidity, a measure of the amount of dirt and debris suspended in the water, has decreased to almost half pre-project levels. Groundwater, which never reached the surface before the restoration work, is now consistently at or above ground level for at least part of the year.

From Water to Wildlife

The Feather River projects have inspired the much larger Sierra-wide meadow restoration coordinated by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Private landowners, universities, local and national resource organizations, and the U.S. Forest Service are working together to design strategies that will raise the water table and slow the flow out of mountain meadows. In an area from the Pit River in the north to the Kern River in the south, they are evaluating potential projects to determine which will yield the maximum benefits to fish and wildlife and the greatest quantities of water. Their goal is to restore at least 20,000 acres a year by 2014, says Male.

“Nationwide, we’re looking for tangible actions that address the realities of climate change. This is one of the best examples in America of a restoration initiative that can directly help people and wildlife adapt to our changing planet,” Male says.

Leave it to Beavers? Nature's water engineers can restore river channels.

The plan, over the first five years, calls for restoring 60,000 acres of meadow. As the water table rises and meadows soak up more water from melting snows, native habitat lost for decades should return. Among the endangered species expected to benefit are the yellow warbler, Yosemite toad, Lahontan cutthroat and golden trout, Townsend’s big-eared bat, and the Sierra Nevada red fox.

But the effects of widespread meadow restoration will also flow downstream to farmers and other water users. The Forest Service manages about half of the Sierra’s degraded meadowlands. The agency is determining which of the 11,700 separate meadows in 10 national forests need to be restored. All are located on streams important for water supply, says Barry Hill, a regional hydrologist. Using foundation funds, the Forest Service hopes to determine the amount of additional water available for downstream use once the meadows return to health.

The Sierra projects are unique among large-scale water restoration efforts in the United States because of their potential to increase the amount of water available in a river system, says Male. Comprehensive efforts to restore the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary, focus on improving the quality of water flows throughout the 64,000-square-mile region. In the Everglades, a wide-ranging plan to revive a dying ecosystem aims to improve the distribution of flows throughout 18,000 square miles in southern Florida. Along the lower Mississippi River and coastal Louisiana, the largest wetlands restoration effort is designed to reverse the pattern of land erosion by buffering against floods and hurricanes and, like all of the major projects, improving wildlife habitat.

Just how much more water healthy Sierra Nevada meadows can deliver is a matter of debate. Some scientists believe the boosts in stream flow may be absorbed by increases in vegetation in the new, restoration-created habitats. Others believe restoration could contribute up to 6.5 billion gallons of additional water storage throughout the California range. Over time, says Male, these restored meadows could hold 16 to 160 billion gallons of fresh water. That’s equal to the size of one of the new dams state officials have proposed for construction to offset the state’s declining snowpack.

Restoring mountain meadows will not solve California’s water crisis. That will take a collective commitment from the agriculture industry, from municipalities, and from everyone who depends on the Sierra snowmelt for their livelihoods and their lives. It will also require more political will than elected officials have traditionally marshaled. Wilcox believes the public recognizes the value of healthy watersheds. He is optimistic that stream restoration will become routine as more people understand its importance upstream and downstream.

Meanwhile, the benefits to wildlife are unequivocal. In the wet meadow surrounding Red Clover Creek, the number of waterfowl species has doubled since Wilcox and his crews completed the pond-and-plug project. He has seen buffleheads, gadwalls, and two species of teal breeding in early spring. Sandhill cranes, willow flycatchers and 10 other species on state and federal watch lists have returned to the area. Walking through Red Clover Valley from the pond, Wilcox bends down to study a clump of dancing hairgrass, one of a handful of plant types that have regenerated from seeds dormant in the soil for decades. He has yet to see elk but he has found their tracks—the first in the area in decades.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Jane Braxton Little wrote this article for Water Solutions, the Summer 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Jane covers natural resource issues from California’s northern Sierra Nevada. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Nature Conservancy, and Audubon, where she is a contributing editor.

Interested?

• American Rivers, a conservation organization based in Washington, D.C., focuses on protecting rivers, wildlife, and water supply and quality. The organization’s Web site also contains information about meadow restoration in California.
• The nonprofit National Fish and Wildlife Foundation provides grants to conservation projects across the United States.
• To find out more about the Feather River project, visit the Feather River Coordinated Resource Management Group.

How the tribes of the Klamath River stood up for the salmon—and won.

by Alice Outwater

It was a dramatic scene in a classic Western water war: Thousands of dead fish, washed up on the shores of the Klamath River. A move meant to help farmers—using Klamath water to irrigate crops—triggered a loss for Indian tribes and the salmon.

That was five years ago, when a detente in the battle was nowhere in sight.

As with many Western rivers, irrigators own nearly all of the water in the Klamath. The river, which straddles the border between Oregon and California, irrigates fields and generates electricity, but it also serves as fish habitat.

The Klamath River was once the third largest salmon fishery on the West Coast, producing roughly a million salmon a year. The upper reaches of the Klamath were originally enormous wetlands and lakes that served as a stopover for millions of waterfowl migrating along the Pacific Flyway, a nursery for tens of millions of fish, and home to two unique species of suckers.

The conflict between Klamath-area farmers and fishermen has lasted for decades, complete with lawsuits and public relations campaigns, a disastrous political intervention, and a thrilling finale. But this year, after 15 years of meetings, an agreement was forged to allow the parties to share water; a related agreement calls for removing four dams. The linchpin? The Yurok and Klamath tribes.

Indian treaties from the 19th century give the Yurok and Klamath the right to speak for the salmon. Through these treaties, the tribes established the salmon’s right to water and required that the river be managed with the health of migrating salmon in mind. Since Indian treaty rights predate the farmers’ rights, salmon have priority over crops.

In 1994, the Yurok formed a fisheries program to develop the legal, political, and biological expertise to restore the Klamath Basin. “We’re salmon people,” says Yurok tribal member Troy Fletcher. “The existence of the Yurok people depends on the health of the Klamath and its fisheries. This is something the creator provided the tribe, and it is the responsibility of the tribe to have healthy fisheries.”

But first, a deal had to be made.

How the Water Was Won

Water is scarce in most Western states, and the laws governing its use date all the way back to the mining days of the 1800s, when mine owners diverted the high mountain streams to power mills that crushed ore; open-pit miners also used water to separate gold from gravel. But rather than allow one person to divert the entire stream, individual mining camps divided the flow into water rights based on the location of the diversion, the amount of water taken, and the date the right was established. Water courts, set up shortly after Western territories became states, enforced these rules. A water right keeps its original date no matter how many times it’s bought and sold; earlier rights have priority.

When ranchers and farmers moved in, salable water rights worked as a way to cope with low rainfall. Farmers without a stream running through their property, for example, could buy rights to use water from a neighbor’s stream. Ranchers and farmers own between

75 percent and 95 percent of the surface flow in Western states, while government-funded dams have helped provide water for holders of more recent water rights—cities. By the 1960s, most Western rivers were dammed, and irrigators with frontier-era water rights drained many rivers. Since then, fish populations have crashed, and rivers have become battlegrounds for fishermen, farmers, ranchers, tribes, utilities, businesses, environmentalists, and recreationists.

With modern irrigation systems, farmers can cultivate the same acreage using much less water. But according to mining-era laws, you lose rights to water you don’t use. So across the West, farmers grow wet-weather crops on arid land with inefficient irrigation methods in order to avoid losing their water rights. Meanwhile, cities run dry. In a reasonable world, some of a river’s flow would be diverted for agriculture, and some of the flow would remain in the river to nurture the fish. But when water is privately owned, those management decisions are more difficult. Take the Klamath Basin, where farmers own 93 percent of the surface water.

Starting in 1905, the federal government began draining much of the Klamath Basin wetlands and lakes for farmland. Today, farmers there cultivate about 500,000 acres of irrigated cropland adjacent to six national wildlife refuges, which serve as a stopover for migratory birds and shelter the largest wintering population of bald eagles in the contiguous United States. The Bureau of Reclamation built two dams on the Klamath and dammed many of its tributaries, while utilities built three others downstream. Upstream farmers divert most of the water to irrigate crops, and manure and fertilizers contaminate the river’s reduced flow. Dams slow the flow, the water heats up, and pollutants breed algae that color the river a bright pea green every summer. The river is so badly damaged that the Klamath’s coho salmon face extinction.

Enter the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Native American treaty rights. The ESA protects the habitat that endangered plants and animals need to survive. The Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker, two species of formerly plentiful lake fish in the Klamath Basin, were listed as endangered in 1988; the Klamath coho salmon was listed in 1997. According to the ESA, these fish have the right to survive and need water for habitat. And by treaty, the Yurok and Klamath tribes have the right to catch them. When the Yurok treaty was ratified in 1855, the tribe retained its right to fish for salmon. In 1864, the Klamath tribe was granted a federally reserved fishing right. Since water rights are based on prior appropriation, the Indian treaty rights to fish trump the farmers’ rights to irrigate.

During the drought of 1992, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shut off the irrigation water from Clear Lake to protect endangered suckers and was sued by a group of farmers and ranchers from the Langell Valley. More lawsuits followed.

In 1995, U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., assembled the Klamath Basin stakeholders and asked them to resolve the water impasse. Local businesses, farmers, ranchers, utilities, conservation groups, the commercial fishing industry, and the tribes were represented in the working group, and Hatfield promised that if they came up with a solution, he’d make it happen. He retired two years later, but the meetings continued.

In 2001, the Klamath Basin received half its normal rainfall, and a group of environmentalists and the fisheries industry sued the Bureau of Reclamation to limit water deliveries to farmers. Scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service concurred, and the Bureau of Reclamation cut off water to the 1,200 farmers in the Klamath’s upper basin. The farmers lost their crops, for which the government compensated them $36 million.

The next year was dry as well but the farmers had no intention of losing their water a second time. The Klamath Bucket Brigade, a grassroots organization of farmers, had a message for Washington, D.C., from rural America: They claimed that the Endangered Species Act threatens the nation’s economic health, and rural property rights were being abused. Their plight struck a chord with the Bush administration, and the irrigators got their full measure of water in 2002. Interior Secretary Gale Norton flew in to open the ditch gates herself. By the end of the summer, low water and high temperatures triggered a bacterial infection that left at least 34,000 dead salmon rotting in the Klamath River.

The waste of those tens of thousands of chinook salmon—some of the last Klamath salmon on Earth—shocked all the parties involved into recognizing that even though farmers held rights, what was happening was wrong.

Everyone was “totally frustrated,” said Fletcher, who helped negotiate the agreement for the Yurok. “They were broke, and beat up by Congress and the administration. All of the parties tried litigation. All tried political routes. And in the end, it turns out that the communities in the basin are the ones who know best how to solve the problems they’re faced with.”

On Feb. 18, 2010, all 28 parties signed an agreement to restore the Klamath Basin. “The Klamath River, which for years was synonymous with controversy, is now a stunning example of how cooperation and partnership can resolve difficult conflicts,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in announcing the agreement. The 369-page plan includes habitat restoration and flow management. Water is provided for agriculture, but the levees around the lakes will be breached, wetlands restored, and, according to the companion agreement, four dams removed to allow salmon access to hundreds of miles of spawning streams while improving water quality.

The plans amount to a compromise; no interest group got all it wanted. And federal money still must be set aside.

It’s a daunting task, Fletcher said. “Now we have to make it happen.”

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Alice Outwater wrote this article for Water Solutions, the Summer 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Alice is a writer based in Durango, Colo. She is the author of Water: A Natural History and co-author of The Cartoon Guide to the Environment.

Interested?

A summary of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement is available from the Yurok Tribe: www.yuroktribe.org/documents/summaryofproposedKlamathBasinRestorationAgreement.pdf

He began by describing California’s ten hydrologic regions, which all drain into the Delta (originally a freshwater marsh).  He described the extraordinary history of engineering projects that led to the  fragile, levee-encircled Delta we have today (fifteen feet below sea-level in some places).

“The Department of Water Resources has understood for a long time that the worst case scenario for the Delta is a significant earthquake centered there, which could collapse all the levees at once.”

“In five minutes,” he said, “the city of Los Angeles could lose its entire water supply.” He couldn’t venture a guess for how long.

For this reason, and others, he suggests that the Peripheral Canal would probably be a good idea.

He opposes the $11+ billion Water Bond on the November ballot, and he repeated the phrase I first heard from him at A.P.P.L.E.’s recent water presentation: “In California, water runs uphill toward money.”

Nick loves his subject, and he could have gone on for hours. He is so engaging that his audience could probably have also listened to and questioned him for hours.

Take heart, those of you who have not yet heard Nick Wilcox: He is one of the featured presenters on March 6th at the Nevada City Methodist Church for the conference, “Water: Sacred and Profaned.”

Here are the details, followed by the poster.

A one-day Conference on “Water: Sacred and Profaned” will be held at the Nevada City United Methodist Church on Saturday, March 6, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The Conference will focus on the growing scarcity of fresh water, water as a right, and the need to preserve water for humans and all living things. It will feature presentations, discussion, film, Native American drumming, song, and ritual.

The Conference is being organized by Earth Justice Ministries, a local faith-based nonprofit, and cosponsored by the Church and Society Committees of Nevada City and Grass Valley United Methodist Churches, Unitarian Universalist Church of the Mountains Social Action Committee, Peace and Social Justice Committee of the Grass Valley Friends Meeting, and Pax Christi of Nevada County. Conference organizers have put forward the following premise which speakers will address:

“Water is sacred, essential for all life. Used as a sacrament in various religions, it is an expression of divine love. But now, Earth’s waters are being profaned. Our premise is that water should be held in trust for the common good and not monopolized, privatized, or sold as a commodity. Access to water is a basic right of humans and all living things.”

Sharon Delgado, a United Methodist clergywoman, will speak from a perspective of water as sacred, and will present an overview of threats to water — how water is being “profaned.” She will point to people’s movements for protection of water around the world.

Keynote speaker Nancy Price is from Defending California for Life, a project of Alliance for Democracy. Ms. Price will speak about global and statewide issues related to water preservation in the context of her understanding of water as sacred. She will cover the upcoming vote on the California Water Bond, climate change and the rights of nature, and implications of the recent Supreme Court decision that strengthens corporate rights. Find out more here.

Speaker Roberto Garcia is the Board President of the local Tsi-Akim Maidu nonprofit organization. He will speak on the value of water from an Indigenous perspective, and on local issues that the Tsi-Akim Maidu are working on, including healing the waters from mercury pollution caused by past mining, their annual Calling Back the Salmon ritual, and attaining federal recognition for the tribe.

Afternoon speakers include local hydrologist Steve Baker, producer of KVMR’s series, “Living Water,” NID Board members Nick Wilcox and Nancy Webber, SYRCL Board President and CLAIM-GV Board member Heidi Hall, and David Edwards of the Nevada City Water District. They will address the themes of the conference and apply their understanding to local issues of water preservation.

Native American drumming will be provided by local group Three River Drum, with Mignon Geli on flute. Hilary Marckx, a United Church of Christ pastor and songwriter from Geyserville, will perform and lead singing. The day will include a “healing the waters” ritual and a film. Lunch will be provided.

Admission to the Conference is by voluntary donation from $0 to $25. For information go to www.earth-justice.org. Pre-registration is desired but not required. To register email water@earth-justice.org or call 274-1320.

]]> http://sierravoices.com/2010/02/water-sacred-and-profaned/feed/ 1 http://sierravoices.com/2010/02/a-p-p-l-e-center-water-panel-well-attended/ http://sierravoices.com/2010/02/a-p-p-l-e-center-water-panel-well-attended/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:58:43 +0000 depelton http://sierravoices.com/?p=2609 The Nevada City Hall Council Chamber was full to overflowing for last night’s “Water: A Panel Discussion,” sponsored by the A.P.P.L.E  Center for Sustainable Living. Let there be no doubt about the passionate interest in water issues among the citizens of Nevada County, nor about the catalytic role that the Sustainability Center is playing in redirecting that interest toward action.

Mali Dyck, Executive Director of the Sustainability Center, introduced the proceedings.

Participating panelists include: Stephen Baker, hydrogeologist and groundwater expert; Carrie Monohan, hydrologist and science director with The Sierra Fund; Jason Rainey, executive director with The South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL); Steve Rothert, director of the California regional office for American Rivers; and Nick Wilcox, NID, Division V board member and former Chief of the Bay-Delta unit with the State Water Resources Control Board. The panel will be moderated by Elizabeth Soderstrom, Senior Director of Conservation for American Rivers.

Here are a few highlights taken from my sparse notes:

Each of the panelists had an impossible ten minutes for general remarks. And each, in one way or another, mentioned the importance of conservation.

After all panelists spoke, they answered wide-ranging questions from the audience, from “How does local water use affect the snowpack?” to “If I’m on a well, does it matter how much water I put back into my own ground?”

Jason Rainey spoke of “enshrining the rights of other beings,” and focused especially on the fate of salmon in local rivers as an indicator of the health of the watersheds as a whole.

Carrie Monahan spoke of her work on mining’s toxic legacy in the form of widespread mercury contamination, resulting from the twenty-six million pounds of mercury used in all the years of gold mining. She said there are 47,000 abandoned mines in California.

Steve Rothert showed slides of the Klammath River and the Bay Delta, among other water systems. It was inspiring to hear his account of the progress being made toward removing dams from the Klammath.

Nick Wilcox of NID mentioned that the snowpack, upon which California’s entire water system depends, is shrinking and retreating to higher elevations, due presumably to global climate change.

Nick also said that he opposes the $11.4 billion water bond, among other reasons because it will create a $600 million yearly interest indebtedness on the general fund.

“In California,” Nick said, “water flows uphill toward money.”