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Titanic Paperwork
California water experts are doing their best to guide the Titanic-sized CALFED around the icebergs and dead-end sloughs and into the deepest and greenest possible port. Three newly released reports attempt to inform the process by which CALFED - the four-year-old state-federal effort to the balance the water needs of humans, fish and wildlife in the Delta - decides which parts of the ecosystem to throw a life preserver.
"All interests agree on the need to restore ecosystem functions and bring species back from the brink of extinction," says U.C. Berkeley hydrologist Dr. Matt Kondolf, a contributor to one of the reports. "The questions now are how does the ecosystem really work and how can we prioritize what we should be doing?"
According to The Bay Institute's Sierra to the Sea report, the best place to find some of these answers is in history. The July 1998 report strips away the fetters of human intervention - the dams and levees and reservoirs - and reveals the natural undisturbed watershed as a mosaic of five separate aquatic ecosystems, including upland and lowland river flood plains, the Delta, the Bay and the nearshore ocean.
According to the report, "Freshwater marshes [once] stretched from Willows to Bakersfield in a continuous swath of green, nestled in river bottoms, the Sacramento Valley flood basin and the Delta....Vast riparian forests teeming with wildlife inhabited natural levees along every stream channel in the Central Valley, stretching like a green ribbon for miles... Permanent marshes, choked with tules, dotted with lakes, and crisscrossed with sloughs, nestled between riparian forests and oak woodlands, savannas and vernal pools, [covering] the plains as far as the eye could see... Naturally meandering rivers [flowed into the Delta].... a vast sea-level swamp composed of huge tracts of intertidal wetlands transected by a complex network of waterways...."
The report goes on to document two centuries of human interventions - among them farming, mining, flood control, water redistribution and the harvest of plants and animals - whose combined effects on system ecology have been "staggering."
"It's depressing how much acreage we've transformed," says the Institute's Peter Vorster, a co-author of the report. "So it's imperative we preserve every last historic shred of the ecosystem."
Report authors point out that early natural conditions and processes shaped the life requirements of many of the native species that are now the focus of recovery and restoration plans, and that careful consideration of pre-disturbance conditions provides the necessary "baseline" for any such efforts.
While restoration planning should be firmly based in historic natural processes, it must also use the current maze of dams, canals and reservoirs to mimic them, according to the second new report. An Environmentally Optimal Alternative for the Bay-Delta, produced by the Natural Heritage Institute this October, tackles current problems, politics, finance, land use and water exports in an attempt to push its own view of the Delta's environmental best shot.
This shot, according to the report, should begin with short-term, low-conflict actions, such as restoring West Delta islands to elevations at or near sea level to improve ecosystem values and water quality. In the longer term, report authors suggest an emphasis on, among other things, local control over restoration, and on selecting restoration projects that address critical knowledge gaps; prevent urbanization, fragmentation, exotic species invasions and other irreversible changes to the Delta ecology; yield the greatest benefits per unit of investment at the lowest-risk; and are the most self-sustaining.
To support these restoration efforts, report authors endorse some major reforms to the water-supply system, including building a small peripheral canal, removing key dams, rewatering the San Joaquin River, placing environmental rather than water project managers in charge of pumping and exports, and maximizing water markets, conservation and groundwater storage.
Deciding which among the myriad possible system changes and restoration projects will breathe the most life into the ecosystem's fish, plants and animals is the purview of the third report, The Strategic Plan for Ecosystem Restoration. This report responds to stakeholders and a science review panel's opinions that the restoration program produced by CALFED last year is a menu of actions not a plan, and that some scientifically sound process is needed to figure out what to do first and how to make the most of it. Without such a strategy, deciding how to spend the big restoration bankroll now available "would simply be left to business and politics as usual, with the money probably divided up among various constituencies," according to Kondolf.
Kondolf was one of six respected scientists who teamed up to conceive and write the strategic plan, which defines those elusive but hip-sounding terms "ecosystem-based planning and adaptive management," describes opportunities and constraints within the Bay-Delta watershed, presents goals and quantifiable restoration objectives, discusses the use of conceptual models, and lays out a strategy for regulatory compliance.
"Ecosystem management is a pretty new idea. No one really knows how to do it," says another of the six scientists, the University of British Columbia's Michael Healey, who has studied Washington's Columbia and Mississippi's Kissimmee river projects and participated in similar-scale projects in Canada. "It's also a big departure from the traditional way of doing things, and there's a lot of institutional resistance. The groundwork to overcome this has been laid more solidly here than in any other process I'm aware of."
One of Healey's contributions to the strategic plan was to champion the often unpopular (in terms of public investment) activity of experimentation. According to the plan itself, "Uncertainty is tackled head on... The power of the scientific method is used in designing restoration actions as experiments to determine the effectiveness of new forms of management, just as, in medicine, new therapies are tested in scientifically based clinical trials."
The strategic plan also highlights 12 overall "opportunities" for restoration (and 17 others specific to rivers and the Delta). It identifies invasive species, for example, as the single most likely impediment to achieving a healthier ecosystem and thus worthy targets for "robust" control efforts. It points out that the chronic exposure of Delta organisms to contaminants may get in the way of long-term restoration, and makes addressing such problems a specific ecosystem restoration goal. It acknowledges uncertainties about the assumption that lack of physical habitat limits certain fish populations and suggests large scale pilot projects to test this assumption. And recognizing that dynamic river channels, free to overflow into floodplains and migrate within a meander zone, provide the best riverine habitats, the plan makes it a priority to identify which parts of the system still have (or can have) adequate flows to inundate flood plains and sufficient energy to erode and deposit.
"We focused on ways to let nature, and natural physical processes within the watershed, do the restoration work," says Kondolf.
The plan also lists some interesting selection criteria for restoration projects. These emphasize projects that will yield the greatest absolute benefits for native species, provide the most useful information about system dynamics, offer results within a short time frame, be the most self-sustaining in the long-term, and be complementary with other projects.
"The strategy tells us how to use applied science to pick priority actions and pick them sequentially, so the first wave supports the second," says Jones & Stokes' Steve Chainey, who managed the strategic plan project. "It puts flesh on the concept of adaptive management, making it real and tangible rather than a nameplate or cliché.. CALFED needs this decision-making framework to have credibility."
The independently produced strategic plan is now undergoing review by the various CALFED agencies. When CALFED releases its own version later this year, it will be interesting to see how much of the original strategic plan remains intact, says Chainey. In the meantime, the Sierra to the Sea report has been heralded by the U.S EPA as noteworthy in the care with which is documents the natural system's capabilities before and during intensive development, and the Heritage Institute report has been the subject of several newspaper editorials on how to rebuild California's water system.
"We may not fully appreciate what it might take to make all this work," sums up Kondolf. "But there are many opportunities and correctable inefficiencies out there. It's not a question of either we give up the fish or starve in the dark."
Contact: CALFED (916)654-4841, NHI (415)288-0550 or TBI (415)721-7680
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