Last week I went on a hike along the Elwha River in Olympic National
Park, Washington. Not only was I excited to get out and hike (which happens far
too infrequently these days), but I wanted to see the Elwha now that it’s a completely
free flowing river again. The largest dam removal in the world just took place on the Elwha—the two dams that were located 5 and 13 miles upstream of
the Strait of Juan de Fuca are now almost completely gone.
Glines Canyon Dam before removal
Glines Canyon Dam as of 11/6/12
I hiked through the mossy dripping rainforest up above where the dams
had been, imagining (or, let’s be honest, hoping)
that I would come across Bigfoot around the next bend and make my millions. The
ecosystem there is incredibly verdant — temperate rainforest that gets
approximately 150 inches of rain annually—with towering Douglas firs, dripping
alders and Bigleaf maples, and plenty of mushrooms pushing their way up through
the mossy ground. I kept my eye out for Oyster mushrooms, but no luck. I also
stopped frequently to scour the turbid water for salmon, since both Chinook and
Pink salmon, as well as steelhead, have already been sighted upriver of the lower
dam! (Granted, it would be surprising to find them above the upper dam, which
is not yet completely gone… but as with Bigfoot, one can hope).
Olympic National Park forest
... Bigfoot?
While I am a firm believer in ecological restoration, there are not
many restoration stories that have brought tears to my eyes, but hearing that
salmon are already returning to parts of the Elwha that have been inaccessible
to them for the past century did literally make me tear up. It’s also a nice
example of how dam removal can be successful. A few months ago, my friend asked
me, “Is dam removal good?” A great question! She had been at a party and gotten
into a discussion about dam removal. As a scientist and someone generally in
favor of ecological restoration, she felt intuitively that dam removal is a
good thing, but when asked why, she wasn’t
sure. What really are the benefits of taking out dams? To emphasize the
importance of this question, you should know that there are about 75,000 larger
dams (over 6ft) in the U.S., and an estimated 2 million total. However, most of
these were built with only a 50-year useful life-span, and the number of “high
hazard dams” in need of either reinforcement or removal is rising sharply.
Map of major dams in the U.S.
One of the many exciting aspects of dam removal (and one close to my
heart) is the benefit to anadromous fish, such as salmon. (Anadromous fish
begin life in freshwater, travel to the ocean to grow, and return to the river
to spawn). Salmon rely on large amounts of high quality river habitat for
spawning, juvenile rearing, and migration. Large dams without fish ladders are
impassible to salmon, cutting off enormous amounts of good river habitat. And the
habitat that’s left is often lower quality, in terms of temperature (too hot) and
sediment composition. Dams block sediment, meaning that lots of fine sediment
that naturally flows downriver is blocked behind dams. The result is that you
get huge sediment build-ups behind
dams (there are 5 billion tons of sediment behind the Glen Canyon Dam!). The
downstream impacts of this sediment blockage include a coarsening of the
riverbed sediment (since all the fine sediment is trapped upstream), which
decreases the amount of good spawning habitat for salmon. In addition to the
impacts on salmon, the lack of natural sediment flow has caused substantial
beach erosion, since this sediment is what beaches are made of (California beaches are being reduced by ~2.8 million cubic meters of sand per year).
Towards the end of my hike along the Elwha, I made my way down to the
large rocky expanse where the upper reservoir used to be. It was sobering to
stand on the bank of what is now a flowing river, and realize that only a year and
a half ago, I would have been deep underwater. The floodplain hasn’t
reconnected with the river yet, but with the river’s natural flow regime
restored, this should happen in time. (Dams drastically alter a river’s flow
regime—the pattern of water flow over time—usually by homogenizing it, so that
the water flow doesn’t change much throughout the year.) One of the less widely
known benefits of dam removal is the restoration of the flow regime. The animals
and plants along a river evolve to take advantage of that particular river’s
flow regime. For example, cottonwoods time the release of their seeds with
floods, to aid in dispersal, and aquatic insects such as caddisflies
synchronize their metamorphosis (from aquatic insect to terrestrial adult) with
the average timing of flood season. When flow regimes change drastically over a
short time period, as happens when a dam goes up, it can be hard for these
species to adapt.
Glines Canyon reservoir bed from the air
On my hike, standing in the Glines Canyon reservoir bed looking downstream
As I’m reminded daily through conversations with my husband,
there’s a lot of controversy surrounding dam removal. I’ve seen my share of
this during my summers doing research on the Klamath River, where the 4 lowest
dams are scheduled to come out in 2020. Many people want to keep dams because
they are a symbol of progress (at least, the Greatest Generation feels this
way), and because they like boating and fishing in the reservoirs. However,
since many of America’s dams are old, it’s worth considering the fact that it
may be more beneficial (ecologically and economically) to remove than to
restore them.
A sign from near where I work on the Klamath River
Another sign from near where I lived...
There’s a lot more to learn about dam removal, but I hope I’ve given
you a few good points to fall back on if you find yourself defending its
benefits at a party. And if you haven’t seen it yet, you really need to watch
this spectacular video of another Washington state dam removal, the Condit dam
on the White Salmon River.
“I think that if it weren't for denial, I
wouldn't be a comedian because to be a comedian you have to go on stage those
first few years and bomb. And then walk off stage and think, that went great.
Because otherwise you'd never get on stage the next night. You would just
think, human beings don't like me. But sometimes denial can kill you.” –Comedian Mike Birbiglia
Are we in denial about climate change and the state of our earth? Certainly
some of this country is... although luckily, on Nov. 6th the country voted
to support the environment (as well as many other important things). But even
for those of us who do believe in climate change, and even try to change our
day to day actions to help alleviate the problem, a question that haunts me is,
“is this enough?” Is biking to work every day and
eating organic and buying carbon offsets for travel (and generally acting like
we are in Portlandia) really
enough? And are current ecological restoration projects and conservation
efforts sufficient?
As I was mulling over how to frame this question into a
constructive blog post—since it is so easy to debate round in circles on this
question, to no avail—I came across a recent paper by one of my advisors that addressed
an interesting angle on this question. The paper, “Ecological restoration and enabling behavior: a new metaphorical lens?”
by KD Moore & JW Moore, examines how we currently view ecological
restoration, and how that perspective might be shaping both our behavior and
the way we go about restoration. When we discuss ecological restoration, we
usually assume that we are talking about something inherently positive. The
paper makes the point that the language of ecological restoration is that of “healing
and repairing,” which carries a positive connotation. Who wouldn’t you want to help the environment by restoring it
(given unlimited money)?
However, as this paper discusses, there are certain
problems with our current approach to restoration. Many restoration projects
are not followed by sufficient monitoring (the case with many dam removals), so
we are left to wonder how effective the restoration actually was. In addition,
Moore & Moore cite several examples where post-restoration monitoring has
shown that “restoration effectiveness is questionable.” (This is not to say all
projects are ineffective, but rather that we should not assume the effectiveness of our restoration projects).
But besides the problem of monitoring, there is the
question of whether we are enabling
our energy-hungry habits by convincing ourselves that our restoration projects
will take care of the problem. The paper draws an interesting metaphor for this
scenario using the co-dependency of addicts (for instance, an alcoholic) and
their enablers (e.g. someone who keeps paying the alcoholic’s bills). In this
case, Americans are addicted to cheap, abundant energy (which comes at the cost
of environmental degradation), and the enablers are the environmental
restorationists, who make us feel like we are healing the environment, and who are
secured a job in the wake of the destruction. Perhaps this view is too
cynical—surely restoration specialists are not voting for Romney or buying SUVs
just to ensure their own job security.
But, as the authors explain, we can draw an interesting
lesson from this perspective; we can use this “metaphoric lens” to think about whether
restoration activities have “opportunity costs”—in other words, are we using
funds for restoration that could be better put towards getting rid of the cause
of the degradation? We can also use this lens to examine whether these
restoration activities “conceal the truth” from ourselves—we want to believe that we can destroy a
habitat, extract what we need, and then restore it back to its starting state.
But this is rarely the case. Yet we often move forward with restoration
projects as if this were true.
I am not arguing, by any means, that we should discontinue ecological
restoration. Rather, it should be a stepping stone to whatever is next. However,
we know from basic physics that systems in motion have momentum, and the
momentum to keep going in the direction of motion can be very strong, not to
mention easier than applying force to
the system to change (yes, I love physics… I even minored in it in college). In
other words, we need to work to
change our current habits, and along the way, we need to continually evaluate
our actions. We do not want to be the ostrich, head stuck in the sand, patting
ourselves on the back at all our good environmental work, and meanwhile
drowning in the rising ocean.
As the comedian Mike Birbiglia says, “sometimes denial can
kill you.” Or, in this case, probably our grandchildren.
So we need to rid ourselves of denial, and ask, does despair begin when denial ends? Or is that when true hope
and action are born, out of the “power of outrage and… the wisdom of grief”*?
I had the opportunity to work on a dune restoration project
on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington last week. We were working out of Sequim
(pronounced ‘Squim’), which is known affectionately as “the blue hole,” because
it gets only about half the rainfall of other towns on the peninsula (and
approximately the same as L.A., for any Angelenos looking to relocate
northwards). The goal of the project was to build/restore a natural bluff along
a beach where houses had suffered considerable storm damage in 2006. The houses
are built between a long beach and a large wetland, and are thus a classic case
of buildings that are not “supposed” to be there. However, given that they are,
we were working on helping implement the best option for mitigating winter
storms that are continually eroding the beach and causing flooding up over the
houses’ decks.
Initially, when the landowners approached Dave (of Shreffler
Environmental, the company working on the project), they proposed building a
large rock seawall to fend off storms. This is an interesting, and common, case
of misguided decision-making in the continual battle between coastal houses and
the ever-present, ever-hungry ocean. Namely, the feeling that big (non-porous)
walls will protect us better than what nature had there in the first place
(i.e. a bluff or wetland). Luckily, the landowners were both amenable to
hearing alternatives to the seawall, and also clearly possessed impressive
collaborative skills – it’s not often you get 13 landowners to all agree on a
land-use plan, and then cooperatively implement it! The idea behind the bluff
restoration is that by providing a natural vegetative barrier, the plants will
absorb a lot of the water. Imagine a hillside of grass versus a hillside of
pavement –water will run off a non-porous surface like pavement much more
quickly. The difference is similar with the bluff of dune grass versus a
seawall; incidentally, this is one of the many reasons that channelizing rivers
is also undesirable (i.e. increased flash flooding potential).
The bluff had already been engineered and built back in 2006,
by carting in large amounts of sand and gravel, and pouring it over a bunch of
large logs and driftwood anchored together with chain to form a solid base.
This formed an ~8ft bluff, on which they planted dune grass. Our goal was to replant dune grass where there was localized erosion. Overall,
the dune has held up remarkably well since 2006, with only minor erosion, and
no breaches or flooding of the houses.
Canada hiding behind the clouds
Bluff on left, stretching down the beach
The beach we worked on was out on a beautiful spit of land,
with views of the Olympic mountains behind us, and the Canadian mountains (and
snow-capped Mount Baker) across the bay. We spent three peaceful days on our
hands and knees, scooping up sand and plopping the small plants into the holes,
stopping occasionally to watch a heron, bald eagle, Northern Harrier, flock of
migrating Canada geese, or lone fisherman towing a gill net. We had hopes of
talking one of them out of a Coho, but unfortunately they always drifted by
before they had caught any. As Dave said, “it’s hard to talk a guy out of a
fish when he doesn’t have any.” The Coho are almost all hatchery spawned, from the
nearby Dungeness river. And I can confirm that they are indeed delicious.
In the end, we planted around 1000 plants. It was inspiring
to participate in a hands-on project with such direct restoration application. Since
I’ve recently spent most days staring at fish data on my computer, with the
goal of contributing to river restoration practice through more indirect routes,
it was nice to actually get out there and dig in the dirt, restoring the beach
plant by plant.
