River Trusts: A New Approach to River Conservation

Phillip Wallin, Western Rivers Conservancy

Speech to the North Umpqua Foundation

Roseburg, OR, October 15, 2004

For many decades the North Umpqua River has been considered by people like you and me to be a holy place, one of the great rivers of the West, and so this invitation to speak to the North Umpqua Foundation is a deep honor. I very much look forward to tomorrow’s Board meeting at the Steamboat Inn.

I have been personally involved in river conservation a little over a quarter century, since the campaign to protect the Stanislaus River in northern California in the 1970’s. Like a Children’s Crusade we stood in that river canyon, linked arm in arm, trying unsuccessfully to stop the Corps of Engineers from damming a magnificent river. I thought it might be worthwhile today to look back in time beyond that episode and review the evolution of the river conservation movement. This might help put the present in perspective.

The history of the Western United States was played out along its rivers. Exploration followed the rivers. Migration and settlement followed the rivers. Trapping and mining and farming and grazing followed the rivers and streams. The rivers were dammed and diverted to make the deserts bloom. Great cities were built on the rivers. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers built dams in every basin to irrigate fields, control floodwaters and generate hydropower. In the Northwest the great dams were built on the Snake and Columbia during the New Deal to float barges and power aluminum smelters. By the 1960’s, scarcely a river in the Western United States had not been dammed, diverted, diked and developed.

The river conservation movement was building, though, beginning with John Muir’s unsuccessful battle to keep Hetch Hetchy Dam out of Yosemite National Park and climaxing in David Brower’s successful campaign to keep new dams out of the Grand Canyon. In 1968 the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was passed by Congress to set aside a few of our most magnificent rivers, such as the Rogue and the Illinois, as exemplars of our rich heritage of wild rivers. These “Wild and Scenic Rivers” were made exempt from federal dams and other federally licensed projects.

Through most of the 20 th century, the river conservation movement consisted largely of desperate battles against dams built with federal money. But in the early 1980’s something happened that put a halt to a hundred years of dam-building. Congress passed a resolution, entitled HR 6, that required the local beneficiaries of federal water projects to pay a portion of the cost of the project. This, of course, was a revolutionary concept. The cities and valleys that wanted a federal dam to store water or control floods had no intention of putting up their own money. Far more than the Endangered Species Act or NEPA, HR 6 brought an end to the era of big dams in America.

Freed from the need to fight endless battles against dams, river conservationists were able to become proactive. We nominated new rivers for Wild and Scenic protection, an approach that reached its highwater mark in Oregon with Senator Hatfield’s 43-river Wild and Scenic designation. We began to focus on National Forest management to protect the headwaters of Western rivers. We used the Clean Water Act to go after polluters. Borrowing an idea from New England, we promoted the idea of watershed organizing and watershed management. We began to work on restoration of damaged river ecosystems. We even began to see a movement toward removal of some of our oldest and least cost-effective dams. In the Northwest we focused on the plight of the salmon and pushed hard for restoration of the endangered wild runs.

River conservationists are still working on all those fronts. Most of us have picked out a particular river, like the North Umpqua, to which we devote our energies. We use all the tools and all the resources we can find to protect the river that has given us so much joy in our lives. The North Umpqua Foundation is a shining example of that kind of dedication.

I firmly believe that local organizing is the best prescription for river conservation in this new millennium. People who know and care about a particular stream need to get organized to be an effective voice for the river and the whole river system. They need to know the landscape, the land ownership, the economic interests, the politics, the stream ecology, the life histories of the salmon runs, the flora and fauna, the hydrology, the sources of water pollution, and a hundred other things about the river. They need to take every opportunity to remind the citizens of the watershed that the river is a treasure that must not be wasted.

I believe in local organizing for river protection. That is why I founded River Network, a national organization that provides all kinds of support for grass-roots river organizations. River Network is a fantastic resource for local people who want to conserve and celebrate their backyard stream.

Over the past few years, I have become convinced that there is something even more important than local organizing to protect local rivers. I believe that all of us, no matter where we live, need to help conserve the very best rivers that remain in the western United States. We need to conserve the best examples that we have left of healthy, intact, fully functioning river systems.

I don’t just mean the ten or twelve absolutely pristine rivers in Alaska. I mean that in every western state, we need to look around for those few streams that can still serve as benchmarks for how a healthy river functions and can serve as refuges for a wide diversity of aquatic and terrestrial life-forms. These would usually be rivers with no dams, or with dams that don’t greatly alter the hydrology of the stream or block fish passage, or dams that could be removed. They would be rivers with protected headwaters so that there is a dependable supply of cold, clean water. They would be rivers with a healthy, forested riparian fringe as a first line of defense against pollution and a corridor for the movement of wildlife.

This is not a new idea. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, when the first alarms were rung about diminishing salmon runs, there have been visionaries who have proposed that we establish salmon refuges, whole river systems that would be protected for the spawning and rearing of different species of salmonids. These refuges could serve as a kind of insurance policy for Pacific salmon, so that even if the runs on less protected rivers disappeared they could be restocked from the genetic material that survived in the salmon refuges. This idea has found increasing favor with fisheries biologists and other scientists: the usual formula is that we should “first save the best, then restore the rest.”

The idea of “saving the best” is undoubtedly sound, but difficult to accomplish in the real world. How can we possibly establish a refuge that encompasses a whole river system, from headwaters to ocean, including private lands, agriculture, communities, different levels of government, tribes, fish hatcheries, recreational and commercial fishing interests, and all the complexities of human land-use and river-use? A river is not like an Alpine wilderness. A river moves. It is complicated. It involves the livelihoods and lifestyles of thousands.

We believe that a possible answer to this riddle lies in the concept of the “river trust.” This is a new idea for a private, non-profit citizen group that would be dedicated to conservation of a particular stream.

We know that river protection cannot be attained through government regulation alone. It takes private action, cooperative action. Only a private organization can work effectively with private landowners along the river who control the destiny of the river landscape. Only a private organization can speak out as a free, independent and principled voice on behalf of the river.

A river trust can educate the community about the specialness of the river and its value to the local economy. It can identify the most critical and sensitive components of the river ecosystem. It can monitor the health of the river and shine a spotlight on problems that must be dealt with. It can work with utilities, municipalities, industries, agriculture and local landowners to find cooperative solutions to problems. It can secure permanent protection and stewardship for lands that are critical habitat for fish and wildlife.

The river trust must be locally based, but not only locally based. Recognizing that a great stream like the North Umpqua, for example, has a widespread constituency, and recognizing that great resources are needed to conserve a great river, the river trust would recruit its Board, members and donors from a wider source than just the river valley. The wealthy alumni of a river like the North Umpqua live not only in Douglas County but in San Francisco, Denver, Dallas and Seattle. Working with local guides and fly shops, the river trust can build an alumni association that can support exciting programs to protect and restore the river.

One major function of the river trust would be to acquire riverlands for conservation. We realize that a river is more than flowing water. It’s the whole river ecosystem, including the riparian woodlands, the wetlands, the tributaries, the floodplain, all the way down to the river estuary. You can’t conserve a river as a rich, complex living thing unless you conserve the lands that are vital to fish and wildlife. As a private organization, the river trust can work quietly and creatively with private landowners to conserve natural lands. This can be done through land purchase, land donation, conservation easement, covenant, bequest, management agreement, or any number of tools.

Land conservation on a meaningful scale requires capital. That capital can come from many different sources, either public or private. Dam relicensing can result in mitigation funds committed by the utility. A wealthy angler can purchase a tract of riverland and donate a conservation easement. A private foundation can loan or even grant the money for a land purchase. Just to show you how creative a river trust can be: the Chagrin River Conservancy in Ohio has persuaded many landowners to attach a covenant to their land, running with the land in perpetuity, that requires every succeeding buyer of the land to donate 5% of the purchase price to the Conservancy. This provides a revolving fund that the Conservancy can use to purchase critical river lands when they come on the market.

I am the first to point out that it can perilous for a non-profit it acquire and own land. It requires a high degree of expertise and risk management. It requires a great deal of resourcefulness in “using other people’s money,” loaned or donated funds, so that the river trust attains a high degree of leverage for its own resources. Finally, land acquisition on any significant scale can raise the hackles of private landowners, especially third or fourth generation farmers, and create a real firestorm of anger and resentment. Local landowners can feel that the river trust, by buying lands, is calling into question their own stewardship and land management.

This business of river conservation is not for the faint of heart. It is challenging work. It touches on the interests and the life-styles of everyone in the watershed. But for those of us who cannot live without the beauty of free-flowing rivers, those of us who live for the smells, the sounds and the sights of a natural river, there is really no choice in the matter. This journey of river conservation is a journey we must make, and once we put our oars in the water and set off down the current, there is no turning back.

In 1869, Major John Wesley Powell and his intrepid band set off down the Colorado River on their journey of discovery through the Grand Canyon. As they set out, he wrote in his journal, “We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.” In the same way, we in this room have set out on a noble journey to conserve a river that we love, in fact to conserve all rivers that we love. Where the journey will take us, we know not. How we will surmount the problems that beset those rivers; we know not. We know, however, that it is a joyful journey full of adventure, challenge and plain old fun, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.