Restoring Colorado River Ecosystems: A Troubled Sense of Immensity

ABOUT ISLAND PRESS

Island Press is the only nonprofit organization in the United States whose principal purpose is the publication of books on environmental issues and natural resource management. We provide solutions-oriented information to professionals, public officials, business and community leaders, and concerned citizens who are shaping responses to environmental problems.

Since 1984, Island Press has been the leading provider of timely and practical books that take a multidisciplinary approach to critical environmental concerns. Our growing list of titles reflects our commitment to bringing the best of an expanding body of literature to the environmental community throughout North America and the world.

Support for Island Press is provided by the Agua Fund, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Joyce Foundation, Kendeda Sustainability Fund of the Tides Foundation, The Forrest & Frances Lattner Foundation, The Henry Luce Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Marisla Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, Oak Foundation, The Overbrook Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Wallace Global Fund, The Winslow Foundation, and other generous donors.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of these foundations.

Copyright © 2007 Robert W. Adler

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009, USA.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adler, Robert W., 1955-

Restoring Colorado River ecosystems : a troubled sense of immensity / Robert W. Adler.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

9781597267786

1. Restoration ecology—Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico) I. Title.

QH104.5.C6A35 2007

333.73’153097913—dc22

2006101562

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper e9781597267786_i0002.jpg

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Michele, for her unending love and support

Table of Contents

ABOUT ISLAND PRESS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Preface

CHAPTER ONE - Introduction: Retaking Old Ground

CHAPTER TWO - The Living Artery: Disruptions to the River’s Linear Connections

CHAPTER THREE - Only the Hills Will Know: Changes in the Watershed

CHAPTER FOUR - Tree of the People: Tree of Life

CHAPTER FIVE - Down the Great Unknown: Environmental Restoration in the Face of Scientific Uncertainty

CHAPTER SIX - Casting of the Lots: Conflicting Methods and Goals in Environmental Restoration

CHAPTER SEVEN - Ownership of Unownable Things: Property Rights and Environmental Restoration at the Water’s Edge

CHAPTER EIGHT - An Elusive and Indefinable Boundary: Restoration and Political Borders

CHAPTER NINE - The Lovely and the Usable: Toward a More Holistic Approach to Restoration

CODA - Into New Dimensions

Endnotes

Index

About the Author

Island Press Board of Directors

Acknowledgments

This book was many years in the writing, during which many people showed extreme patience and support, and many others provided invaluable assistance, perspectives, and information. I want to acknowledge all of their help with deep appreciation, whether I remember to name them or not, while taking full responsibility for the ultimate contents of the book. I apologize in advance to those whom I unintentionally omit from the following list of acknowledgments.

Highest in the patience department comes my family, especially my wife, Michele, my son, Woody, and my daughter, Sierra, who have listened to my ramblings about this book for all too long, and endured my extra hours of work and other inconveniences along the way. As partial compensation, they did get to accompany me on some of my wanderings to wonderful places along the Colorado River. Our dog Habibi listened to some of my discourse about the book during our trail runs in the Wasatch Mountains, but he probably paid less attention. Brian Kamm and other running friends at least had to pretend they were interested.

My editors at Island Press also showed great patience with my procrastination and technical foibles. More importantly, they had tremendous judgment and advice about how to improve the final product. Barbara Dean encouraged and supported this project from the outset, and helped me to reduce such an immensity of information and ideas about such a complex set of issues into a more manageable and I hope readable book. Barbara Youngblood and Erin Johnson helped with the clarity of the writing and the seemingly endless but important technical details. Liz Wilson and her staff expertly shepherded the manuscript through copyediting and production, and Joy Drohan was a very careful and helpful copyeditor, who caught many of my errors.

Many people associated with the University of Utah, S. J. Quinney College of Law, provided research help, support, and guidance. John Bevin and others on the staff at the S. J. Quinney Law Library tracked down dozens of documents through interlibrary loan. Many works were available in the superb rare documents collection of the University of Utah’s Marriott Library. My assistants Barbara McFarlane and Sandra Fatt helped in countless ways, with both research and production. Student research assistants included Tracy Bennett-Hecht, Craig Condie, Jeremy Eyre, Heather Green, David McArthur, Andrew Hartsig, Jeff Merchant, Zach Peterson, John Ruple, Paul Sacksteder, Rod Smith, and Kirsten Uchitel. I am also indebted to the many students who participated in my Protection of water systems and Colorado River seminars, many of whom suggested ideas during class discussion and submitted research papers that helped me with issues addressed in the book.

Many others provided documents, leads, interviews, bibliographies, and other information that helped me to identify and sort through the massive amount of information available about the Colorado River and ongoing restoration efforts. For reasons of confidentiality (in some cases), I will list first the categories of help I received, and then name individuals who provided assistance in one or more of those ways. Some individuals granted interviews or helped me tour key locations and facilities along the Colorado River. Others suggested documents, other key information, and research leads. Others reviewed one or more drafts of this book, or of previous writings from which I drew ideas in writing the book. I was given the privilege of testing some of the ideas that appear herein at lectures and other events sponsored by the University of Utah, S. J. Quinney College of Law; the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation Natural Resources Law Teachers Institute; the Virginia Environmental Law Journal and the University of Virginia College of Law; the Environmental Law Institute; and Chapman University College of Law. Agencies and organizations that provided additional assistance and information include the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the Arizona Department of Game and Fish, the Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Forum, Environmental Defense, Defenders of Wildlife, Glen Canyon Institute, Glen Canyon Action Network, Sierra Club, Living Rivers, Friends of Lake Powell, Pacific Institute, Upper Colorado River Commission, and Western Area Power Authority.

Included among the many generous people who contributed to this book in one or more of those ways, again with my sincere apologies to those I may have omitted, are: Bert Anderson, Larry Anderson, Craig Anthony Arnold, Jack Barnett, Kathleen Blair, Jeff Brady Baugh, Kay Brothers, Gary Bryant, Jim Cherry, Michael Cohen, Wayne Cook, Dan Crabtree, Julian DeSantiago, Debbie Felker, Karl Flessa, Lisa Force, Dave Foreman, Suzanne Fouty, Steve Gloss, Barry Gold, Reed Harris, Mike Hawes, Barbara Hjelle, Richard Hobbs, Pam Hyde, Richard Ingebretsen, Rick Johnson, Robert Keiter, Richard Kettenstette, Dennis Kubly, Owen Lammers, Geri Ledbetter, Henry Maddux, Jan Matusek, Chuck McAda, Steve McCall, Jim McMahon, Theodore Melis, LeGrand Nielson, David Orr, Mary Orton, Clayton Palmer, Randy Peterson, Jennifer Pitt, Ginger Reeves, Kirsten Rowell, David Ruitter, Jack Schmidt, Dave Sharrow, Tom Shrader, Ron Simms, Michele Straube, Gary Taylor, Ron Thompson, Shannon Traub, Dave Trueman, Tim Ulrich, Dave Wegner, John Weisheit, and Barry Wirth.

Preface

The Colorado River is a favorite topic of western authors, and for good reason. The wonders and the dangers of the river and its canyons are documented in the travel journals of Fathers Dominguéz and Escalante, James Pattie, Lieutenant Joseph C. Ives, and Major John Wesley Powell. Zane Grey used the mystique and majesty of the Colorado as the backdrop to his classic romance The Rainbow Trail. Scientists document and explore all aspects of the river’s secrets in shelves of books, journal articles, and technical reports. The history of the Colorado, its changes, its battles, and its challenges are chronicled in Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire, Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, Philip Fradkin’s A River No More, and Paul Martin’s A Story That Stands Like a Dam. Photographer Elliott Porter (The Place No One Knew), singer/songwriter Katie Lee (All My Rivers Are Gone), and others lamented the demise of some of the river’s most treasured features. Edward Abbey lampooned environmental foibles in the region in The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire. Fradkin commented that [p]robably no other single natural feature in this country has attracted so many written words, mostly on the technical and legal levels.¹ John McPhee added: Anyone interested, for whatever reason, in the study of water in the West will in the end concentrate on the Colorado, wildest of rivers, foaming, raging, rushing southward—erratic, headlong, incongruous in the desert. ²

Unlike most of that vast literature, this book is primarily about neither the past nor the present. It is about the future of the Colorado River and its ecosystems and human users, however uncertain those intertwined fates may be. It is less about what we have done with and to the river over the past century and more about what we might do for it in the next. It is less about utility and harm, and more about restoration.

Of course, it is not possible to address the river’s future without putting it in the context of the past and the present. We need to know what the river was before we intruded, and what it has become now. We need to know how we have changed this remarkable place, and why. Above all, we need to understand what we have lost, and what we have gained in return. The first four chapters of this book depict the condition of the river through the eyes of some of the key species and other ecosystem resources affected by our past actions. I use these resources largely as focal points to highlight the broader changes to the ecosystem as a whole and why they occurred. No one intended to drive the razorback sucker to the brink of extinction. It is essential to understand why it does cling to that precipice, however, before restoration is possible. For these purposes, to some degree this book traces the paths of its many superb antecedents, with due respect and hopefully proper attribution to the many great authors and other experts on whom I rely. I discuss the past, however, only to the extent necessary to move on to the future.

Chapters 5–9 address our current efforts to restore the river and its adjacent habitats. Hundreds of smart, dedicated, hard-working, and well-intentioned people labor to heal the river, its species, and their habitats. Those actions affect the lives and livelihoods of a large number of people and groups, whose voices and values may differ greatly. These many individuals and organizations do their jobs under difficult circumstances. Some have been heroic in their efforts to achieve what has seemed impossible in the past. Others strive to balance, as if on the edge of the river’s sharp cliffs, dozens of competing and conflicting interests and concerns. Despite all of those good intentions and endeavors, it is my job to raise some of the difficult questions about their work. Criticism is not my underlying intent, but critical analysis is. I hope to do so with respect and without any suggestion of fault by specific individuals. My purpose is to help inform and perhaps to inspire and improve the future of those efforts.

My main aspiration, however, is not to describe and evaluate the many details of restoration program structure and implementation. Nor is it my goal to explain or evaluate in great detail the scientific complexities inherent in river restoration, and as a student of law and policy rather than science, I am not qualified to do so. Details help to organize and to focus the inquiry, but I want to ask broader questions about ecosystem restoration choices and goals, and how we might achieve them. What do we mean by restoration? For a river that has changed dramatically over the course of geological and ecological history, to what previous state do we seek to restore the system, and for what purposes? What do we now reap from the river (water, power, recreation) that we are willing to give back in order to recover what has been lost? Or are there other ways to attain those benefits that allow us to have it both ways? Who should make those hard choices, and how? Despite a veneer of laws, policies, and directives designed to guide those decisions, in most cases the hardest questions remain unanswered. In addition to restoring the river, I will urge that we need to restore the open process by which those difficult, value-laden choices are made.

Once we break this impasse and decide what we want to do, we are left with equally daunting questions of how. Do we tinker with how we operate what is now an artificially plumbed river, or do we take more dramatic steps to dismantle some of the hydraulic hardware that dots the system from its headwaters to its end in the Sea of Cortéz? To some, the granddaddy of all Colorado River restoration efforts would be to decommission Glen Canyon Dam, to set the now-shackled river free, at least through the Grand Canyon. The idea is difficult, bitterly controversial, and a lightning rod for attention. But it is impossible to separate what happens at (or to) the dam from other restoration efforts both upstream and down. They are all closely connected, as are the various resources associated with the river itself.

At the same time, pointed ideas often stimulate the most useful debates, whether or not they are actually adopted. Forcing people to answer the most difficult questions often generates the most useful results. Because some of the value-laden questions necessary to restore ecosystems are so perplexing, and because they force us to make choices, we defer or avoid them or pretend falsely that we can have it all. The more important part, I believe, is to ask those hard questions.

Although this book is mainly about restoration of Colorado River ecosystems, it is also about uncertainty, conflict, competing values, and the nature, pace, and implications of environmental change. It is about our place in the natural environment, and whether there are limits to that presence we ought to respect. It is about our responsibility to the ecosystems we live in and use. At bottom, it is about environmental restoration more generally—what I will argue is the third major strategy of the modern environmental movement, and perhaps the most difficult of all to design and accomplish. Similar programs are under way to restore watersheds and ecosystems all over the country. Those efforts struggle with the same core issues as we do for the Colorado.

That broader inquiry suggests some even more fundamental lessons about the degree to which we can hope to succeed in restoring seriously degraded large ecosystems. Around the country, there are dozens of examples of successful restoration at a much smaller scale. Urban streams have been freed from their concrete prisons. Once straightened rivers-turned-canals meander again through their original channels and floodplains. Formerly denuded riverbanks have been replanted with native riparian species. Native fish species have been reintroduced to their indigenous habitats. Smaller projects may involve difficult technical and other problems, but they are within our conceptual and political reach.

Replicating those successes in places such as the Colorado River, the Columbia River, and the Everglades is another matter. Restoring such vast ecosystems requires us to think and act on a much larger scale. We must deal with much larger sets of scientific uncertainties and many more variables. Much more is demanded of the army of scientists who must predict, experiment, and rethink their hypotheses amid incessant political jockeying and interference. Significantly more fundamental choices are needed about conflicting values and trade-offs. These projects demand that we consider ecosystems, issues, and solutions on a larger scale and with more open minds than we have in past.

That realization explains the subtitle of this book. I am professionally trained and accustomed to dealing with complex information on a massive scale. I have litigated cases involving hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. Yet I was still overwhelmed by the immensity of the information needed to obtain even a good general understanding of the intricate, intertwined web of issues involved in restoring the Colorado. Relevant information is generated by disciplines ranging from my own field of law to a dozen or so branches of science to economics, politics, anthropology, history, archaeology, and sociology. Throw in a dose of philosophy and even some religion and you begin to approach the full set of ideas invoked to debate the issues involved. Most disturbing of all, but not surprisingly, even if one can absorb and assimilate that jumble of information, it all seems to point in different directions. Potential solutions to some problems might create or exacerbate others. Some theories suggest one set of actions, while equally plausible hypotheses advise the opposite.

No wonder I decided on the book’s subtitle the moment I stumbled on its source quote at the visitors center at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. To pioneering 19th century geologist Clarence Dutton, the canyon’s scale posed almost dizzying problems for a human brain that was trained to see and to understand the world from an entirely different perspective: "Dimensions mean nothing to the senses, and all that we are conscious of in this respect is a troubled sense of immensity."³

Yet some action is needed, and decisions must be made in the face of conflicting, incomplete, or even nonexistent information. Choices are essential. We are at a multidirectional crossroad in the river’s future, facing a set of decisions that transcends technical judgments and legal choices to an honest confrontation with the cacophony of competing voices and values about what the river’s future should be. The most that I can hope to accomplish in these pages, and if I succeed that will be quite enough, is to convince readers that there are no easy answers, no simple solutions, and certainly no perfect ones. Success will lie in our ability to work with uncertainty rather than trying either to ignore it or to overcome it. We need to make some very difficult choices, because we cannot have it all.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Retaking Old Ground

With the power of modern engineering, we increased dramatically our ability to change the natural world. Especially in the European tradition, and in some interpretations of Judeo-Christian liturgy, some believe it to be our very obligation to mold nature to our benefit.¹ Those of us who are wealthy enough to enjoy modern conveniences protect ourselves from the elements in climate-controlled buildings. We do not feel the effects of famine and drought because of mass-produced and chemically preserved food delivered by truck and train, and stored water piped through indoor plumbing. We blast through mountains to route our highways, fill in swamps to grow our food and to build our cities, and even change the course of mighty rivers and the destiny of colossal canyons.

Thus, it was with supreme confidence that late 19th century engineer Robert Brewster Stanton promoted his proposed railroad along the Colorado River through the length of the Grand Canyon: That the proposed road is feasible and practicable, and at a reasonable amount of cost, is beyond question. He was probably correct, given that railroads had been built in even more challenging locations by that time, although the railroad through the Grand Canyon was never built.² But other, even more profound engineered changes were not too far distant.

The massive Glen Canyon Dam seems almost more permanent than the sandstone cliffs into which it is anchored. Engineers designed the dam with massive blocks of concrete, cured with refrigerated coils to ensure its strength. The natural canyon consists largely of more fragile rock, sandstone whose very aesthetic fame is caused by erosion. The dam, however, is only as strong as its host canyon. As the walls erode, so goes the dam. Regardless of whether it lasts another decade, another century, or another millennium, it cannot last forever. After all, the hydrological power it restrains helped to cut the Grand Canyon out of the Colorado Plateau in the space of just several million years, a flicker of a nod in geological time.³

More long-lasting than the dam itself may be the changes it has brought to the Colorado River, especially combined with the effects of the dozens of other dams, water diversions, dikes, levees, and other artificial changes to the river, its channel, its banks, its tributaries, and its biota. We molded (or more accurately, remolded) the river to serve the needs of human communities, but with significant impacts to the river and its ecosystems. Now, many scientists, public officials, and citizens hope to reshape nature in a different way, to restore portions of the river and its ecosystems. Environmental restoration on the scale of the Colorado River basin, or even significant portions of the basin, is an immensely challenging endeavor. In addition to an almost overwhelming array of technical difficulties, it is fraught with perplexing questions about the appropriate goals of restoration and the extent to which environmental restoration must be balanced against environmental changes designed to sustain the human economy.

This book explores those questions and challenges. It evaluates the relationships among the laws, policies, and institutions governing use and management of the Colorado River for human benefit, and those designed to protect and restore the river and its environment. It examines and critiques the challenging interactions among law, science, economics, and politics within which restoration efforts must operate, often in the face of tremendous scientific uncertainty. Ultimately, this book proposes that the concept of restoration must include more than efforts to rehabilitate individual patches of habitat or specific features of the river. Restoration should include changes in how we use and manage the resources of the river, or ways to replace those resources, to strike an appropriate balance between human and environmental needs (to the extent that those goals can be separated), for the Colorado River and elsewhere.

This chapter introduces the major challenges inherent in an undertaking as complex as restoring the ecosystems of the Colorado River. First, however, although these issues will be explored in more detail in chapters 2–4, we need some background on how we have changed the river, and why.

Taming the Colorado—How We Changed the River to Meet Human Needs

The Colorado River plummets from its headwaters more than 14,000 feet above sea level through the magnificent canyons of Utah and Arizona (figure 1.1). It continues through the deserts of Arizona, California, Baja California, and Sonora to its languid end in the Colorado River delta and the Sea of Cortéz (Gulf of California). Wild, volatile, and unpredictable, the natural river varied dramatically from its headwaters to the delta, from year to year, and from season to season. The river once raged through its canyons every spring, sending hundreds of thousands of cubic feet per second of snowmelt from the Rockies to the sea, only to subside to a comparative trickle during the fall and winter. Each summer, after the snowmelt receded, sand and gravel bars emerged and formed habitats used by native fish. Those unique conditions supported a system with one of the world’s largest percentages of endemic fish, species found nowhere else on the planet. In its lower reaches, the river often spilled out over a broad floodplain, nourishing thousands of acres of wetlands that hosted lush vegetation and a bounty of waterfowl and other wildlife. The river also carved the sublime, rugged, and remote canyons for which the Colorado Plateau earned its scenic fame.⁴

Figure 1.1. Colorado River basin. Courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation

But while the wild Colorado was bountiful and beautiful, it was hardly friendly to human users. Hohokam Indians built dams and irrigation canals similar in concept, although not in size and impact, to those built by European settlers centuries later.⁵ The Hohokam structures were relatively easy to build, but also easy for the river to wash away during a spring surge. Some early southwestern explorers and traders traveled the waters of the lower Colorado in sternwheeler steamboats, but at times they ran their craft in reverse so the wheel could plow rather than ply through the river’s frequently shifting sandbars. Upriver, brave (or foolish) trappers and explorers plummeted through roaring whitewater canyons in flimsy boats and canoes. Farmers and ranchers found plenty of water during the spring runoff, but only a silt-laden trickle during summer and fall when they needed it most for crops and pastures.

That once volatile Colorado is now relatively tamed by what has been called a massive system of plumbing, designed to provide more reliable water supplies to farmers and urban users, to control flooding, and to generate hydroelectric power. Dams include Glen Canyon, Hoover, Davis, Parker, Imperial, Laguna, and Morelos on the main stem down to the Mexican border; Fontanelle and Flaming Gorge on the Green; the Aspinell Project on the Gunnison; Navajo on the San Juan; Coolidge on the Gila; and Saguaro, Canyon, Apache, and Theodore Roosevelt on the Salt. These monuments—and hundreds of smaller dams and diversions throughout the system—leveled the river’s natural volatility and transformed it into a step-series of placid lakes joined by remnants of flowing river. By storing the region’s spring runoff behind dams, communities could divert for human use waters that once flowed to the sea. Farms and communities now could use the river’s liquid gold when and where it was needed, not when and where it happened to flow. Storing water behind dams also protected communities from the annual floods that once discouraged extensive settlement along the river’s broad floodplains.

The Colorado River’s artificial plumbing system contributes immensely to the human economy and lifestyle in the arid Southwest.⁶ It provides water and electricity for the economies of seven U.S. states and two in Mexico. Water stored behind dams within the basin and diverted to users both in and out of the watershed now serves population centers with more than 30 million people, and irrigates more than 3 million acres of land. That same water drives turbines that generate 11.5 billion kilowatt-hours of hydroelectric power a year, enough to supply about 13 million households. (Average annual household consumption in the United States is 908 kilowatt-hours.⁷) Hydroelectric plants are particularly suited to generate power during periods of peak demand, such as hot summer days in the Southwest when air conditioners run almost constantly. This is power that comes without the need to dig for coal or drill for oil, without the smoke that fouls human lungs, and without the greenhouse gases that transform the global climate. Hydroelectric power is sustainable in that it will continue so long as the river flows.

If those benefits were not enough, the massive reservoirs behind the dams built to fuel the region’s economic growth are also playgrounds for millions of visitors who come to boat, camp, fish, and enjoy the splendor of the Colorado’s canyons, and who pour buckets of money into local and regional economies. Land once subject to flooding is now protected behind dikes and levees because the dams hold back and release water gradually, except during exceptionally wet periods when storage capacity is insufficient. Colorado River reservoirs can store an impressive 60 million acre-feet (maf) of water, four times the average annual flow of the river. (An acre-foot, intuitively enough, is the volume of water necessary to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot [approximately 326,000 gallons]). The vast majority of that capacity is in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs in the United States, with a combined maximum storage of more than 50 maf.

But those benefits come with a serious price. From its headwaters in the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado to its delta in the Sea of Cortéz—where the river flows at a tiny fraction of its former majesty—human change has taken its toll on the biological and aesthetic resources of the Colorado River. Hundreds of miles of formerly flowing river now lie below artificial reservoirs, and the dams fragment the river both physically and biologically. With a few exceptions in the headwaters, upstream of any dams, even those stretches that remain river have been changed significantly. In most places, spring flood flows are significantly smaller and flows from the dams are much higher and more uniform during other parts of the year. Especially below the Hoover Dam, hundreds of miles of river channel are imprisoned within levees or constrained by artificially armored rock banks. Water released from the dams is typically much colder and more uniform in temperature than in the natural river, and is starved of the sediment and nutrients that used to flow downstream. This loss of sediment changed the former patterns of bars and eddies that provide habitat for native fish. It also robbed sand from beaches formerly used by river runners, other recreationists, and wildlife. Water quality has deteriorated due to direct releases of sewage and industrial waste, and polluted runoff from farms, roads, mines, mining wastes, and other sources adds salts and other contaminants.

On top of all that, we have introduced dozens of nonnative (exotic or alien) species, some intentionally and others by accident, which can prey on or outcompete native species. Once-thriving populations of endemic fish are now gone from parts of their former range, replaced and outcompeted by artificially introduced trout and other species. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed four Colorado River fish species—the humpback chub, bonytail chub, razorback sucker, and Colorado pikeminnow—as endangered.⁸ (Ichthyologists changed the popular name of the last to pikeminnow from Colorado squawfish, which was an offensive slur to Native Americans. The new name will be used in this book, except in quotations from earlier sources.) Riparian communities once dominated by cottonwood, willow, and other native plants are now overrun by tamarisk. (This plant is often known as salt cedar, although this name is technically correct for only one species of tamarisk. For convenience I will refer to all species collectively via the singular tamarisk.) For hundreds of miles, levees and other structures separate the river from its natural floodplain, and reduced flows have eliminated the river’s natural spring overflows. Birds and other species that once thrived in those habitats, like the southwestern willow flycatcher and the Yuma clapper rail, are endangered due to the loss of riparian habitat. Many of the canyons that once contributed to the majesty and mystery of the region are drowned below hundreds of feet of water and silt. Among the affected portions of the ecosystem is the Grand Canyon, that towering symbol of American conservation and undisputed international treasure.⁹

The Colorado River is just one example of what we have done to almost all rivers in the United States since European settlement. And no wonder, given the degree to which waterways fueled economic activity. Virtually from the beginning of recorded history, people have settled at the water’s edge. Waterfront areas were among the first to be developed, because proximity to water was useful for navigation, irrigation, industry, defense, and household use. Flat, fertile floodplains were easy to build on and productive to farm. From before the earliest days of the American republic, waterways were critical for transportation and trade, settlement, fishing, and defense.¹⁰

This use and development of U.S. rivers and other waterways produced some of the most dramatic ecological change in human history. Most people know that we have dumped immense amounts of chemical pollution into our waters, but do not consider the many other ways we have changed the face and the shape of the aquatic environment. Experts are virtually unanimous that the biggest problem facing aquatic ecosystems is not pollution, but the destruction and alteration of aquatic habitats. The banks of most rivers and streams no longer support their natural riparian plants, with a loss of as much as ninety-five percent of natural vegetation in some areas. Floodplain development destroyed about half of the natural woody riparian habitat in the contiguous states. We filled or otherwise destroyed more than half of the wetlands in those states, and although the rate of wetlands destruction has slowed, we continue to lose about 60,000 acres a year, despite a stated national goal of no net loss of wetlands. More than six hundred thousand stream miles are inundated by reservoirs, and diversions from those structures seriously alter natural stream flows and habitats. Many more waters are levied, diked, armored, rip-rapped, and channelized, largely to aid or protect development at the water’s edge. We justify this massive hydraulic machine by arguing that economic progress is needed if not inevitable, change is essential to foster that growth, and we must accept a highly modified environment as the price of our modern lifestyle.¹¹

The growing environmental restoration movement, however, openly defies such concepts of futility in the name of utility. Although restoration as a strategy for environmental protection is not new, it is becoming more prominent and more ambitious. In fact, it can be viewed as the third major strategy of the modern environmental era (beginning in the 1960s).¹² Let’s take a moment first to explore briefly the way in which restoration fits within the overall suite of environmental management strategies, issues to which we will return in more detail in chapters 5–9.

Restoration and the Environmental Movement

In the second half of the 20th century, environmental management involved two main strategies. First, we tried to mitigate the increasingly severe environmental damage caused by our accelerating industrial economy and our thirst for more and bigger things. Asthmatics choked on smoky air; rivers caught fire; and solitude dwindled as millions of Americans sought the great outdoors in their cars and trailers. Mitigation is somewhat like a paramedic treating an accident victim. The immediate task is to stop the bleeding and to minimize the resulting harm. We built fish ladders, for example, to reduce the effects of dams on migratory fish, although often with questionable success. The dams were designed to accommodate water development with as little harm to fish as possible. We set treatment requirements for polluted effluent from factory pipes and public sewage systems, but continued to release somewhat cleaner residues into the nation’s rivers. With this treatment strategy, we aimed to reduce impacts while allowing the growth of American industry, population, and quality of life.¹³

Mitigation, of course, costs money, resources that could be used to feed and clothe and provide other economic goods and services. The costs of environmental controls stimulated debate about whether pollution controls and other forms of mitigation provided society with more benefit than they cost. Economists sought optimal levels of pollution. How much we should spend on this environmental emergency room became the subject of cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness determinations, and the like. Others asked whether and how we could place a price on such amenities as clean air, clean water, healthy ecosystems, and the spiritual, emotional, and intrinsic values of wild places in their natural state.¹⁴

Gradually, we learned that it might be cheaper and more effective to prevent environmental harm by providing the same or similar goods and services in ways that cause less damage to the environment, thereby avoiding debates over the value of environmental mitigation. This second-phase strategy is like the efforts of an epidemiologist to prevent accidents and causes of disease in the first place, rather than treating patients once they become injured or ill. We use laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, discussed extensively in later chapters, to predict adverse impacts in advance and to consider feasible but less harmful alternatives. That information can be used to decide whether a dam or a highway should be built, or whether more efficient water use or mass transit could serve the same ends with less environmental harm. Congress designed antipollution laws such as the Superfund statute, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Pollution Prevention Act to encourage or require industry to produce the same or similar goods or services with less environmental harm.¹⁵

Prevention strategies work when innovation generates economic strategies that produce the same goods and services with less environmental harm, and at the same or lower costs. Otherwise, we continue to face difficult choices. Will we pay more for white paper manufactured without dioxin-causing chlorine bleach, or for cars that carry the same load, at the same speed, but that emit less pollution and use less gas? Even perfect prevention, moreover, cannot undo our past mistakes, and new mistakes are inevitable. A serious legacy of environmental damage remains, and is likely to endure for the foreseeable future.

The third, most recent modern environmental strategy, then, is to take affirmative steps to restore the health of ecosystems that have been altered or damaged by our past actions. Restoration is the holistic medicine of environmental policy. Holistic medicine might help a patient to recover and to prevent further illness through a combination of treatment, exercise, stress relief, diet, and other changes in lifestyle. It requires us to look at the whole patient rather than individual symptoms or body parts. In some cases, it requires the patient to choose between good health and cheeseburgers. To that extent, holistic medicine combines elements of prevention as part of a broader strategy of restoring and maintaining a patient’s health.¹⁶

Similarly, environmental restoration requires us to look at all parts of the ecosystem’s anatomy and physiology, particularly for large-scale restoration efforts like those in the Colorado River basin. It requires us to make hard choices about the value of a healthy environment compared to material wealth, such as the choice between water for off-stream economic use and the value of a free-flowing river. Scientists and others involved in Colorado River restoration efforts have grappled with those choices for many years and noted the impossibility of optimizing all river uses and values simultaneously.¹⁷ Often, however, politicians and the public want perfect, win-win solutions. In restoration we seek to redress the cumulative effects of human actions on ecosystems rather than focusing only on specific environmental media (e.g., air, water, land, wildlife) or on particular human activities (e.g., steel or power production, farming, hunting). As I will argue in chapter 9, environmental restoration in the Colorado River and elsewhere should incorporate elements of prevention as part of a broadly defined strategy to restore and maintain the health of the river and its ecosystems.

Some environmental philosophers question whether restoration is appropriate. They argue that restored ecosystems are human artifacts passed off as real nature, that restoration illustrates hubris about human ability to dominate and mold the natural world, and that the practice will lead to more environmental ills because of the false view that future harm can be reversed through restoration. One philosopher asserted that captive breeding programs for razorback sucker in the Colorado River region, in a futile effort to save a doomed species, are morally suspect and analogous to the impairment of a person’s right to die with dignity. As other philosophers and practicing restoration ecologists counter, however, these arguments ignore the practical reality that tremendous harm has already occurred, and more is likely despite our best mitigation and prevention strategies.¹⁸ The Colorado River is a good example of this. More than a century of human use has left a serious legacy of harm, including species perched on the brink of extinction, effects that are not likely to be reversed absent affirmative restoration.

That conclusion, however, raises perplexing issues of what we mean by a healthier ecosystem. Restoration requires difficult judgments about what we want to restore, to what condition, and to what