by Mike Fugagli – 08/08
Restoration is a loaded word. It speaks of potential. It also suggests a returning, or a making whole. It is a deeply political term. It goes quickly to the heart of human nature.
When I think about restoration, I think about species like beaver and bullfrog, entering our watersheds with muscles flexed. The beaver works overtime to add complexity to its ecosystem and to increase biological diversity, while the bullfrog thrashes about blindly like a bull in a china shop. The beaver is a keystone species, the bullfrog an invasive exotic; the beaver makes music, the frog makes noise.
Restoration is a loaded word, because like it or not, we have a choice to make. Kierkegaard was right: it is either/or; it’s beaver or frog. We either enhance the world or we degrade it. Held consciously or not, it is a decision that affects the meaning of our lives.
Restoration is the only type of ecology we have now. It is a brave new world. We have behaved clumsily and our footprint is large. Much will be lost. Mass extinction changes the meaning of restoration.
Restoration is an emancipation; a giving back, not of this fish or that bird, necessarily, but of a quality of wildness to the earth itself.
Restoration is also a limitation; an admission by our ego that there is something larger than ourselves that requires our attention. It is the recognition of a process so old, so complex, and so completely out of our purposeful control that we stand before it like a child staring into the eyes of a great horned owl.
Restoration is a peace offering to the emergent.
Say it with me, “The Gila River is the last major undammed river in New Mexico”. How many times have you heard that? A lot, I hope, because the phrase carries some weight. It seems to matter. But why? Have you thought about what it really means? It means that early in the twenty-first century, at the end of the age of oil, as human population crests globally in a catastrophic ecological bottleneck, and C02 concentrations rocket past 350 parts per million in the atmosphere – perhaps the point of no return, at least in terms of maintaining significant diversity in our own species - we find ourselves parked along the banks of a glorious desert river still governed largely by the wild. It’s astonishing really; a part of our natural heritage that yet remains emergent, connecting the far away past to a future held nervously in the palms of our hands.
The Upper Gila River is surprisingly intact, not because we have been overly-thoughtful stewards, but because it remains governed, fundamentally, by a natural hydrologic regime. It still floods, big on occasion, and that force, that boundary condition, still provides the river its catastrophic and creative pulse.
Fluvial-Geomorphology: now there’s a word to leave at the office. It’s the science of the interplay between water and land. It’s the shape of the river corridor, the movement of the channel, the slithering sine curve of friction and gravity. It is the big floods that give the Gila its fluvial-geomorphological character. And it’s the occasional big flood that presents life with an ultimatum: It says, “Look life; look at my watershed - 2200 square miles with headwaters above 10,000 feet. Look at my climate, wet enough to make a snow pack, but warm enough to lose it overnight. Most of the time I am asleep, but when I am awake, I am a freight train off the rails. I have nothing against you. But I am what I am. .
Because the Gila River is governed by a catastrophic ecology, the species that comprise its ecosystems have evolved to withstand periodic large-scale flooding events. They are used to catastrophe. In fact, they depend on it. And, thus, unlike our upland landscapes that are absolutely dependent upon the very slow process of soil formation for their vigor, rivers, like the Gila, are highly resilient. Knocked down, they spring back up again, almost overnight. It is the trees that do the heavy lifting: the cottonwoods, the willows, and the sycamores. They stand in armies to do battle with gravity. They answer back to the flood: “Is that all you have, 36,000 cubic feet per second? Don’t you know that I am life, and that I am very old. I have come a long way just to slow your waters down, and spread them softly across a fertile piece of earth.” Life then, as it has for 3.8 billion years, finds its way, and the rest is gravy; the black hawks, the cuckoos, the Greater sandhill cranes, even my own son, burrowing in the tall grass on the river’s edge.
Loren Eiseley wrote, “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” Magic is hardly the word when you visit one of the Gila’s oxbow lakes, or back-water sloughs. What are we to make of a Virginia rail, on the sly, in a desert marsh? How do we measure the lives of bats, feasting at night above an improbable riot of rushes and reeds? A marsh in the desert is a crescendo, an exclamation point. There is nothing rarer in the desert than a marsh. Yet, marshes belong here, as rare and precious as Mimbres polishing stones. They belong wherever desert-rivers like the Gila emerge from their mountain strongholds and spill out onto broad, low-gradient floodplains like the Cliff –Gila Valley. A valley is a release valve; it literally sets the river free. And released from the walls of its canyon, the river is free to rise up into thick clouds of cottonwoods and swirl in the sky, shape-shifted, into a thousand red-winged black birds, their calls piercing the air and their epaulets shining like jewels.
Of course, we don’t have to dam a river to kill it. We’re smarter than that. Heck, we can channelize it if we want to, and send those floodwaters down a narrow, straight channel just as fast as it can go. Catastrophic scouring and channel incision being a small price to pay, some might say, for unfettered access to rich floodplain soils. It’s so hard to think like a beaver. It’s hard to admit that the river’s floodplain is the river too, and so we turn valley reaches into canyon reaches and remove the ideals of beaver and otter from our minds.
When we turn a broad, alluvial floodplain, like the Cliff-Gila Valley into a canyon reach through river channelization, it is the river’s potential we are taking away. We are removing one important source of the river’s creativity. The Gila River, as it struggles it’s way down the Cliff-Gila Valley, has been under the spell of channelization for more than fifty years now, and it’s clear what the costs have been: Gone are the wetlands, and the wet meadows. Gone are the floodplain grasslands, the semi-riparian woodlands, and the mesquite bosques. On the river corridor, there is no release valve, except where the levees have failed. The river incises, cutting down like a knife. And the cottonwoods are battered, time and again, by flood waters shot down a barrel.
And now we are forced to consider the possibility of a diversion, another step away from the meaning of restoration, another chance for us to ignore what we already know in our hearts: that the days of unsustainability must come to an end. We no longer have much of a choice. The twenty-first century will be a century of loss. You’d better get used to it. It is our story now. The twenty-first century is a bottle-neck, a spasm, not unlike the other five extinction events in earth’s history; events so fantastic in scale that we tack on “Mass” as the appropriate descriptor. They are each impressive, teaching us that our biggest bullfrogs - randomness and natural catastrophe - working well beyond the time-scale of operability for Darwinian natural selection, are largely responsible for guiding life’s journey through time. Have we learned the river’s lesson of resilience? No! Instead, it is as if we have channelized the entire world and now the big one’s coming down. What can we do? Can we stand in the way like cottonwoods? Are there enough of us that care to even slow the water down?
Proponents of a diversion slip into their beaver skins, like trickster, and tell us that the river is sick; that there’s too much water. And it’s true, in a sense. We have certainly experienced a significant alteration of hydrological function in our upper watershed. Peak flow events, since the catastrophic episode of soil loss and channel incision that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century, have had their peaks raised in direct relation to the landscapes decreased ability to capture, hold, and release water slowly back into the river. For the plants and animals trying to hold their ground along the river corridor, it is as if the size of their watershed has been significantly increased. They are forced to deal with more catastrophic energy on a more regular basis. That is the deal we with made with the river when we chose to graze these lands, alter their fire-regimes, and pretend their future would not be inexorably linked to our own. And so we are told that for the benefit of nature, we can reduce those dangerous peaks, not by improving hydrological function in the upper watershed, but by skimming them off and selling them to the highest bidder. In the same breath we are told not to worry, there will be no ill ecological effects. After all, what’s the difference between a 20,000 cubic feet per second flood and a 19,700. Exactly, at that scale, what is the difference? You can’t have your cake and eat it too. At 19,700, the river’s still a freight train.
It’s the little floods I worry about; the ones that bring us mother’s milk: that chocolate-brown, willy-wonka offering of fertility from the upper watershed; the ones that ride on the backs of destruction, laughing, while sowing the seeds of creation. The ones that pick up the chisel and begin giving inanimate Nature its living face. It is the little floods that are threatened most by a diversion. If you’re ever going to capture 14,000 acre-feet of Gila River water, reliably, on an annual basis - and that is what it would take to even begin to justify the costs - you would have to flip on the switch much sooner, maybe at a 1,000, or 500, or 300 cfs. It doesn’t matter, because once the infrastructure is there, the rules can always be changed. Ecologically, there is a fundamental difference between a 500 cfs flood and a 200; even more so between a 400 and a 100. The smaller the flood and the closer its peak is to the river’s base-flow – and in the Cliff-Gila Valley, the base-flow of the Gila is somewhere between 50 and 100 cfs - the more times that particular magnitude of flood can be seen in the hydrological record. Small floods are just more common, they are anticipated, reflected in the expectation of the ecosystem’s collective genome. Big floods set the stage for life, but small floods nourish the actors. A small flood means to the life of the river what taking breakfast in the morning means to us.
F
It’s not enough to see the river as it is; you have to look beyond to see the river as it could be. High wall dams, channelization projects, river diversions: those are bullfrogs dressed up as beavers. They all represent win-lose scenarios. Humanity wins, in the short term, at a significant cost to biological richness. Each, in its own way, reduces the river’s potential and stifles its creativity. Each, in its own way is a path away from restoration.
Drill, drill, drill. Dam, dam, dam. It’s the drumbeat of scarcity, a rain dance, not to fertility, but futility. It’s as if Mary Poppins was wrong and “enough isn’t as good as a feast”. As if the people of New Mexico were not already putting that 14,000 cubic feet per second to its highest and best use. Those waters are working hard, nursing a mystery that lies, ultimately, beyond our comprehension. It’s the greatest who-done-it ever written and we stand within the story, as actors, stultified.
Often, when I’m sinking into a dust-in-the- wind kind of existentialism, I think, “Nature has failed us as a god because she makes no judgments”. We’re left to stew in our own juices, not only free to choose…but forced to choose; a reminder that behind the freedom of choice, is the tyrant of responsibility; a tyrant protected by a praetorian guard of memory cells, capable of harnessing time into the flip-pages of a book; there to be judge like any story for its specific merits. Climate change is a big story. Peak oil is a big story. Mass extinction is a big story. These are stories, not of problems, but of predicaments. Problems can be solved, predicaments cannot. Predicaments are boundary conditions, like the size and shape of the watershed, or the distance to the moon. Or like levees, restricting within a catastrophic corridor all further potential, erasing those storylines and voices not suited to energetic canyon life.
I’m suggesting, I suppose, that restoration hangs its hat on potential and that creating potential is a whole lot harder than destroying it. It’s better, perhaps, to stand back and give thanks for what you have, or what you could have. Or better yet, take off your shoes, and go for a long walk down the river. Go into the muck of a cuckoo slough. Feel its coolness and its high humidity. A cuckoo does not fear the desert sun. It is consilient with Nature. Its story and Nature’s story are one. We, however, who have borne the burden of choice not particularly well, have laid down that old book, Nature, tired, perhaps, of the storyline, or fearful of the next chapter. We have instead chosen to play monopoly with the planet. Fun for a while, but incompatible with physical reality, the potentialities of matter, and the living world that we have emerged from just as an apple emerges from a tree. We did not come into the world, we came out of it. That, on its own, should give us pause. Of course, the cuckoo’s story is our story too; we can’t just put it down. All we can do… all we have ever been able to do… is help in the writing.
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