by Martin Doyle
Professor Gordon “Reds” Wolman, Leopold’s well-matched coauthor, ca. 1972.
Their book was riddled with these kinds of quantifications. How tight were meander bends? How often do rivers tend to flood? How wide and deep should we expect a river to be? Human intuition was replaced with the seeds of engineering certainty. And because Leopold and Wolman were drawing on vast datasets, they gave their readers a tool with seemingly universal applicability.
Armed with this book, the river restoration movement adapted its methods. Instead of using the needs of specific types of fish—like trout—to design specific structures, the proponents of restoration began using the science of fluvial geomorphology to simulate natural conditions when they designed rivers. Channelized streams were de-channelized and then re-meandered to resemble some semi-natural version of their former selves, and the equations of Leopold and Wolman guided the design. Restoration was no longer a simple weekend hobby for fishing buddies—it was becoming an industry.
CHAPTER 12
The Restoration Economy
Interstates I-90 and I-15 cross unceremoniously in Montana. West of Butte and South of Missoula, the landscape can appear lunar on a hot summer day, the dusty open spaces punctuated only by the cars with liberal interpretations of Montana’s daytime speed limit that howl past. The town—really a truck stop—at the crossing of the highways is Silver Bow, named for the adjacent creek. From the air, Silver Bow Creek stands out against the landscape: a sinusoidal wave that wanders across dozens and dozens of miles, lined on both sides by ribbons of green amid the surrounding brown. It is a re-meandered stream in the middle of nowhere.
Greg Koonce was part of the impetus behind redefining the first few miles of Silver Bow Creek, in addition to 750 other completely rebuilt rivers throughout the western United States. In the world of river restoration, and especially river re-meandering, Koonce is a relative old-timer. His company was one of the first consulting firms dedicated solely to fixing streams. In the 1980s Koonce was an early example of a new breed of consultants who served a new breed of clients in the mega-ranches of Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. Declining land prices had created opportunities for hobby ranches and vacation homes, and many subsequent newcomers to the West were avid fly-fishers.
The traditional development practice in the Rockies at the time was to put up as many houses as possible and make profit in sheer numbers. But a few developers had a different business model—they wanted to mix environmental conservation with capitalism. Koonce recalled his first interactions with these new developers: “The idea was that no one was going to restore these lands unless there was an economic reason. These new developers, however, would restore the land and the streams, and then charge more money per parcel.” The idea that private property was in need of improvement was something new. Land wasn’t polluted, it was just beaten up: vegetation and soil were degraded by years of overgrazing and neglect. This condition limited the potential for ranching and really anything else.
When Koonce co-founded Inter-Fluve with Bob O’Brien, Dale Miller, and Joe Urbani, they were just a group of four river scientists willing to try restoring streams. The young company rebooted the restoration industry at a substantially greater scale. Its scientists were in the business of using geomorphology to increase the chances of catching fish. Inter-Fluve advertisements in the early 1990s issues of Rod & Reel, Trout, and Field & Stream magazines are an almost humorous mixture of ichthyology and Mad Men: a picture of a trout jumping out of a stream with the caption, “We can build one for you!”
In many ways, Inter-Fluve and its clients were the modern heirs of the Catskills fishing clubs. The restoration would all be done on private land, the motivation was all about catching more trout, and it was bankrolled by wealthy landowners, many of whom were vacationers. Koonce and the others at Inter-Fluve knew about using in-channel weirs and building structures in streams for habitat. But in a significant way, their work was quite different from Van Cleef’s. All the founders of Inter-Fluve went through school in the years after Leopold and Wolman’s book was published. They were now armed with equations, and they could go well beyond building habitats and planting trees. As Koonce noted, “When we started Inter-Fluve, we just started building pools and riffles into existing streams with a backhoe.” When these in-stream structures and built pools and riffles proved ineffective, just as they had for Van Cleef and Hubbs, Koonce wanted to try re-meandering an entire stream.
Changing the entire river was an enormous step. Koonce recalled: “The first re-meander we did was totally scary.” The impetus to finally try re-meandering was part gumption and part geometry. On private land, with an aggressive developer who wanted great fishing, the scientists from Inter-Fluve had some leeway to try novel things. They were further bolstered by the reality that fly-fishing is less about the fish than it is about the aesthetics of the experience. Koonce knew that meanders were more than just natural; they were also elegantly geometric. The desire to fly-fish, and to pay to rebuild the entire river, was really a desire to improve the holistic angling experience, which meanders would enhance across the board. “The experience of standing on a gravel bar in a couple feet of water, casting into the head of a pool, and then the beautiful arc of following the pool downstream with your line; that’s the essence of fly fishing,” said Koonce. Fly-fishing has a natural, aesthetic use of geometry that only meandering streams can provide. And thanks to Leopold and Wolman’s book, the Inter-Fluve team had the equations to size, scale, and design their meanders.
With the first re-meander under their belt, and with results proving surprisingly effective in terms of actual fish caught in the restored streams, Inter-Fluve was officially in the business of playing god with the shape of rivers. First in Idaho and then in Montana, Oregon, and throughout the Northwest, Koonce and his partners developed an entire business of sketching blueprints of rivers based on equations derived from Leopold and Wolman. Then they headed out with the construction crews to start moving rivers around—with a certain amount of horror the whole time that they didn’t really know enough to do what they were doing. When word got back to Johns Hopkins and Berkeley, “Reds was flabbergasted by what we were doing,” recalled Koonce. As was Luna.
For many years, Inter-Fluve took on small streams for private clients. Silver Bow Creek was one of the firm’s more ambitious projects. For decades the creek had drained out of Berkeley Pit, which at the time was the largest open-pit copper mine in the world. Throughout those decades, copper tailings had accumulated in the sediment, making the river toxic and inert. Inter-Fluve led the restoration of the stream for the EPA’s Superfund, a federal program that mandates cleanup of the nation’s most contaminated land and ecosystems. This project was far more complicated than fixing a stream for trout. Inter-Fluve had to move the entire river to the edge of the valley, dig out the contaminated soil, replace it with imported clean soil, and then rebuild the river in the middle of the valley. The team shaped the river meanders according to Leopold and Wolman’s equations; they sized the river according to the equations of hydraulic geometry. River restoration was growing up.
Other river restoration consulting firms were starting up at about the same time, first around the trout streams of the West and eventually throughout the United States. The trajectory of restoration in the 1990s essentially mirrored the trajectory of restoration in the early twentieth century, ranging from projects on the private lands of the Catskills to those on public lands for the CCC. As river restoration gained traction in the late twentieth century, projects took place less and less on private ranches or newly developed plots and increasingly on public lands like National Forests or state and county parks. Federal and state regulations also increased demand for restoration: California streams were restored in response to new salmon restoration requirements under the Endangered Species Act, and new surface mine reclamation laws required rebuilding and restoring streams in Wyoming. Federal agencies picked up on the trend as they sought to com
ply with environmental regulations: in South Florida, the Corps of Engineers began re-meandering the Kissimmee River, which they had finished de-meandering only thirty years earlier. There seemed to be no end of enthusiasm for stream restoration; by 2015, Inter-Fluve alone had restored over five hundred miles of streams. The number of stream restoration projects grew exponentially through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, when over $1 billion per year was being spent on stream restoration nationwide.1
In the late 1990s, restoration evolved yet again, and firms like Inter-Fluve began to focus their gaze on dams. Ecologists and environmental scientists had long bemoaned the environmental destruction wreaked by dams. They stop flow. They frustrate salmon. They fragment landscapes. They kill rivers. John McPhee wrote emphatically in Encounters with the Archdruid that “there is something metaphysically sinister” about dams; that in the “absolute epicenter of hell sits a dam.”2
Dams were—and are—rampant on America’s rivers; in 2000, the Corps of Engineers estimated that the nation has over 80,000 dams more than ten feet tall. By that estimate, Americans have been building on average one dam per day since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. When we think of dams, we think of the Hoover Dam or Grand Coulee; but the vast majority of dams are small, private structures built decades or even centuries ago, often for reasons that are no longer relevant—from grinding grain for colonial villages to powering the mills of now-defunct textile manufacturers. Many of these obscure, ubiquitous dams are abandoned and useless for their original purposes, yet they are still causing all the harm that draws environmentalists’ scorn.
By the close of the twentieth century, society was faced with painful end-of-life decisions for these geriatric pieces of infrastructure. In some cases, state agencies stepped in to pull the plug. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, for instance, realized that old, abandoned dams were enormous safety hazards; locals called them drowning machines for kids. And so both states began to remove the most egregious cases of disused, harmful dams, and other states followed suit. Just as river restoration began quietly, as an almost secret passion of river eccentrics, so began the era of dam removal—slightly under the radar of national attention.3
It’s a strange thing to watch a dam being removed. In most cases it is anticlimactic, yet hypnotic. Like watching a building be assembled, but in reverse. A track hoe with a giant jackhammer noisily sidles up to the downstream side of the long concrete wall of the dam, which awkwardly protects its own destroyer. Then, for several hours, the jackhammer, arm extended, notches its way into the structure like a gigantic woodpecker. As work progresses, water begins seeping into and expanding the crack until some of the river is gushing through this narrow gap. Then the destroyer moves on along the dam to its next appointed notching. Soon the water no longer cascades over the breadth of the dam, but rather through the notches, eroding them further. Eventually the jackhammer is replaced with an enormous, scooping backhoe that shovels the bits and pieces of crumbled dam into a waiting dump truck, which unceremoniously carries the remnants to a landfill.
Two things are inevitable when removing a small dam. First, there will always be a crowd. Locals will come and watch, telling stories of things that happened at the dam. “That’s where I proposed to Evelyn.” “Remember when Billy’s boy drowned?” Every dam is inexorably linked to its town and thus to its history. Second, as the dam is dismembered and the reservoir drains, there are always surprises. In Minnesota, for example, hockey nets and hundreds of hockey pucks gradually emerge. Often, as the concrete is removed, structural stratigraphic layers appear one by one. The hitherto unsuspected age and history of the dam are revealed as the underlying logs and jerry-rigged historic dam structure surface after a century of being blanketed with nondescript concrete.
Throughout the late 1990s, dam removal took place hundreds of times. Each time the work was similar, yet had a local flavor. In Wisconsin, adjustments had to be made for elephants from the Circus World Museum. For years these animals had bathed in the historic millpond of the Baraboo River; removing the dam left the elephants without their customary afternoon dip. In Oregon, restoring salmon runs by dam removal was a pet project of the Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt, who brandished a golden sledgehammer to take out the first notch. In North Carolina, to garner local support, dam removers brought in Marines from nearby Camp Lejeune with dynamite—river restoration as military training exercise.
From bulldozers to backhoes to explosives laid by helicopter, dam removal became part of stream restoration. Perhaps the capstone event of dam removal, when river use and abuse came full circle, took place on September 17, 2011, at the ceremony marking the removal of two dams on the Elwha River in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. In attendance were two senators, a governor, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Secretary of the Interior—a group that likely would have been at the ribbon-cutting ceremony of a dam construction only a few decades earlier. The first notch was taken out of the dormant hydropower dam on the lower Elwha River. Backhoes floating on barges cut further notches while enormous cranes lifted house-sized concrete slabs from the top, working their way 257 feet down to the canyon floor, where swirling Chinook salmon bided their time.
Amid the fanfare—the politicians wielding golden sledgehammers and the giddy environmentalists—the economic accounting of dam removal and stream restoration more broadly was being tallied in the background. In Montana, digging out contaminated sediment and rebuilding Silver Bow Creek had not been cheap. Re-meandering a stream in Olympic National Forest was not easy. Removing a small dam was costly enough to show up as a line item on state budgets. Removing big dams, however, was downright expensive. Removing two dams on the Elwha River and restoring other stretches of the river ended up costing a shade under $325 million and was financed almost exclusively by the federal government.
If dam removal—or river restoration generally—was to occur at the scale needed to be effective, if it was going to affect a significant portion of the hundreds of thousands of miles of America’s degraded streams and rivers, then the economic calculus would have to change. Somehow, a different set of motives and mechanisms would have to come into play: the power of the market.
Much of the stream restoration work of the early and mid-twentieth century took place during a particular period for the national economy. The idea behind the funding of river restoration was that the economy should be supported by government spending on public goods, such as stream restoration. The economic growth after World War II, along with the enduring legacies of the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, had established the federal government as the economic engine of natural resources conservation. Stream restoration projects were often designed and built by private consulting firms like Inter-Fluve, and at times they were paid for by private ranchers; but more often, they were bankrolled by a federal agency or perhaps a state or local conservation program. If the problem of beat-up streams was going to be fixed, it was presumed that the government would have to do it. There were, however, a few divergent thinkers who questioned this assumption about the economy of environmental restoration.
John Dales is not your typical visionary. For starters, Dales was an economist—a practitioner of the dismal science. As a professor at the University of Toronto, sitting on the shore of Lake Ontario through the mid-twentieth century, Dales must have thought things looked particularly dismal. The rampant pollution of the Great Lakes and the surrounding rivers and streams had reached its nadir, and the burning Cuyahoga River was the poster child for all that had gone wrong. And yet there Dales was, quietly transforming our ideas of how to make it better.
Five hundred miles to his west, on the shore of Lake Michigan, Dales’s more outspoken colleagues at the University of Chicago—Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and Ronald Coase—were doing their best to reshape the world economy. They had unrestrained faith in the market, believing that minimal government combined with open markets was
the most efficient approach to solving any policy conundrum. Poor health care? Privatize. High electricity prices? Deregulate. Underperforming schools? Vouchers. This rethinking of how the economy and government would fit together was unprecedented, and it notably proposed minimizing the role of government in the economy altogether.4
Dales didn’t disagree with the Chicago boys, but he didn’t totally agree either. He shared a basic faith in the market; but he was also interested in solving immediate problems, which called for pragmatic solutions to messy situations. In classic academic fashion, he sat down and worked out a thought experiment for how markets and prices might be used to reduce pollution in the Great Lakes, which today we call “cap and trade.”
First off, Dales assumed that the public could not be counted on to address pollution. Instead, the government would need to recognize pollution as a public problem and mandate that the Great Lakes needed to be made cleaner by reducing it. By mandating that the Great Lakes have clean water, against the background of egregious pollution emptying into the lakes, the government would be creating a scarcity of clean water. Secondly, Dales realized that a market must have something to trade—a commodity. He argued that government should create this commodity—the right to emit pollutants. Each polluter—such as a steel manufacturer or a city’s wastewater treatment plant—would be given a number of pollution permits and could either use the permits themselves or sell them to other polluters. If a polluter reduced its pollution sufficiently, it would have extra pollution permits to sell for profit. If its pollution increased, the polluter would then have to buy permits from someone else. Government agencies interested in improving water quality could reduce the number of permits given out over time, thus constraining total pollution and increasing the scarcity of the permits. In this way, the government could improve water quality by harnessing Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand. Thus the pillars of free-market environmentalism—cap and trade, carbon trading, and biodiversity offsets—were all born in 1968 in Dales’s slender 111-page book.5