Women & Water
Rivers: Trophy Wives or Wild Women?
By Contributing Writer, 9-28-05
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By Jon Christensen
This might be a guy thing, but I think Gary Jones, a rancher who blogs about ecology at Muck and Mystery, is onto something. It seems there is some new research from along the Colorado Front Range arguing that people tend to admire rivers that are like trophy wives, beautiful to look at, well constructed, with a few well-placed meanders, but, well, not exactly all natural. On the other hand, there are few natural rivers that people think could use a few, ahem, improvements.
In a paper in the current edition of Ecology and Society online, Ellen Wohl, a professor in the Geosciences Department at Colorado State University, argues that people tend to see simple, pretty, nicely constrained rivers as not needing to be restored, when in fact, they may not be very functional at all. On the other hand, people tend to think that complicated, unpredictable, messy rivers have problems that need to be fixed, when in fact, they may be quite fine.
Wohl has studied the history of land use changes on the more than 10 streams that form the upper South Platte River basin on the Colorado Front Range, from beaver trapping, to placer mining, logging, railroads, irrigation, highway construction and now restoration efforts. Several years of drought combined with rapid population growth have revitalized proposals to build new reservoirs and undertake restoration projects along the front range. But before trying to restore rivers, Wohl argues, it's important to understand their back story.
"Rivers have a history," Wohl writes, "and restoration or other management activities conducted in ignorance of this history are a disservice to river ecosystems and to human society."
A river that looks messed up, may be acting naturally. A river that looks just fine, may be badly compromised.
"An emphasis on appearance only can be misleading when the general public’s conception of river health is based on a tidy appearance rather than on an understanding of ongoing river functions, such as floods that maintain the grain-size distribution of pool and riffle bedforms. A segment of river can meet many people’s expectations of a healthy river if the water is clear and the stream banks are not rapidly eroding. However, the function of such a healthy-looking river can be highly compromised if flow and sediment are no longer moving downstream so that the habitats needed for diverse aquatic and riparian communities are not being maintained. This dichotomy between appearance, or form, and function gives rise to the concept of a compromised river. A compromised river is one that preserves a simplified albeit attractive form but has lost function because the hydrologic and geomorphic processes no longer create and maintain the habitat and natural disturbance regime necessary to ecosystem integrity."
Gary Jones, a self-described "bumpkin" who lives near a "more or less natural river" in the Sierra Nevada foothills in California writes: "the last thing I would find attractive is a tidy appearance. Rivers are supposed to be ever changing object lessons in water and force. They can uproot trees and tear down mountains. Heap big medicine! Terrible beauty."
Jones says this confusion about rivers is akin to "our current lack of sophistication... about feminine beauty. Many of us have difficulty seeing things that are strong, wild, dangerous and fecund as beautiful."
I hasten to add that this metaphorical insight is Jones's contribution. It does not appear in Wohl's work.
Jones thinks this problem might be cured with education and information. I suspect it will take experience.
Ellen Wohl argues for history.
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Comments
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For example, what may seem like unsightly debris in a river is actually prime spawning habitat.
The same can be said of my love handles -- they are protecting my ovaries afterall.
as an aside, one of the google ads is coming up "How Old is Your Deer? -- When you Really need to know the Actual age of Your Trophy Deer!" So many of us in LA could use a product like this!
In the West and the North, such systems are the heart of what we call "pulsed ecosystems," or ecosystems that depend upon the seasonal spring melt and runoff, causing floods and periodically ripping out riparian vegetation, which allows new growth to occur. Such seasonal "pulsed" destruction and regrowth is especially important for moose, which thrive on the higher nutrition that new growth, such as willows and birch, provides.
Without the "pulsed," seasonal, sudden release of meltwater into such riparian systems, bird and wildlife habitat suffer as vegetation that evolved with periodic flooding ages, and that is one thing we've seen both with drought and a warming climate. In many Rocky Mountain river systems, moose for example are at high stress, as their primary food, willow, have become degenerate with age as well as overbrowsing.
We could use some serious flooding in the river systems of the West. Of course, people object to that, which is another reason our river systems are in declining health. People demand flood control, but as we've seen with Katrina, flood control encourages even worse flooding when the "right" storm hits. So what do you want--lots of little floods or one really big flood? It's one or the other.