Good evening and welcome to the seminar series watersheds the critical link. My name is bill malarkey I am a professional fishery biologist and worked 31 years for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife And I'm currently the coordinator producer for this seminar series and co-host with Jim McKeever Who is the the director of the Learning Center of the Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute? It is our desire that the outcome of these seminar series is to present up-to-date thinking and science to help land and resource Managers and the public make prudent management decisions that will sustain natural resources as well as Commodity production and extraction This seminar series is being presented by the Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute and the Grand Lawn model watershed program It's also being sponsored by the governor's strategic water management group Which dispenses lottery dollars approved by the 1993 legislature for watershed health and restoration projects It's also being sponsored by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife the Oregon chapter of the American Fishery Society the union soil and water conservation district wasco county soil water conservation district soil conservation service the Bonneville power administration the U.S. Forest Service the Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute the Bureau of Land Management the city of Walla Walla and eastern Oregon State College This is the third seminar series presented by the Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute The first series covered topics on ecosystem management The second series covered topics on fire ecology and management and this series will cover topics on watersheds This series is being transmitted via satellite to 22 different sites in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho The seminar series is being transmitted via satellite on space net three Transponder 23. It's on KU band and frequency 12080 on channel 11 If anyone would like to tune into those those coordinates We're also offering college credit for the seminar series And you can get you can attain one hour college credit for $35 and the requirement is that you would prepare a three page single spaced report summarizing The each presentation now that's a total of three pages for the whole series not three pages for each evening You can pick up your registration forms in the back of the room and Fill those out and bring them back to us later We also have handout material on the back of the room that you can pick up And take home with you and enjoy We'd also like to have you sign the sign-up sheets so that we can get an accounting of all the participants of the seminar series This evening we will have a one hour presentation And then we'll go right into questions and answers We won't have a formal break as we've had in the past because of the interest in this topic this evening And the time time that we have to present this this information I'd like to introduce jim mckiever who is the director of the learning center Of the blue mountains natural resources institute and jim will introduce our keynote speaker for the evening Make this real short. Thank you all for coming tonight here and out the remote audiences This seminar series comes at a time of rapid change in how we care for our natural resources A time when more and more people seem to be drawing more from less and less At the talk of the day has become ecosystem management All resources all species including people And the most commonly used resource planning unit in ecosystem management is the watershed So hence the series in this seminar series We begin tonight by taking a look at the big picture very big picture The arena in which science and values interact on watershed issues Next week we'll take a close look at what watersheds are and how they function In the physical chemical and biological worlds We then discuss how watersheds are used by people and other organisms We follow with a look of how watershed health is measured and how damaged watersheds are restored And four weeks from tonight in the final Offering of the series will finish by talking about how watershed problems can be solved So that the land we share for now can maintain its value for future generations of people As well as the plants and animals that depend on these on the land with us And so tonight I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Kai in Lee A person who has some experience of his own in dealing with watershed issues Kai was at the University of Washington for 18 years starting in 1973 And during the latter part of that time he served as one of Washington's two representatives Under northwest power planning council Where he worked on the issues of the columbia basin particularly the salamonet issue He has collected his experiences and his thoughts on adaptive management A planning tool in a book entitled compass and gyroscope We've got a plug for that book right here Integrating science and politics for the environment Kai is currently director of environmental studies at Williams College in massachusetts And for And the title of his talk tonight is adaptive management for watershed based land use planning. Please help me welcome Dr. Kai Lee Thank you very much jim. I'm sitting there Wondering what it what it is about television that's managed to create a live audience again I'm delighted to see all of you out here And i'm delighted not to see the people who are in the distant sites and I hope that i'll hear from you At the end of the hour I want to say first how Delighted I am to be in the blue mountains on such a beautiful day And it's very good for me to be back in the northwest where I lived for so long where both my children were born And grew up As I drove here this afternoon. I was reminded of my favorite western writer walla stegner Who once commented that what this nation needs is a civilization that is fit for its landscape I don't know about the civilization that we've got here, but you you people sure have got the landscape And i'm delighted to be able to to see it and to be with you Tonight you're starting down a path And in the remainder of this seminar series You will be on that path to that will lead you to places That you already know to places like the grand ronde the willamette the snake the colombia and the pacific northwest It is my pleasant task this evening to make those well-known names seem a little less familiar to you And to stimulate you to think about the landscape you live in from a different perspective The angle of view of a raindrop Raindrops like fish and many other living things encounter the land as shape The lay of the land channels how water will flow within and finally away from the landscape The places from which water will flow within Will flow to a particular outlet or a collecting point Is called a drainage or a watershed 40 miles south of lewiston, idaho is One finds the outlet of the saman river not very far away from where i'm talking And the saman river watershed as many of you know Covers a particularly handsome piece of real estate In turn lewiston like lagrand and portland And the tri-cities in washington Lies within the colombia drainage whose outlet is out west beyond estoria Watersheds are natural boundaries they're boundaries first of all for water Along ridges two or more watersheds meet along the ridge line the line that's called divide by geographers Sometimes the divide separates watersheds heading in very different directions Again not very far away from here along a jagged and beautiful set of ridges in montana Two raindrops falling next to each other can land on either side of a divide One headed for the gulf of mexico and the atlantic the other Looping up toward canada before finding its way down to the to the pacific at the mouth of the colombia This ridgeline is known of course as the continental divide You might notice that the continental divide parallels the idaho montana border but lies entirely inside montana That is because lewiston clark and other explorers made a mistake They thought the divide lay along a slightly lower ridge line The border was established there, but the true continental divide turned out to be one ridge to the east That story about the limits of human knowledge is one of the themes that i want to explore with you tonight As these examples that i've talked about demonstrate watersheds come in all sizes from your bathroom Tub or shower to the colombia basin, which is as large as a european country A watershed is a natural province not only because it is a drainage But because living things tend to observe its boundaries This is evidently the case for fish and other water dwellers But it's also true for plants and animals that don't have long migrations in their regular life history patterns A watershed is thus often home Or as a scientist would say an ecosystem the natural range of a living population The salmon native to the pacific northwest are a fine example of this idea For although they do migrate sometimes for more than 10 000 miles Salmon are famous for returning to their native streams To the very spot where they emerge from the gravel four or five years earlier And there to make a nest to make to hatch the next generation Larger watersheds tend to be complicated of course because they are inhabited by people People don't limit their activities to natural provinces. They engage in trade and transportation That is how it's possible for me to be here with you tonight So far away from the Hudson River watershed that is now the habitat that I inhabit That's how it's possible to have all that brilliantly colored fresh food in the supermarkets at this time of year And not just the potatoes left from the harvest last fall Human borders take little heed usually of nature's provinces The boundary lines of many states are straight Although the natural world has few straight edges Many other human boundaries follow waterways the borders between Oregon and its neighbors Washington and Idaho Are both drawn along major rivers in part But rivers are the centers of natural provinces not their edges Rivers are where animals congregate where nutrients converge But because we are not an aquatic species we think of rivers as barriers and we have put borders there One result of the way we draw perimeters is that inhabited watersheds have tended to be places Where human actions and natural cycles fail to mesh Those failures become what we call environmental problems During my adult life we Americans have undergone an extraordinary change of consciousness about the environment And that is why a subject like watersheds which would have been dismissed as of only technical interest if that A generation ago now merits flying in alleged experts from distant places As delighted as I am to be with you here one must keep in mind what this means That landscapes including watersheds have become battlegrounds Battlegrounds in which the economic and environmental future of our land our water and our society is being worked out The battles have had many names a bit farther up the Snake River watershed The battle of redfish lake is largely but not completely settled now Over to the west of the cascade crest the siege of the spotted owls may be nearly done The war is over the future of industrial societies About whether we can move from an unsustainable economy dependent on depleting resources and producing economic and technological miracles And whether we can move toward a sustainable durable economy that remains vital and prosperous I want to return to that point But first I want to share with you the rich complexity of a large inhabited watershed The columbia where we are I think almost all of us are now So let me share with you A little bit of the the story of the columbia A watershed that I came to know particularly well when I served on the power planning council as jim mentioned I'd like to tell you a story about two human civilizations Each in its time claimed the columbia river The columbia rises in the canadian rocky mountains and it flows 1200 miles through the pacific northwest The columbia is the fourth largest river in north america The columbia drains an area the size of france It's that includes seven united states and two canadian provinces The river has an annual average stream flow of 141 million acre feet A number that I don't expect will mean very much to most people But it's 10 times as large as that of the color colorado river The columbia's high flows and extensive drainage have made it ideal for colonization First by fish and wildlife as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age about 10 000 years ago And much later by dam building humans There have been two columbia river civilizations A third one is now emerging To its earliest human inhabitants the river provided a rich life of fishing and gathering Centered on the pacific salmon Later on the fish became the river became an industrial waterway The sinew and the pulse of the regional economy that we live in now But now the columbia has become the site of an awkward search for balance Among its industrial uses and its environmental treasures This evening I want to consider how the story of the first two columbia river civilizations Illuminates the promise of a sustainable future And reveals some of the challenges that we will have to surmount if we're if we're to find it Not very long ago the columbia was a wilderness Before its settlement by caucasians this ecosystem supported a population of perhaps 50 000 native americans Their world revolved around the yearly migrations that brought brought 10 to 16 million salmon back to the river The fish were harvest harvested by spear net and boat And provided both food and trade goods for the people that lived here in the river basin The indian tribes lived in a long run ecological equilibrium They had bad times they had good times, but they endured over many many human generations This original columbia civilization lasted from a prehistory as far back as anybody could remember Until the early 19th century when strangers arrived The strangers came in search of manifest destiny A nation that would stretch from sea to shining sea As their logging mining and farming transformed the landscape Conflict between the native tribes and the colonizing settlers escalated By the 1850s Isaac Stevens who was then the territorial governor and representative Of the distant powers of the united states of america Negotiated trees with the indian peoples so as to secure the property claims of the newcomers In 1855 Stevens concluded agreements with tribes throughout the pacific northwest These treaties created reservations within which the indians agreed to live While retaining rights to fish hunt and gather roots and plants over a territory well beyond the reservation boundaries The treaty said more exactly that the tribes could harvest fish and wildlife In common with unquote the settlers Those words in common with would reverberate more than a century later But at the time it did not seem very much to concede It afforded the indians their traditional livelihood and there was plenty to share in common But governor Stevens had underestimated the power of his own people In the background of this slide you can see in the in the on the left hand on the upper left hand corner A structure that we now call the dowels dam And it was being it was being built then across the colombia The dowels and and it's a joining dam john day flooded slylo falls where these indians are fishing And when the floods covered the falls it extinguished a native trading site that had been there for many many centuries Beginning in 1969 after the settlers and their descendants had transformed the landscape and obliterated many of the fish runs The northwest tribes filed lawsuits to claim their treaty rights To everybody's surprise they won The immediate result was to reallocate shares of the salmon harvest That phrase in common with non-indians according to the courts meant that the tribes were entitled to harvest half the fish This imposed a drastic and sudden curtailment upon a fishing industry already in decline Striking hard at commercial and sport fisheries which had ignored the indians since the time of the stevens treaties After more than a decade of hard feelings as the litigation was carried to the supreme court Where the treaty claims were reaffirmed both non-indian and tribal leaders Realized that there was only one option that all could abide That was to rebuild the salmon populations So that there would once again be enough for all to take in common Without battling one another for the right to kill off the stocks forever The long-run result of the tribal fishing rights dispute that that is was the rediscovery of a principle of the wilderness To take what one needs But to leave enough for the future In 1941 a young folk singer in portland, oregon wrote a song for the new bonneville power administration The government agency that had begun to sell power from the dams completed that same year Roll along columbia woody guthrie wrote you can ramble to the sea, but river while you ramble you can do some work for me Woody Guthrie was celebrating the second columbia basin civilization This basin's 19 major dams together with more than five dozen smaller hydro projects Today constitute the world's largest hydroelectric power system The columbia river and its tributaries generate on average about 12 000 megawatts from falling water Somewhat more power than is used in new york city Largely built by the united states government at a time of low labor costs The dams fostered economic growth in the pacific northwest with cheap electricity Industrial and agricultural development have built the population centers of the northwest aluminum for soda pop cans and Boeing airliners comes from northwest smelters like this one powered by hydro power So too mcdonald's french fries are processed in the potato country of Idaho Plywood and computer chips come from oregon There are two by force from the sawmills of montana Grocery bags and software from washington These are all products and jobs dependent on the river's electricity The 50 000 indians who lived in the wilderness have given away now to a population of nine million More than a hundred times larger than the aboriginal level That increase in population by two orders of magnitude Reflects a fundamental change in the relationships between people and their environment The domesticated river provides power and irrigation while controlling the once destructive floods of the river The river now serves as an inland waterway navigable by tug and barge for 500 miles from the river's mouth all the way to central Idaho And of course, there is world-class windsurfing in the colombia gorge The industrial colombia is a multiple-purpose marvel A river as the historian donald rooster put it that died and was reborn as money The governing principle behind the many functions of the river has been to maximize economic return The river's uses have been ranked accordingly power first then urban and industrial uses agriculture flood control navigation recreation And finally fish and wildlife What economic development meant for the salmon was that the river no longer flowed in its natural fashion Instead the spring floods that came each year when the snow melts have been impounded by dams Those waters had been used by young salmon to migrate to the sea But by the late 1970s, there was only one reach of the colombia where salmon still spawned naturally Here at a lonely spot in eastern washington that's called the verneeta bar The annual fish runs of 10 to 16 million that nourish the wilderness dwindled to two and a half million And more than two-thirds of those fish were born in hatcheries because their natural habitat had been so drastically altered The appetites of economic growth will in time reach the limits of the natural world to support them In the pacific northwest the limits have been measured by fish and power Each an emblem of its age Salmon ranging the length of the river since time immemorial gauged the health of the ecosystem Their decline has been a slow crisis by human calendars The biological depletions have been hidden and deferred by shifting fish from indians to commercial fleets And from natural habitat to hatcheries The power system the symbol of the modern age is now fully developed More useful energy quite a lot more can come from more efficient use From energy efficient practices and technologies that are now being adopted throughout the northwest Yet the real significance of energy efficiency is far broader That significance is that the industrial era on the colombia has come to an end Though no one can yet say what has succeeded what has succeeded it For nearly a generation the people of the northwest have struggled with the problems of declining salmon And the hydropower dams that are the single most important cause of that decline The crisis has been so long and drawn out that it is beginning to seem like poverty or racism The kind of deep scar in our culture that policy alone cannot heal I think there is something to that the scar is what we usually call industrialization and economic growth But I think it's wrong to think that nothing can be done What has taken the as I mentioned the long the decline of of salmon in the pacific northwest has been a long slow process What has taken a century to do will not be swiftly undone The problems are of human institutional origin And remedies if they are to be found must entail human institutional change The goal is to stop the decline of the salmon and to rebuild the fisherons to levels at which sustainable fishing might once again be possible Many ambitious steps have already been taken Hatcheries fishing restrictions large-scale subsidies from the hydropower dams All have proved to be less durable and effective and more painful than had been hoped A harder subtler remedy is deliberate institutional design And for this three ideas have come into prominence and I'd like to talk about them The first of these ideas is is the one organizing this symposium. That is the question of watersheds More generally the idea is to align human activities with the spatial scale of nature By planning around natural regions or ecosystems This is a sensible idea, but it's one that is rarely carried out But as as jim mentioned most contemporary analyses including forest plans developed by washington state's department of natural resources And the response to the spotted owl problem by the us forest service known by the acronym femat Do now employ the watershed as the unit of planning If you think about if you if you look at the map of the pacific northwest You'll see about a thousand drainages in this region counting streams of order six or higher This level of spatial division is about the same size as the number of local governments in the region If you look at cities and towns, there are also about a thousand of those But unfortunately, there's little correspondence between the two sets of boundaries Let me show you a map of the key watersheds In the pacific northwest and northern california That were identified last year by the forest ecosystems management and assessment team This is the femat group that i mentioned a few minutes ago That is responsible for trying to find a cure to the afflictions of the spotted owl These key key watersheds Are the centerpiece of the femat team's strategy for saving the spotted owl And i want you to compare the this this map that i'm showing you To this map This is a map of that shows you the the The boundaries of the counties In the same region in the same part of the in the same part of the the world What you'll see is that between the county map And the watershed map there's almost no resemblance The watershed map is drawn by gravity The human map is drawn with a ruler So what we have is a situation now where The human responsibilities And the natural and the and the natural organization Are out of sync with each other in a spatial sense So this is the challenge of watersheds to take the natural logic that nature has given us And and to take them into account in human governance While leaving room for human initiative and prosperity to to to continue Let me show you another example a little closer to where we are right now Where this is northeastern oregon And you can see on this map I tried to do a little color coding so that you can so that you can see the the boundary lines Here is the border between washington and oregon washington's up here and this is oregon And and idaho is is over here And this is the where where I am speaking to you from le grand here In in in the upper part of the grand ron river basin And I've drawn the outline of the grand ron watershed in blue on this map I've then included the state boundary in green And county boundaries in red And what you can see is that this is the same lesson I was I was I was teaching a moment ago about the northwest as a region If you look at the local scale and at the large scale what you see is The natural boundaries the watersheds and the human boundaries county and state lines There no resemblance to each other and that of course makes governing The governing the natural system a great deal more difficult for humans because humans have to cooperate And you have to get in order to To to deal with the grand ron for example, you need to get washington and oregon In several counties to to cooperate And that's obviously harder than having to than being able to do it under a single under a single management Now let me come back to the three ideas For sustainable management that I that I was talking about The first of them was the question of watershed Using watershed boundaries As the as the way to think about human responsibilities. We see we are not doing very good doing very well on that front Second I want to talk about an idea that's called cooperative management As conflict over natural resources intensified over the past generation Observers and disputing parties have increasingly turned to cooperative management A term defined by one thoughtful observer as power sharing In the exercise of resource management between a government agency And a community or organization of stakeholders Real sharing of power has been resisted in part because the american culture of accountability Is rooted in the legal idea that official governments can seek advice, but cannot yield their statutory powers Partly for this reason conflict has persisted Nonetheless cooperative management has a persuasive political claim to representing those with who have the most at stake Given their differing objectives representatives of user groups the scientific community and government agencies should share knowledge power and responsibility This is an idea that democratic political systems find hard to disagree with To achieve more effective and equitable governance involve the stakeholders in the decision making At a more practical level too it is difficult to create an effective management regime What we need is an arrangement that is equitable in the distribution of responsibilities and costs That is based on knowledge and data adequate to the task of creating workable rules And that is enforceable In principle cooperative management can reduce this difficulty by bringing resource users and others with stakes in the resources directly into the management process This assumes that stakeholders have data understanding and motivation That can help government officials better assess problems and devise solutions That more cooperation will moderate the equity problems that often arise And that if resource users are more fully involved They will be more likely to perceive the management system as legitimate And therefore that they will comply more readily with rules and regulations Cooperative management of resources like timber or fish or water Implicitly recognizes the central role of equity and fairness in fashioning solutions to difficult questions of natural resource management If the spotted owl problem is largely a people problem And if approaches to it are likely to have large social and economic costs Then many of the people affected will demand to be involved in addressing and trying to resolve this problem As the femat report put it because the issue is fundamentally social its solution must embrace people Residents workers harvesters and those who depend on tourists as well as environmentalists all have a right to be involved in governance The logic is compelling People will not support what they cannot understand says the femat report And they cannot understand that with which they are not involved Of course as the number of recognized voices increases So do the costs and complexities of forging workable solutions from the competing interests The costs of a cooperative approach may be worth paying High conflict Typically means that cooperative management becomes the only feasible path to institutional change The only way to shift the structure of legitimacy and power in order to acknowledge the genuine participation of various interests consumers the public representatives of different industries environmentalists And to take their power into account in policy in planning and implementation and in evaluation In cooperative management these traditional outsiders Act with each other and with the government agencies that exercise legal mandates in resource management Even though these agencies have traditionally controlled most of the financial resources in information But they have now lost the legitimacy or legal discretion to manage by themselves Cooperative management is already institutionalized in the pacific northwest in several important ways Beginning with the treaty fishing rights litigation of the late 1960s The treaty tribes in the state of washington eventually worked out true cooperative management For salmon harvest in the Puget Sound in the mid 1980s A federal court oversees a similar arrangement in oregon Second the pacific fishery management council an interstate body that regulates ocean fishing under federal law Has designed its decision structure to promote active consultation with advisory committees Third in 1990 is the threat of filings under the endangered species act materialized senator mark hatfield of oregon convened Something called the salmon summit to recognize a wide range of interests as legitimate ones And to expand the arena for cooperative management to include fisheries utilities and other claimants to the multiple uses of northwest rivers The largest attempt to manage cooperatively is the framework established by the northwest power act of 1980 By creating a regional planning council The act brought the governors of the northwest states into a decision arena that had been dominated by the bonneville power administration And the and the northwest congressional delegation The northwest power planning council created by that act Broadened the political base of the bonneville power administration as the governors through their council gained significant authority and influence Over this regionally important federal agency The power planning council also took its statutory mandate for public involvement seriously Affording opportunities for comment to citizens and organized groups as the council developed plans for electric power and proficient wildlife in the colombia basin As is often seen in this variant of open government, however The complexity of the issues before the council and the large geographic scope of the region made it impossible in a practical sense For those without substantial resources to stay involved By the mid 1980s when I served on the council the public with whom the council and bonneville consulted was a population of organizations Not individuals There were electric utilities with direct economic interests in the federal hydropower system There was a small set of consumer and civic groups like the league of women voters Who could field volunteers to follow the council through meetings and four states And there were state fisheries and wildlife agencies and indian tribes with stakes in the council's fish and wildlife program Even though the northwest power act process falls short of the ideal of power sharing in the exercise of resource management It did couple the agendas of fisheries and hydropower in a way that has forced conflict into the open and fostered joint action To despite all this progress there are two large interrelated challenges to cooperative management that remain to be solved The first is to develop a scientifically sound ecosystem approach to what to cooperative management And second to link the stakes of legitimate stakeholders to watersheds as well as trade routes Emerging from conflicts involving governmental agencies with established spatial jurisdictions Cooperative management arrangements have yet to move beyond the planning stage in dealing with Salmon ecosystems as units of management This shift to a watershed perspective is a social as well as a scientific realignment It requires stakeholders to establish legit legitimate claims And to act at the ecosystem level of biological and spatial organization Today stakeholder claims are grounded in economic interests or else in universal public interests such as species conservation The economic interests have had the upper hand for a long time But the changes in the northwest economy together with the decline of salmon harvests And the changes in the economics of electric power all suggests that material interests alone No longer define the governance of environmental quality and natural resources Indeed the rise of environmentalism as a politically potent force over the past 25 years A force rooted in the suburban populations that harbor electoral and economic power Now implies the passing of an extractive policy regime At the same time the economic adjustments required to achieve ecological rehabilitation Will be large and will sometimes be fiercely resisted That is the lesson of the spotted owl Unless social energies among all stakeholders are focused at the watershed or ecosystem scale The efforts required will tax even the most eager participants And hinder the widespread adoption of cooperative management as a mode of collective action on behalf of salmon and their watersheds Today there is little evidence that such an ecosystem perspective can or will be reflected in the agendas that characterize conflict and that structure action If you think about it even the petitions filed under the Endangered Species Act Do not draw attention to the landscape units at which watershed management is needed The history of the pacific northwest in some does not provide clear guidance On the way to create socially coherent bioregions in which cooperative management of ecosystems can take root There are subregions like the coasts of oregon and washington that have economic and cultural unity But there have been no successful attempts to govern at the bioregional level And past attempts including several institutional experiments in the Puget Sound have been of limited success at best Nonetheless it seems that trying to manage at the level of the watershed or the biological province Is an attractive idea. It's an it's an idea that That couples long range biological and social choices together And and gives us hope that it's possible to make those choices in a sensible long-term fashion Let me turn finally to the third prominent idea the idea of adaptive management Which i had a small role to play I had a small role in introducing to this region when i was at the power planning council Because human understanding of nature is so imperfect human interactions with nature should be experimental Adaptive management applies the concept of experimentation to the design and implementation of natural resource policies An adaptive policy is one that is designed from the beginning to test clearly formulated hypotheses About the behavior of an ecosystem that is being modified by human use If the policy works the hypothesis is affirmed But even if the policy fails an adaptive design still permits learning So that future decisions can proceed from a better base of understanding This picture shows you how the forest service femat has Has portrayed adaptive management Their diagram as i'll i'll discuss in a few minutes seems rational and straightforward. You simply track policy around in this circle But as we'll see Experience suggests a somewhat less happy reality Adaptive management is highly advantageous when policymakers face uncertainty But the adaptive approach is not free The costs of information gathering and the political risks of having clearly identified failures are two of the barriers to its use An adaptive approach has been tried in the pacific northwest in three arenas and has now been proposed in a fourth The idea was developed initially by a group centered at the university of british columbia They used adaptive management to In to manage fisheries harvest as part of the canadian department of fisheries and oceans sophisticated program of salmon management Two recent case studies led by carl walters and ray hillborn Co-inventors of the concept of adaptive management 20 years ago Provide appraisals of the successes and limitations of the adaptive process A second major application began in 1984 in the columbia basin program of the of the northwest power planning council A recent retrospective analysis by two senior members of the council staff Comes to conclusions that are remarkably similar to those in the studies by walters and hillborn Third there was an adaptive an abortive attempt to borrow the flexibility implicit in an adaptive management scheme And this this attempt was tried in 1987 in a program called timber fishing wildlife in washington state And finally and most recently the the idea of adaptive management areas In which timber harvest would be combined with ecosystem management Is being studied by the us forest service program to manage federal forest lands in the pacific northwest This body of experience has produced lessons now about the practicability of adaptive management and the institutional conditions That affect the conditions under which experiments at this large scale the ecosystem scale can be conducted The first lesson is that learning is very slow It takes decades to times as long as a century to secure reliable knowledge Patience particularly in institutional settings such as government that work on much faster cycles is both necessary and hard to come by The second lesson lesson is that systematic record keeping and monitoring is essential if learning is to be possible at all Yet collecting information is expensive and it's often hard to justify at the outset because the benefits of learning are hard to estimate quantitatively Third lesson cooperative management in the design and execution of experiments is indispensable One can only do experiments of this kind by having the cooperation of the resource users Without their cooperation what you have is sabotage and evasion Not data that's usable for science And fourth adaptive management does not eliminate political conflict, but it can affect its character in important although indirect ways Paradoxically each of these lessons runs counter to or at cross purposes with the administrative framework of the endangered species act Conserving species and habitats whose biology is poorly understood Requires patient observation and analysis that takes into account the economic needs of resource users And that relies upon the painstaking fashioning of political consensus That's the opposite of what the endangered species act does The urgency that prompts listing of a species as endangered raises the perceived risk of failure inhibits experimentation And and makes a even even though it's quite clear That that the urgency of an endangered species makes learning even more valuable than it would be otherwise More generally the femad diagram here understates the element of surprise and the reality of conflict And what i've done here is to annotate this diagram to show you what it leaves out because what it leaves out is terribly important The femad process like any adaptive process yields two kinds of results I'll give you the color-coded one, which we can see a little bit clearly The first sort of the first result The first set of results are the anticipated consequences These are the things that the scientists planning the experiment Thought that they would see That produces opportunities which leads to new technologies And the anticipated consequences also of course produce data that improve our understanding in our inventory of what's already out there But in addition to anticipated consequences Experiments always yield surprises as well The surprises include unexpected connections Ways in which things are related that we didn't anticipate before And that leads to new knowledge But among the unanticipated connections are also disappointments Disappointments force the revision of goals And while the the femad model includes the revision of goals It underestimates the amount of conflict That is necessary if if goals are going to be redefined successfully And these red arrows here these red circles here Which I've drawn to indicate that there are our pools or eddies of conflict Indicate other places where the adaptive management scheme is nowhere near as straight as a as straightforward As might at first seem in this in the idealistic in the idealistic setting If I might paraphrase The the german theorist clausowitz's dictum about war Adaptive management is the continuation of resource conflicts by other means I want to emphasize that the means chosen make a big difference As children may now say sticks and stones are not the same as bits and bytes That is adaptive management does transform the rhetoric of argument towards science and away from litigation and politics This is good news when the science yields fresh creative ways of devising solutions It is bad news when ordinary citizens and politicians accountable to voters Are excluded from decision-making by the scientific tenor of the debate Both the good and the bad have occurred Although my sense is that the good has tended to outweigh the bad For the simple reason that we understand so little about the natural world That any bit of science at all is better than than what we have had in the past I've talked a lot about why watersheds are battlegrounds for contentious humans And I've said more about that than why watersheds make biological sense for resource management Are there any conclusions that I can support With in talking with you I think there are if I can only find a place in my notes here we go The first conclusion is that the evolution of environmental policy Which has been dominated for a generation by natural science and legal thinking Is now beginning to acknowledge that humans and human institutions are the driving force behind environmental problems That's a very significant change What we've discovered with the fact together with human beings Is that changing human beings and their institutions is very hard First because there is stiff resistance with those who have a stake in the status quo And second because our social scientific understanding is weak enough That it's very often unclear whether change will be a constructive will be will be a constructive one Nonetheless, there are lines of consensus among those on all sides of these battles First we now recognize that watersheds and other natural units make compelling sense as a way to organize the data we have So that we can learn from them and ask better questions Secondly all sides agree that involving those with economic environmental and cultural stakes Is both unavoidable and often quite helpful And third I think we have come to agree that we know far too little Experimental learning is urgently needed even though one must be patient and careful in gathering and analyzing experimental results I'd like to end this talk By showing you The largest watershed the planet that we live on My purpose in doing this is to leave you with an image of the task that we have before us Saving the earth is a slogan Its message is that humans need to manage the planet A task that is so large that all earlier societies have assigned it to their gods This picture is called earth at night It was assembled by woodruff sullivan an astronomer who teaches at the university of washington This image is a photo montage put together from hundreds of weather satellite images Stored on magnetic tape in boulder, colorado Earth at night does not show us the real earth of course But a cloudless image of our planet as it would look if it all were to face away from the sun With his artificial image professor sullivan brings us a valuable insight Into what our species has done on this planet Greek myth tells us that prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind From the forest clearing fires of the amazon rainforest to the urban glow of california From the natural gas flares of the arabian peninsula To the squid luring lights of fishing boats in the sea of japan Humans have taken fire and put it to work in a thousand different ways Earth at night is a portrait of us. It is a portrait of the decentralized diversity of human industry and innovation Without the centralizing vision of science without satellites that enable us to see the world We cannot perceive the planet that we share with other living things But what we see when we look through the lens of science is a vast decentralized diverse reality It is a reality that is unlikely to be controlled or directed by any government Because it is impossible to monitor in real time or to govern through central rule That is the truth in the bumper sticker think globally, but act locally The image in the slogan suggests something else If central control cannot work the spread of ideas brought to life by human intelligence in a decentralized fashion can make a difference Thus the most important contribution the united states has made to the global environment so far did not come from the government at all It was our invention about a hundred years ago of the citizen-based environmental group A social technology that no government sponsors and that many repress because it is dangerously inconvenient A humane and environmentally sound future lies in reach, I think But only if we can have the leadership and participation of people who are widely educated Who have the courage to be thoughtful over times that make a difference to large ecosystems and powerful human institutions People of that kind in my experience tend to be well rooted to know where they come from Where they belong and how to articulate and to defend the places that they hold dear You can learn to read the force of gravity in your watershed You can learn how water is guided in your ecosystem as it goes from the sky to the sea And you can see how it nourishes a wealth of living things as it does so That learning is the beginning of the power to redefine humanity's place in the landscape So that we and it may both endure I wish you a good journey through watersheds in the weeks to come And I'd be happy to answer questions. Of course. Thanks very much We have a couple. Well, we have three different options here for answering questions First of all our live audience Secondly, we have our interactive group of remote sites and then we have the non interactive So I think we'll start out. Well, first of all with with a non interactive Sites will have an 800 number up here on the screen that you can call Getting some signs from phil That that you can call your your questions directly to dr. Lee with the interactive With the interactive system we have what we call hand raising and there is a There's a white Button at the remote sites that you push the white button and then you push your red button and then you can ask questions directly also Here live. We don't need well. We do need to press buttons Also, when you ask a question here the red button on your desk When we ask those questions So let's entertain a couple of questions from the live audience to begin with and then we'll go to the other audiences Anybody have any questions for dr. Lee? Yes Push the button bob Keep it faster. Yes. Yes. Keep it pressed given that this uh basin Supported about 50,000 people when it was in balance And even then there was starvation at times when the runs weren't good And I don't know what the numbers are now probably five six million nine million nine million How do we bring that to To play and and still hope to uh bring it back to what it was when only 50 000 were here Well, it's there is uh, there there's several things to say I think the the the blunt answer is we don't know how to bring or whether it's I simply don't think it's possible. I know it's not possible to restore The ecosystem to its original form By building grand coulee dam and hell's canyon dam We we eliminated Stocks of salmon and that part of the gene pool is just gone So we can't bring those fish back for sure What we do know is that we've increased the number of human beings About 200 fold But we have we have decreased the number of salmon by about 10 fold If you look at the wild salmon that are left in the in the basin and take them as an indicator About a tenth of their numbers are left. We have we have about actually about We have several times more fish than that but the rest are Are hatched and come out of hatcheries So We have increased the number of people by a larger factor than we have decreased the number of salmon So that may mean that that the the meeting point is somewhere in between that that's that's that can be favorable for human beings The third thing I think it's important to say is that even though we don't know How to get to an ultimate state of equilibrium There are uh We do know some initial steps to take And that's those are the ones that we're trying to make right now And we are struggling mightily with those And and from my standpoint You don't need to know where the ultimate destination is in order to get keep sailing in the right direction That's the concept behind my book Compass and gyroscope that even if you don't have a map even if you don't know where the destination is It still makes sense to venture in the right direction. That's what columbus did 500 years ago He found some pretty surprising results that that that most of us I think are inclined to think of as As on balance good although certainly with with bad bad effects But I think your question is a very difficult one that cannot be answered in its own terms. That is Can we get back to a state of nature? The only answer that I could settle on is no we cannot get to a state of nature We may be able to get to something that's sustainable And that that is that also has a human presence on the landscape. Yes, sir You suggest a process of involving Citizens or people and along with the scientists that you admit is a slow process cumbersome How does how does that work with populations of salmon that are very close to becoming extinct? Um, do we just write off some of those and muddle along with A process that we know is slow It's a good question. The question the question is what do we do about the endangered stocks? Do we just write them off? We're not able today legally to write them off Because the Endangered Species Act is on the is on the statute books And until it is repealed or amended It is the law of the land And what we do know is that we don't know enough To be sure that we can save this the endangered salmon And and the recovery plans that are that are now under discussion As you know as you probably know for them for the snake river stocks The recovery plans are less ambitious than what's been done already And and less ambitious less ambitious than than what's been than what's been proposed So we're at us. We're at a stage where The costs and impacts on humans Of um of the steps that are that are being seriously discussed are so large that people are backing away from trying to do Everything they can do already Is this writing off the stocks? I don't know I I because I I don't think that That the nature the natural situation that we've modified so heavily Is not a situation where where we can say Um with any clarity that that that if we try harder we'll get there sooner or or with more confidence What we know is that we've done a lot of things With the best of intentions in the past hatcheries are a good example And that oftentimes the things we've done with good intentions Have had very surprising results that that nobody had anticipated My own guess is that we are going to be losing endangered species We are losing endangered species worldwide At at a truly impressive rate As most of you probably know that the largest store of biological diversity On the planet is in the tropical rainforests Tropical rainforests in area are about the size of the continental united states about the size of the 48 states Each year we lose an area of tropical rainforest that's about the size of florida And with the that loss we lose most not all but most of the species that inhabit it So from a global perspective Losing a few more stocks of pacific salmon Is noise Is noise in the holocaust the holocaust is already going on That doesn't mean that we should try less hard Or or weep less bitterly about every endangered species in the pacific northwest It does mean that we have to think about our efforts in the perspective Of the planet because if we're going to talk about saving the planet Let's not let's not only concentrate on the upper snake river basin Um, what can we do to help save the watersheds around us by ourselves? Question is what can you do to save the watersheds around you? The first thing to do and i'm i'm glad it's a young person that's asked The first thing to do is to learn about those watersheds To learn about where you live And and and to learn just just to learn about the different borders and boundaries that i showed How the how the grand ron where we are tonight? Is cut apart by the borders of national forests and counties and states And to begin to get a sense of how much how essential human cooperation is So the first thing is science and government The second thing that you need to do it seems to me Is to begin to learn what is what the history Of this of this natural system has been to think about how depleted it has been and of what remains In the in the jaunday drainage nearby There are still many healthy salmon runs because the jaunday has been relatively lightly modified by human beings In the willamette a little farther to the west There are healthy salmon runs that weren't there before there were people That were that were only brought there when when fish passage was opened up In the lower willamette and allowed the colonization of the upper parts of the river So we we have examples and then and then up in washington state in the yakima We have a watershed that used to sustain as many as half a million fish a year The fish numbers now are as low as 2000 a year So we have we have all kinds of watersheds in the pacific northwest And i'm using salmon The way that i would use spotted owls only as an indicator of the quality of the watershed So the third thing you need to learn is something about natural history, which is which is not what most biologists teach in school But but which groups like Like the the autobahn society and other outdoor recreational groups Often do a very good job of teaching And and the fourth thing Is to think about How you want to live the rest of your life because your lives Stretch out into times of biological significance In my lifetime the environmental movement has gone from nothing to being powerful enough to overturn european governments And to have written an entirely new body of law that simply didn't exist Until 1969 when the national environmental policy act was signed into law So we've got we've got time to do a lot. Maybe not time to save all the endangered species I think that's it's important to keep that in mind But we have time to make a tremendous difference If we can keep the keep up this head of steam that's been going now for almost a human generation So for the young people who are starting out into this What i'd say to you is you have enough time to really make a difference And to those of us who are older Look back and think about how much our species has done in so little time To turn away from the headlong rush of industrialism. We still have a long way to go I'm not trying to say that the battle is won I'm simply saying the battle has been joined in a way that that I would have imagined was not possible In fact the first book that I published In 1980 a study of the columbia electric power system I said that I said in that book and you can look it up I'll show you where the citation is I said in that book that I thought that trying to rescue the salmon of the columbia basin Was probably a fool's errand that nobody should try and here I am 15 years later singing a very different song as you hear as you hear so even I can learn Let's go to some of the remote sites now and for the remote viewers Would you please identify where you're calling from or speaking from so that we can get a sense of Direction and space to see their faces Some of them we can if they're on the ed net two site. We can yes Anybody have a question out there? remember push your white button and your red button If you're at the interactive site and with the other sites call the toll-free number It's hard to believe that people in le grand could be more vocal than people in the rest isn't that true? Well, we can go to another live question then if we'd like go ahead If anybody's got a question here, I have a question. Okay, there you go Inside you've got two species that are competing for the same resource you might say You've got Seals blocking This isn't eating them. Which ones do you say? The question is when you have two competing species both under human protection Which one do you say even the example is seals? Those of you this far from the coast may not be aware that the sea sea lions Along the coast who that are protected by the marine mammal protection act, which is a different act than the endangered species act are now Very efficient terminal harvesters of salmon And they're eating the salmon as they come back to reproduce And being eaten by a seal is a good way not to reproduce And and there is there is a there's there's a there's only one stock that I think is Is really in serious pressure under serious pressure the steelhead That returned to lake washington Near seattle, but this is clearly a coast wide phenomenon As people have stopped harassing marine mammals Especially the seals seals and sea lions Their numbers have have mushroomed in the last 15 years or so I think this is one of those cases where We are called upon to play god There were seals and sea lions before there were industries And there were salmon And it's possible. I you know, it's not clear to me that the salmon Of the olden of the olden times were a whole lot smarter On the salmon of today And it seems very unlikely that the seals of today are a whole lot smarter than the seals of of the olden times But something has changed in the balance of nature And one alternative that humans have is to let nature find a new balance This is uh, you know going back to the gentleman here in le grand's question earlier This really I think tests our willingness to let a species go extinct Because of a natural process that we could intervene and do something about So another alternative is to make a change My own change the change that I would favor partly because I lived in seattle Is to vote for the salmon and not for the sea lions Thus showing that there is no loyalty among mammals But even though there is some loyalty among vertebrates, I guess And uh, and so so but that's but i'm only one i'm only one voter This is the this is the kind of question that I think it's appropriate for a democratic society to wrestle with What if the democratic society decided to exterminate both species? That's I think one of the you know that that doesn't seem very likely today But it's one of those things that that that gives me pause sometime And certainly it gives me pause watching how the The green parties in eastern europe and the former soviet union Have gone down to ignominious defeat in the recent elections Because as they say in the former soviet union you have to be able to eat before you can be an ecologist And and so they're you know, they're a trade-off. They're very difficult trade-offs out there I don't know what the answer is. You know what I would do as a citizen from the remote sides There's a question in the back there Would you would you go up to a microphone so that people in the remote sides can hear you? Back to the sea lion question It seems to me that the sea lions did that probably forever and ever And the problem is that there are a lot of other factors that are reducing the salmon But now we have a convenient Um escape target to say well, we we can start controlling the sea lions and so It just I I think you have to be careful With that idea. That's that's a good point. This is the the theory of the scape seal And and that and that we don't want to we don't want to pick on sea lions and seals Because they are attacking already severely depleted salmon populations That's why I mentioned actually before when I was answering the question that there's only one population of salmon That's that's that's that seems to be in an endangered condition or nearly endangered condition Because of this I think I think you're absolutely right that we want to keep that in perspective On the other hand if there is that one endangered stock or if that stock is judged to be endangered What do you do at that point? Do you say? That do you say, you know if the if the seals and sea lions only had better salmon populations Then they wouldn't be driving this species extinct. So I'm not sure how you finish that sentence and I think that drives you back to to where where I was You mentioned the john day and cited it as relatively untouched Yet in fact the upper john day due to mining probably was disturbed far more Even than the upper grand ronde is not the major difference for more dams Especially when you consider the grand ronde has two major tributaries what your wilderness streams the one on Mine and both of which have seen declines equal to any other stream in northeast oregon Now you're you're having now you're watching Someone who knows a watershed talk to someone that's only heard about a watershed I accept your I what you say sounds quite plausible to me I'm not I'm not having not not having been through the the john day I don't have I don't have a good answer for you I do I do think that the kind of knowledge that you're talking about that you're displaying Is exactly the sort of knowledge that is the answer to the Question from that young man before that that what you need it's it's only by Sorting through these difficult and in many cases unanswerable historical questions That we can put into proper perspective the things that we have available to us in the future There was another question from cyberspace. I think Yes, go ahead Okay, I couldn't hear your question real well, let me try to Rephrase it briefly and you tell me whether I got it. I got the gist of it. I think you were asking What is the role of the political? Actors in the decision-making process Are they stakeholders or are they neutral? Magistrates are they neutral parties did I get your question right? Well, thank you Professors are good at turning questions that they're not sure how to answer into questions that they know the answer to And the answer to your question is that that the political actors Will do what the democratic process allows them to do and and That is oftentimes to be stakeholders. You may recall those of you who have as much gray hair as I do Will remember that the state of washington strenuously fought against the indian tribes In the tribal fishing treaties treaty litigation all the way up to the supreme court And it it made one It made the attorney general of the state of washington so famous that he's a united state senator to this day Um, so that was successful in in that was successful for slade gordon. It was unsuccessful for the state of washington Sometimes politicians will try to be We'll try to be more even-handed and to try to fashion a solution That will that will accommodate all of the interests I think you see in the in the struggles that uh, president clinton has That trying to please everybody sometimes leads you to please nobody um, so I think that that that we've that that's What we have is a is a quite well-tuned Social ecosystem that elicits behavior from our elected officials That according to their ability to harvest votes now That can lead to all sorts of of unfortunate outcomes from my standpoint. I know and I imagine that's true of a lot of people But um, but I think that that what uh, what you see What you see happening here is that the political system is struggling to come up with with workable acceptable answers under circumstances in which There may not be workable acceptable answers, uh, visible think about our our long struggle over abortion rights Or think about the dilemmas that we face today with crime or with the with the deficit The salmon problem the endangered species problems Uh, I think are in the long run as difficult as the federal deficit But like the federal deficit that there there are a lot of near-term evasions that it's very easy to take So part of what what citizens need to do is to sort out the evasions from the real progress Uh, and and whatever the citizens figure out I can assure you the politicians will follow faithfully let me uh Let me share with you a question from someplace called halfway, oregon That must be a town that I never visited when I was on the power planning council it says From someone named jasper a discussion of cost you said costs were high Did not cover equitable cost distribution to the people who are making the distribution the decision Miners farmers, etc are paying the cost Have you given any thought to how to distribute the cost to the people who make the decision? Okay, this is actually three questions or so. Uh, let me try to answer them quickly each Um, I said the costs were high. Yes, they are More than a billion dollars has been spent on trying to Stabilize the salmon of the columbia river basin in the past 15 years And that that billion dollars So far as we know has not worked. Uh, it's not it's not wasted, but it hasn't worked yet Secondly the question of uh of whether um whether the people who are whether miners and farmers, etc Are paying this this cost The billion dollars that I just mentioned came In proportion to people's electricity bills because it was paid by it was not even all their electricity bills But just the electricity bills for the federal hydropower marketed by the Bonneville power administration and so Miners and farmers paid a share but only in proportion to the their their purchase of electricity if you are a farmer that uses irrigated The uses irrigation water You paid for the electric power to pump your pump your water You did not pay in the cost of your water for that that billion dollars because farmers have never been charged that Most miners who did the damage are no longer here And and they are beyond the reach of bills Except perhaps bills levied by the almighty and uh, and and and miners and farmers Together with loggers are conspicuous among those who are not paying their fair share by any reasonable historical measure So, uh, it is not it's in fact wrong that miners and farmers, etc Are paying the cost most of the cost is borne by et cetera today Um Third have you given any thought to how to distribute the cost to the people who make the decision? Well, I was one of the people that made those decisions For a while and I tried to to figure out what my fair share was And and I concluded that my fair share was first of all To pay for um, certainly to pay my electric bill cheerfully And to be and and second of all to be very careful To to support only those decisions that had a reasonable chance of actually returning a positive result I did not want to be part of wasting a billion dollars And as you as you just heard The decisions I voted for Contributed to the spending of a billion dollars, which has had as yet no tangible results Which shows you that I was I was as prone to be wrong as most people who make decisions In public life or I dare say in private life So I did in fact try to give a lot of thought to to what to do I I've I've thought about the degree to which I was willing to lead a politically correct life To this day, I will only operate my electric drier at night So that so that I use off-peak electric power Because when I lived in seattle that was one way to keep the water flowing at night So that the salmon would have flowing water to swim in But I I kind of think that that's an irrelevant contribution Because there are nine million ratepayers in the northwest And even though my wife thinks to do the laundry a little bit more often than I do It is I doubt that that between us we make much of a difference To the fish in any of the rivers that that we take our power from So I think that the the real question Is not How how to make the people who make the decisions Pay their fair share Because the cost today is more than 250 million dollars per year And anybody's fair share you divide that by nine by nine million You see that each of you that lives in the northwest I don't I don't live in the northwest any longer though though in some at some moments like this one I wish I did Each each of you each of you is paying Something like 30 a piece Family of four is is paying 120 a year That is considerably more than most people give to the Sierra club that I know of So you are already paying a you are already paying a substantial amount And every one of the salmon that comes back into the Columbia river Is the beneficiary today Of more than a hundred dollars of this of this yearly subsidy that's going to salmon That's before it gets caught and what the price you pay in the store Is the price of catching it and delivering it to the store It doesn't include that hundred dollars, which the ratepayers have given you So so we are talking about serious money. That's my point We're talking about as about roughly as much money As most families that subscribe to newspapers pay for their daily newspapers Is that too much to pay for an effort at rehabilitation? Certainly it's way too much if the effort at rehabilitation fails I don't have my you know my own judgment is that's not too much If we can save the symbol of the pacific northwest in the long term But in order to do that we're going to it's going to take Courage and and political astuteness on a scale that we haven't seen yet Among among the northwest's population and and among its political leaders I'm telling you these things In part because I think it's It is a scandal to our democracy That our voters don't know that they're paying $30 a piece to try to resuscitate the salmon When the council first went around the region before I joined it in 1982 to talk about their efforts The one thing they heard all over the pacific northwest from harney origan to uh to seattle washington was We think you guys are a bunch of fools and ninnies But for god's sake save the salmon and if you have to raise the price of my power Here's an extra dollar because I think it's really worth it. That's what people said 12 years ago I don't know what they'd say today and that's the question that I think voters in a democracy need to make themselves heard on Yes, sir One of the things that that maybe I got out of the question you're trying to answer things that I've heard before Concerns that Some people may be paying More than their share or taking The brunt of some of this a little more than others and I and I agree that that probably If if I hear what you're saying that the most equitable way is for everybody to both be aware As a consumer that they're paying for it and and and have it that's Having the consumer the beneficiaries of our larger cooperative share the responsibility But also be conscious that they're sharing Of one of the things that's happened with the spotted owl Thing and maybe this too. I'm not sure is it some people Uh tend to There's always a lot of finger pointing and blaming and the people that are actually on the end of the shovel or the end of the chainsaw Are the easiest targets and in reality Our system is a very large cooperative And if we blame the people that are running the chainsaw and still living in our You know houses then we're not being conscious as a democracy Correct. I I agree with you. There's certainly a lot of finger pointing that goes on And and the finger pointing I think is the single Largest reason why that billion dollars has not shown any results so far And I and I think it's it's it's real important to to keep in mind that there is plenty of blame to go around The question is not who is to blame, but how are we going to try to fix this? And and as for the how to apportion the costs You have to remember that that the costs are now being apportioned through a user's fee. That is through What's in effect a tax levied on the electric on the electric power? And as I said, it's larger than most people are aware of but it's actually quite small In proportion, it's it's about 10 percent of the retail cost of electric power today Think about how large your power bill the last power bill you paid was 10 percent of that was for for the the salmon program in in the colombia basin That I think is actually fairer than a whole lot of other ways that we could that that we could we could think of And and there are as I mentioned people like irrigation farmers Who are not paying any additional amount for the water that that they're withdrawing Even though those water withdrawals In places like the yakima basin Have have obviously been a major part of the depletion of the fish of the fish habitat So there are people in in the fisheries area in the salmon air in the salmon Policy, there are many many more people who we're getting away with not paying Then there are people who are who are paying more than their fair share And there isn't anybody in the salmon situation With the exception of of gillnetters and other harvesters who are clearly identifiable Who can be said to be at as you put it at the end of the chainsaw Bear in mind that the salmon question in the colombia and the northwest generally Is a question that in economic terms is vastly vastly larger than the question of The the loggers in the spotted owl The what you have with the loggers in the spotted owl is an extremely visible And well organized because they're very visible are also very well organized Minority that stands to lose everything they stand to lose their way of life And that is the reason why we have heard so much about the spotted owl And the loggers and the jobs and owls trade off And and it's and it's very interesting that in the northwest we don't have we don't have There's a similar amount of outcry even though the amounts of money are much much larger So this shows the you know this example I think is instructive because it shows you how noisy the political channel really is that we don't You know senators and congressmen tend to think of spotted owls as a very serious problem In terms a political problem and they tend to think of salmon as a less serious problem or at least they they have until recently Even though the you know in measured in dollar terms, it's just the other way around So it's it's a it's a very interesting way in which our our social perceptions In two different channels don't match Another question from Okay, okay Yeah, I'd like to ask the questioner more from roseburg here and One of the things that seems to be unique about the pacific northwest Is that there is quite a bit of government ownership that came about through history Is less of a case as far as the overall landscape And with the decline of the riparian areas What kind of thought have you given to As far as incentives for private landowners and you know, specifically, I know that with this ecosystem based management That in the southwest or southeast, I should say in uh, george alabama That those areas there's there's rebellion going on amongst foresters because of mostly ownership And wanting to have their stewardship on their land if you give any thought as to incentives For those private landowners So that's a very good question. I think it's this is this is perhaps the most important question With respect to the forest management That that that has yet to be that has yet to be even closed with And i'm very glad that you've asked this question because I think the question of how Private landowners and private water rights holders are to be brought into this picture is uh, is a central question We have assumed that this is a governmental problem that can be solved by government Well, it can't be It can't be because too much of the land and too much of the water is in private hands And and the way in which people have thought so far Is in terms of relatively simple minded notions Of of gaining ownership rights or ownership easements From the from the owners of of land and water But in fact, as you say there is a lot of concern among private property holders all over the country now About whether environmental regulations might be too invasive of their private rights The problems with the controversy over wetlands and what what is a wetland? I think is is is the the issue that it's brought together a lot of conservative opposition all around the country And I think it is a good question. It is a good question Whether in a society that has that has traditionally believed that private Private ownership confers a very large degree of discretionary control Um How we should deal with that when we propose to limit the discretionary control in the interests of environmental protection This is one way in which uh in which uh We we as a democratic Private property owning society may actually decide to let some species go extinct Because we may we may be able to we may not be able to marshal The the will and the and the financial resources Uh to buy out people that are that are not going to especially ones who are going to be unwilling sellers One of the things that I've learned from moving from the west Whereas you say quite properly. There's a lot of public ownership to the east Where there isn't very much is that environmentalism in the east is an elitist movement because it's mostly a movement that is Supported by private owners of large tracts of land Who want to who want to conserve the lands that they own and that they find that they find that they find benefit them Uh, and one of the things that I miss from the west Is a middle class environmental movement because out here where there is so much public ownership And there is a more outdoors oriented lifestyle generally Many more people are concerned about the environment because they actually Have a significant amount of their life experience out there in in the natural world And that's not something that's true in the east So I think you you've raised a critically important question It is one that I urge you to keep on pressing from roseburg I will try to keep on pressing it from williams town because it it is um It is a question that the government is really wrestling with uh, and that we at at this point do not have Uh a sensible response a sensible response to One of the ways you could imagine an incentive structure being set up Is to is to say For example that landowners that will invest in the quality of their land Should be given the right to or given given privileges With respect to the tax treatment of their investment of their other Of their other investment savings say the retirement savings or something of that sort because investment benefits to the public should be Matched by investment benefits on the private side. That's a way to limit the the tax impact Of some of the the ways that incentives are normally couched But i'm i'm really not sure whether that would be a sufficient incentive To get most private landowners to be responsible In the way that I think is really necessary So I think that we're going to have a mix of regulatory and um and voluntary incentive driven approaches We have a government that thanks to um 12 years of of republican criticism at the national level We have a government that's very gun shy about using its public powers for public purposes um And we have enough abuse of public power that I think most citizens in this in this country would just assume that the government stay pretty gun shy On that front. So that's that's where we are right now Is there a question was it did I see mom Mom let's take one more from the remote sides if there are Hearing none. Okay back of the room I'd just like to make one comment and then a question With respect to The question from halfway regarding equitable distribution of costs. I would turn that around and ask who over the last 20 to 50 hundred years has actually reaped the benefits of all those resources and perhaps You know seen some of the damage as a result Now for the question We hear that natural resource problems are sometimes termed wicked And that these are such complex problems. They don't seem to have a solution Uh, I ask you to comment on whether you think an adaptive management is an adequate tool To uh to answer or to find some solutions. Good. Okay. That's a that's a good question And you used a uh, you used a a very a word that I hope more more people Come to know this is the the term the term you used was wicked Uh, those of you that watch saturday night live know that wicked is a is an adjective much favored in new england Where I live now, but it's but this is actually it's it's used in a somewhat different way Um, a wicked problem is a problem that is beyond our capacity to solve And and as I mentioned in my talk There are those who think that the problems of natural resources may be Becoming wicked the way that we think that problems like welfare And and racism may be wicked problems in our society And your question was is adaptive management sufficient to um to deal with the wicked with wicked problems in natural resources And the answer is probably not immediately I yeah, I you know, I I likened I likened the I the compass and gyroscope to uh To to navigational tools I said Or if I didn't say it I meant it that we don't have a map. We don't know Where the promised land lies or even if there is a promised land When you are going on a voyage it sure helps to have a map And we don't have one uh and and and the my you know the problem that I that I saw that led me to write this book is That I didn't see a way not to take the journey For the last 200 to 300 years We have we human beings as a species have stopped co-evolving with nature The when the indians lived in the columbia basin They they were in harmony with nature because there was no alternative We have an alternative. It's called technology and economics And I do not know of a way to get off the train that's called technology and economics Without having a without having a very large change In the way that we relate to each other let and as well as to the as well as to the natural world And and the dream that that has been promulgated the dream that's been that's that's been spread around the world now By the rio summit the earth summit in 1992 held in brazil The dream is something called sustainable development That the present generation should meet its own needs in such a way as to leave it possible for future generations To meet their own needs Nobody knows if this is possible. In fact, we we rather suspect that it's not And and if it's going to be possible We'll have to do one of three different things The first thing that we might try to do is to keep on inventing technologies that get us to that enable us To harvest still more goods and services out of nature That's what we've been doing for the last 250 years with tremendous success So one one philosophy is letter rip. Let's keep on going The second answer is the answer of the environmentalist It is to live lightly on the planet that we have and to share generously with the humans that do not have And this is something that was this is a new answer As I as I mentioned a few minutes ago This is an answer that was undreamed of when I was a young person when I was a college student Like the ones that that normally inhabit this room But the idea that that we should live lightly and that we could we could find a social mechanism For bringing that about to a considerable degree although again not not far enough Is amazing to have have happened in in only a human generation But we don't know whether living lightly and spreading what wealth we have equitably We don't know that that's going to work either So the third alternative Is an alternative that is that came into that that I learned from an anthropologist Who was talking about what we used to call primitive peoples And this all this anthropologist whose name is marshal salons Wrote in a book about 20 years ago that one their societies that are rich because they have a lot And there are societies that are rich because they want only a little We are a society and we have been a society for 250 years That wants to get rich by having a lot And the question which we have only begun to glimpse And which I certainly don't have any answers to The question that faces humanity I think is Can we be rich by wanting little? That's a question that's not a question of science. It's not a question of politics It's a question of the humanities and of the human heart It's a question that I think we should all be thinking about Because I don't trust technology to keep us What technology does is it keeps on raising the ante it keeps on saying Keep on borrowing your grandchildren will be happy to repay And frankly I don't think they will be And the idea of living lightly Which is an idea that's that can only be held by a minority In a society that lusts after consumer goods the way that ours does The idea of living lightly I don't think has enough oomph in it What we need is something that's closer to a religious transformation And I want only to suggest that a religious transformation Is something that is that we know It several times in human history has come over the human race The invention of industrialism was one of them in fact And this is the threshold that I think that we are approaching I would be a fool to tell you that I knew what lay on the other side of that threshold Or even how to get the human race over it, but I think that's the threshold that's out there So no adaptive management is by no means enough It is only a way to you know, it's a very small flashlight With which you can begin to glimpse where the threshold might lie Yes, sir I was going to say the three things you mentioned Already are happening and they're happening together. It's not an either or kind of thing And one of the things that another way of characterizing what's happening now is crisis management Um, and that may have been kind of covered by the first option you were talking about One thing that I think that's helpful to remember is that the history of civilization is the history of cooperation Unfortunately civilization is evolving in lots of groups. And so there's competition between cooperatives And it's primarily the the competition between nation states that drives that economic technological thing You're talking about that creates the catastrophes that create the necessity for the next level of cooperation And we will get there. We might come real close to destroying the planet and getting there, but the The path is fairly clear if you look at at what What the competition between nation states creates in terms of wars advancement of technologies of Trying to draw world Countries into a world economy by enticing them with with a system that is actually destructive, but it's the first step In producing the next level of cooperation through catastrophes It's like the catastrophes cannot be separated from the cooperative solutions. I see what you're saying I would ask the people at the remote sites to bear in mind that we've just heard a a testament And one that I hope is true We better go to the remote sites again. We're running short on time for the for the telelink here when I called it You have no registration. So can I ask a question right now? Yes, go ahead Where are you calling from? From the bend site. There you go The question I would have dr. Lee is Earlier you talked about the need to bring people with something at stake Or something to lose together to the problems What suggestions do you have in that we find ourselves continually in the courts? with the spotted owl issue And the old growth issue and will that not happen again with the salmon issue? I think there's no question that we are currently on a track where we're going to be dragged into Endangered species act petitions I did repeatedly and and The the political systems attempt Through things like the salmon summit To try to avoid What the secretary of the interior calls the train wrecks of the of the endangered species act has not yet worked The the salmon recovery team that's working on the snake river the endangered snake river stocks Is trying I think to do something very interesting. They're trying to they're trying to signal politically That the endangered species act will not get any further Than the northwest power planning council's plan. They're trying because they're that's why I said that the That the recommended Recovery plan is less ambitious than what was already being proposed by the by the power planning council So what what we see is indeed crisis management to Take a leaf to borrow the phrase of the last uh of the last questioner And what we I think this I think the crisis that's building is Is uh This is the way that we are trying to clarify what is actually going on And to see whether the stakes are large enough To bring about a genuine reform Remember that the that the pacific northwest Has been transformed or the pacific northwest landscape has been transformed Really twice by deliberate human actions uh in the last in the last century The first was the building of the dams The building of the dams was inspired by the great depression Because it was only in the midst of a national economic crisis That the national government Summied up the will to invest all the capital to create The regional hydroelectric power network and the dams that are that are a generating element The second thing that happened In terms of an attempt at a stem discern kind of reform Was the northwest power act of 1980 The northwest power act was inspired by something that most of you mercifully will have forgotten A crisis of nuclear power called whoops And and uh five nuclear power plants at that point under construction in in the state of washington That were that were about to bleed the northwest uh ratepayers White or at least so it was feared And and it was the energy crisis of the 70s Symbolized by the nuclear plants together with the indian treaty litigation Which also threatened to tie things up in knots to a fairly well That that caused the northwest power act to be formed not to be passed and the northwest power planning council to be formed And the plan that is now on the books to be drafted Do we face a crisis of that proportion today? The answer i think politically is people don't yet think so They think that by crisis management by trying various kinds of reform measures That it is possible to hold off the crisis for a little while longer And so i think that we are what we have is a situation in which society and the mech with the mechanisms of Conflict that are available in a an open democratic and highly litigious society What we have are are the exercise of those mechanisms of people trying to turn up the heat and saying Damn it. I'm not being served well yet. You've got to do more Whoever the u is out there and the u raises that all that question about equitable Allocation of costs and benefits and all that business So what we have today is A problem that has not yet gotten the attention of enough people in this region To uh to really start to get the political wheels moving I'm enormously heartened to see this room full and the screens that from the remote sites That show that there are enough people that are willing to turn out In towns all over the northwest To hear to hear somebody come from massachusetts to tell you how to run your own region Which i think is you know, which which i think is remarkable It shows you among other things the television is even worse than I thought it was out here And uh, but i'm delighted that enough of you are concerned To to spend this kind of time to spend two hours in a row I mean, you know, I am not worth twice as much as rosanne according to my children And and um And so and so I think that it's it's very it's very interesting that there are people like yourselves And you are of course a tiny minority of the people that need to be involved Before people like senator hatfield and senator gorton Begin to think about how to put this kind of these sorts of problems Not only on their agenda for their newsletters for their monthly newsletters And not only so that they can look good with the suburban voters of the willamette basin and the And the and the puget sound but so that they can start to do the things that will really hurt And to do the things that that that will look like they have some chance of making a difference So the next billion dollars doesn't look as fruitless as this first billion dollars does today And then we can take questions from the live audience after nine o'clock I'm sure dr. Lee would be willing to stay for that any other people on the remote sites that have a question We hear a rustling this has been Go ahead I have a just a quick question on the author of this the statement That you need a civilization to fit for the landscape. Who is that the author was a man named wallis stegner Who wrote what is to my mind the best book about the west? It's about the historical book about the west It's called angle of repose. It won the national book award in 1971 And it's sent it's it's pivotal scene, which is at the end is set in set in in Idaho just to the east of boise Where the the protagonist the one of the central characters Was building the first dam that was built here in the pacific northwest It was an irrigation diversion dam at the end of at the end of the 19th century, but wallis stegner Was a was a man who really had a wonderful feel for the west and for its landscapes Excuse me stegner st. E. G. N. E. R. Uh And uh his great book is called angle of repose I commend it to you as a as as just a lot of fun to read. It's a it's a very interesting book It's about the west of about a hundred years ago a landscape that none of you will recognize I have a few closing comments. I'm going to cut off the questions right now But for the remote sites, I wish you would uh sign the sign up sheets Pick up your registration forms if you would like to take this for college credit We have handouts at each of the remote sites be sure and pick some of those up if you like We also are videotaping this whole series and that will be available for 20 dollars for the whole series Their order forms at each site go ahead and pick those up and get your orders in And now I'd like to thank dr. Lee for his presentation and and uh for those that want to stay later Can hear the remotes or at the live site. Thanks a lot. Thank you all I have some stuff to send in any way so okay any questions from the live audience Yes, ma'am Go ahead birdie. I guess it's a comment you talked about environmentalists Thinking that we should live lightly on the earth and to share with everyone That is somewhat uh by some people That's considered considered communism That's I've heard that I've heard that alleged I I didn't know there were any communists left, but it's uh No, I think it's uh I the another way of describing why I wrote compass and gyroscope is it The environmentalists that I the part of me that's environmentalists uh It could not believe I just found I couldn't believe the technological optimism That said we can keep on going and everything we'll take care of things because we're very smart But the part of me that's a scientist Could not believe that that's simply by moral reforms of scale and magnitude that we hadn't yet seen That it was going to be possible to overcome the ignorance that you can see all around you when you when you look at the natural world So it's trying to figure out how to how to merge those two things that the impulse To realize that we are finite beings on a finite planet and to deal with The very large although I think still finite ignorance that we have in finding our place on the planet That motivated me to try to to try to go through these ideas. And it's you know, there's a very good question that I got before Uh indicated I don't think that the answers that I put forward Are complete answers. There's certainly not uh, I mean one of the one of the comments I make in the book is that In this book you will find no recipe for finding Our way to sustainable development And and uh What you will find is something that reads more like an essay about cooking than a recipe If I had known what the recipe was I would have given the recipe I wouldn't have written an essay about cooking and it's because I didn't know the answer and because I don't think any of us Knows the answer that I think it's terribly important for us all to think about What the right way to approach the problem of cooking is or you know, it's what the right this is This is a problem that I think is Is in the in the immediate sense probably not as serious as the problems of racism and poverty But in the long term sense, it's probably as important as any question that we've ever faced I know it's more important than the question of capitalism versus communism Which has now turned out to be a false that that turns out to be a false dichotomy. Thank goodness, since you know, That was that was a very uninteresting question. I'm glad it turned out to be the wrong one There was a question in the back bruce has the next question Um referring back to your comments Well, maybe there's I'm not sure if we're transmitting go ahead and push it down Go ahead and push it down. We may still be transmitting referring to your comments before about crisis kind of management You referred earlier to endangered species act and maybe we've outlived that as an effective tool My concern is is that maybe that's the political motivator that keeps the ball rolling for politicians and The public to raise their level of concern about these issues. Could you comment on that? No, I think that's I think you're right I think that that without a hammer like the endangered species act which gives It's one of the only cases that I know of where non-human Beings are accorded legal rights of some kind It's not much of a right if you think about the quality of life, but it's but to be endangered anyway, but it's a But it is right And there's no question that it makes a big difference in the way that that governments react My comments were About the inefficiency of the endangered species act as it is now structured To deliver the biological resuscitation that it seems to promise And they're not about the you know, not about its effectiveness at Focusing people's attention Dr. Samuel Johnson said there's nothing like the prospect of being hanged the following morning to concentrate the mind Well, you know most teachers Would like to find methods a little gentler than that for their students And and similarly with the endangered species act Now that the interesting Political question, you know politics is said to be the art of the possible Is it possible now to have a more intelligent in endangered species act that is equally compelling of action? And we don't know the you know, we don't yet I think that's that's the question the congress is facing I think we were just phasing out Phasing out our broadcast, but anyway, this is my point is I I agree