Watershed councils east and west: advocacy, consensus and environmental progress.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Author: Lavigne, Peter M.
• Date: 22 December 2004

I.

INTRODUCTION

The views in this article originate from an experience I had at a national rivers conference in 1993, replicated dozens of times in the subsequent ten years, where conference participants were using the term "watershed councils" in ways that assumed everyone was talking about the same thing. Few in the audience then (and it still is true today) knew the distinctive regional differences in structure, law and culture in organizations often called watershed councils from coast to coast in the United States. The broad scope of watershed institutional history in the United States includes the analysis of the effects of forests on water supplies by George Perkins Marsh in Vermont in the 1860s, (2) the efforts to create the Adirondack Park in New York in the 1880s and 1890s, (3) and the seminal work of John Wesley Powell and his report on the arid lands of the great American West in 1878. (4) These are all antecedents of regional differences in governance and activism which endure to this day. More importantly, the nascent emergence of ecosystem law and policy in the twenty-first century (5) is best served by a clear understanding of common terminology and conceptual approaches.

In the spirit of cross-fertilization and further development of ecosystem law and policy, the views in this article are based on a twenty-year history of work in watershed ecosystem protection and restoration. Because of positions in local watershed organizations in New England and moving to regional work for American Rivers in the Northeastern United States and Canada, For the Sake of the Salmon in the Pacific Northwest, along with national and international work at River Network, as a private consultant, university professor, and at the Rivers Foundation of the Americas, I cannot address these issues as a disinterested academic. It is, however, the knowledge acquired through this diversity of experience and involvement that makes the analysis possible. (6)

II.

WATERSHED: THE BUZZ WORD OF THE 1990s

"Watershed protection and restoration" was the "new" environmental buzz phrase of the 1990s, and watershed ecosystem restoration will continue to be a focus far into the future. The enthusiasm for characterizing the newness of the watershed approach to ecosystem management and restoration is best represented by the important 1993 book from the Pacific Rivers Council entitled Entering the Watershed: A New Approach to Save America's River Ecosystems (1993). (7) Partly in response to the ideas in Entering the Watershed, conservation techniques shifted dramatically over the decade to more comprehensive watershed ecosystem approaches. The emphasis in the West (and in federal agencies nationally and some state agencies in other regions of the United States) moved towards comprehensive restoration and away from single focus efforts on water, air, and land pollution and degradation issues.

Following the lead of the national organization River Network (whose work changed between 1988 and 1993 from "helping local people protect rivers," to "helping people organize to conserve their river watershed"), masses of agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began the same shift during the mid-1990s. That shift had previously occurred within the Pacific Rivers Council as it evolved from the wild and scenic river oriented Oregon Rivers Council at its founding in 1987 to its more comprehensive regional (and occasionally national) watershed approaches to ecosystem restoration and protection in the early 1990s. At that time it seemed, for many people working on environmental issues in the West, that "watershed councils," "alliances," and "associations" in various forms and with various purposes sprang instantaneously, from nowhere, all over the West. (8)

Of course, watershed advocacy of one sort existed in the West from the early decades of the United States federal government's dominion over the region. Though oriented more towards encouraging ecological limits to sensible development of the high desert on the eastern slope of the Rockies, Civil War hero and famed scientist and explorer Major John Wesley Powell spent much of his post Civil War life advocating, and in part implementing, a watershed approach to the rivers of the West. (9) Wallace Stegner, in an introduction to a 1962 reprint of Powell's seminal 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah, said, "Essentially, Powell's Report ... was a sober and farsighted warning about the consequences of trying to impose on a dry country the [land use] habits that have been formed in a wet one." (10)

Watershed councils and the watershed approach to ecosystem restoration have a long and effective history in New England, as well as in other parts of the East and Midwest. The eastern version of watershed advocacy, oriented in large part to ecological restoration, began while Major Powell's efforts at the end of the nineteenth century to bring the conquering white pioneer's governance of natural resources and political boundaries in sync with the river watershed basins of the West failed dismally. (11) In the wet East referred to by Powell and Stegner, the first campaign to "restore" a river watershed built an eventually successful effort just as Powell's twenty-two-year campaign sputtered and ended.

III.

ORIGINS OF WATERSHED RESTORATIONS THE MERRIMACK RIVER WATERSHED AND THE WEEKS ACT OF 191112

In 1885, 680 timber companies were indiscriminately cutting trees in the headwaters of the Merrimack River, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In their wake they left denuded hillsides, streams choked with runoff, and devastating forest fires that fed on the piles of slash and waste. As logging railroads pushed the cutting higher into the mountains, visitors to the fgrand resort hotels of the Whites were greeted by burned over hillsides and great clouds of smoke. (13)

Textile mill owners downstream on the Pemigewasset and the Merrimack watched helplessly as erosion-fueled freshets and summer droughts alternately flooded and spun their wheels. In the late 1890s, concerned editorials started to appear in the Boston and New York newspapers while a handful of early conservationists huddled with business and political leaders. In 1899, an Episcopal missionary from northern New Hampshire found the critical human angle that started to turn the tide. The Rev. John E. Johnson wrote an incendiary pamphlet that accused the New Hampshire Land Company--a Hartford, Connecticut-based concern that was buying and consolidating large tracts to sell to the timber companies--of genocide. (14)

In early 1901, former New Hampshire Governor Frank West Rollins convened a meeting of nine friends from a range of backgrounds. They called themselves the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests (the Forest Society). The Forest Society was (and still is) an amalgam of New Hampshire's political power and Boston's social and financial elite, plus a seasoning of conservationists, foresters, outdoors enthusiasts and hardy Yankee townspeople. (15) United with advocates for a southern Appalachian reserve, the Forest Society coalition decided that the only adequate response was federal ownership and restoration of the mountain forest.

Leisure, timber, and scenery were all factors in the fight to establish the White Mountain National Forest but it was water that turned the battle. In a letter to Congress included in a booklet entitled, "Reasons for a National Forest Reservation in the White Mountains," Amoskeag Manufacturing Company President T. Jefferson Coolidge blamed clearcutting upstream for the alternating floods and droughts damaging his mills on the Merrimack in Manchester. Soon, over 100 mill owners in the watershed joined the fray. (16)

Finally, in 1911, with the support of Midwest Progressives and sponsored by Representative John Weeks of Massachusetts (a New Hampshire native), Congress passed an Eastern forest reserve bill that was signed by President Taft. The legislation, called the Weeks Act, enabled the federal government to purchase privately owned land to protect the headwaters of "navigable streams."

No region of the country was specifically named, but within a year of passage, the federal government began land acquisition in the White Mountain National Forest. (17) Eventually the Weeks Act would enable the creation of fifty national forests in the East. In some ways it was perhaps appropriate that Powell died way "down East" in Haven, Maine in 1902, just as the first successful effort to "restore" a major river watershed was building a head of steam in the mountains of New Hampshire. (18)

IV.

STRUCTURAL AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN WATERSHED COUNCILS EAST AND WEST

Along with over a century of history of watershed advocacy pioneered by the Forest Society, watershed councils, associations and alliances have existed for thirty to fifty years in many northeast watersheds. The very existence of the EPA Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds (OWOW) was inspired by some New England projects in the 1980s. (19) Thus, this "new" watershed approach, facilitating place-based ecosystem conservation, is not so new.

The term "watershed council," however, has important regional differences that often are glossed over in the rush by former Interior Secretary Babbitt and others to praise such organizations. (20) In the West it implies a consensus-based decision process, while in the East watershed councils imply a different animal altogether.

1. East

   In the East, watershed councils are most often private nonprofit river watershed protection associations, with dues-paying members and professional staff working with volunteers. These councils educate and advocate for broadly based river protection and restoration as independent "501 (c)(3)" environmental groups granted nonprofit charity status by the Internal Revenue Service. Funding for...