Idaho Company Helping With Owens Valley Restoration in California

By Kovsky, Eddie

In 1913, when water from the Owens Valley of California began flowing into an aqueduct built to satisfy the city of Los Angeles’ thirst, William Mulholland, then director of the city’s Department of Water and Power, is said to have acknowledged the theft by saying “There it is. Take it.”

Taking the water dried up the Lower Owens River and the lakes it once fed. Since the first drop from those bodies flowed into Los Angeles nearly a century ago, the valley has been the center of a fierce battle over water rights, ecological damage and resource management. It’s a fight that has a long and painful history in California.

Now, after nearly 25 years of litigation over environmental damage in the Owens Valley, a small company in Idaho, Ecosystem Sciences, has completed the first step in what may be the biggest restoration project in the west.

And while the employees of Ecosystem Sciences were working in California, they discovered how much Los Angeles and Idaho have in common.

Los Angeles

Ecosystem Sciences was formed in 1994 to work on the Owens Valley project. The company has also done restoration and study projects in California, Mexico and the Lower Boise River, but the Owens Valley project remains their largest.

All nine employees are owners in the company, which does consulting work on for-profit projects. There is also a sister non- profit corporation to do work on important projects lacking funding, and each employee has a seat on that board of directors. Consulting fees from the for-profit company are funneled back to the Foundation, and every employee also contributes a part of their salary to the nonprofit.

“We all share one common philosophy – make the world a better place to live,” Managing Director Mark Hill said. “No one here is gonna get rich, but we have a hell of a lot of fun. We come to work and feel like we’ve accomplished something.”

Before forming the company, Hill had worked with fellow ecologist William Platts to restore Mono Lake, another site that had been decimated by Los Angeles’ water consumption. Because of their work on Mono Lake, the two were selected for the Owens Valley project. It took 10 years and $10 million in planning and implementation, but last December the city of Los Angeles began sending water back into the valley.

To make it happen, Hill said they had to create a fishery, 3,000 acres of wetlands and restore a river bed that has been dry for almost a hundred years – all before water could be pumped back into the valley.

The complexity of the project made the Owens Valley unique, Hill said. The valley includes three watersheds and a variety of Ecosystem more complex than the Florida everglades, he said.

Old wounds

The project was also unique because the history of the Owens Valley is so well known.

“The people who feel their land and water were stolen are still there,” Hill said. “But there’s also a recognition that if (the Department of) Water and Power didn’t own the land, the whole valley would be developed. The legacy of the conflict is still there. I never worked on a watershed with so much animosity.”

The people living in the Owens Valley in the ’20s and ’30s had no market for what they produced, so the local economy was self- contained, Hill said. That’s why when Mulholland bought up the land the owners were happy to sell.

But the local merchants went bankrupt, and those who were left behind without benefiting from the buyout blamed the city, Hill said.

In 1972, Los Angeles wanted still more water. The city had plans to double the size of the aqueduct pumping from the Owens Valley. But by that time new laws were in place, which opened the door for environmental groups and government agencies to sue the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Around 1994, the tangled litigation reached a settlement, which required the city to restore the water in the valley.

Pumping water back into the river is a huge accomplishment, but Hill says it’s largely symbolic.

“It’s a small desert river, not the Amazon,” he said. “We have a long way to go, including 15 years of monitoring to assess improvements. It gets interesting from here.”

It gets interesting for the city of Los Angeles as well, which has just given up 20 percent of its water supply, and will surrender another 10 percent as the Owens Valley restoration continues.

Los Angeles gets all its water now from a central aqueduct in southern California, Hill said. The only place they can get more water is from northern California, which rekindles another old conflict between the northern and southern halves of the state, he said.

“It’s a tremendous change for Los Angeles,” Hill said. “In the end they’re still a large city in the desert. But they are making strides with water conservation.”

Idaho

In 2005, the foundation completed a study showing how water quality could be improved with better land use along the Lower Boise River. Hill and his company used many of things they learned from Owens Valley and applied them to Idaho.

“Boise is developing rapidly,” Hill said. “Agricultural land is being redeveloped, but water rights aren’t always going with them. The way water rights are allocated has not changed as priorities have changed.”

The company designed a network of corridors to carry water from the Boise River to sustain ground water, which would benefit the local ecology and wildlife.

The corridors could be restored if a management plan existed, but that would require a public agency to tell land owners what to do with their water.

“They’re just causing headaches 20 years down the line,” he said. “Idaho is unique – if you tell a landowner he can or cannot do something with his land he can sue for takings. It comes down to the common good or individual rights. The concept threatens private land owners. It’s a knee jerk reaction, but it can be win-win.”

In Owens Valley, Hill had to convince ranchers there that a grazing management plant was good for them even though it required more effort. After the plan was implemented, the forage base for their cattle was actually higher, Hill said.

“We had nothing but opposition from rancher until we showed them the forage would be improved,” he said.

Hill thinks that if he can show a working demonstration of an ecosystem coexisting in an urban area, he can change minds in Idaho.

“Boise is no different from Mexico or California,” Hill said. “But we have to have a model for our own growth. There are lots of models for failure – where Boise is headed. (But) Boise has a real opportunity to do some cutting edge stuff.”

Developing a land management plan around water resources can actually create additional value in the area.

Developers have found that they can increase property values by building around an ecosystem instead of stripping a property and building on top of it, Hill said.

And the automobile, in addition to polluting the air and contributing to winter time inversions in the Treasure Valley, also pollute the water. At the same time, paved roads prevent the ground from reabsorbing water, which rolls away instead of being reused.

“Getting people to change habits is hard part,” Hill said. “Someone has to get behind it and stick to it.”

Science and society

When Ecosystem Sciences begins a restoration project, they intend for human beings to live in it.

“The best scientific answer may not be best sociological answer,” Hill said. “Science has to fall in line with society. You have to make it work for people, who are the primary inhabitants of any watershed.”

It’s possible to degrade nature to a point where it can’t bounce back, Hill said. But for projects where an ecosystem recovery is possible, there are different levels of restoration.

A pristine restoration is impossible, Hill said, because an ecosystem can’t be restored to what it looked like before human beings were there. A historic restoration is sometimes possible, just by removing man-made impediments, like dams, inside a system.

What Hill aims for is a functional restoration, by removing everything that degraded an ecosystem and letting nature return on its own. This approach creates a working ecosystem, but one that is often fundamentally different from what originally existed.

For example, Owens Valley never had a brown trout stream, but it does now, Hill said.

After a restoration has been planned, Hill believes in letting nature do the heavy lifting.

“There’s no way we can engineer all the discrete aspects of an ecosystem,” he said. “Nature does a better job than we ever will putting the pieces back together.”

The people who inhabit the ecosystem will determine if the restoration is a success.

“Most projects fail because they don’t address how land is being used around water,” Hill said. “You have to account for the cause of the problem first.”

A sustainable system between man and nature is possible, Hill said, but requires planning to recharge the groundwater system and an understanding that growth cannot outpace resources.

“If you have good land management that doesn’t cover everything in pavement, you will have sustainability,” Hill said. “In the long run you have to recognize everything is finite. Part of development is recognizing limits – there is a point where growth cannot go on.”

(Copyright 2007 Dolan Media Newswires)

(c) 2007 Idaho Business Review, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.