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16: Science as Faith: Putting Adaptive Management to Its First Test with the Sedimentation-Vegetation Problem
- University Press of Colorado
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179 Sediments washed down from the Rocky Mountain Front Range have long provided much of the muddy glop on which Lower Mississippi River Valley ecosystems and civilizations have been built. Sedimentation had been crucial to the construction of traditional tern, plover, and crane habitat along the Platte. The capacity of basin water flows to move a range of sizes of earthen particles would loom large in recovery program negotiations. The problem of moving sands and gravels by Platte flows to the right places and in the right shapes would bring the negotiations to their lowest point, to the very edge of a blowup. It would not be science per se that would save the day because available science lacked sufficient answers. It would be faith in science, within an adaptive management framework, that would get negotiators through to a tenuous resolution—albeit one barely adequate to allow the construction of a reasonable and prudent alternative. Unexpected Bad news Members of the Governance Committee, their assistants, and other observers gathered in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (USFWS) third-floor conference room in the agency’s office suite in Lakewood, a western Denver suburb. It was August 3, 2000, and there was reason to feel good about the direction of things. The water, land, and research-monitoring agreements had been sketched, even if they were not fully complete. The forthcoming November elections would put a new administration in place the following January, but there was guarded hope that the recovery program was far enough along to produce a reasonable C h a p t e r 1 6 science as Faith putting adaptive Management to Its First test with the Sedimentation-Vegetation problem SCI enC e aS Fa It h : put t In g ada pt IV e M a n a g eMen t t o ItS FIr St t eSt 180 and prudent alternative that could be signed in the last days of the Clinton administration . If not, the signing could occur in the early months of the newly installed presidency. The major general concern had been Nebraska’s problem in finding sufficient support for the proposed program. Ralph Morgenweck, the USFWS regional director, opened the meeting with a three-minute statement. The environmental impact statement (EIS) team had completed a preliminary analysis of the proposed water action plan (along with other alternatives the team had constructed over the past months, with the knowledge and consent of the Governance Committee as required by the National Environmental Policy Act). The EIS team had found that none of the alternatives served as a reasonable and prudent alternative. Years of work lay in disarray. Sediment issues had been mentioned only sporadically in discussions prior to the signing of the Cooperative Agreement in July 1997. In the discourses that followed, no attention had been paid to sedimentation. Negotiators had pieced together a proposed water action plan on the premise that an average of approximately 130,000–140,000 acre feet added to the spring and summer flows would do much to help produce the desired wide, shallow, braided river required by the listed birds. However, now the EIS team had found that the laboriously constructed action plan produced mostly clear water that had dropped its sediment in reservoirs behind North Platte dams. When released for program purposes, this clear water would scrub up sediment and thereby scour out and further incise channels. The EIS team determined that following installation of the Kingsley Dam, which created Lake McConaughy, and construction of the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District (CNPPID) canal system, three factors pertaining to sediment were at the core of the problem. First, Lake McConaughy was itself a sediment trap that made for clear water releases out of Kingsley. Second, the CNPPID plumbing constituted another sediment trap, resulting in clear water releases from the Johnson Lake power plant return (J-2) (see Figure 5.1). Third, the proposed program made the situation worse by moving additional flows through the CNPPID system as a method of delivering program water to critical habitat. Roughly half of the water flowing to the critical habitat was projected to come out of the J-2 return as clear flows that gouged river channels . Just a few months before the December 31 deadline for producing a viable program, the proposed collaborative program option, as it stood, was estimated to contribute to the very problem it was supposed to help solve. Morgenweck made it clear that the...