Healthy Watersheds, Healthy Water

Replanting areas subject to heavy erosion improves watersheds and water PHOTO BY TIM WORLEY

John Muir famously said, Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe. Gifford Pinchot, a contemporary of Muir's who headed the United States Forest Service at the turn of the 20th Century, was more utilitarian in his conservation ethic, but strongly championed the importance of forest management to the protection of water resources. A century ago, conservation leaders like these thought, spoke, and planned on a watershed scale.

Water maintains an important place in the multiple-use mandate of the Forest Service, even as many other water managers and land use planners neglected the fundamental importance of a healthy watershed to good water resources. This is most evident in the urban environment, where most people scarcely recognize that they even reside within a watershed. Sadly, as flood protection assumed pre-eminence, residents turned their collective backs on increasingly channelized urban streams and rivers. Impervious urban surfaces of roofs, asphalt and concrete have also broken nature's system of groundwater replenishment by hastening rain water down storm drains, and out of the area-carrying in the first flush a literally sickening load of trash, metals and other pollutants.

Fortunately, signs point to a reemergence of watershed thinking, but a great distance remains on the road to recovery. At the beginning of this century, the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority (SAWPA) had embarked on watershed scale planning, integrating concerns of ecosystem restoration (such as invasive species removal and habitat improvement) with traditional concerns of water quality and quantity.

The example set by SAWPA went statewide in 2002 as the progressive architects of Proposition 50 wrote Integrated Regional Water Management (Chapter 8 of the ballot proposition) into state law, offering $500 million in competitive funding as an incentive. While too early to truly evaluate this provision, at a minimum the rush to develop IRWM plans and integrated projects has broken down some of the silos and gotten agencies and non-governmental organizations talking and collaborating in a new way.

While IRWM planning has drawn the most attention, some examples of collaboration for watershed health carry on with little public fanfare. Lisa Northrop, Resource Officer for the Angeles National Forest, says the agency embraces partnerships with local organizations and agencies, such as the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District. For almost 20 years, the water district has carried on a partnership for the purpose of restoring the local watershed. Attracting a few hundred volunteers each time, the program works on events supervised by Forest Service experts that range from collecting acorns and other native plant seeds, to replanting areas subject to heavy erosion.

If the needs of the National Forest are great, a truly colossal transformation is needed in the developed urban landscape. Here too, glimmers of change may be found. Partnerships between local government and non-profit organizations have built storm water systems using parks, school playgrounds, and other public property. Projects employ a range of solutions, from low-technology swales to retain storm water, to more elaborate systems incorporating pollutant treatment, storage cisterns, and irrigation pumps. The scale of projects also varies, from small pocket parks or parking lots to full city blocks.

Planning and acting to improve our mountain and urban valley watershed areas holds the promise of a more sustainable local water supply.

A Club member since 1987, Dr. Worley consults on water issues and serves as Treasurer for the L.A. and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council.