| Question: You know
cattle are walking up and down a trail in a deep, sandy
bottom in desert country, cutting a deeper and deeper
incision in the soft soil with each journey. You also
know that left unchecked, the trail may soon capture
the creek and start downcutting, dropping the water
table and causing the whole system to unravel over time.
What do you do?
If you are an environmentalist, the traditional
answer has been to kick the cows out and damn the social
and economic consequences to the local community. If
you are a rancher, the traditional response is to ignore
the damage the cattle are doing and pray for more rain.
If you belong to an agency, a typical answer might be
to get a government grant to fix the damage and then
orchestrate a symphony of backhoes, riprap, cement and
paperwork.
If you are Bill Zeedyk, who tried all of
the above through a long career as a biologist with
the U.S. Forest Service, you try something else. You
get community members to construct short fences and
place them squarely across the trail, at carefully measured
intervals, so that the cattle are forced to meander
in an S-pattern as they walk – precisely where
you think the water would meander naturally.
Then you stand back and watch the water
table come up, vegetation grow back, steep banks slough
off, and water appear in the bottom of the arroyo –
as Bill did in a pilot project he directed some years
back. In other words, you let nature do the work –
though in this case, only for a while.
"It worked until someone stole the fences,"
said Bill, with his warm, wry smile.
Bill's experience reminds us that environmental
problems are, at heart, "people problems" – our
society, culture, economics, and politics – which
means that most ecological "fixes" require equivalent
social solutions as well. Or, to paraphrase Aldo Leopold,
fixing the "pump" without fixing the "well" is only
doing half of the job.
However, at age 71, Bill would rather leave
the "people problem" to somebody else. "I'm done arguing,"
he said, "I'd rather focus my energy on fixing creeks
and roads."
And how. Over the span of two decades, Bill
has become one the most inspiring teachers in the region.
He has also developed a significant new toolbox for
the restoration of damaged landscapes using techniques
that "heal nature with nature," as he puts it.
This is important news. In this age of restoration
we need all sorts of practitioners, including economists,
entrepreneurs, ranchers, specialists, lobbyists, and
myriad volunteers. But everyone needs new tools, as
well as new teachers, in order to make progress where
it counts most – on the ground.
Fixing the Pump
An inventory of the restoration toolbox
that Bill has created demonstrates how his low-cost,
low-tech solutions allow "nature to do the work." Each
solution works to reduce erosion and sedimentation,
return riparian areas to a healthier functioning condition,
and restore wet meadows and other wetlands, all at a
minimal cost compared to other techniques, and often
with longer lasting success.
Those solutions include:
• one-rock dams
• picket baffles and deflectors
• wicker weirs
• rock berms
• vanes
• head cut control structures
• worm ditches
• "Zuni" rock bowls
Many of these structures are placed directly
in a stream. Vanes and baffles, for instance, often
constructed of wooden pickets (harvested locally), are
used to deflect streamflow toward the opposite bank.
Weirs are used to control streambed grade and pool depth.
One-rock dams are used to stabilize bed elevation, modify
slope gradient, retain moisture and nurture vegetation.
The goal of these structures is to stop
down-cutting, often by "inducing" an incised stream
to return to a "dynamically stable" channel type through
the power of small flood events. They do this by restoring
channel dimensions, increasing sinuosity, reestablishing
appropriate meander patterns and pool/riffle ratios,
restoring stream access to its floodplain, and raising
the alluvial water table which enables riparian vegetation
to grow.
"My aim is to armor eroded stream banks
the old-fashioned way," said Bill, "with green, growing
plants, not with cement and rock gabions."
To accomplish this goal, Bill uses to his
advantage a simple fact: creeks want to meander. Even
an incised system will create a sinuous streambed in
a new floodplain over time. The trick to restoration
is to speed the process up – a process he calls
"Induced Meandering."
"As a species,
– Bill Zeedyk
"The Induced Meandering Method," writes
Zeedyk in a field guide, "uses artificial instream structures,
manipulation of stream bank vegetation, and the power
of running water to expedite channel evolution and floodplain
development."
The employment of one-rock dams perhaps
best typifies Bill's naturalistic approach. The typical
response of landowners over the years to eroded, downcut
streams and arroyos has been to build a tall check dam.
The old idea was to trap sediment behind a dam, which
would give vegetation a place to take root as moisture
is captured and stored.
The trouble is check dams work against nature's
long-term plans.
"All check dams, big or small, are doomed
to fail," said Bill. "That's because nature has a lot
more time than we do. As water does its work, especially
during floods, the dam will be undercut and eventually
collapse, sending all that sediment downstream and making
things worse then if you did nothing at all."
"The trick is to think like a creek," he
continued. "As someone once told me long ago, creeks
don't like to be lakes, even tiny ones. Over time, they'll
be creeks again."
One-rock dams, by contrast, don't collapse
– because they are only one-rock tall. Instead,
they slow water down, capture sediment, store a bit
of moisture and give vegetation a place to take root.
It just takes longer. One-rock dams can be enlarged
slightly once secured by vegetation simply by adding
another layer of rock.
"As a species, we humans want immediate
results. But nature often has the last word," said Bill.
"It took 150 years to get the land into this condition;
it's going to take at least as long to get it repaired."
The key is to learn how to read the landscape
– to become literate in the language of ecological
health.
"All ecological change is a matter of process.
I try to learn the process and let nature do the work,"
said Bill, "but you've got to understand the process,
because if you don't, you can't fix the problem."
Trouble With Roads
Bill's second career as a restoration specialist,
which began while he was still working for the Forest
Service, had a simple genesis: bad roads.
During the 1980s, while serving as the agency's
Regional Director of Wildlife and Fisheries, a position
he held for fourteen years, Bill began to notice the
deleterious effects of roads on wet meadows. Whenever
a road crossed a wet meadow or a stream, he observed,
almost invariably a culvert was installed too deeply,
in order to make it lie well, often with profound and
adverse effects on adjacent landforms.
"The culvert created a headcut that subsequently
drained the meadow and often destroyed the resource,"
said Bill. "That's because the only goal of road construction
at the time was cheap and safe roads with no regard
for offsite effects."
While on a turkey hunt in the Zuni Mountains
in 1985, Bill had a revelation. Disappointed that he
wasn't finding any turkeys, Bill paused while hiking
back to his truck, and suddenly took notice of a deep
gully alongside the road. Following the gully, which
started with the culvert under the road, he saw that
it had drained a big meadow nearby.
"It was like a light went on," he recalled.
"Maybe that's why there weren't any turkeys; the road
had destroyed a key part of the habitat."
Bill went back to his boss, the regional
forester, and got his concurrence to organize a team,
which included the regional engineer, a hydrologist,
members of the range staff, and others. They took a
field trip to the drained meadow in the Zunis. Their
reaction was positive, which led Bill to consider the
power of collaborative thinking in problem-solving.
More immediately, it led to new designs
in road crossings on forest lands. He also set about
engaging the wildlife conservation community, of which
he was an active member, in restoration projects around
the region.
In the process, he scoped a lot of roads,
which eventually led him to author a book on road repair
and maintenance in 1995.
Bill is currently completing a new book
on the subject entitled "A Good Road Lies Easy
On The Land… Water Harvesting From Low Standard
Rural Roads" and will be available from The Quivira
Coalition this summer.
As an illustration of the impact roads can
have on water, as well as the troubling consequences
of our land illiteracy, Bill likes to tell the story
of a rancher in the Estancia Basin, east of Albuquerque,
who built a road across a wet meadow to his daughter's
house. The road interrupted the natural flow of water
across the meadow. When the meadow dried up, the rancher
blamed the prairie dogs.
"But he did it himself," said Bill, "by
starving the meadow of its water supply. What impressed
me was that after some discussion, he recognized and
acknowledged the problem.
The landowner was willing to try one of
Bill's simple but unconventional remedies. Bill directed
a backhoe operator to excavate ‘rolling dips'
every 300 feet or so in the road. This allowed the water
to flow back across the meadow, instead of being captured
in a ditch and hustled off the property as quickly as
possible, as usual.
"I really respect him for getting at the
real nature of the problem," said Bill.
The meadow came back to life.
"Too often we treat water as a nuisance,
not a resource," said Bill, who calls his method of
road repair "water harvesting."
Photo courtesy
of Bill Zeedyk
Vanes are made
of pickets or rock and installed at strategic
locations in Comanche Creek to direct stream flow
left or right, away from an eroding bank to reduce
stream sediment.
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Like many restorationists, Bill likes to
think in terms of "opportunities" not "obstacles." And
he thinks we're missing many of them.
"A huge part of our erosion problem in the
Southwest is a result of bad roads," said Bill. "This
is equal to over-grazing, in my mind. In fact, I like
to say that 2 + 2 = 5. Poor roads plus overgrazing by
livestock is greater than the sum of the parts."
That's because less grass means more water
coming off the hillslopes, which gets captured in a
gully created by a culvert or a bad road ditch, which
increases the erosive power of the water and causes
even more erosion. In the meantime, the water is lost
from the land it might otherwise nurture."
But you can't just fix the roads," he warned,
"you must also do proper grazing. And vice versa."
Careful Steward
How Bill came to his second career says
as much about his generation, and how far it has come
over the decades, as it does about him.
Born in New Jersey in 1935, in what was
then a rural area, to schoolteacher-parents, he attended
the University of New Hampshire where he majored in
forestry, having decided at the tender age of fourteen
that he wanted to be a forester.
He liked to hunt, fish, and trap –
in fact, he paid for his first year at college by trapping
muskrats. This led to his interest in habitat management
–because he wanted to trap more muskrats, a subject
pretty much taboo now.
"Trapping taught me how to observe wildlife
and encouraged a sensitivity to habitat needs. It taught
me how to read a landscape."
Despite his burgeoning respect for nature,
however, Bill grew up in an era when humans assumed
they knew best.
"We were always looking for a better tool
to control nature," he recalled. "That changed with
Earth Day, when we began to see that there are consequences
to all that we do. Up until then we rarely took responsibility
for our actions."
This included his employer. Bill joined
the Forest Service right out of college and in 1962,
he became the first biologist on the Daniel Boone (then
Cumberland) National Forest. He believed firmly in the
wisdom of multiple use on public lands (and still does)
because of its inclusiveness.
"Everyone stood to gain something from the
common management of our forests and this made the public
lands system strong," he said. "Unfortunately, today
the interests are splintered and the support for public
lands has eroded to the point where I believe their
future may be in doubt. There is no longer the bond
of common ownership that protected the integrity of
the national forest system."
As he rose through the ranks, he remained
focused on the needs of wildlife. While in Washington,
D.C., in the early 1970s, he helped draft the first
policies for the Forest Service in implementing the
Endangered Species Act.
He was also on the front lines of the development
of riparian management rules within the Forest Service.
It didn't make him very popular.
"No one valued riparian health back in the
1970s," he recalled. "One forest supervisor told me
to my face to get lost. He said there were no riparian
areas on his forest. It was all about timber and cows."
The unofficial attitude toward wildlife
wasn't much better. There were few biologists in the
agency and the ones there got caught up in intense turf
battles with state wildlife agencies and the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service.
"The old thinking was: get the range right
[i.e. grazing] then the wildlife will be OK," he said.
"In the old days 'wildlife' meant deer and elk, not
much else."
Things began to change, however, mostly
as a result of intense pressure from an environmental
movement that was flush with victory at the time. Standards
rose, especially for riparian areas, but so did conflict
and stress, along with the number of lawsuits.
By 1990, Bill was done arguing. He retired
and tried to relax. But a personal tragedy and an innate
desire to make things better pushed Bill into his new
career. Upon completing a series of classes with hydrologist
and restoration pioneer Dave Rosgen, who Bill credits
with organizing his ideas, Bill was asked by Tom Morris
of the Navajo Environmental Protection Agency to take
a look at a serious erosion problem that threatened
Hubbell Trading Post, near Ganado, Ariz.
It became the first project where Bill could
try "Induced Meandering" on an ecosystem scale. It appeared
to work, and soon he found himself working in the Zuni
Mountains again where he studied a program the Zuni
people had invented to stop headcuts in streams and
meadows: shallow, rock-lined depressions that Bill came
to call "Zuni bowls."
Bill fiddled with all these ideas for a
few years, only giving them a proper working out while
on a consulting job in Mexico in 1996, which he liked
a lot because there was no paperwork.
Back in the states, the emergence of Bill's
ideas was greeted with a mixture of skepticism and outright
resistance. Induced Meandering in particular was a hard
sell to regulating agencies because it operated on the
principle that creating more erosion – temporarily
while the creek created a new floodplain – was
necessary to stop erosion. And Bill's emphasis on "sticks
and rocks" as a way to fix creeks instead of backhoes,
hard hats, diesel, cement, and gabions was a difficult
novelty for some to accept.
Working in Bill's favor, however, was a
general shift in society, away from the "humans know
best" paradigm that had dominated natural resource management
and on the one hand the "leave it alone" paradigm that
dominated environmentalism. The talk now was all about
restoration.
Today, nearly 16 years after his retirement
from the Forest Service, Bill has never been busier.
He is, in fact, booked. Of all the indicators that Bill
employs to monitor the success of his work, this may
be the most telling.
So, the next time that you see a cattle
trail beginning to dig into the soil along a fence in
a way that should raise an alarm, consider one of Bill's
ideas: place an obstacle in the trail, such as short
jog in a fence, and make the cows meander around it.
Only, don't think of it as an "obstacle"
- consider it an "opportunity."
A number of publications focused on Bill Zeedyk's work
are available from The
Quivira Coalition. Details of a major restoration
project involving Bill can also be viewed at www.comanchecreek.org
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