BENTONVILLE - The key to achieving restoration goals in the Illinois River watershed is to stop trying to complete small projects in a piecemeal fashion and instead set large-scale goals that span a decade or more, experts said Thursday.
That was the message Todd Reeve, chief executive officer of the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, delivered to attendees of the second annual “Restoration of Our Rivers” conference, organized by the Illinois River Watershed Partnership.
“The approach has been characterized as an ‘all-in’ approach,” said Reeve, who is based in Portland, Ore. “We’re not cherry-picking the best projects and putting up photos to say, ‘Hey, we supported this project and we feel good about it.’ We’re taking a risk, and we’re really investing for the long haul. The only reasonable alternative is sitting on the sidelines, just sort of dabbling in established, status quo projects.”
Reeve and his organization have worked for several years with the Russell Family Foundation in Oregon to restore and protect the Puyallup River watershed in western Washington. Reeve discussed various aspects of efforts to support the overall health of the Puyallup watershed but stressed that in order to succeed, the two foundations had ignored muchof the typical thinking about short-term goals in environmental projects.
“This can create some tension, because there are some large, powerful groups who say, ‘That’s great, just give us the money,’” Reeve said. “The Russell family has said, ‘We’ve tried the status quo approach; we want to raise the bar. So instead of just giving you the money, how about we support you and work with you to see if you can really build out a strategy that can achieve a much greater scale and impact.’”
Reeve stressed that he didn’t intend to diminish the value of short-term projects but wanted to make the point that if local organizers limit their vision to a few such projects a year, they can “ultimately add up to nothing.”
“Short-term projects are usually critical to long-term solutions,” Reeve said. “My point is, if people are serious about the health of an ecosystem, they have to think beyond the short-term projects.”
Some common shortterm projects he has seen repeatedly implemented include replanting vegetation in riverbank buffer areas that have been denuded by industrial development, replacing small or clogged storm-water culverts with bridges, and installing fences to prevent livestock from entering streams.
Reeve was one of more than a dozen speakers scheduled to address the conference, which drew more than 100 attendees representing about 50 organizations. Several speakers, including a representative of the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., had to cancel their scheduled appearances because of the partial shutdown of the federal government.
Delia Haak, executive director of the Illinois River Watershed Partnership, referred to watersheds in general as “wicked problems,” due to the complex mixture of social and scientific forces affecting them.
“Every watershed has multiple challenges going on at the same time,” Haak said. “We’ve got land and water, drinking water and wastewater, recreation, agriculture, forestry, urban areas, and so on. So they all have to be addressed holistically, rather than in isolated ways, in order to have a healthy watershed.”
The conference will conclude today, and will featurespeakers including professor Andrew Sharpley, the University of Arkansas researcher who is heading the soil and water research project in Newton County that will eventually analyze the environmental effects of C&H Hog Farms in Mount Judea.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 10/04/2013