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It is a place of balanced unbalance and natural chaos, California’s North Coast. An ecologically violent and beautiful place where the salt sea smashes against the edge of the earth, straining to scale100-foot cliffs in its desire to swallow the land. It is where the earth groans from within, shifting and grinding against itself, splitting open as if wanting to swallow itself from the inside out. Where the land runs away from the sea and the water the land. One up the mountains, one down, like strangers, passing each other once in time but never crossing paths again; all cloaked beneath tall dark forests of redwoods, Douglas firs and tan oaks. Those runs of Pacific salmon, steelhead and coastal cutthroat trout are no longer what they used to be. The fish are threatened or endangered in watersheds all along the North Coast, and the simple black type listing now extinct individual stream runs neatly fills line after line on a page of paper that reads like a daily newspaper's obituary section. The causes of death--overfishing, water diversion, dams, sedimentation, loss of habitat--repeat themselves again and again. To reverse the trend in one watershed, Trout Unlimited has formed a unique partnership with a major timber company to restore runs of coho salmon on the Garcia River.
The effort, known as The North Coast Coho Project, is attempting to reduce sediment pollution in the South Fork of the Garcia River by 72 percent and do instream work to restore spawning and juvenile habitat for coho and steelhead trout. The land surrounding the stream is privately owned by Mendocino Redwood Company (MRC), which purchased it two years ago following decades of ownership by Louisiana Pacific, the multi-national timber giant that had a suspect environmental record in the area. According to Bell, much of the sediment that has smothered the Garcia was a direct result of the poor forestry practices he participated in when Louisiana Pacific owned the 235,000 acres of coastal rainforest.
" I had very limited permission to do things," Bell explained. "They let me put in log structures to form pools, but the real problem was sediment coming off the roads up the slope. They knew it, but they didn't want to talk about it." Bell says the best he got was limited permission to do instream work, but Louisiana Pacific always admonished him by saying "You stay in the stream but no wandering around up on the slopes."
"There is nothing we've asked for that we haven't gotten," Bell continued. "We've got total access to anywhere we want to go on their property; all of their records-fisheries records, all of their own assessments of erosion problems. We have carte blanche access to anything we want." Mendocino Redwood CEO Sandy Dean says the most exciting thing about the restoration effort is it has the potential to be the template for similar projects on its property. "The hope will be that five years from now when we talk about this, we'll have done this many more times and we're going to have populations of fish in much greater numbers than we have today," Dean said. "And that's exciting because aquatic habitat is a great barometer of the health of the forest." You can imagine Bell's response to such talk after a decade of dealing with Louisiana Pacific. But Dean's beliefs mirror the philosophy of the Donald Fisher family of San Francisco, founders of The Gap clothing stores and the folks who set up Mendocino Redwood. John Fisher says his family's land stewardship ethic comes from having lived in the San Francisco Bay area since the mid-1800s. "This is our home, and we want to make things better," he said. "My brother [Robert] is on the board of NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council], and we have a commitment to the environment." John Fisher says that even though the family is not from Mendocino County, they've brought that environmental commitment with them in managing the company lands. "We have the advantage of coming into the area without a history there," he explained. "We don't have a way of looking at things having to be done a certain way there, just because that's the way they've always been done. That frees us to try and do things differently."
"There's an extensive road system throughout the area, and it's been poorly maintained," he said. He says the goal is to make roads as "hydrologically invisible as we can" so their sediment effects will be as minimal as possible. Hagans says that doesn't mean a "no roads" policy but it does mean well-built and well-maintained roads. The pre-restoration road system totaled almost 25 miles in a 2,500-acre area. Another part of the roadwork involves dosing and replanting roads no longer necessary. Most of these are lower section haul roads that run parallel to the South Fork and down to where it joins with the Garcia's mainstem. TU's Trafton hopes this project is the beginning of many more, not only with Mendocino Redwood, but also with other North Coast timber companies. "I hope it's going to be the example that sets the tone for the future," he said. "Relations between conservation organizations and the timber companies have been fairly frosty, to say the least, for many years, and still are. There are plenty of conservation workers out there who would jump at the chance to do the kind of work we're doing here." Trafton, like MRC's Dean, hopes the Garcia project sets the standard for what gets done in the future. John Fisher already seems to have decided that's the way things will happen on Mendocino Redwood Company lands. "The wonderful thing about our relationship with Trout Unlimited," said Fisher, "is we've got numerous streams on our land, and we'd be happy to work with them to restore each one." Maybe the salmon and steelhead have now evolved into our consciences enough that they can weave their silver threads, not only securing the land to the sea, but perhaps, also, reconnecting our souls with those same elements, keeping our spirits from splitting away and leaving us unable to return from where we came.
______ [See also TU Projects>North Coast Coho] |
Threading
together sea to land, shoreline to mountains, salt to fresh water,
and open coast to dense forest are fish-salmon and trout-that
with the precision and consistency of the weaver's loom, run
silver threads back and forth that precariously seem to hold
this diverse ecotone together. The fish run with determined urgency
and a seeming belief that if they don't keep going back and forth,
weaving their invisible threads, the earth will split wide open
and drop off into the sea.
The Garcia runs through steep mountainous country
in Mendocino County on its way to the Pacific Ocean. This is
timber country where logging has been a way of life for generations
of people and still is. But the logging industry that's been
good for the people and the local economies of this rural area
has been bad for salmon and the people who once depended on them
for their living. Fifty-year-old Craig Bell, a local, lives in
Gualala. Like the land where he lives, Bell's working life has
been a clash of divergent careers. He's worked both as commercial
fisherman and logger. Now, he's a professional stream restorer
hired to coordinate TU's restoration' efforts on the South Fork
of the Garcia River. "I helped fish out the salmon along
the coast and then I became a logger," he said. "I
even cut down the trees and helped build the roads that ruined
the Garcia River. Now I'm trying to fix it all. How's that for
irony?"
Now,
with a new landowner and a cooperative partnership developed,
there's hope that things will get better for salmon and steelhead
in the Garcia River. The MRC owns 88 percent of the sub-watershed
containing the South Fork of the Garcia River. Bell had spearheaded
the development of a restoration plan for the Garcia River as
far back as 1990, but his efforts had only marginal success.
When
Mendocino Redwood bought the land, Bell was coordinating the
local Garcia River Watershed Advisory Group. A friend suggested
he call Steve Trafton, TU's California Policy Coordinator. The
two talked about successes TV was having on restoring salmon
populations on other North Coast streams. Bell told him about
a rough plan he'd developed to protect the South Fork of the
Garcia from sedimentation. He suggested with Louisiana Pacific
now gone, maybe it would be worth a shot to contact Mendocino
Redwood and see if they were interested. Bell recalls the meeting
much like a child would describe his or her Christmas wish list
to Santa Claus.
One
of those different things is to significantly help the stream
by taking care of problems high above it-specifically roads.
Danny Hagans of Pacific Watershed Associates is doing that part
of the project. He calls it storm-proofing or armoring the road
system.
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