The BRSF joined the River Network in July. River Network is a nationwide organization whose mission is to help people save rivers. River Network believes America needs a broadly based citizen movement to protect rivers and their watersheds. River Network supports river conservationists at the grassroots, state, and regional levels, helping them build effective organizations. Following are excerpts relevant to BRSF from their handbook, “How To Save a River.”
The tools available to grassroots river activists include:
• The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (article, p. 10 — ed.)
• State river protection programs
• Statewide river assessments
• The Clean Water Act
• The Endangered Species Act
• State and national environmental policy acts
• Water rights and instream flow regulations
• Public Trust Doctrine
• Flood plain management
• Water efficiency and conservation
• Economic analysis
• Citizen environmental lawsuits
• Comprehensive watershed management plans
• Land acquisition and conservation easements
• River restoration.
While conservationists sometimes cringe at the thought of putting a dollar value on rivers and watersheds, the fact remains that economic analysis is an essential tool in river protection. You may not be able to reduce a stretch of whitewater or a scenic river canyon to figures on a balance sheet, but you can certainly quantify its recreational value, estimate the worth of its fishery, and assess its importance as a clean water supply.
Economic analysis really has two components: one involves dissecting the economic rationale put forth by proponents of river-threatening projects, and the other involves a valuation of the natural resources being threatened. Both are important.
Federal dam projects require preparing cost-benefit analyses, which must demonstrate a return on investment better than 1:1 over the amortized life of the project. Analyzed objectively, federal dam projects routinely fail the cost-benefit test, but the benefit figures are often fattened by inflated recreation estimates and other economic sleight-of-hand to produce a positive equation. Similarly, river-threatening projects routinely underreport the value of environmental resources degraded or lost, and inflate the value of mitigation measures proposed.
Among the river issues for which economic analysis is a valuable tool, are these:
1. Hydropower proposals.
2. Water storage projects.
3. Pollution. When the complete cost of pollution is calculated, it is clearly cheaper to keep rivers clean than to clean them up after they’ve been fouled. Calculating that cost advantage provides a convincing campaign tool.
4. Loss of fishery habitat. Compare the cost of restoring anadromous fish runs to the cost of preserving the habitat they need to survive and you have a strong economic argument for preserving rivers and streams.
5. Loss of whitewater and scenic boating. Recreational boating is a fast growing sport with enormous economic value.
6. Degradation of riparian corridors. When rivers are degraded, diverted, and polluted, they bring down the value of riparian land. Restored river corridors dramatically increase land values.
7. Flood plain development. Compare the cost of catastrophic flooding to the revenue lost from limiting flood plain development and you have a powerful economic argument for keeping houses and businesses out of flood plains.
Economic analysis helps expose the inadequacies of questionable water and energy development projects and dramatizes the true cost of pollution and flood plain development. It is a powerful tool for demonstrating that environmental protection benefits business and that free flowing rivers are important economic assets.
Reducing river conservation to a financial equation can obscure the legitimate and essential biological and emotional value of wilderness and wild rivers. Public trust values aren’t measured in dollars.
Most Wild and Scenic designations cover upper watersheds and remote rivers. To a lot of people in the activist community, Wild and Scenic Rivers are the easy ones to save. The tough ones are downstream, where rivers flow through private land.
Land development encroaches into river corridors with little legal restraint and there is no simple tool available to stop it. Public land rivers have a multitude of agencies to look after their welfare and protect them from abuse. If some of these agencies have also been among the abusers, they are nevertheless charged with the responsibility of managing river resources, and legal recourse is available when they shirk their duties. There are no such agencies responsible for rivers flowing through most reaches of private land.
Dealing with abuses to private land rivers often calls into play a variety of river-saving tools to address a variety of different problems. But when all else fails and you don’t know what else to do for your river, it’s time to think about buying it.
Now, not many of us are going to be capable of writing a check for a river. But we may be able to talk interested landowners into selling their property to a land trust which will convey it to a public agency for permanent protection. Or, barring that, we may be able to convince riparian property owners to sell conservation easements to their land, while continuing to own and enjoy them.
Land acquisitions and conservation easements both eliminate the possibility of future development for a parcel of land. Acquisition is generally the most preferred and most expensive option. Generally it involves an agreement between a willing seller and a buyer capable of disposing of the land in a way that provides permanent protection. Typically, the buyer will be a public agency with funds available for the purchase of riparian land. Purchase may also be made or brokered by a land trust.
Conservation easements often have a wider application than outright purchase because they allow property owners, many of whom don’t want more development around them anyway, to stay on their land. In exchange for tax benefits and cash payments, they give up future development of their property. Usually the land can even be sold, but the easement remains in place.
Unless you have experience brokering land buys or conservation easements, this is not something to try by yourself. Finding a willing buyer requires personal contact and positive relationships with riparian landowners. It also means responding quickly when you know important pieces of property are on the market.
The necessary ingredients for a transaction include the seller and a buyer with enough money to make the purchase. Numerous local, state, and federal agencies have budgets for land acquisition. When no single agency can afford the purchase price of a piece of land, several buyers—including private land trusts—can sometimes be brought together.
Given the complexities of tax benefits and the variety of purchase options available, negotiating either a land purchase or a conservation easement is best left to someone with experience. But although you may not swing the deal yourself, you will still play a key role in the transaction if you can establish a positive, personal relationship with the seller and provide convincing arguments for the need to protect the river it adjoins.
Land acquisition and conservation easements eliminate uncertainty about the fate of riverside property, providing protection in perpetuity, removing any threat of development and helping to preserve the riparian corridor. Willing sellers are often large landholders like timber companies, and buying the land takes it out of production, allowing part of the watershed to heal. Ironically, while development opportunity is eliminated, land values may actually increase.
The most important ingredient for these tools to work is also one of the scarcest ingredients available — money. Buying the land or development rights won’t stop dams or other river development up- or downstream, and finding a willing seller in some of the most critically endangered river corridors is difficult to impossible.
People who love rivers don’t usually need technical explanations to explain or defend their value. A river is worth saving for what it manifestly is: a corridor of water, rock and land, a zone of life, a place of inexpressible beauty constantly reshaping itself. But the value of a river exceeds anything most of us can imagine — it encompasses the very essence of planetary life. Healthy rivers define the health of the planet.
Following is an inventory of the basic values rivers provide, most of them systematically ignored as rivers all across the country have been degraded and destroyed:
• Riparian ecosystems and biodiversity
• Fisheries
• Cultural resources
• Recreation
• Urban amenities
• Water, power, and sewage disposal
• Water quality
• Soil and Bank Stability
• Natural beauty
The special value of river recreation is that it can be enjoyed in harmony with nature, rather than at nature’s expense. Recreational use of a river requires little or no intervention by engineers and is often improved by the absence of human “enhancements.” Reservoirs, on the other hand, exact an enormous price from the environment. That price is then compounded by the impact of ubiquitous motor boats and their consumption of fossil fuels.
Free-flowing rivers are rapidly growing in popularity as one of the nation’s leading recreation resources. That popularity corresponds, in part, to the growth of the river conservation movement and the exposure it has given to the wonders of wild rivers. It may reflect as well the human need to stay in touch with the natural world and the unique magic of moving water.
River-oriented activities include canoeing, kayaking, rafting, swimming, picnicking, camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, bird watching, photography, and simply lolling about.
One of the most important recreational values rivers provide is hard to measure because surveys aren’t taken on the number of people who visit rivers just to look at them, to stand beside them in silent wonder, to take pause from life’s pressures in the presence of moving water. This intangible value separates rivers and river corridors from the noise and congestion and preoccupation with speed typical of reservoirs, and offers a recreational experience closer to the true meaning of the word.
Natural beauty, many people would argue, is reason enough to save rivers. And many people, therefore, find it hard to understand the mentality capable of burying the Missouri, drying up the Everglades, or paving the Los Angeles River. The last few people to float through Glen Canyon (Colorado) were unanimous in their disbelief that a place of such breathtaking and tranquil beauty could be destroyed. It sits beneath Lake Powell now, gathering silt and bearing mute testimony to a value in desperate need of defense.
We glorify natural beauty even as we destroy it; its value is universally acknowledged even as it slips away. Because rivers are among nature’s most beautiful works, the damage we do to them is painfully apparent. And yet our culture sanctions that damage on an epic scale and a majority of us acquiesce.
Natural beauty can never be computed in a cost-benefit ratio. The beauty of rivers should be defended because its loss diminishes us all. It is worth protecting just because it’s there.
The River Network is based in Portland, Oregon. David Bolling is the former Executive Director of Friends of the River, a California group.
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