Watersheds integrate environmental processes - physical and biological, natural and human influenced, intended and incidental. Watershed management succeeds when this is recognized and often fails when overlooked.
Watershed condition influences water quality and flow regimes. Flow regimes influence stream channels. Stream channels influence groundwater recharge. Ground water supplies influence stream base flows. Stream base flows influence plants, animals, and fish. The interconnections are endless.
However, with rare exceptions, watershed management as currently practiced does not reflect this essential fact of natural history. To paraphrase John Muir, everything in nature is connected to everything else.
Whether you are a John Muir adherent or an advocate of Gifford Pinchot's "wise use" or somewhere in between, we need to acknowledge the basic interconnections that occur in watersheds. Well functioning watersheds require that our management be as integrated as the environment itself. This is not now the norm.
Most watersheds have some management. Some have a lot. It's clear that the watershed management that is taking place in most watersheds is fragmented, and is some cases management measures are working at cross-purposes. In some watersheds, while one agency is trying to reduce cumulative watershed effects by altering logging patterns to reduce peak flows, another agency is trying to augment water supply via increased runoff with the effect of increasing peak flows. Embarrassment is spared by two facts. First, nobody is scrutinizing objectives on a inter-agency/ watershed-wide basis. Second, neither practice has produced results large enough to measure outside of experimental watersheds.
In some watersheds, water quality effects of logging are getting a lot of attention, while other significant sources like non-logging roads, mining, grazing, grading, and development are not.
We need balance. If clean water is the objective, we need to address all the sources of pollution, and apply our resources to the problems in the most cost efficient ways.
We have constructed artifices that keep us from efficiently managing water and watersheds. In California, we draw a legal line between surface water and ground water, a distinction that nature, in the main, does not recognize. California long ago had the foresight to place regulatory control of water quantity (except for ground water) and water quality under one board. Yet we still do a lot of things in watershed management that indicate we don't fully appreciate how interrelated water quality and water quantity are in nature. Even worse, we've almost totally ignored the fact that altering flow regimes triggers changes stream and riparian habitats.
Others states, like Colorado, have done a better job of avoiding or abating legal impediments to integrated watershed management. I'm told though, that Denver is home to half the water lawyers in the U.S. I'm not sure there is a cause and effect, but the correlation is disturbing. I'd like to see watershed problems solved on the watershed, not in the court.
My vision for integrated watershed management is to see people working together cooperatively for common goals, with a shared understanding of how processes in the watershed are interconnected. Laws that ignore these important interconnections should be revised or eliminated. People with people skills and watershed understanding will have to step forward to serve as mediators and leaders. Information and ideas need to be developed, freely exchanged, and validated.
Finally, getting government agencies to integrate their watershed management activities is a very difficult problem. There are just too many agencies. I advocate combining and/or eliminating agencies as a means of integrating watershed management. There is a crying need to integrate the activities of government agencies, both within agencies and between agencies.
And you thought I was being utopian when I advocated more cooperative working relationships, legal reform, individual responsibility, and the free exchange of ideas and information.
Indeed, our most difficult challenge may be reforming the reforms of the past century, so that watershed management is as integrated as watershed function.
