This is Paul Hertz and Jen Sweeney of Arizona State University
interviewing Carl Walters at the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver BC on August 18th, 2018. Carl, thanks for being with us today
for this interview. You are most welcome. Um Would you start by telling us
your full name, the positions you held in the Adaptive Management Program
in the years that you were involved with it? OK. I'm Carl Walters. Carl
John Walters, Professor Emeritus University of British Columbia, where
I've been since 1969.
My involvement with uh GC Damp began in 1996.
W uh when we had a proposal accepted to uh conduct a series of modeling
workshops and policy analysis workshops for the program. Uh Our main
contact at that time was Ted Mellis uh in the Grand Canyon Monitoring and
Research Center. Uh We, I then worked uh with primarily with people at
GCMRC over the next decade or so. And I had an appointment from 1998. I
think it was till about 2010 as the Grand Canyon Senior Ecologist uh with
the contract from uh GCMRC. So that would be a US GS contract. And what
kind of work were you primarily doing during those years? In the first few
years, we were doing primarily development of large simulation models
using what's called the adaptive environmental assessment and management
process, which is basically identical to what in recent years is called
structured decision making. Us GS has done in the L temp process. So what
we did was to go in and sit down with large groups of scientists, managers
from the agencies involved in the canyon and stakeholders. And we tried to
build computer models of the Grand Canyon water and riparian ecosystem and
to try various management policies mainly associated with trying to
maintain the ecology of the Grand Canyon, its fishes and, and vegetation
and animals. Uh The primary result of that early work was the recognition
that their uh monitoring programs were largely, well, there are very large
uncertainties about how that ecosystem was going to behave under
management. And uh uh their monitoring programs were largely inadequate to
detect changes and more particularly to detect the efficacy of various
management experiments that they were proposing like high high flow
experiments to manage sand and uh things to try to save the endangered
Humpback chub and so on. So, uh what I then did, recognizing this high
uncertainty associated with their monitoring programs was to shift most of
my attention to the aquatic ecology program, mainly the fish program and
to work on uh exper on field monitoring designs and the implementation of
those designs in the canyon. So I did t something like 15 of the
monitoring trips down the river. There's 18 day long trips for you catch
fish and tag them and things like that and develop various methods for
analyzing the data that they were collecting to try to get better
population estimates and so on. And then uh late in that period, in around
2008, we ran another series of workshops uh using an ecosystem modeling uh
approach called OP PA with Eco Sim to try to get at uh food web structure
in the aquatic ecosystem and how it was changing over time.
Uh But by about 2010, I think they were getting tired of me and I was
getting tired of traveling down there all the time and I kind of dropped
out. I ran one small workshop on aquatic ecology in 2014 with some of the
GCMRC scientists. I had a, a very limited involvement with the uh Juicy
Damp Administrative Structure. I could not make sense of that structure
when we first went down there. Uh The, the operation of the Juicy Damp
from the stamp from the science side was being managed by Barry Gold,
who'd heard of uh our adaptive management approaches. And he was the one
that got us a contract to go down there and work with them in the first
place. And we were told about these administrative structures, the TWG and
technical work group and the M wig, but we never really saw them. I think
I was invited to a couple of TWG and M wig meetings and asked to give
talks about what we were doing. But they, we were never directly involved
with them except in one multi attribute utility analysis exercise uh in
the mid two thousands trying to quantify tradeoffs between different uh
management objectives and performance measures for the Adaptive Management
program. So most of your work was with the Grand Canyon Monitoring and
Research Center. Yeah, one of one of the things that uh when the Adaptive
Management uh this AD AM process first started back in the seventies, we
had uh uh uh two large contracts, one with uh uh us fish and wildlife
Service and one with Canadian Department of Environment of the day. And we
applied this workshop, modeling technology to a whole series of case
studies in Canada and the United States. So we looked at things like
Caribou management in Canada and hydroelectric developments in Canada and
fisheries. And then in the States, we looked at a series mainly of water
management problems around the Sacramento river basin. And so on, one of
the really striking things that we saw in those applications was that we
had a really difficult time with the American groups that we were working
with and the Canadian groups when we would go in and sit down with them,
scientists, managers, stakeholders, all they wanted to do is focus on the
problem and the analysis of the problem. And what we could do in the way
of modeling the Americans. On the other hand, wanted to focus basically on
administrative process and bureaucratic process and how the things we were
doing would basically further their bureaucratic careers. So we had an
awful time getting them to even talk about the science issues and modeling
issues and so on. And they wanted to do this other thing of figured out
how they were gonna manage all this administratively. What that, that's
what we saw when we were invited to talk to Twig. And an anyway, that the
technical working group hardly had any technical people of any confidence
on it. There were more scientifically, intellectually competent people on
AM wig than on Twig. And when we sat in on their meetings, they were
mostly about budget matters and funding allocations and things like that
rather than about matters of substance in the Adaptive Management Program
, the, the the substantive uncertain discussion of the substantive
uncertainties and the options for dealing with those. So we saw that same
problem we've seen in other, in other case studies earlier as soon as we
hit the Grand Canyon.
Do you think that got in the way of um of achieving some of the goals of
adaptive management? Or was it just an extra layer of bureaucracy that
slowed things down? A little bit. I think that the latter, I think it
mainly just slowed things down. Uh the the the working groups that were
actually developed and uh collecting data and developing policy options
and so on like that were largely doing that outside of that administrative
structure, like through our workshops and through other things. Um the
management experiments that were tried over the period, high flow
experiments and uh steady flow experiments and some trout removal
experiments and so on was it was never entirely clear how the decision to
do those had had been arrived at. Uh the, it's interesting, they're
probably from a scientist from the ecologists point of view. The single
most informative experiment that's been done in the Grand Canyon, wasn't
these high flow experiments to get all the publicity about sand, the most
informative thing they ever did was to stabilize the river for four months
and at a low flow in the summer of 2000. And that generated all manner of
striking uh ecological changes in the system that uh help guided a lot of
our later work. Uh Do you know, I could never figure out why that
experiment was conducted because I don't recall at all the process that
led to a decision to do it. In fact, the science group that I've been
working with that kind of warned against doing it. We thought it might do
more harm than good by uh triggering outbreaks of exotic species of
creatures that have invaded the canyon. And in fact, they did do that with
one of the species. The tamarisk, salt cedar that lines the river banks.
There are still tamarisks living in that system that recruited during
that low flow event down at a low level near the river bank that are
horrifically flooded for much of the year. Uh Nowadays, with the water
going up and down and they're still there from 2000 very resilient species.
Yeah. Yeah. Horrid creature. That one. So you don't remember why they
decided to stabilize the river at a low level for I was never really told
the story, exact story of how that decision was made. I just remember that
we said they came out with they, I'm not sure who your reclamation pre
came out with the decision to do this. And it was never clear to me what
the consultation process had been that led to that decision. It may have
had something to do simply with the hydropower generation and drought
conditions in the watershed and nothing to do at all with experimental
management of the river. Save some water for the p
Well, we'll look that up and find out. It sounds like a very interesting
event, especially since as you say, they learned, there were a lot of
changes that some were surprising, some were merely instructive. Can you
think of any others besides a tamarisk recruitment that happened at that
time?
One of the things we were seeing, uh, around the early two thousands, was
that the trout population, rainbow trout above, uh, le ferry, it's
basically a valuable resource in its own. Right. It's not internationally
known trout fishery, but it's also a threat to humpback chub because the
trout dispersed downstream and eat baby humpback chub. So, there was this
endangered species versus fisheries conflict that we were a bit worried
about. Uh, the rainbow trout population had built up dramatically when
falls were partially stabilized in the river. Starting in about, um, was
it 1991? They reduced the diurnal flow fluctuation that created better
conditions for baby trout. The population had built up and then it was
starting to crash and it crashed down to all the low level. And then it,
uh, by the, uh, around 2010 or 2012, we build up to another peak and then
it crashed again. And, uh, some of the ecosystem maing work we did was to
try to figure out why there was this violent population cycle in the trout
in a cyclic threat to the native species, native fish species. Uh They are
just now sorting out what the probable reason for that is. And it's
something that we had looked at in the early modeling and then it kind of
put aside is probably not that important. And that's the management of
Lake Powell. Uh, so Lake Powell source water for both producing power, uh
, out of Grand Canyon Dam and from delivery of water to Lake Mead to
equalize, stabilize Lake Mead's delivery of water and so on. Uh And if you
, if you're a hydro dam operator,
the, the first thing you want to do is to get the water out of the dam as
much as time is you keep the level of the reservoir down as much as you
can. They had had this horrific object lesson with the 1982 83 El Nino.
When they almost lost Glen Canyon dam, they had Plywood along the top of
the dam to stop from having to use the spillway and the water level huge
flows through the system at that time. So a lot of their management
actions were aimed basically, even though they weren't saying that I think
they were basically trying to keep the reservoir lower. But what, what,
what's been found since then is that as the reservoir goes up and down, it
does. So in a multiyear cycle, it doesn't fill in one year. It takes years
of wet conditions for it to fill and years of dry conditions for it to
empty down. Uh When it's near fall, the water is drawn out of the bottom
of the dam uh through almost all the water goes out through the turbines
and that water is very cold. And in any uh lake or reservoir, the there's
a gradient of nutrients, the nutrients get depleted at the surface and
they accumulate in the deep water. So the water running out of the dam
when the reservoir is high, is very nutrient rich and it stimulates its
really high productivity in the least where you reach and on down to the
river aquatic productivity. So that's great for everything from uh from
the fish to the peregrine falcons, they eat the ducks that eat the algae
and so on. Like that, the whole food web responds pretty dramatically to
these high productivity conditions. But when the reservoirs down, it
starts sucking uh surface water, warmer, surface water through the
turbines and that surface water is nutrient depleted and the productivity
of the river below goes way down. And that it expressed in everything from
trout population collapses to skinny humpback chub to fewer ducks swimming
around the river to fewer peregrine falcons. And it's a the whole food web
response to that productivity driver. If we had understood that in the
early days, we were told by a couple of the people who were working, uh in
the Grand Canyon Monitoring Research Center who were working on Lake
Powell, we were told about this issue and I said, well, this is, this is
outside of the scope of the work we're gonna do. We're gonna stick to
working with what goes on below Glen Canyon Dam. So we, we, we made what's
called a problem bounding mistake by not including the dynamics of Lake
Powell and the way it was forcing the ecosystem in our analysis. And so we
didn't look at any options for managing it differently. And in hindsight,
it looks like a lot of the, the most interesting options for Grand Canyon
ecosystem restoration have to do with how Lake Powell is managed better
than what's done in the river below. Unfortunately, it seems like some of
those options are foreclosed. Now with 17 years of drought, the lake is
down below 50% full and nobody really expects it to be full again unless
we get some miraculous rains or winter storms. Sooner or later. There's
going to be another big whack in El Nino. It just took one year to fill.
The thing went from below to a really high level in 8283. So, well, a lot
of people are hoping for that.
But yeah, I know. I think the climate change analysis and predictions are
generally for um, more prolonged and severe droughts just like we're
seeing out here. So you look out the window here. Yeah, that's smoke. I
think you've been told that that's, we don't have a blue sky because of
the forest fire situation because of the persistent dry conditions over
several years that we've had here. I just took a trip through the
southwest, uh bunch of national parks and the rocky mountains with a
family and we had smoke everywhere we went and most of it was from
California. California has been on fire for a couple of months and all
that smoke is drifting eastward. My little sister lives near the edge of
all of those fires. So we get lots of news about that from here.
Uh, Carl, let, let me step back a little bit. One of the reasons that, um
, you, uh, were, uh, recruited to be involved in adaptive management
programs because of your prominent position as one of the architects of
adaptive management uh theory. And I wonder if you could just uh you're
probably in a better position than anybody else that we've interviewed uh
to talk a little bit about what adaptive management is. Um how it got sort
of launched, how it has developed over time and how that theory and your,
you know, to your way of thinking how that theory was attempted to be
applied to this unique situation on the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon. OK.
So the, the, I think, even as early as 1970 I think I had given a paper at
an American Fisheries Society National meeting where I said, look, the
models that we're trying to develop are not reliable for prediction
because there's too many uncertainties that we can't resolve uh without
large scale manipulations and experiments. We, we're, we're getting really
good data on a lot of ecology processes, but not on how they fit together.
And there's lots of ways you can make mistakes. So I had back then
advocated experimental approaches to management saying we need to treat
management actions as experiments.
Uh recognizing full, full while recognizing that the outcomes of those
experiments are highly uncertain. Uh Then uh uh Ray Hilborn, uh one of my
ex students and I were uh uh doing a sabbatical leave in the International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna in 1974 and 75. And we
were working on fisheries problems and we showed some of the data that we
were working on to a uh control system theorist named John Ky and asked
him what he thought we might, what we thought we might be able to use
optimal control ideas to figure out how to manage fisheries in the face of
variability. And John took one look at this and he said you have an
adaptive control problem and Hilborne and I looked at each other and we
were working for buzz hauling and buzz halling was known for his history
of getting great buzzwords to describe the things that he was interested
in, like resilience and so on. So here's this word adaptive management,
Hillar. And I looked at each adaptive control and he said we've got a new
buzzword.
So that was actually the the kind of formal launch of the use of the term
adaptive control and adaptive management. In, in in ecological context, we
published a big paper about it won a major award and so on. But this was
all going on in parallel with these workshop processes and so on and and
hauling was seeing better, I think more clearly than Ray and I did who
were buried in the details that the workshop processes were doing a really
good job at exposing major uncertainties and uh triggering discussion
about the need for experimental management approaches. So he started
calling those workshops, the adaptive environmental assessment and
management process because the the results they were producing over and
over and over again, it was us saying to the collected people are working
with us, we can't resolve these uncertainties by modeling. You're gonna
have to go out there and do an experiment. You're gonna have to test
things, you're gonna commit yourself sooner or later. So the whole
original concept of adaptive management was uh one of management as
experimentation. Basically, uh the explicit recognition of extreme
uncertainty about the efficacy of a lot of the things that we do in
management, the need to monitor those things and to actively make
management changes to probe for better policies. And we call it probing
for opportunity.
But uh as that uh A E AM process got applied more broadly. A couple of
people started to uh look in on the process as outsiders. There was a
fellow named Steve Light uh who was with um Well, I think at that time
he'd been in the University of Minnesota and he had uh he'd been working
in the, on the Florida Everglades. And then there was another one who was
working in the Grand Canyon system called Steve Gloss. Have you run into
that name? Gloss was the administrator of the science side of the GC Damp
after Barry Gold left. Uh and the uh 02 F glasses last name is Gl Os S
Yeah, Steve Solo and Light
didn't as far as I can tell, did not understand this idea that the basic
product of an adaptive management planning exercise is an experimental
design. They saw the process itself, the business of bringing together
scientists and managers and stakeholders and working together in problem
clarification. So on this kind of dramatic uh
en enhancement of co-operation really that's required among stakeholders
and scientists and managers. When they try to build a model, they saw that
model building process as being the core of adaptive management, whether
or not it resulted in a recommendation to do experiments or anything like
that. They saw it was essentially administrative idea. You can people work
together better if they're, if they're, if they're forced to be really
clear about what they're dealing with, with, with their objectives, with
their performance measures and and how they're gonna make predictions
about how to link performance to action. So uh they started this thing, a
thing called the Adaptive Management Practitioners Network. And it started
pushing the idea of adaptive management as collaborative work. People just
working together in a in a more structured way to come up with better
decisions without regard to uncertainty. And the word uncertainty doesn't
really appear much at all in adaptive management definitions developed by
the Adaptive Management Practitioners Group. Uh Later on when uh some of
the adaptive management programs started to receive scrutiny by in, in
legal challenges, uh The lawyers started looking just and started asking
what the hell do you mean by adaptive management? And they came up with
this wonderful term for the thing that gloss and light had promoted and
they're still pro the stuff is still being promoted stronger. They called
it adaptive management. Light.
Yeah. And to my mind, iii I it over the years in all sorts of settings has
done more harm than good. Uh It's led people into a lot of people into a
sense of confidence that they have solved problems just because they sat
down together and worked together to build walls, not be rather rather
than being forced to admit that they really didn't know what the hell they
were doing out there and needed to manage very carefully and differently.
Yeah. One is about uh natural resources and ecosystems. The other is about
the human dimensions of collaboration. Yeah, exactly. And, well, this
whole administrative notion of how to administer better rather than how to
, how to actually meet objectives. Do you feel like um adaptive management
should be the two of those integrated or? Oh, they definitely, and they
have been in the process as we ran it. Definitely did. Try to integrate it
mainly because we always saw the basic product of the process to be uh the
explicit recognition of high uncertainty and the explicit need to manage
experimentally in order to resolve uncertainty about policy and be
flexible enough about your goals to adapt once you monitor results. And
you see, then you then you adapt right. And to recognize that any time you
go out there and do an experiment
in nature, there's all certainty to be serendipity. I will certainly be
surprises. Things you hadn't expected at all that turn out to be things
you can turn into opportunities for improving management that you never
even thought of that for opportunities was a wonderful phrase. I love that.
Yeah, we, so we wrote, we wrote a paper, uh Ted Mellis ended up writing
it and publishing it uh called uh uh Surprise and Opportunity in the Grand
Canyon Adaptive Management Program, which the, well, no, no attention has
been paid to that paper at all. As far as I can tell. You said that was
Melis Mel Isme Lis. And me is one of the really key people in the, in the
development of persistence of the whole adaptive management program there.
He's a scientist with GCMRC. He was the leader of their sediment research
group for some time and then later their ecosystem research group at GCMRC.
And he was one of the lead people that maintained contact between the
scientific community and Twig and Amy. So a lot of what they heard came
straight out from Ted. He was our great administrative defender of his
people. And that in the early days meant defending the sediment research
work, the, the high flow experiment work and so on, making sure that, that
, that the sediment research was always very prominent in any presentation
to Twig and Amway. And that persists to the state. You can see this in the
temp process where if you go through and, and, and look at all the records
of the L temp meetings and the discussions in the old temp meetings, we
say the said heads dominated the meetings.
Yeah, and they, they and settle related policies dominated discussion.
Same thing happened to us except we weren't fooled. Uh We started out
early on development set budgets and so on and say, hey, look, there's
some really serious uncertainties going on with the SAN management in this
system that you people aren't admitting and they still haven't admitted
those and the failure to admit them is reflected strongly in the character
of the temp uh results.
So a temp basically said there's no need for experimentation with regard
to high flow uh release experiments to build sandbars, we know they work.
So we'll always include them in our plans. So there's no value of
information for doing things differently. Well, that is that is seriously
false. There's a huge uncertainty associated with the efficacy of those uh
of those high f uh uh treatments which they've never been willing to admit.
And that is, they can build little beaches in the upper end of the Grand
Canyon by having these little high flow experiments. And they take
pictures of these little beaches that they created up in Marble Canyon and
so on. And they talk about how great this is. They don't talk about two
downsides that one of them is that most of those little beaches go away
really quick and most of them look like little pyramids of sand that rode
away on really short timescales, not even usable as camping beaches. So
they're not even fulfilling that objective in Marble Canyon. And then
there's the whole rest of the Grand Canyon downstream for which is still
uh sediment starved. And these high flow uh events may actually be eroding
the sand resources of the bulk of the Grand Canyon uh faster than if they
didn't do them. So we would be losing resources in the sand, sediment
riparian resources in the lower part of the Grand Canyon faster because of
these experiments. So for the Grand Canyon as a whole, the the high full
of things may actually be a net negative thing. When we interviewed Kerri
Christensen who represents the Walla tribe, he talked about how the high
flow events bring so much sediment down that settles in their area. The
Canyon Diamond Creek and downstream and it causes tremendous problems for
them as soon as you get past, uh, the, there's a little, little black
Canyon area for a few miles and then the river just spreads out and get,
and it is about a mile wide and about that deep. And, yeah, that's where
all that stuff ends up and on down. Even into Lake Mead. Yeah, it, it, it
, it turns out that lower canyon is an absolute navigational nightmare for
people with boats and so on. Yeah. And because there basically isn't
enough sediment going into the system anymore. It's trapped in Lake Powell.
There's no way that they can restore and maintain the whole canyon. So
they've been uh misleadingly, I think focusing on their ability to improve
things a little bit in that upper end by messing with the sand that comes
in from the Pri the Colorado River.
Yeah, it's a difficult challenge to try to. They're, they're now trying to
see if they can't model um sediment deposition coming out of the pa to
help figure out exactly when it is effective to do a high flow event and
when it isn't. And that's really the only source they have basically the
sin head approach to research is to make it. And this is the way a lot of
scientists operate and it's antithetical to adapting management is to go
more and more detail on smaller and smaller problems and narrow yourself
down and keep you in and keep your scientific sanity. Keep your focus. So
their, their focus is in the research saw almost entirely on the upper end
of the canyon where they can monitor and can do things. And that's where
the Humpback chub are too. Right. So that's sort of in the lower part of
that, the lower part of the upper part.
So let's talk when you look at monitoring way down low in the system where
some of these problems develop even above time increase. Uh The data are
really limited. Uh And there's, there's still a very high un like the best
data we have on what's going on in the riparian ecosystem down. The lower
part of the canyon actually comes from camping, beach studies that pe
people like Peter, uh uh like, uh shes done scientists that have gone down
and just map the camping areas along the river. Have you been down to
Canyon? I've been down the first half from Lee's ferry down to Phantom
Ranch and hiked out at Phantom hoping to do the lower half this coming
year. Yeah, it changes quite a bit. You get a lot more of these big Eddie
recirculating Eddie systems and big sand bars with great big campsites and
things like that that are really important for the recreational community.
They're mostly down below Phantom.
Yeah, I didn't see a lot of that in the upper section. The upper doesn't
have these big huge Eddie structure. It's got a few of them but not very
many, big Eddie Structures. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the
significant changes and, or significant events that occurred during, you
know, you were involved from about 1997 till at least 2010. Can you think
of any uh particular events or, or you know, changes in the evolution of
adaptive management or the research to support it that occurred during
those years? Ok. Yeah. Well, the, the modeling exercise and so on, as I
said, led initially to this really strong warning that the monitoring
programs were were inadequate. So there was a major change in monitoring
programs and that extended to the sediment management program as well as
the ecology side of the thing. So they got into some very detailed channel
, sediment storage monitoring in the upper part of the system. Uh And in
the ecology side, we set up a bunch of uh better uh monitoring protocols
for systematically sampling down the river. Uh a whole variety of aquatic
organisms and so on and they initiated some repeated photogrammetry,
mapping exercises to look at vegetation change patterns over time in a, in
a systematic way uh that they hadn't been doing before. And those were
funded and implemented that science got done. Yeah. Yeah. There was one
program that was dropped, I think basically because the people who were
involved in it just could not be convinced to behave sensibly as
scientists. There was a kind of a terrestrial ecology research team. That
would go down the canyon and set mouse traps and count birds and things
like this. And their protocols were pretty pathetic. And, and that, that
research program was dropped as far as I know, you couldn't even the way
we were doing the work. You couldn't even get basic trend uh assessments
from the data that they were collecting. There were so crude.
So there was a, a major improvement in monitoring programs over over the
2000 to 2010 period. Uh There were uh really important experiments, most
importantly, the summer steady flow. That was one of my favorite examples
of an opportunity.
When you go way back in the early days of development of the Adaptive
measurement program. There were a couple of people that pointed out that
if you stabilize the flow, it would change the thermal structure of the
river and it would create uh little warming conditions along the edge of
the river that might be favorable to native fish. We kind of laughed at
that. She got a huge river running down there like that and it's cold
water and it's icy cold. You know what the fuck, what, what's gonna go on
the edge of the river? It's just gonna get mixed up with that cold water.
Nothing. Well, I in the late summer of 2000, I was down there on a trip
and I was standing in the river with one leg in 10 degree water. And the
other leg in 18 degree water with a thermal cline in between. So there was
this dramatic development of shoreline warming along the river, wherever
there was water slowed down, it would warm up. You figure that out on
river trips when you're trying to like cool off or bathe, you figure out
there's uh warm parts and cold parts. Yeah, a little backs. The other
place warm enough to have a bathroom. You got about two miles, 2200.
So anyway, so this, this was an opportunity right to maybe manage native
aquatic organisms that need warm water better. And it also was a threat in
the sense that it triggered explosions of, of some non native fishes that
they didn't want. Such as, oh, there's a fat head men. Really like those
conditions. It's an exotic species. And then it, it greatly improved
survival rates of, uh, little, uh, native suckers and fishes like that
didn't seem to do much to Humpback chub. And anyway, at the end of the
experiment, they ran a big flushing float to get rid of the exotics and it
also got rid of the board. Yeah. Erased the native as well. Yeah. So the
main beneficiaries of it in the end because they do cope better with those
kind of condition. Pulses of water with rainbow trout. They had a pretty
good year.
It was crazy. I remember walking down to the, the, the ramp at least ferry
and headed down the trip and I walked up to the water and I said this is a
fish hatchery. A bloody fish hatchery. I smell, I grew up around fish
hatches, trout hatches. The whole river smelled like a fish hatchery. I
looked in the water and all along the edge of the river, the stable flow
river where every, every 10 inches was a little rainbow trout fried. So
the whole edge of the river looked like a rearing trough for trout. They
benefited dramatically from the stabilization of the water levels during
that, that summer.
Were there any other events like that? That were unusual that you can.
Well, the HFE in 2008 is one that generated. It made it really made it
clear that the sandbars that the guys were, were generating with the HFE
didn't really improve conditions for camping and so on. In the upper part
of the canyon, there were little tiny bars and they were big and steep.
Most of them were not usable and rolled away rapidly.
Um
Also trying to think what else. Uh Then the other really major event while
I was still at all involved with the system was, was the decision to
proceed with the temp process. And this kind of what, what I would call
basically a rediscovery of the wheel where they repeated an awful lot of
the kind of workshops and meetings and so on that we've done back in the
late nineties with many, many of the same players, many of the same
characters and uh reach much of the same general conclusion about what's
uncertain and what's not, except the settlement business that they
persisted in treating is not uncertain. What do you, um uh what do you
think? What kinds of research and monitoring and adaptive management do
you think could and should have been done that maybe didn't get the kind
of attention and support that it needed? Well, the the the biggest single
thing is the one that I think people just started really getting clear
about in the last two or three years. And after temp basically, as well as
this management of water levels in Lake Paul, where they do have certain
flexibility to keep the water levels higher or lower,
not just trying to minimize them all the time. Uh Then uh from an ecology
point of view, one of the biggest issues in the canyon has always been
water temperature. The assumption has always been that native aquatic
organisms would do better in warmer conditions than the dam results in
fish or native fish and so on like that. And there was always this idea of
an expensive uh temperature control device to bring warm water down to the
pen stocks. Uh
They had put a co such a device on Flaming Gorge above the operating
system has seemed to have been generated some beneficial results down
stream in, in Colorado.
So there was a, there had always been this kind of pressure to manage
temperatures that way. And uh our recommendation from the early Adaptive
management workshops was, yeah, that is important and you need to do
something. So let's see if we can figure out how to build a cheap
temperature control device using plastic film or something that will get
warm water down to the pen stocks, not in a permanent and expensive way,
but in a simple, cheap way. And we can test it for a couple of years and
see if that warming, what that warming actually does and if it doesn't
work, we can throw it away. And so the idea of building A T CD was passed
to a research group in the Bureau of Reclamation Engineering Group to
figure out a design. And they came up with a $500 million concrete
monstrosity as being the best design option. Well, of course, nobody is
going to make a $500 million investment on a highly uncertain possibility
of making an improvement for a few fish, right? Or maybe make it easier to
have a bath in the river. So the T CD I temperature control device idea
got never got any serious consideration in the L temp process. It was just
said, look, this is just, this is too extreme. One of the L temp mistakes
was to uh try to measure utility uh to stakeholders for uh different
circumstances on kind of a arbitrary additive scales over different
performance measures. They didn't actually do what we had tried to do,
which was to say, well, we're gonna try to compare different resources and
different values from the system. We need to get them on a comparable
scale. And uh that scale really needs to recognize cost and benefits. We
so we basically recommended a kind of traditional cost benefit analysis to
get at uh whether certain actions ought to be taken. You need to consider
how much it costs as well as the benefits. And just because you can't
quantify the benefits very well, they're, they're not monetary benefits
doesn't mean you, you shouldn't scale them relative to the costs. And so
well with the newer way that Kemp did it this so called swing waiting
utility assessment method or multi attribute utility analysis method, they
only look at the benefit part of that your cuts like that. They, they not
like anybody looking at cost, they wanna look at benefit scales, they only
wanna look at the positive side of what they're doing and not not the uh
not the public co commitment, which is cost. So uh so the, the, the t they
did screen out policies like the T CD from even being looked at. Then when
uh when the temp was being developed, uh we ran into uh rich Valdes who is
one of the scientists who was involved for many years and fish way before
me in the Fish College side of the Grand Canyon and it management uh we
stumbled on this thing called the Weirs Impeller, which the Australian
said a man for trying to manage water temperatures and oxygen and
reservoirs in Australia. What it is is this, it's a column about 10 m in
diameter of plastic that goes down 2010 or 20 m in the water. And it's got
big propeller at the top and they spin this propeller and they drive our
water down through this big big plastic tube and then it goes down and
breaks up the thermal coin and can carry water all the way down the pin
stop. So we said, hey, look, we can get these wear and fellers for a
couple of million each. Let's put in 10 of these things and just blast
warm water down to the pit stocks and we'll warm the river in a cheap way.
And uh the all process by that time had been come so carved in stone, uh
looking at a very, very narrow range of policy options that they really
refused to even consider that broader option. One of the things we've
learned early on in adaptive management is you put a bunch of bureaucrats
and managers and administrators in a room and look for options to try and
they will always tell you to keep doing whatever the hell it was you were
doing before and they don't want to change it. It's the standard operating
procedure, notion of bureaucratic behavior that you, you, you don't take
risks, right? You, and, and the least risky thing is what you've got away
with so far. So you just keep doing what you do. And that's basically the
way lte options came out is a very narrow range of alternatives that
they're even willing to look at in water flow management and other, and
other things is that one of the things that frustrated you so that you
decided to sort of step back around 2010 is the lack of, of willingness to
really uh take more risk with uh uh ideas for policy change. Uh huh. Uh
And you think that that would be, so the adaptive management work group is
pretty broad based, there are a lot of representatives on there, you know
, from federal agencies to state representatives to, you know, resource
stakeholders like fisheries people and river runners. And they're all the
kind of people that should have been involved in. And, and many of them
were actually as individuals involved in the original Adaptive Management
workshop process and the tribes of course, are all involved. So where is
this sort of conservative bureaucratic culture really coming from in your
mind? And why do you think that that that segment of the adaptive
management team has so much influence over? I can't claim to understand
the administrative structure that well of what's actually implemented on
the ground. I know, there are two lead agencies that tend to be very
conservative in there are policy choices and recommendations. Uh One of
them, of course is the National Park Service who claims ultimate authority
over everything in the canyon. Uh And then the other is reclamation
and reclamation is a big, powerful bureaucracy. And it's got, they
basically, whenever anything anybody wants to mess with the water, they
always can fall back on the Colorado River compact and the series of legal
decisions made about how the water has to move through the Grand Canyon.
Let's move down through the Colorado river system and those, those
compacts put really severe constraints on how much they can, they can mess
with the water, right? So and storage patterns in the reservoirs and so on
like that. So basically the excuse for inaction, we call an adaptive
management quotes, excuse for inaction for bureau of reclamation. It was
always the Colorado River compact that they only could explore
alternatives within a very narrow range defined legally through the the
legal decisions about water in the Grand Canon in Colorado in general.
Were there any um uh significant
documents or reports that you would like to highlight that should be, you
know, remembered as important parts of the evolution of this program? Yeah
, the two papers that, that we've published in Ecology of Society is the
name of the journal today. So uh what was it called? It had a different
name back and they changed names at some point. Uh Anyway, ecology and
society is the way you would find it in Google scholar today. Uh
The first one was uh Josh Carman and I paper about describing the original
model of development work and uh uh and why and the decisions we'd made
and what we'd included and who was involved and so on and so on. Then uh
the second one would be Ted Malice's surprise and opportunity paper in
that same journal. It's looking back from a perspective of about 2014,
2012 on, on what had happened and surprised ways we've been surprised by
the experiments. Great well done. Think of any other, understand another
key one that I think is an example. I consider an example how not to do it
, not not to do things because of the stupid utility in all season. So on
, not the modeling, the modeling was good in it as well, but it's uh run
at all open file report just came out, I think at least in 2018 the US GS
open file reports on the uh the all temp modeling process uh spell the
author's name. Uh Runge R un ge like run
and that's a GCMRC Open file report. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Title.
Oh I'm not sure. I don't remember the title.
Uh It was called
Had Structured Decision Making in the title case.
And I think L temp is also LTE MP is also in the title. Yeah. All right.
We can ever downloaded that thing. I can take a look at my computer later
and see if I can get that. And if you have handy PDF of your article with
the College of Society is they don't, they don't give you PDF, they, they
want, it's open access. Well, you get the HTML A real me to deal with.
I'll see if I can get those references for you.
Um You've mentioned a number of individuals that you thought were uh
particularly um important to the evolution of the program. Um Wanna, is
there anybody else that you don't think you can start up for it all? So,
oh my gosh, his wife just died.
You asked me to you, you were meeting with him and he asked you to be
remembered to me. Oh, yeah, Dave Garrett. Dave, I think Dave Garrett with
the, the was really the initiator of the whole thing. I think it was Dave
that initiated the organization that the administrative organization for
it. Certainly the scientific review system that's been used over the years.
I think it was probably Dave that brought in uh Barry Gold. Uh And I
suspect also Steve uh gloss into the system. Those are uh two people we
have not interviewed yet. So light and gloss
Barry Gold, I haven't interviewed him, but I've got him written down as a
possible. Barry would be really good. Barry was just real shame that Barry
left the program. He was a kindred spirit and really understood what we
were trying to do very well and was, I think, also frustrated by the way
the administrative structure that looked, right. It looks like policy
people and science people and you have these working groups in it. Yeah.
Why he was frustrated that it hadn't performed as expected.
It's really weird that the, the people on the twig generally are less
scientifically competent in, in my experience than and white people.
There's a really weird reversal of roles going on in it. So I don't think
anybody tended to have happened and I'm not sure that that has been a
consistent uh feature.
No, it's changed for a bit. So, yeah. Uh One of the things we noticed is
that the twig behavior, I saw a little more of it than them. We really
depended on who is chairing it. And there were chairman who just wanted to
get through the process and survive the day and others that wanted to
become more engaged in substantive technical discussions.
Yeah, let me ask you to reflect a little bit more on that because uh some
of the interviews that we've had have been with people who were invested
in the human dimension side of collaboration. Um who think that a
significant part of adaptive management is getting key stakeholders to the
table, getting them to talk to each other, getting them to respect each
other's differing positions and working on a consensus decision about how
to move forward in a complex and uncertain environment. Adaptive
management. Yeah. Yeah. Um So to what extent do you think some of yours
and others disappointments with progress in the program are based on the
fact that some of what happens um is democracy in action which is messy
and slow. Um uh you know, to, to what extent is it just bureaucratic
conservatism as you've characterized it? And I'm sure there's a lot of
that and to what extent is it a commitment to democratic processes that
are also sort of show up as any of that democratic process business here
in the workshops that we ran and what I could see listening, you know,
parts of the old temp workshop processes. So it was pretty clear that
there was lots of this collaboration and there was lots of consensus about
at least the options to, to be tried. Uh There was not consensus about the
values and there was not consensus about how to deal with some of the
basic trade-off issues. So you want more, you want more power production
out of that system. It's gonna be at the expense of quality for rafting
use and for fish. And so is gonna run the water up and down a lot more.
And so that, that's an irreconcilable trade-off can produce more power
without screwing other things up. So,
uh and you can't settle that I don't think of the democratic type process
, but it wasn't, I didn't see that. What, uh,
I'm trying to think, you know, maybe, maybe, actually, maybe you're right
because what, what are a more or less democratic process is gonna end up
producing in those situations where there are strongly conflicting
objectives, it's gonna produce a lowest common denominator. It's gonna
produce a compromise that isn't very good. And that's one of the things
that did come out of our work and it came out of the L temp work as well
that the current, what's called MLFF modified low fluctuating flows where
they allow some fluctuation di only for power production, but they don't
optimize for it. And it's enough fluctuation to degrade some ecological
values and to make the river harder to use that compromise may actually
not be the best thing to do. But it, uh it is a kind of democratic. We can
all live with this compromise even though it's, you know, lots of times
the, the compromise is the worst choice. Yeah, this happens in politics,
doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. You poor guys.
Yeah. My number two son is thinking about giving up his job at Penn State.
He's just about, yeah, he's, he's frightened now to come home. Good. Yeah.
Uh We talked a little bit about surprises and I'm really glad that you
mentioned this article by Mellis about surprises and opportunities because
that's something that Larry Stevens emphasized to us. He was our very
first interview and he's the person who probably more than anybody else is
responsible for making sure this administrative history was supported,
funded and, and implemented. And he said that he thought it would be
interesting if we asked everybody that we interviewed, what surprised you.
Um What what happened that you weren't expecting? And I think surprises
are a really interesting topic. Let me say a little bit about Steve. We
would never have been successful anywhere near as successful as I think we
were in the original adaptive management model had been for learn in every
major case study that I've been involved in in, in these large scale
management programs with 30 or 40 case studies all around the world.
There's always been a Larry Stevens. There's always been somebody who had
a real system sense of what was going on. He was able to step back and
things to look at them from the standpoint of uh of both the ecosystem
ecology uh uh broadly in the ecology and also the people and, and in the
Grand Canyon area, uh when I was appointed to Grand Canyon Senior
Ecologist, when they wanted to give me that name, I said you're crazy.