WEBVTT 00:00:00.889 --> 00:00:04.665 This is Paul Hertz and Jen Sweeney of Arizona State University 00:00:04.698 --> 00:00:08.566 interviewing Carl Walters at the University of British Columbia in 00:00:08.599 --> 00:00:16.599 Vancouver BC on August 18th, 2018. Carl, thanks for being with us today 00:00:16.859 --> 00:00:22.096 for this interview. You are most welcome. Um Would you start by telling us 00:00:22.129 --> 00:00:25.806 your full name, the positions you held in the Adaptive Management Program 00:00:25.839 --> 00:00:30.387 in the years that you were involved with it? OK. I'm Carl Walters. Carl 00:00:30.420 --> 00:00:34.656 John Walters, Professor Emeritus University of British Columbia, where 00:00:34.689 --> 00:00:37.536 I've been since 1969. 00:00:37.569 --> 00:00:43.076 My involvement with uh GC Damp began in 1996. 00:00:43.109 --> 00:00:50.167 W uh when we had a proposal accepted to uh conduct a series of modeling 00:00:50.200 --> 00:00:57.046 workshops and policy analysis workshops for the program. Uh Our main 00:00:57.079 --> 00:01:03.866 contact at that time was Ted Mellis uh in the Grand Canyon Monitoring and 00:01:03.899 --> 00:01:11.899 Research Center. Uh We, I then worked uh with primarily with people at 00:01:13.698 --> 00:01:21.576 GCMRC over the next decade or so. And I had an appointment from 1998. I 00:01:21.609 --> 00:01:28.855 think it was till about 2010 as the Grand Canyon Senior Ecologist uh with 00:01:28.888 --> 00:01:35.876 the contract from uh GCMRC. So that would be a US GS contract. And what 00:01:35.909 --> 00:01:40.617 kind of work were you primarily doing during those years? In the first few 00:01:40.650 --> 00:01:45.697 years, we were doing primarily development of large simulation models 00:01:45.730 --> 00:01:49.257 using what's called the adaptive environmental assessment and management 00:01:49.290 --> 00:01:55.576 process, which is basically identical to what in recent years is called 00:01:55.609 --> 00:02:01.757 structured decision making. Us GS has done in the L temp process. So what 00:02:01.790 --> 00:02:07.897 we did was to go in and sit down with large groups of scientists, managers 00:02:07.930 --> 00:02:12.755 from the agencies involved in the canyon and stakeholders. And we tried to 00:02:12.788 --> 00:02:19.356 build computer models of the Grand Canyon water and riparian ecosystem and 00:02:19.389 --> 00:02:25.066 to try various management policies mainly associated with trying to 00:02:25.099 --> 00:02:30.327 maintain the ecology of the Grand Canyon, its fishes and, and vegetation 00:02:30.360 --> 00:02:37.767 and animals. Uh The primary result of that early work was the recognition 00:02:37.800 --> 00:02:43.775 that their uh monitoring programs were largely, well, there are very large 00:02:43.808 --> 00:02:46.737 uncertainties about how that ecosystem was going to behave under 00:02:46.770 --> 00:02:54.505 management. And uh uh their monitoring programs were largely inadequate to 00:02:54.538 --> 00:02:59.967 detect changes and more particularly to detect the efficacy of various 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:05.457 management experiments that they were proposing like high high flow 00:03:05.490 --> 00:03:11.827 experiments to manage sand and uh things to try to save the endangered 00:03:11.860 --> 00:03:18.566 Humpback chub and so on. So, uh what I then did, recognizing this high 00:03:18.599 --> 00:03:23.446 uncertainty associated with their monitoring programs was to shift most of 00:03:23.479 --> 00:03:29.005 my attention to the aquatic ecology program, mainly the fish program and 00:03:29.038 --> 00:03:35.416 to work on uh exper on field monitoring designs and the implementation of 00:03:35.449 --> 00:03:43.406 those designs in the canyon. So I did t something like 15 of the 00:03:43.439 --> 00:03:48.957 monitoring trips down the river. There's 18 day long trips for you catch 00:03:48.990 --> 00:03:53.446 fish and tag them and things like that and develop various methods for 00:03:53.479 --> 00:03:57.217 analyzing the data that they were collecting to try to get better 00:03:57.250 --> 00:04:03.916 population estimates and so on. And then uh late in that period, in around 00:04:03.949 --> 00:04:11.505 2008, we ran another series of workshops uh using an ecosystem modeling uh 00:04:11.538 --> 00:04:17.276 approach called OP PA with Eco Sim to try to get at uh food web structure 00:04:17.309 --> 00:04:22.877 in the aquatic ecosystem and how it was changing over time. 00:04:22.910 --> 00:04:28.995 Uh But by about 2010, I think they were getting tired of me and I was 00:04:29.028 --> 00:04:32.395 getting tired of traveling down there all the time and I kind of dropped 00:04:32.428 --> 00:04:39.176 out. I ran one small workshop on aquatic ecology in 2014 with some of the 00:04:39.209 --> 00:04:47.209 GCMRC scientists. I had a, a very limited involvement with the uh Juicy 00:04:47.569 --> 00:04:52.486 Damp Administrative Structure. I could not make sense of that structure 00:04:52.519 --> 00:04:59.757 when we first went down there. Uh The, the operation of the Juicy Damp 00:04:59.790 --> 00:05:03.926 from the stamp from the science side was being managed by Barry Gold, 00:05:03.959 --> 00:05:08.015 who'd heard of uh our adaptive management approaches. And he was the one 00:05:08.048 --> 00:05:12.645 that got us a contract to go down there and work with them in the first 00:05:12.678 --> 00:05:20.036 place. And we were told about these administrative structures, the TWG and 00:05:20.069 --> 00:05:24.856 technical work group and the M wig, but we never really saw them. I think 00:05:24.889 --> 00:05:29.765 I was invited to a couple of TWG and M wig meetings and asked to give 00:05:29.798 --> 00:05:34.676 talks about what we were doing. But they, we were never directly involved 00:05:34.709 --> 00:05:42.709 with them except in one multi attribute utility analysis exercise uh in 00:05:42.730 --> 00:05:48.416 the mid two thousands trying to quantify tradeoffs between different uh 00:05:48.449 --> 00:05:52.325 management objectives and performance measures for the Adaptive Management 00:05:52.358 --> 00:05:56.467 program. So most of your work was with the Grand Canyon Monitoring and 00:05:56.500 --> 00:06:00.976 Research Center. Yeah, one of one of the things that uh when the Adaptive 00:06:01.009 --> 00:06:06.226 Management uh this AD AM process first started back in the seventies, we 00:06:06.259 --> 00:06:11.825 had uh uh uh two large contracts, one with uh uh us fish and wildlife 00:06:11.858 --> 00:06:16.745 Service and one with Canadian Department of Environment of the day. And we 00:06:16.778 --> 00:06:21.116 applied this workshop, modeling technology to a whole series of case 00:06:21.149 --> 00:06:25.895 studies in Canada and the United States. So we looked at things like 00:06:25.928 --> 00:06:30.377 Caribou management in Canada and hydroelectric developments in Canada and 00:06:30.410 --> 00:06:34.687 fisheries. And then in the States, we looked at a series mainly of water 00:06:34.720 --> 00:06:40.067 management problems around the Sacramento river basin. And so on, one of 00:06:40.100 --> 00:06:46.116 the really striking things that we saw in those applications was that we 00:06:46.149 --> 00:06:50.877 had a really difficult time with the American groups that we were working 00:06:50.910 --> 00:06:55.096 with and the Canadian groups when we would go in and sit down with them, 00:06:55.129 --> 00:06:58.555 scientists, managers, stakeholders, all they wanted to do is focus on the 00:06:58.588 --> 00:07:02.416 problem and the analysis of the problem. And what we could do in the way 00:07:02.449 --> 00:07:07.426 of modeling the Americans. On the other hand, wanted to focus basically on 00:07:07.459 --> 00:07:12.245 administrative process and bureaucratic process and how the things we were 00:07:12.278 --> 00:07:17.176 doing would basically further their bureaucratic careers. So we had an 00:07:17.209 --> 00:07:20.676 awful time getting them to even talk about the science issues and modeling 00:07:20.709 --> 00:07:25.406 issues and so on. And they wanted to do this other thing of figured out 00:07:25.439 --> 00:07:29.856 how they were gonna manage all this administratively. What that, that's 00:07:29.889 --> 00:07:34.387 what we saw when we were invited to talk to Twig. And an anyway, that the 00:07:34.420 --> 00:07:38.486 technical working group hardly had any technical people of any confidence 00:07:38.519 --> 00:07:44.536 on it. There were more scientifically, intellectually competent people on 00:07:44.569 --> 00:07:48.846 AM wig than on Twig. And when we sat in on their meetings, they were 00:07:48.879 --> 00:07:54.156 mostly about budget matters and funding allocations and things like that 00:07:54.189 --> 00:07:58.515 rather than about matters of substance in the Adaptive Management Program 00:07:58.548 --> 00:08:02.536 , the, the the substantive uncertain discussion of the substantive 00:08:02.569 --> 00:08:08.145 uncertainties and the options for dealing with those. So we saw that same 00:08:08.178 --> 00:08:13.276 problem we've seen in other, in other case studies earlier as soon as we 00:08:13.309 --> 00:08:15.906 hit the Grand Canyon. 00:08:15.939 --> 00:08:20.656 Do you think that got in the way of um of achieving some of the goals of 00:08:20.689 --> 00:08:25.526 adaptive management? Or was it just an extra layer of bureaucracy that 00:08:25.559 --> 00:08:29.205 slowed things down? A little bit. I think that the latter, I think it 00:08:29.238 --> 00:08:34.316 mainly just slowed things down. Uh the the the working groups that were 00:08:34.349 --> 00:08:39.167 actually developed and uh collecting data and developing policy options 00:08:39.200 --> 00:08:43.316 and so on like that were largely doing that outside of that administrative 00:08:43.349 --> 00:08:49.927 structure, like through our workshops and through other things. Um the 00:08:49.960 --> 00:08:53.917 management experiments that were tried over the period, high flow 00:08:53.950 --> 00:08:59.846 experiments and uh steady flow experiments and some trout removal 00:08:59.879 --> 00:09:06.866 experiments and so on was it was never entirely clear how the decision to 00:09:06.899 --> 00:09:13.986 do those had had been arrived at. Uh the, it's interesting, they're 00:09:14.019 --> 00:09:18.946 probably from a scientist from the ecologists point of view. The single 00:09:18.979 --> 00:09:22.736 most informative experiment that's been done in the Grand Canyon, wasn't 00:09:22.769 --> 00:09:26.346 these high flow experiments to get all the publicity about sand, the most 00:09:26.379 --> 00:09:30.846 informative thing they ever did was to stabilize the river for four months 00:09:30.879 --> 00:09:36.657 and at a low flow in the summer of 2000. And that generated all manner of 00:09:36.690 --> 00:09:43.236 striking uh ecological changes in the system that uh help guided a lot of 00:09:43.269 --> 00:09:49.816 our later work. Uh Do you know, I could never figure out why that 00:09:49.849 --> 00:09:55.496 experiment was conducted because I don't recall at all the process that 00:09:55.529 --> 00:09:59.047 led to a decision to do it. In fact, the science group that I've been 00:09:59.080 --> 00:10:02.255 working with that kind of warned against doing it. We thought it might do 00:10:02.288 --> 00:10:08.496 more harm than good by uh triggering outbreaks of exotic species of 00:10:08.529 --> 00:10:11.967 creatures that have invaded the canyon. And in fact, they did do that with 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:17.116 one of the species. The tamarisk, salt cedar that lines the river banks. 00:10:17.149 --> 00:10:21.566 There are still tamarisks living in that system that recruited during 00:10:21.599 --> 00:10:25.885 that low flow event down at a low level near the river bank that are 00:10:25.918 --> 00:10:30.116 horrifically flooded for much of the year. Uh Nowadays, with the water 00:10:30.149 --> 00:10:35.427 going up and down and they're still there from 2000 very resilient species. 00:10:35.460 --> 00:10:41.385 Yeah. Yeah. Horrid creature. That one. So you don't remember why they 00:10:41.418 --> 00:10:47.537 decided to stabilize the river at a low level for I was never really told 00:10:47.570 --> 00:10:52.496 the story, exact story of how that decision was made. I just remember that 00:10:52.529 --> 00:10:58.196 we said they came out with they, I'm not sure who your reclamation pre 00:10:58.229 --> 00:11:02.686 came out with the decision to do this. And it was never clear to me what 00:11:02.719 --> 00:11:07.505 the consultation process had been that led to that decision. It may have 00:11:07.538 --> 00:11:10.885 had something to do simply with the hydropower generation and drought 00:11:10.918 --> 00:11:14.625 conditions in the watershed and nothing to do at all with experimental 00:11:14.658 --> 00:11:19.787 management of the river. Save some water for the p 00:11:19.820 --> 00:11:23.456 Well, we'll look that up and find out. It sounds like a very interesting 00:11:23.489 --> 00:11:26.816 event, especially since as you say, they learned, there were a lot of 00:11:26.849 --> 00:11:31.616 changes that some were surprising, some were merely instructive. Can you 00:11:31.649 --> 00:11:35.316 think of any others besides a tamarisk recruitment that happened at that 00:11:35.349 --> 00:11:37.525 time? 00:11:37.558 --> 00:11:42.797 One of the things we were seeing, uh, around the early two thousands, was 00:11:42.830 --> 00:11:48.917 that the trout population, rainbow trout above, uh, le ferry, it's 00:11:48.950 --> 00:11:53.657 basically a valuable resource in its own. Right. It's not internationally 00:11:53.690 --> 00:11:57.326 known trout fishery, but it's also a threat to humpback chub because the 00:11:57.359 --> 00:12:01.996 trout dispersed downstream and eat baby humpback chub. So, there was this 00:12:02.029 --> 00:12:06.037 endangered species versus fisheries conflict that we were a bit worried 00:12:06.070 --> 00:12:11.356 about. Uh, the rainbow trout population had built up dramatically when 00:12:11.389 --> 00:12:16.135 falls were partially stabilized in the river. Starting in about, um, was 00:12:16.168 --> 00:12:22.167 it 1991? They reduced the diurnal flow fluctuation that created better 00:12:22.200 --> 00:12:26.436 conditions for baby trout. The population had built up and then it was 00:12:26.469 --> 00:12:30.775 starting to crash and it crashed down to all the low level. And then it, 00:12:30.808 --> 00:12:35.895 uh, by the, uh, around 2010 or 2012, we build up to another peak and then 00:12:35.928 --> 00:12:40.775 it crashed again. And, uh, some of the ecosystem maing work we did was to 00:12:40.808 --> 00:12:45.326 try to figure out why there was this violent population cycle in the trout 00:12:45.359 --> 00:12:52.677 in a cyclic threat to the native species, native fish species. Uh They are 00:12:52.710 --> 00:12:56.385 just now sorting out what the probable reason for that is. And it's 00:12:56.418 --> 00:13:00.096 something that we had looked at in the early modeling and then it kind of 00:13:00.129 --> 00:13:04.366 put aside is probably not that important. And that's the management of 00:13:04.399 --> 00:13:11.986 Lake Powell. Uh, so Lake Powell source water for both producing power, uh 00:13:12.019 --> 00:13:16.427 , out of Grand Canyon Dam and from delivery of water to Lake Mead to 00:13:16.460 --> 00:13:24.025 equalize, stabilize Lake Mead's delivery of water and so on. Uh And if you 00:13:24.058 --> 00:13:28.336 , if you're a hydro dam operator, 00:13:28.369 --> 00:13:33.366 the, the first thing you want to do is to get the water out of the dam as 00:13:33.399 --> 00:13:36.537 much as time is you keep the level of the reservoir down as much as you 00:13:36.570 --> 00:13:43.356 can. They had had this horrific object lesson with the 1982 83 El Nino. 00:13:43.389 --> 00:13:47.885 When they almost lost Glen Canyon dam, they had Plywood along the top of 00:13:47.918 --> 00:13:52.446 the dam to stop from having to use the spillway and the water level huge 00:13:52.479 --> 00:13:56.486 flows through the system at that time. So a lot of their management 00:13:56.519 --> 00:13:59.765 actions were aimed basically, even though they weren't saying that I think 00:13:59.798 --> 00:14:04.356 they were basically trying to keep the reservoir lower. But what, what, 00:14:04.389 --> 00:14:09.076 what's been found since then is that as the reservoir goes up and down, it 00:14:09.109 --> 00:14:13.206 does. So in a multiyear cycle, it doesn't fill in one year. It takes years 00:14:13.239 --> 00:14:17.625 of wet conditions for it to fill and years of dry conditions for it to 00:14:17.658 --> 00:14:25.015 empty down. Uh When it's near fall, the water is drawn out of the bottom 00:14:25.048 --> 00:14:30.446 of the dam uh through almost all the water goes out through the turbines 00:14:30.479 --> 00:14:36.467 and that water is very cold. And in any uh lake or reservoir, the there's 00:14:36.500 --> 00:14:39.667 a gradient of nutrients, the nutrients get depleted at the surface and 00:14:39.700 --> 00:14:43.467 they accumulate in the deep water. So the water running out of the dam 00:14:43.500 --> 00:14:47.336 when the reservoir is high, is very nutrient rich and it stimulates its 00:14:47.369 --> 00:14:51.015 really high productivity in the least where you reach and on down to the 00:14:51.048 --> 00:14:57.486 river aquatic productivity. So that's great for everything from uh from 00:14:57.519 --> 00:15:01.537 the fish to the peregrine falcons, they eat the ducks that eat the algae 00:15:01.570 --> 00:15:04.755 and so on. Like that, the whole food web responds pretty dramatically to 00:15:04.788 --> 00:15:08.667 these high productivity conditions. But when the reservoirs down, it 00:15:08.700 --> 00:15:13.765 starts sucking uh surface water, warmer, surface water through the 00:15:13.798 --> 00:15:18.226 turbines and that surface water is nutrient depleted and the productivity 00:15:18.259 --> 00:15:23.236 of the river below goes way down. And that it expressed in everything from 00:15:23.269 --> 00:15:29.326 trout population collapses to skinny humpback chub to fewer ducks swimming 00:15:29.359 --> 00:15:33.797 around the river to fewer peregrine falcons. And it's a the whole food web 00:15:33.830 --> 00:15:39.076 response to that productivity driver. If we had understood that in the 00:15:39.109 --> 00:15:43.596 early days, we were told by a couple of the people who were working, uh in 00:15:43.629 --> 00:15:46.956 the Grand Canyon Monitoring Research Center who were working on Lake 00:15:46.989 --> 00:15:51.596 Powell, we were told about this issue and I said, well, this is, this is 00:15:51.629 --> 00:15:55.135 outside of the scope of the work we're gonna do. We're gonna stick to 00:15:55.168 --> 00:15:59.586 working with what goes on below Glen Canyon Dam. So we, we, we made what's 00:15:59.619 --> 00:16:03.936 called a problem bounding mistake by not including the dynamics of Lake 00:16:03.969 --> 00:16:09.047 Powell and the way it was forcing the ecosystem in our analysis. And so we 00:16:09.080 --> 00:16:13.635 didn't look at any options for managing it differently. And in hindsight, 00:16:13.668 --> 00:16:18.086 it looks like a lot of the, the most interesting options for Grand Canyon 00:16:18.119 --> 00:16:22.616 ecosystem restoration have to do with how Lake Powell is managed better 00:16:22.649 --> 00:16:27.907 than what's done in the river below. Unfortunately, it seems like some of 00:16:27.940 --> 00:16:32.787 those options are foreclosed. Now with 17 years of drought, the lake is 00:16:32.820 --> 00:16:37.135 down below 50% full and nobody really expects it to be full again unless 00:16:37.168 --> 00:16:41.667 we get some miraculous rains or winter storms. Sooner or later. There's 00:16:41.700 --> 00:16:45.986 going to be another big whack in El Nino. It just took one year to fill. 00:16:46.019 --> 00:16:51.645 The thing went from below to a really high level in 8283. So, well, a lot 00:16:51.678 --> 00:16:54.996 of people are hoping for that. 00:16:55.029 --> 00:16:58.505 But yeah, I know. I think the climate change analysis and predictions are 00:16:58.538 --> 00:17:04.305 generally for um, more prolonged and severe droughts just like we're 00:17:04.338 --> 00:17:08.776 seeing out here. So you look out the window here. Yeah, that's smoke. I 00:17:08.809 --> 00:17:12.097 think you've been told that that's, we don't have a blue sky because of 00:17:12.130 --> 00:17:17.266 the forest fire situation because of the persistent dry conditions over 00:17:17.299 --> 00:17:21.367 several years that we've had here. I just took a trip through the 00:17:21.400 --> 00:17:26.367 southwest, uh bunch of national parks and the rocky mountains with a 00:17:26.400 --> 00:17:30.617 family and we had smoke everywhere we went and most of it was from 00:17:30.650 --> 00:17:34.467 California. California has been on fire for a couple of months and all 00:17:34.500 --> 00:17:38.656 that smoke is drifting eastward. My little sister lives near the edge of 00:17:38.689 --> 00:17:43.906 all of those fires. So we get lots of news about that from here. 00:17:43.939 --> 00:17:47.147 Uh, Carl, let, let me step back a little bit. One of the reasons that, um 00:17:47.180 --> 00:17:51.936 , you, uh, were, uh, recruited to be involved in adaptive management 00:17:51.969 --> 00:17:56.016 programs because of your prominent position as one of the architects of 00:17:56.049 --> 00:18:00.825 adaptive management uh theory. And I wonder if you could just uh you're 00:18:00.858 --> 00:18:04.107 probably in a better position than anybody else that we've interviewed uh 00:18:04.140 --> 00:18:09.795 to talk a little bit about what adaptive management is. Um how it got sort 00:18:09.828 --> 00:18:15.776 of launched, how it has developed over time and how that theory and your, 00:18:15.809 --> 00:18:18.717 you know, to your way of thinking how that theory was attempted to be 00:18:18.750 --> 00:18:24.226 applied to this unique situation on the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon. OK. 00:18:24.259 --> 00:18:30.117 So the, the, I think, even as early as 1970 I think I had given a paper at 00:18:30.150 --> 00:18:34.776 an American Fisheries Society National meeting where I said, look, the 00:18:34.809 --> 00:18:39.416 models that we're trying to develop are not reliable for prediction 00:18:39.449 --> 00:18:45.217 because there's too many uncertainties that we can't resolve uh without 00:18:45.250 --> 00:18:50.075 large scale manipulations and experiments. We, we're, we're getting really 00:18:50.108 --> 00:18:54.055 good data on a lot of ecology processes, but not on how they fit together. 00:18:54.088 --> 00:18:58.065 And there's lots of ways you can make mistakes. So I had back then 00:18:58.098 --> 00:19:02.805 advocated experimental approaches to management saying we need to treat 00:19:02.838 --> 00:19:06.916 management actions as experiments. 00:19:06.949 --> 00:19:11.916 Uh recognizing full, full while recognizing that the outcomes of those 00:19:11.949 --> 00:19:19.949 experiments are highly uncertain. Uh Then uh uh Ray Hilborn, uh one of my 00:19:20.039 --> 00:19:25.107 ex students and I were uh uh doing a sabbatical leave in the International 00:19:25.140 --> 00:19:31.256 Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna in 1974 and 75. And we 00:19:31.289 --> 00:19:35.137 were working on fisheries problems and we showed some of the data that we 00:19:35.170 --> 00:19:43.170 were working on to a uh control system theorist named John Ky and asked 00:19:43.410 --> 00:19:47.416 him what he thought we might, what we thought we might be able to use 00:19:47.449 --> 00:19:51.637 optimal control ideas to figure out how to manage fisheries in the face of 00:19:51.670 --> 00:19:56.387 variability. And John took one look at this and he said you have an 00:19:56.420 --> 00:20:02.127 adaptive control problem and Hilborne and I looked at each other and we 00:20:02.160 --> 00:20:06.967 were working for buzz hauling and buzz halling was known for his history 00:20:07.000 --> 00:20:11.867 of getting great buzzwords to describe the things that he was interested 00:20:11.900 --> 00:20:16.016 in, like resilience and so on. So here's this word adaptive management, 00:20:16.049 --> 00:20:20.085 Hillar. And I looked at each adaptive control and he said we've got a new 00:20:20.118 --> 00:20:22.236 buzzword. 00:20:22.269 --> 00:20:27.016 So that was actually the the kind of formal launch of the use of the term 00:20:27.049 --> 00:20:31.976 adaptive control and adaptive management. In, in in ecological context, we 00:20:32.009 --> 00:20:37.305 published a big paper about it won a major award and so on. But this was 00:20:37.338 --> 00:20:42.696 all going on in parallel with these workshop processes and so on and and 00:20:42.729 --> 00:20:46.436 hauling was seeing better, I think more clearly than Ray and I did who 00:20:46.469 --> 00:20:50.617 were buried in the details that the workshop processes were doing a really 00:20:50.650 --> 00:20:56.107 good job at exposing major uncertainties and uh triggering discussion 00:20:56.140 --> 00:21:00.486 about the need for experimental management approaches. So he started 00:21:00.519 --> 00:21:03.887 calling those workshops, the adaptive environmental assessment and 00:21:03.920 --> 00:21:08.206 management process because the the results they were producing over and 00:21:08.239 --> 00:21:12.446 over and over again, it was us saying to the collected people are working 00:21:12.479 --> 00:21:16.075 with us, we can't resolve these uncertainties by modeling. You're gonna 00:21:16.108 --> 00:21:18.717 have to go out there and do an experiment. You're gonna have to test 00:21:18.750 --> 00:21:22.637 things, you're gonna commit yourself sooner or later. So the whole 00:21:22.670 --> 00:21:27.357 original concept of adaptive management was uh one of management as 00:21:27.390 --> 00:21:32.666 experimentation. Basically, uh the explicit recognition of extreme 00:21:32.699 --> 00:21:35.996 uncertainty about the efficacy of a lot of the things that we do in 00:21:36.029 --> 00:21:40.137 management, the need to monitor those things and to actively make 00:21:40.170 --> 00:21:45.256 management changes to probe for better policies. And we call it probing 00:21:45.289 --> 00:21:47.506 for opportunity. 00:21:47.539 --> 00:21:52.295 But uh as that uh A E AM process got applied more broadly. A couple of 00:21:52.328 --> 00:21:57.026 people started to uh look in on the process as outsiders. There was a 00:21:57.059 --> 00:22:03.565 fellow named Steve Light uh who was with um Well, I think at that time 00:22:03.598 --> 00:22:09.276 he'd been in the University of Minnesota and he had uh he'd been working 00:22:09.309 --> 00:22:14.666 in the, on the Florida Everglades. And then there was another one who was 00:22:14.699 --> 00:22:19.367 working in the Grand Canyon system called Steve Gloss. Have you run into 00:22:19.400 --> 00:22:24.607 that name? Gloss was the administrator of the science side of the GC Damp 00:22:24.640 --> 00:22:32.640 after Barry Gold left. Uh and the uh 02 F glasses last name is Gl Os S 00:22:36.430 --> 00:22:42.416 Yeah, Steve Solo and Light 00:22:42.449 --> 00:22:48.085 didn't as far as I can tell, did not understand this idea that the basic 00:22:48.118 --> 00:22:52.305 product of an adaptive management planning exercise is an experimental 00:22:52.338 --> 00:22:58.075 design. They saw the process itself, the business of bringing together 00:22:58.108 --> 00:23:02.325 scientists and managers and stakeholders and working together in problem 00:23:02.358 --> 00:23:08.446 clarification. So on this kind of dramatic uh 00:23:08.479 --> 00:23:14.805 en enhancement of co-operation really that's required among stakeholders 00:23:14.838 --> 00:23:19.236 and scientists and managers. When they try to build a model, they saw that 00:23:19.269 --> 00:23:25.137 model building process as being the core of adaptive management, whether 00:23:25.170 --> 00:23:30.016 or not it resulted in a recommendation to do experiments or anything like 00:23:30.049 --> 00:23:33.976 that. They saw it was essentially administrative idea. You can people work 00:23:34.009 --> 00:23:36.936 together better if they're, if they're, if they're forced to be really 00:23:36.969 --> 00:23:40.107 clear about what they're dealing with, with, with their objectives, with 00:23:40.140 --> 00:23:43.357 their performance measures and and how they're gonna make predictions 00:23:43.390 --> 00:23:51.390 about how to link performance to action. So uh they started this thing, a 00:23:51.449 --> 00:23:55.377 thing called the Adaptive Management Practitioners Network. And it started 00:23:55.410 --> 00:24:00.805 pushing the idea of adaptive management as collaborative work. People just 00:24:00.838 --> 00:24:05.607 working together in a in a more structured way to come up with better 00:24:05.640 --> 00:24:10.867 decisions without regard to uncertainty. And the word uncertainty doesn't 00:24:10.900 --> 00:24:16.476 really appear much at all in adaptive management definitions developed by 00:24:16.509 --> 00:24:21.696 the Adaptive Management Practitioners Group. Uh Later on when uh some of 00:24:21.729 --> 00:24:25.847 the adaptive management programs started to receive scrutiny by in, in 00:24:25.880 --> 00:24:30.335 legal challenges, uh The lawyers started looking just and started asking 00:24:30.368 --> 00:24:34.217 what the hell do you mean by adaptive management? And they came up with 00:24:34.250 --> 00:24:38.906 this wonderful term for the thing that gloss and light had promoted and 00:24:38.939 --> 00:24:43.276 they're still pro the stuff is still being promoted stronger. They called 00:24:43.309 --> 00:24:47.055 it adaptive management. Light. 00:24:47.088 --> 00:24:52.226 Yeah. And to my mind, iii I it over the years in all sorts of settings has 00:24:52.259 --> 00:24:58.506 done more harm than good. Uh It's led people into a lot of people into a 00:24:58.539 --> 00:25:02.637 sense of confidence that they have solved problems just because they sat 00:25:02.670 --> 00:25:08.006 down together and worked together to build walls, not be rather rather 00:25:08.039 --> 00:25:10.246 than being forced to admit that they really didn't know what the hell they 00:25:10.279 --> 00:25:15.160 were doing out there and needed to manage very carefully and differently. 00:25:15.989 --> 00:25:17.989 Yeah. One is about uh natural resources and ecosystems. The other is about 00:25:20.608 --> 00:25:24.897 the human dimensions of collaboration. Yeah, exactly. And, well, this 00:25:24.930 --> 00:25:29.815 whole administrative notion of how to administer better rather than how to 00:25:29.848 --> 00:25:35.276 , how to actually meet objectives. Do you feel like um adaptive management 00:25:35.309 --> 00:25:38.936 should be the two of those integrated or? Oh, they definitely, and they 00:25:38.969 --> 00:25:43.315 have been in the process as we ran it. Definitely did. Try to integrate it 00:25:43.348 --> 00:25:50.397 mainly because we always saw the basic product of the process to be uh the 00:25:50.430 --> 00:25:55.526 explicit recognition of high uncertainty and the explicit need to manage 00:25:55.559 --> 00:25:59.976 experimentally in order to resolve uncertainty about policy and be 00:26:00.009 --> 00:26:04.627 flexible enough about your goals to adapt once you monitor results. And 00:26:04.660 --> 00:26:08.847 you see, then you then you adapt right. And to recognize that any time you 00:26:08.880 --> 00:26:12.666 go out there and do an experiment 00:26:12.699 --> 00:26:16.592 in nature, there's all certainty to be serendipity. I will certainly be 00:26:16.625 --> 00:26:21.321 surprises. Things you hadn't expected at all that turn out to be things 00:26:21.354 --> 00:26:24.440 you can turn into opportunities for improving management that you never 00:26:24.473 --> 00:26:29.732 even thought of that for opportunities was a wonderful phrase. I love that. 00:26:29.765 --> 00:26:34.842 Yeah, we, so we wrote, we wrote a paper, uh Ted Mellis ended up writing 00:26:34.875 --> 00:26:40.242 it and publishing it uh called uh uh Surprise and Opportunity in the Grand 00:26:40.275 --> 00:26:46.006 Canyon Adaptive Management Program, which the, well, no, no attention has 00:26:46.039 --> 00:26:49.956 been paid to that paper at all. As far as I can tell. You said that was 00:26:49.989 --> 00:26:57.989 Melis Mel Isme Lis. And me is one of the really key people in the, in the 00:26:58.189 --> 00:27:01.516 development of persistence of the whole adaptive management program there. 00:27:01.549 --> 00:27:07.097 He's a scientist with GCMRC. He was the leader of their sediment research 00:27:07.130 --> 00:27:13.098 group for some time and then later their ecosystem research group at GCMRC. 00:27:13.189 --> 00:27:15.189 And he was one of the lead people that maintained contact between the 00:27:16.759 --> 00:27:21.906 scientific community and Twig and Amy. So a lot of what they heard came 00:27:21.939 --> 00:27:27.676 straight out from Ted. He was our great administrative defender of his 00:27:27.709 --> 00:27:32.746 people. And that in the early days meant defending the sediment research 00:27:32.779 --> 00:27:38.246 work, the, the high flow experiment work and so on, making sure that, that 00:27:38.279 --> 00:27:42.916 , that the sediment research was always very prominent in any presentation 00:27:42.949 --> 00:27:47.446 to Twig and Amway. And that persists to the state. You can see this in the 00:27:47.479 --> 00:27:51.916 temp process where if you go through and, and, and look at all the records 00:27:51.949 --> 00:27:56.347 of the L temp meetings and the discussions in the old temp meetings, we 00:27:56.380 --> 00:28:01.166 say the said heads dominated the meetings. 00:28:01.199 --> 00:28:05.446 Yeah, and they, they and settle related policies dominated discussion. 00:28:05.479 --> 00:28:11.256 Same thing happened to us except we weren't fooled. Uh We started out 00:28:11.289 --> 00:28:14.946 early on development set budgets and so on and say, hey, look, there's 00:28:14.979 --> 00:28:18.617 some really serious uncertainties going on with the SAN management in this 00:28:18.650 --> 00:28:22.387 system that you people aren't admitting and they still haven't admitted 00:28:22.420 --> 00:28:27.147 those and the failure to admit them is reflected strongly in the character 00:28:27.180 --> 00:28:30.285 of the temp uh results. 00:28:30.318 --> 00:28:34.516 So a temp basically said there's no need for experimentation with regard 00:28:34.549 --> 00:28:39.847 to high flow uh release experiments to build sandbars, we know they work. 00:28:39.880 --> 00:28:42.847 So we'll always include them in our plans. So there's no value of 00:28:42.880 --> 00:28:47.545 information for doing things differently. Well, that is that is seriously 00:28:47.578 --> 00:28:52.597 false. There's a huge uncertainty associated with the efficacy of those uh 00:28:52.630 --> 00:29:00.186 of those high f uh uh treatments which they've never been willing to admit. 00:29:00.219 --> 00:29:05.127 And that is, they can build little beaches in the upper end of the Grand 00:29:05.160 --> 00:29:07.666 Canyon by having these little high flow experiments. And they take 00:29:07.699 --> 00:29:11.926 pictures of these little beaches that they created up in Marble Canyon and 00:29:11.959 --> 00:29:16.176 so on. And they talk about how great this is. They don't talk about two 00:29:16.209 --> 00:29:19.416 downsides that one of them is that most of those little beaches go away 00:29:19.449 --> 00:29:23.637 really quick and most of them look like little pyramids of sand that rode 00:29:23.670 --> 00:29:28.545 away on really short timescales, not even usable as camping beaches. So 00:29:28.578 --> 00:29:32.686 they're not even fulfilling that objective in Marble Canyon. And then 00:29:32.719 --> 00:29:36.897 there's the whole rest of the Grand Canyon downstream for which is still 00:29:36.930 --> 00:29:44.717 uh sediment starved. And these high flow uh events may actually be eroding 00:29:44.750 --> 00:29:50.186 the sand resources of the bulk of the Grand Canyon uh faster than if they 00:29:50.219 --> 00:29:55.676 didn't do them. So we would be losing resources in the sand, sediment 00:29:55.709 --> 00:29:59.325 riparian resources in the lower part of the Grand Canyon faster because of 00:29:59.358 --> 00:30:03.535 these experiments. So for the Grand Canyon as a whole, the the high full 00:30:03.568 --> 00:30:08.686 of things may actually be a net negative thing. When we interviewed Kerri 00:30:08.719 --> 00:30:12.637 Christensen who represents the Walla tribe, he talked about how the high 00:30:12.670 --> 00:30:17.476 flow events bring so much sediment down that settles in their area. The 00:30:17.509 --> 00:30:21.206 Canyon Diamond Creek and downstream and it causes tremendous problems for 00:30:21.239 --> 00:30:26.996 them as soon as you get past, uh, the, there's a little, little black 00:30:27.029 --> 00:30:30.426 Canyon area for a few miles and then the river just spreads out and get, 00:30:30.459 --> 00:30:34.347 and it is about a mile wide and about that deep. And, yeah, that's where 00:30:34.380 --> 00:30:41.295 all that stuff ends up and on down. Even into Lake Mead. Yeah, it, it, it 00:30:41.328 --> 00:30:45.416 , it turns out that lower canyon is an absolute navigational nightmare for 00:30:45.449 --> 00:30:50.795 people with boats and so on. Yeah. And because there basically isn't 00:30:50.828 --> 00:30:55.026 enough sediment going into the system anymore. It's trapped in Lake Powell. 00:30:55.059 --> 00:30:59.055 There's no way that they can restore and maintain the whole canyon. So 00:30:59.088 --> 00:31:05.676 they've been uh misleadingly, I think focusing on their ability to improve 00:31:05.709 --> 00:31:09.305 things a little bit in that upper end by messing with the sand that comes 00:31:09.338 --> 00:31:14.137 in from the Pri the Colorado River. 00:31:14.170 --> 00:31:18.065 Yeah, it's a difficult challenge to try to. They're, they're now trying to 00:31:18.098 --> 00:31:23.996 see if they can't model um sediment deposition coming out of the pa to 00:31:24.029 --> 00:31:28.736 help figure out exactly when it is effective to do a high flow event and 00:31:28.769 --> 00:31:33.967 when it isn't. And that's really the only source they have basically the 00:31:34.000 --> 00:31:38.166 sin head approach to research is to make it. And this is the way a lot of 00:31:38.199 --> 00:31:42.285 scientists operate and it's antithetical to adapting management is to go 00:31:42.318 --> 00:31:45.916 more and more detail on smaller and smaller problems and narrow yourself 00:31:45.949 --> 00:31:50.335 down and keep you in and keep your scientific sanity. Keep your focus. So 00:31:50.368 --> 00:31:55.656 their, their focus is in the research saw almost entirely on the upper end 00:31:55.689 --> 00:32:00.295 of the canyon where they can monitor and can do things. And that's where 00:32:00.328 --> 00:32:04.565 the Humpback chub are too. Right. So that's sort of in the lower part of 00:32:04.598 --> 00:32:10.137 that, the lower part of the upper part. 00:32:10.170 --> 00:32:14.085 So let's talk when you look at monitoring way down low in the system where 00:32:14.118 --> 00:32:19.897 some of these problems develop even above time increase. Uh The data are 00:32:19.930 --> 00:32:24.597 really limited. Uh And there's, there's still a very high un like the best 00:32:24.630 --> 00:32:28.666 data we have on what's going on in the riparian ecosystem down. The lower 00:32:28.699 --> 00:32:33.256 part of the canyon actually comes from camping, beach studies that pe 00:32:33.289 --> 00:32:39.867 people like Peter, uh uh like, uh shes done scientists that have gone down 00:32:39.900 --> 00:32:44.147 and just map the camping areas along the river. Have you been down to 00:32:44.180 --> 00:32:49.597 Canyon? I've been down the first half from Lee's ferry down to Phantom 00:32:49.630 --> 00:32:54.617 Ranch and hiked out at Phantom hoping to do the lower half this coming 00:32:54.650 --> 00:32:58.436 year. Yeah, it changes quite a bit. You get a lot more of these big Eddie 00:32:58.469 --> 00:33:03.446 recirculating Eddie systems and big sand bars with great big campsites and 00:33:03.479 --> 00:33:06.996 things like that that are really important for the recreational community. 00:33:07.029 --> 00:33:10.416 They're mostly down below Phantom. 00:33:10.449 --> 00:33:14.666 Yeah, I didn't see a lot of that in the upper section. The upper doesn't 00:33:14.699 --> 00:33:17.835 have these big huge Eddie structure. It's got a few of them but not very 00:33:17.868 --> 00:33:25.156 many, big Eddie Structures. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the 00:33:25.189 --> 00:33:30.976 significant changes and, or significant events that occurred during, you 00:33:31.009 --> 00:33:36.315 know, you were involved from about 1997 till at least 2010. Can you think 00:33:36.348 --> 00:33:41.926 of any uh particular events or, or you know, changes in the evolution of 00:33:41.959 --> 00:33:46.416 adaptive management or the research to support it that occurred during 00:33:46.449 --> 00:33:53.857 those years? Ok. Yeah. Well, the, the modeling exercise and so on, as I 00:33:53.890 --> 00:33:58.506 said, led initially to this really strong warning that the monitoring 00:33:58.539 --> 00:34:02.785 programs were were inadequate. So there was a major change in monitoring 00:34:02.818 --> 00:34:07.325 programs and that extended to the sediment management program as well as 00:34:07.358 --> 00:34:11.336 the ecology side of the thing. So they got into some very detailed channel 00:34:11.369 --> 00:34:18.046 , sediment storage monitoring in the upper part of the system. Uh And in 00:34:18.079 --> 00:34:23.425 the ecology side, we set up a bunch of uh better uh monitoring protocols 00:34:23.458 --> 00:34:28.546 for systematically sampling down the river. Uh a whole variety of aquatic 00:34:28.579 --> 00:34:33.787 organisms and so on and they initiated some repeated photogrammetry, 00:34:33.820 --> 00:34:39.796 mapping exercises to look at vegetation change patterns over time in a, in 00:34:39.829 --> 00:34:45.126 a systematic way uh that they hadn't been doing before. And those were 00:34:45.159 --> 00:34:49.086 funded and implemented that science got done. Yeah. Yeah. There was one 00:34:49.119 --> 00:34:53.506 program that was dropped, I think basically because the people who were 00:34:53.539 --> 00:34:57.276 involved in it just could not be convinced to behave sensibly as 00:34:57.309 --> 00:35:04.936 scientists. There was a kind of a terrestrial ecology research team. That 00:35:04.969 --> 00:35:09.066 would go down the canyon and set mouse traps and count birds and things 00:35:09.099 --> 00:35:15.356 like this. And their protocols were pretty pathetic. And, and that, that 00:35:15.389 --> 00:35:19.356 research program was dropped as far as I know, you couldn't even the way 00:35:19.389 --> 00:35:22.796 we were doing the work. You couldn't even get basic trend uh assessments 00:35:22.829 --> 00:35:26.845 from the data that they were collecting. There were so crude. 00:35:26.878 --> 00:35:31.077 So there was a, a major improvement in monitoring programs over over the 00:35:31.110 --> 00:35:39.110 2000 to 2010 period. Uh There were uh really important experiments, most 00:35:39.458 --> 00:35:44.666 importantly, the summer steady flow. That was one of my favorite examples 00:35:44.699 --> 00:35:47.316 of an opportunity. 00:35:47.349 --> 00:35:50.247 When you go way back in the early days of development of the Adaptive 00:35:50.280 --> 00:35:52.727 measurement program. There were a couple of people that pointed out that 00:35:52.760 --> 00:35:57.635 if you stabilize the flow, it would change the thermal structure of the 00:35:57.668 --> 00:36:03.416 river and it would create uh little warming conditions along the edge of 00:36:03.449 --> 00:36:07.287 the river that might be favorable to native fish. We kind of laughed at 00:36:07.320 --> 00:36:11.327 that. She got a huge river running down there like that and it's cold 00:36:11.360 --> 00:36:14.787 water and it's icy cold. You know what the fuck, what, what's gonna go on 00:36:14.820 --> 00:36:17.595 the edge of the river? It's just gonna get mixed up with that cold water. 00:36:17.628 --> 00:36:24.736 Nothing. Well, I in the late summer of 2000, I was down there on a trip 00:36:24.769 --> 00:36:31.307 and I was standing in the river with one leg in 10 degree water. And the 00:36:31.340 --> 00:36:35.856 other leg in 18 degree water with a thermal cline in between. So there was 00:36:35.889 --> 00:36:40.986 this dramatic development of shoreline warming along the river, wherever 00:36:41.019 --> 00:36:44.905 there was water slowed down, it would warm up. You figure that out on 00:36:44.938 --> 00:36:50.477 river trips when you're trying to like cool off or bathe, you figure out 00:36:50.510 --> 00:36:54.956 there's uh warm parts and cold parts. Yeah, a little backs. The other 00:36:54.989 --> 00:37:00.885 place warm enough to have a bathroom. You got about two miles, 2200. 00:37:00.918 --> 00:37:05.905 So anyway, so this, this was an opportunity right to maybe manage native 00:37:05.938 --> 00:37:10.997 aquatic organisms that need warm water better. And it also was a threat in 00:37:11.030 --> 00:37:16.756 the sense that it triggered explosions of, of some non native fishes that 00:37:16.789 --> 00:37:23.006 they didn't want. Such as, oh, there's a fat head men. Really like those 00:37:23.039 --> 00:37:27.526 conditions. It's an exotic species. And then it, it greatly improved 00:37:27.559 --> 00:37:32.175 survival rates of, uh, little, uh, native suckers and fishes like that 00:37:32.208 --> 00:37:36.796 didn't seem to do much to Humpback chub. And anyway, at the end of the 00:37:36.829 --> 00:37:41.876 experiment, they ran a big flushing float to get rid of the exotics and it 00:37:41.909 --> 00:37:49.909 also got rid of the board. Yeah. Erased the native as well. Yeah. So the 00:37:50.119 --> 00:37:54.467 main beneficiaries of it in the end because they do cope better with those 00:37:54.500 --> 00:37:59.666 kind of condition. Pulses of water with rainbow trout. They had a pretty 00:37:59.699 --> 00:38:01.977 good year. 00:38:02.010 --> 00:38:06.776 It was crazy. I remember walking down to the, the, the ramp at least ferry 00:38:06.809 --> 00:38:12.526 and headed down the trip and I walked up to the water and I said this is a 00:38:12.559 --> 00:38:16.126 fish hatchery. A bloody fish hatchery. I smell, I grew up around fish 00:38:16.159 --> 00:38:20.546 hatches, trout hatches. The whole river smelled like a fish hatchery. I 00:38:20.579 --> 00:38:25.247 looked in the water and all along the edge of the river, the stable flow 00:38:25.280 --> 00:38:30.557 river where every, every 10 inches was a little rainbow trout fried. So 00:38:30.590 --> 00:38:35.537 the whole edge of the river looked like a rearing trough for trout. They 00:38:35.570 --> 00:38:40.166 benefited dramatically from the stabilization of the water levels during 00:38:40.199 --> 00:38:42.736 that, that summer. 00:38:42.769 --> 00:38:46.967 Were there any other events like that? That were unusual that you can. 00:38:47.000 --> 00:38:52.247 Well, the HFE in 2008 is one that generated. It made it really made it 00:38:52.280 --> 00:38:57.655 clear that the sandbars that the guys were, were generating with the HFE 00:38:57.688 --> 00:39:01.316 didn't really improve conditions for camping and so on. In the upper part 00:39:01.349 --> 00:39:05.356 of the canyon, there were little tiny bars and they were big and steep. 00:39:05.389 --> 00:39:10.506 Most of them were not usable and rolled away rapidly. 00:39:10.539 --> 00:39:12.905 Um 00:39:12.938 --> 00:39:18.456 Also trying to think what else. Uh Then the other really major event while 00:39:18.489 --> 00:39:23.017 I was still at all involved with the system was, was the decision to 00:39:23.050 --> 00:39:27.856 proceed with the temp process. And this kind of what, what I would call 00:39:27.889 --> 00:39:31.936 basically a rediscovery of the wheel where they repeated an awful lot of 00:39:31.969 --> 00:39:36.376 the kind of workshops and meetings and so on that we've done back in the 00:39:36.409 --> 00:39:40.865 late nineties with many, many of the same players, many of the same 00:39:40.898 --> 00:39:45.876 characters and uh reach much of the same general conclusion about what's 00:39:45.909 --> 00:39:52.086 uncertain and what's not, except the settlement business that they 00:39:52.119 --> 00:39:59.356 persisted in treating is not uncertain. What do you, um uh what do you 00:39:59.389 --> 00:40:04.345 think? What kinds of research and monitoring and adaptive management do 00:40:04.378 --> 00:40:09.885 you think could and should have been done that maybe didn't get the kind 00:40:09.918 --> 00:40:15.717 of attention and support that it needed? Well, the the the biggest single 00:40:15.750 --> 00:40:19.296 thing is the one that I think people just started really getting clear 00:40:19.329 --> 00:40:24.026 about in the last two or three years. And after temp basically, as well as 00:40:24.059 --> 00:40:28.376 this management of water levels in Lake Paul, where they do have certain 00:40:28.409 --> 00:40:34.077 flexibility to keep the water levels higher or lower, 00:40:34.110 --> 00:40:42.110 not just trying to minimize them all the time. Uh Then uh from an ecology 00:40:42.389 --> 00:40:45.586 point of view, one of the biggest issues in the canyon has always been 00:40:45.619 --> 00:40:49.816 water temperature. The assumption has always been that native aquatic 00:40:49.849 --> 00:40:55.385 organisms would do better in warmer conditions than the dam results in 00:40:55.418 --> 00:41:01.486 fish or native fish and so on like that. And there was always this idea of 00:41:01.519 --> 00:41:07.206 an expensive uh temperature control device to bring warm water down to the 00:41:07.239 --> 00:41:11.467 pen stocks. Uh 00:41:11.500 --> 00:41:17.477 They had put a co such a device on Flaming Gorge above the operating 00:41:17.510 --> 00:41:21.477 system has seemed to have been generated some beneficial results down 00:41:21.510 --> 00:41:25.287 stream in, in Colorado. 00:41:25.320 --> 00:41:29.517 So there was a, there had always been this kind of pressure to manage 00:41:29.550 --> 00:41:35.247 temperatures that way. And uh our recommendation from the early Adaptive 00:41:35.280 --> 00:41:38.845 management workshops was, yeah, that is important and you need to do 00:41:38.878 --> 00:41:43.526 something. So let's see if we can figure out how to build a cheap 00:41:43.559 --> 00:41:48.206 temperature control device using plastic film or something that will get 00:41:48.239 --> 00:41:53.166 warm water down to the pen stocks, not in a permanent and expensive way, 00:41:53.199 --> 00:41:57.206 but in a simple, cheap way. And we can test it for a couple of years and 00:41:57.239 --> 00:42:01.566 see if that warming, what that warming actually does and if it doesn't 00:42:01.599 --> 00:42:07.115 work, we can throw it away. And so the idea of building A T CD was passed 00:42:07.148 --> 00:42:12.276 to a research group in the Bureau of Reclamation Engineering Group to 00:42:12.309 --> 00:42:16.945 figure out a design. And they came up with a $500 million concrete 00:42:16.978 --> 00:42:22.017 monstrosity as being the best design option. Well, of course, nobody is 00:42:22.050 --> 00:42:28.566 going to make a $500 million investment on a highly uncertain possibility 00:42:28.599 --> 00:42:33.836 of making an improvement for a few fish, right? Or maybe make it easier to 00:42:33.869 --> 00:42:40.336 have a bath in the river. So the T CD I temperature control device idea 00:42:40.369 --> 00:42:45.517 got never got any serious consideration in the L temp process. It was just 00:42:45.550 --> 00:42:50.385 said, look, this is just, this is too extreme. One of the L temp mistakes 00:42:50.418 --> 00:42:57.046 was to uh try to measure utility uh to stakeholders for uh different 00:42:57.079 --> 00:43:02.566 circumstances on kind of a arbitrary additive scales over different 00:43:02.599 --> 00:43:07.566 performance measures. They didn't actually do what we had tried to do, 00:43:07.599 --> 00:43:12.247 which was to say, well, we're gonna try to compare different resources and 00:43:12.280 --> 00:43:15.606 different values from the system. We need to get them on a comparable 00:43:15.639 --> 00:43:21.905 scale. And uh that scale really needs to recognize cost and benefits. We 00:43:21.938 --> 00:43:27.256 so we basically recommended a kind of traditional cost benefit analysis to 00:43:27.289 --> 00:43:31.396 get at uh whether certain actions ought to be taken. You need to consider 00:43:31.429 --> 00:43:35.666 how much it costs as well as the benefits. And just because you can't 00:43:35.699 --> 00:43:39.307 quantify the benefits very well, they're, they're not monetary benefits 00:43:39.340 --> 00:43:43.577 doesn't mean you, you shouldn't scale them relative to the costs. And so 00:43:43.610 --> 00:43:49.095 well with the newer way that Kemp did it this so called swing waiting 00:43:49.128 --> 00:43:54.267 utility assessment method or multi attribute utility analysis method, they 00:43:54.300 --> 00:43:58.166 only look at the benefit part of that your cuts like that. They, they not 00:43:58.199 --> 00:44:01.827 like anybody looking at cost, they wanna look at benefit scales, they only 00:44:01.860 --> 00:44:06.155 wanna look at the positive side of what they're doing and not not the uh 00:44:06.188 --> 00:44:14.188 not the public co commitment, which is cost. So uh so the, the, the t they 00:44:15.438 --> 00:44:19.717 did screen out policies like the T CD from even being looked at. Then when 00:44:19.750 --> 00:44:26.635 uh when the temp was being developed, uh we ran into uh rich Valdes who is 00:44:26.668 --> 00:44:29.776 one of the scientists who was involved for many years and fish way before 00:44:29.809 --> 00:44:35.736 me in the Fish College side of the Grand Canyon and it management uh we 00:44:35.769 --> 00:44:40.327 stumbled on this thing called the Weirs Impeller, which the Australian 00:44:40.360 --> 00:44:44.606 said a man for trying to manage water temperatures and oxygen and 00:44:44.639 --> 00:44:49.416 reservoirs in Australia. What it is is this, it's a column about 10 m in 00:44:49.449 --> 00:44:55.316 diameter of plastic that goes down 2010 or 20 m in the water. And it's got 00:44:55.349 --> 00:44:59.046 big propeller at the top and they spin this propeller and they drive our 00:44:59.079 --> 00:45:02.706 water down through this big big plastic tube and then it goes down and 00:45:02.739 --> 00:45:06.345 breaks up the thermal coin and can carry water all the way down the pin 00:45:06.378 --> 00:45:10.166 stop. So we said, hey, look, we can get these wear and fellers for a 00:45:10.199 --> 00:45:13.807 couple of million each. Let's put in 10 of these things and just blast 00:45:13.840 --> 00:45:19.635 warm water down to the pit stocks and we'll warm the river in a cheap way. 00:45:19.668 --> 00:45:25.686 And uh the all process by that time had been come so carved in stone, uh 00:45:25.719 --> 00:45:29.756 looking at a very, very narrow range of policy options that they really 00:45:29.789 --> 00:45:33.936 refused to even consider that broader option. One of the things we've 00:45:33.969 --> 00:45:37.706 learned early on in adaptive management is you put a bunch of bureaucrats 00:45:37.739 --> 00:45:42.807 and managers and administrators in a room and look for options to try and 00:45:42.840 --> 00:45:45.736 they will always tell you to keep doing whatever the hell it was you were 00:45:45.769 --> 00:45:51.247 doing before and they don't want to change it. It's the standard operating 00:45:51.280 --> 00:45:56.296 procedure, notion of bureaucratic behavior that you, you, you don't take 00:45:56.329 --> 00:46:00.057 risks, right? You, and, and the least risky thing is what you've got away 00:46:00.090 --> 00:46:04.615 with so far. So you just keep doing what you do. And that's basically the 00:46:04.648 --> 00:46:09.356 way lte options came out is a very narrow range of alternatives that 00:46:09.389 --> 00:46:14.307 they're even willing to look at in water flow management and other, and 00:46:14.340 --> 00:46:19.126 other things is that one of the things that frustrated you so that you 00:46:19.159 --> 00:46:27.159 decided to sort of step back around 2010 is the lack of, of willingness to 00:46:27.590 --> 00:46:35.590 really uh take more risk with uh uh ideas for policy change. Uh huh. Uh 00:46:39.840 --> 00:46:44.517 And you think that that would be, so the adaptive management work group is 00:46:44.550 --> 00:46:48.517 pretty broad based, there are a lot of representatives on there, you know 00:46:48.550 --> 00:46:53.416 , from federal agencies to state representatives to, you know, resource 00:46:53.449 --> 00:46:56.925 stakeholders like fisheries people and river runners. And they're all the 00:46:56.958 --> 00:47:00.106 kind of people that should have been involved in. And, and many of them 00:47:00.139 --> 00:47:04.155 were actually as individuals involved in the original Adaptive Management 00:47:04.188 --> 00:47:09.267 workshop process and the tribes of course, are all involved. So where is 00:47:09.300 --> 00:47:15.727 this sort of conservative bureaucratic culture really coming from in your 00:47:15.760 --> 00:47:21.767 mind? And why do you think that that that segment of the adaptive 00:47:21.800 --> 00:47:28.977 management team has so much influence over? I can't claim to understand 00:47:29.010 --> 00:47:33.296 the administrative structure that well of what's actually implemented on 00:47:33.329 --> 00:47:37.885 the ground. I know, there are two lead agencies that tend to be very 00:47:37.918 --> 00:47:42.977 conservative in there are policy choices and recommendations. Uh One of 00:47:43.010 --> 00:47:47.186 them, of course is the National Park Service who claims ultimate authority 00:47:47.219 --> 00:47:53.345 over everything in the canyon. Uh And then the other is reclamation 00:47:53.378 --> 00:47:59.155 and reclamation is a big, powerful bureaucracy. And it's got, they 00:47:59.188 --> 00:48:03.267 basically, whenever anything anybody wants to mess with the water, they 00:48:03.300 --> 00:48:08.557 always can fall back on the Colorado River compact and the series of legal 00:48:08.590 --> 00:48:12.566 decisions made about how the water has to move through the Grand Canyon. 00:48:12.599 --> 00:48:17.256 Let's move down through the Colorado river system and those, those 00:48:17.289 --> 00:48:21.267 compacts put really severe constraints on how much they can, they can mess 00:48:21.300 --> 00:48:27.615 with the water, right? So and storage patterns in the reservoirs and so on 00:48:27.648 --> 00:48:34.115 like that. So basically the excuse for inaction, we call an adaptive 00:48:34.148 --> 00:48:39.175 management quotes, excuse for inaction for bureau of reclamation. It was 00:48:39.208 --> 00:48:43.865 always the Colorado River compact that they only could explore 00:48:43.898 --> 00:48:49.517 alternatives within a very narrow range defined legally through the the 00:48:49.550 --> 00:48:56.195 legal decisions about water in the Grand Canon in Colorado in general. 00:48:56.228 --> 00:48:59.865 Were there any um uh significant 00:48:59.898 --> 00:49:06.017 documents or reports that you would like to highlight that should be, you 00:49:06.050 --> 00:49:10.967 know, remembered as important parts of the evolution of this program? Yeah 00:49:11.000 --> 00:49:16.776 , the two papers that, that we've published in Ecology of Society is the 00:49:16.809 --> 00:49:22.066 name of the journal today. So uh what was it called? It had a different 00:49:22.099 --> 00:49:26.845 name back and they changed names at some point. Uh Anyway, ecology and 00:49:26.878 --> 00:49:33.986 society is the way you would find it in Google scholar today. Uh 00:49:34.019 --> 00:49:40.316 The first one was uh Josh Carman and I paper about describing the original 00:49:40.349 --> 00:49:45.675 model of development work and uh uh and why and the decisions we'd made 00:49:45.708 --> 00:49:50.046 and what we'd included and who was involved and so on and so on. Then uh 00:49:50.079 --> 00:49:55.577 the second one would be Ted Malice's surprise and opportunity paper in 00:49:55.610 --> 00:50:01.026 that same journal. It's looking back from a perspective of about 2014, 00:50:01.059 --> 00:50:08.586 2012 on, on what had happened and surprised ways we've been surprised by 00:50:08.619 --> 00:50:15.365 the experiments. Great well done. Think of any other, understand another 00:50:15.398 --> 00:50:21.425 key one that I think is an example. I consider an example how not to do it 00:50:21.458 --> 00:50:27.135 , not not to do things because of the stupid utility in all season. So on 00:50:27.168 --> 00:50:33.206 , not the modeling, the modeling was good in it as well, but it's uh run 00:50:33.239 --> 00:50:40.206 at all open file report just came out, I think at least in 2018 the US GS 00:50:40.239 --> 00:50:47.186 open file reports on the uh the all temp modeling process uh spell the 00:50:47.219 --> 00:50:55.219 author's name. Uh Runge R un ge like run 00:50:57.050 --> 00:51:05.050 and that's a GCMRC Open file report. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Title. 00:51:05.148 --> 00:51:10.146 Oh I'm not sure. I don't remember the title. 00:51:10.179 --> 00:51:13.256 Uh It was called 00:51:13.289 --> 00:51:19.247 Had Structured Decision Making in the title case. 00:51:19.280 --> 00:51:26.385 And I think L temp is also LTE MP is also in the title. Yeah. All right. 00:51:26.418 --> 00:51:33.316 We can ever downloaded that thing. I can take a look at my computer later 00:51:33.349 --> 00:51:40.727 and see if I can get that. And if you have handy PDF of your article with 00:51:40.760 --> 00:51:46.967 the College of Society is they don't, they don't give you PDF, they, they 00:51:47.000 --> 00:51:53.526 want, it's open access. Well, you get the HTML A real me to deal with. 00:51:53.559 --> 00:51:57.635 I'll see if I can get those references for you. 00:51:57.668 --> 00:52:01.827 Um You've mentioned a number of individuals that you thought were uh 00:52:01.860 --> 00:52:08.925 particularly um important to the evolution of the program. Um Wanna, is 00:52:08.958 --> 00:52:14.256 there anybody else that you don't think you can start up for it all? So, 00:52:14.289 --> 00:52:18.217 oh my gosh, his wife just died. 00:52:18.250 --> 00:52:23.267 You asked me to you, you were meeting with him and he asked you to be 00:52:23.300 --> 00:52:28.885 remembered to me. Oh, yeah, Dave Garrett. Dave, I think Dave Garrett with 00:52:28.918 --> 00:52:33.646 the, the was really the initiator of the whole thing. I think it was Dave 00:52:33.679 --> 00:52:39.077 that initiated the organization that the administrative organization for 00:52:39.110 --> 00:52:43.467 it. Certainly the scientific review system that's been used over the years. 00:52:43.500 --> 00:52:51.236 I think it was probably Dave that brought in uh Barry Gold. Uh And I 00:52:51.269 --> 00:52:59.269 suspect also Steve uh gloss into the system. Those are uh two people we 00:52:59.590 --> 00:53:04.747 have not interviewed yet. So light and gloss 00:53:04.780 --> 00:53:08.776 Barry Gold, I haven't interviewed him, but I've got him written down as a 00:53:08.809 --> 00:53:13.675 possible. Barry would be really good. Barry was just real shame that Barry 00:53:13.708 --> 00:53:18.206 left the program. He was a kindred spirit and really understood what we 00:53:18.239 --> 00:53:25.017 were trying to do very well and was, I think, also frustrated by the way 00:53:25.050 --> 00:53:29.276 the administrative structure that looked, right. It looks like policy 00:53:29.309 --> 00:53:34.876 people and science people and you have these working groups in it. Yeah. 00:53:34.909 --> 00:53:40.135 Why he was frustrated that it hadn't performed as expected. 00:53:40.168 --> 00:53:45.267 It's really weird that the, the people on the twig generally are less 00:53:45.300 --> 00:53:50.967 scientifically competent in, in my experience than and white people. 00:53:51.000 --> 00:53:57.606 There's a really weird reversal of roles going on in it. So I don't think 00:53:57.639 --> 00:54:02.376 anybody tended to have happened and I'm not sure that that has been a 00:54:02.409 --> 00:54:05.646 consistent uh feature. 00:54:05.679 --> 00:54:11.836 No, it's changed for a bit. So, yeah. Uh One of the things we noticed is 00:54:11.869 --> 00:54:16.316 that the twig behavior, I saw a little more of it than them. We really 00:54:16.349 --> 00:54:20.776 depended on who is chairing it. And there were chairman who just wanted to 00:54:20.809 --> 00:54:26.956 get through the process and survive the day and others that wanted to 00:54:26.989 --> 00:54:33.686 become more engaged in substantive technical discussions. 00:54:33.719 --> 00:54:38.287 Yeah, let me ask you to reflect a little bit more on that because uh some 00:54:38.320 --> 00:54:43.787 of the interviews that we've had have been with people who were invested 00:54:43.820 --> 00:54:51.820 in the human dimension side of collaboration. Um who think that a 00:54:53.688 --> 00:54:57.865 significant part of adaptive management is getting key stakeholders to the 00:54:57.898 --> 00:55:02.997 table, getting them to talk to each other, getting them to respect each 00:55:03.030 --> 00:55:08.836 other's differing positions and working on a consensus decision about how 00:55:08.869 --> 00:55:12.327 to move forward in a complex and uncertain environment. Adaptive 00:55:12.360 --> 00:55:19.945 management. Yeah. Yeah. Um So to what extent do you think some of yours 00:55:19.978 --> 00:55:24.595 and others disappointments with progress in the program are based on the 00:55:24.628 --> 00:55:31.236 fact that some of what happens um is democracy in action which is messy 00:55:31.269 --> 00:55:37.006 and slow. Um uh you know, to, to what extent is it just bureaucratic 00:55:37.039 --> 00:55:40.546 conservatism as you've characterized it? And I'm sure there's a lot of 00:55:40.579 --> 00:55:45.606 that and to what extent is it a commitment to democratic processes that 00:55:45.639 --> 00:55:52.827 are also sort of show up as any of that democratic process business here 00:55:52.860 --> 00:55:56.327 in the workshops that we ran and what I could see listening, you know, 00:55:56.360 --> 00:56:01.126 parts of the old temp workshop processes. So it was pretty clear that 00:56:01.159 --> 00:56:06.037 there was lots of this collaboration and there was lots of consensus about 00:56:06.070 --> 00:56:12.776 at least the options to, to be tried. Uh There was not consensus about the 00:56:12.809 --> 00:56:17.316 values and there was not consensus about how to deal with some of the 00:56:17.349 --> 00:56:23.006 basic trade-off issues. So you want more, you want more power production 00:56:23.039 --> 00:56:27.747 out of that system. It's gonna be at the expense of quality for rafting 00:56:27.780 --> 00:56:32.166 use and for fish. And so is gonna run the water up and down a lot more. 00:56:32.199 --> 00:56:36.586 And so that, that's an irreconcilable trade-off can produce more power 00:56:36.619 --> 00:56:41.106 without screwing other things up. So, 00:56:41.139 --> 00:56:45.686 uh and you can't settle that I don't think of the democratic type process 00:56:45.719 --> 00:56:53.719 , but it wasn't, I didn't see that. What, uh, 00:56:56.708 --> 00:57:00.006 I'm trying to think, you know, maybe, maybe, actually, maybe you're right 00:57:00.039 --> 00:57:04.095 because what, what are a more or less democratic process is gonna end up 00:57:04.128 --> 00:57:08.327 producing in those situations where there are strongly conflicting 00:57:08.360 --> 00:57:12.615 objectives, it's gonna produce a lowest common denominator. It's gonna 00:57:12.648 --> 00:57:15.586 produce a compromise that isn't very good. And that's one of the things 00:57:15.619 --> 00:57:19.686 that did come out of our work and it came out of the L temp work as well 00:57:19.719 --> 00:57:24.796 that the current, what's called MLFF modified low fluctuating flows where 00:57:24.829 --> 00:57:28.776 they allow some fluctuation di only for power production, but they don't 00:57:28.809 --> 00:57:34.086 optimize for it. And it's enough fluctuation to degrade some ecological 00:57:34.119 --> 00:57:38.206 values and to make the river harder to use that compromise may actually 00:57:38.239 --> 00:57:45.686 not be the best thing to do. But it, uh it is a kind of democratic. We can 00:57:45.719 --> 00:57:49.916 all live with this compromise even though it's, you know, lots of times 00:57:49.949 --> 00:57:54.095 the, the compromise is the worst choice. Yeah, this happens in politics, 00:57:54.128 --> 00:58:00.916 doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. You poor guys. 00:58:00.949 --> 00:58:07.307 Yeah. My number two son is thinking about giving up his job at Penn State. 00:58:07.340 --> 00:58:15.340 He's just about, yeah, he's, he's frightened now to come home. Good. Yeah. 00:58:16.500 --> 00:58:20.316 Uh We talked a little bit about surprises and I'm really glad that you 00:58:20.349 --> 00:58:24.776 mentioned this article by Mellis about surprises and opportunities because 00:58:24.809 --> 00:58:29.526 that's something that Larry Stevens emphasized to us. He was our very 00:58:29.559 --> 00:58:35.816 first interview and he's the person who probably more than anybody else is 00:58:35.849 --> 00:58:39.356 responsible for making sure this administrative history was supported, 00:58:39.389 --> 00:58:44.356 funded and, and implemented. And he said that he thought it would be 00:58:44.389 --> 00:58:49.456 interesting if we asked everybody that we interviewed, what surprised you. 00:58:49.489 --> 00:58:53.095 Um What what happened that you weren't expecting? And I think surprises 00:58:53.128 --> 00:58:58.405 are a really interesting topic. Let me say a little bit about Steve. We 00:58:58.438 --> 00:59:03.086 would never have been successful anywhere near as successful as I think we 00:59:03.119 --> 00:59:07.905 were in the original adaptive management model had been for learn in every 00:59:07.938 --> 00:59:11.606 major case study that I've been involved in in, in these large scale 00:59:11.639 --> 00:59:16.497 management programs with 30 or 40 case studies all around the world. 00:59:16.530 --> 00:59:21.026 There's always been a Larry Stevens. There's always been somebody who had 00:59:21.059 --> 00:59:25.467 a real system sense of what was going on. He was able to step back and 00:59:25.500 --> 00:59:29.646 things to look at them from the standpoint of uh of both the ecosystem 00:59:29.679 --> 00:59:35.256 ecology uh uh broadly in the ecology and also the people and, and in the 00:59:35.289 --> 00:59:39.467 Grand Canyon area, uh when I was appointed to Grand Canyon Senior 00:59:39.500 --> 00:59:44.059 Ecologist, when they wanted to give me that name, I said you're crazy.