So this is the oral history interview with Dave Wagner in Tucson, Arizona
on August 4th, 2017. And uh thanks for coming to meet with us today. I
really appreciate it. And if you could just start, we were having a little
chat about your background in public lands and policy. And uh if you would
just sort of go back to that conversation and fill us in about uh you know
, your experiences where you used to work and how you originally got
involved in the program. Well, I think to put it in context, I should
start kind of at the beginning. Um First off, my name is Dave Wagner. It's
Wegn er um I was recruited to come work in Duchesne Utah in 1974
for the Utah Division of Wildlife, uh specifically to work on this uh
environmental impact statement for the Central Utah project. Um That
project was to take water out of the Green River System, essentially on
that side of the Colorado River basin and capture it all and ship it over
to the Wasatch Front. So my job was looking at the aquatic ecology and the
limnology, the water chemistry of the rivers of the lakes and of the water
, the reservoirs that the Bureau was intending to build or had already
built. Um From 74 to 75.5. I worked for Utah State of Utah. And then the
Bureau of reclamation hired me as an engineering technician. One of my
degrees is in um engineering. Um and they wanted me to work on helping
build the dams that the Central Utah project was building as part of that
overall endeavor. I worked for as an engineer for two years and then I
decided I, if I was gonna further my education, it was time to do it then
because I was gonna get sucked into working forever. If I don't go back to
school when I had to or needed to went to Colorado State University where
I got a degree in, well, I it's called um river Engineering, but it was
geomorphology related how to rebuild rivers specifically because the
Bureau wanted me to look at how do, how can we restructure rivers below
dams after we've built dams because they just were having terrible luck
with um fish species and biology and all kinds of things. So, while I was
at, you know, we're going to Color State University and work and living in
Fort Collins, I worked full time for the fish and wildlife service. What
years were that? That would have been 77
probably the end of 77 through now. It had to be, it had to be like
November 77 to
January of 1980.
I got my master's degree there. And then the bureau recruited me to come
back to work for them in Salt Lake City at the regional office where I was
worked on the regional water quality staff looking specifically at setting
up the reservoir monitoring program for all the reservoirs in the upper
Colorado river basin. So that's what I did. That's when I started working
on Lake Powell Flaming Gorge, the dam, the dams and reservoirs on the
Gunnison System, Fontanel Reservoir in Wyoming. So I got to know the
watershed of the upper Colorado basin intimately and that was great. Um
Long about 1982.
Um the middle I know probably fall of 82. Um
We had a particularly sensitive Secretary of Interior by the name of J
Watt who was having chronic foot and mouth disease over his proclamations
that he wanted to put additional generators on Glen Canyon Dam. Um He
wanted to do that without doing N A. He wanted to do it without having to
worry about the endangered Species Act because that's how it had always
been done. Um Keep in mind the Glen Canyon Dam was authorized by Congress
on April 11th, 1956. Never had any need. A compliance didn't have to,
there wasn't a law then never had any es a compliance Clean Water Act
because those laws didn't exist. So this time around Mr Watt said, well,
we're just gonna put generators at on Glen on the outlet works at Glen
Canyon Dam so we can increase. This was right after the energy crisis of
the mid to late seventies. When we needed more energy, the United States
was looking to get out from underneath the the yoke of foreign oil, et
cetera, et cetera and they were gonna develop energy everywhere. 1977 the
Department of Energy. In fact, today is the anniversary of the Department
of Energy going into Business Department of Energy took all the bureau of
reclamation power marketing jobs that we used to have in the bureau. And
those were all transferred to the Department of Energy. And that's when
the Western area, Power Administration became a the player that they are
now is whatever how many years ago it is on today when the Department of
Energy was authorized, but to make matters worse, the Department of Energy
and when was populated now by a bunch of old bureau guys that said, well,
we've always just, we don't need these, this environmental stuff. We'll
just go do it. Well, they come to find out they had a particularly
sensitive meeting in Page Arizona where the environmental community now
knowing that the National Environmental Policy Act was in place and they
had rights to open transparent process that they called him out. And some
another particularly sensitive person from the bureau of reclamation stood
up and said the bureau build, the bureau can taketh away and that blew up.
Coming back all around to Congressman George Miller, who at that point
was climbing up the ranks uh in the House of Representatives. Um He became
, he was very, still is heavily involved in public land issues, especially
Western public land and water issues had, had, had run ins with the bureau
of reclamation in the past. And he said you can't do that. And so the, the
either congress was going to implement some sort of requirement on the
bureau at Glen Canyon Dam or they were gonna get sued by the environmental
community. And at that point, Secretary Watt basically decided, well, I
gotta give myself some cover to protect this process. I still want to put
these generators on there. I want, let's just do the minimal amount of
environmental compliance we have to, which is an environmental assessment.
And so the environmental assessment was initiated on December 8th, 1982.
Part of that was that they had, they were initiating what's called the
Glen Canyon environmental studies. So that's where that came from. At that
point, I was, I, I had already been working at, at Lake Powell on water
quality stuff for the through the regional office. I had already started
working below Glen Canyon Dam when I was with the fish and wildlife
service in Fort Collins, looking at trying to figure out what's the
minimum flow. We used to call them minimum instream flow that we needed.
The bureau needed to release from the dam to support the trout fishery
that the Bureau of the Fish and Wildlife Service in Arizona game and fish
had initiated after the closure of Glen Canyon Dam. Um So I was at least
as I was told, there were several folks in the regional office who were
contacted by Washington and said we need to do some environmental studies
below the dam to give us cover. We're gonna do the minimum amount possible.
Select somebody from the region who will go down there and initiate that.
Two. Engineers, two. And before me had turned it down because they said
that's a no end job and it's not gonna go anywhere, you know, and plus
you're gonna have to move to page or some God awful place and who wants to
go there? Um So I was asked um by the regional environmental office,
Harold Szl at the time, if I would consider taking this position. And
Cliff Barrett was regional director, Bill Plummer had been regional
director, Cliff had come in and they basically, as Cliff later told me,
they wanted to put somebody down there who they knew would never get
anything done. And so being a biologist, scientist, they knew that, you
know, engineers are God in the bureau of reclamation, they've always been
God. They always will be God. Scientists are, you know, we're so far down
the totem pole, it doesn't, we don't even register. So I got selected to
take that position on and, but I was to be a staff of one. I wouldn't have
any staff. I couldn't even have an office officially. Um, they were
wanting to move me to Flagstaff Arizona because that's where all the
environmental conservation community was. They're the ones who were
raising all the holy ruckus. They wanted to have somebody out there that
could take the heat for the bureau through all that. So make a long story
short, I took that job on, I moved Flagstaff my office. I was able to con
then Gene Shoemaker who was alive. I don't know if you know of Gene, but
he was the man who discovered the sheep, the um shoemaker Levy comet out
there. And he's, well, he's, he was the guy that brought um the program to
flag the US GS to Flagstaff to help train the astronauts out on a meteor
crater and those place Sunset Crater in those areas. So Gene took a liking
to me, Sue Kiefer was another scientist who took a shine to me. She gave
me a corner of her lab um in at Flagstaff US GS and that's where G CS
started and it was me staff of one. So uh and then from there, of course,
1983 happened um when we almost lost Glen Canyon Dam. So that changed the
whole perspective on the studies and we're gonna, the studies were to be
focused on initially bile and these were the categories I was given
sediment transport and physical hydrology, biology and recreation. Go out
and figure what to do. There was, there was zero, direct zero, no
direction, it was, go figure out what to do, what do we need? Go talk to
people, just get out of here, get out of Salt Lake, go down there, just
make them see that the bureau has somebody out there fumbling around on
this stuff. It'll give us cover to do what Mr Watt. By this time, Mr Watt
had been let go, he had put foot in mouth one too many times with Nancy
Reagan and he was gone. Uh Don Hoel, who came from the Power Marketing
Arena became the new Secretary of Interior. And for some reason, he kind
of wanted to find out about issues in the West. And so we chatted a lot
about dams and things like that. He at that point had been previously
involved with Columbia River dams. So he was already knowing the impact of
dams through BP A and through the Power Marketing Administration up there
to look at what some of the issues. And that's where if you, you, I know
you want to get to adaptive management. Do you wanna talk about the
genesis of adaptive management in this country? It's the Pacific Northwest.
That's where it started. It started with the Northwest um forest plan and
it started coming out of the writings of Kyle Lee and Carl Walters and
everybody that was looking at those issues in the Pacific Northwest with
the Columbia River because the Columbia because of the salmon had and the
iconic this of the salmon had this issue was on their radar screen far
sooner than it was down in the south with Humpback chub or squaw fish or
something that people couldn't eat and couldn't keep if they did catch
them, they had to let them go. So 1983 though really changed the dynamic
because now the studies from just looking at the very narrow band that we
were told to look at, which was the change of operation from present
operating to what would happen if we added a couple of more generators to
the river altitude. So it was a very narrow band. After 1983 the bureau
was in total chaos and I was at the dam when all this was going on. So I,
you know, you could see, are you talking about the flood flood? The 83 was
the big flood year. And when we, it was that this Saturday, they had to go
up to page to go by the marine plywood to throw on the top of the dam. I
was up at the dam on that day. So, and you could just feel the dam
rumbling and when you saw chunks of concrete, the size of Volkswagens, the
old Volkswagens flying out the spillway. And when you lost the, the sweep
on the spillways, and then when the water turned red, you knew that the
spillway tunnels had been compromised. The bureau shut them down, put
plywood on this, on the ups on the upstream side of the spillway gates so
we could put the reservoir into surcharge. So there was actually more
water in the reservoir than it's designed to hold. But what came out of
that is that the, the the discussion that emerged? And I remember having
this very discussion with Cliff Barrett and, and uh the commissioner at
that point was well, we could, you can, you could shut down the studies
and just say we got bigger things to do or we could postpone the studies
until the bureau got through this state of emergency. In 83. Actually, 84
was a bigger year than 83. It was just the bureau thought ahead in 84 to
release more water all during the year rather than wait until may to start
releasing water. Um which the dam was not designed as the flood control
dam. It's designed as a storage dam. So it's not built like the Columbia
River Dam. So it's a whole different engineering perspective or the third
option was is we could embrace this opportunity and look at the whole
range of operational issues at Glen Canyon Dam caught the flood. So we
could take into account the flood, we could take into account of low flows.
We could take into account operational changes that the bureau may wish
to look at down the road. So that was where the studies changed from being
a very small entity to being a potentially a much larger entity as part of
this. And as a result of that, um the bureau wanted me to include and
embrace bringing other agencies into the process. Fish and Wildlife
Service, us Geologic Survey, other bureau folks, Arizona, game and fish
and a whole variety of other agencies that have issues associated with the
operation and maintenance, Western area. Power of Glen Canyon Dam. So I
still didn't have staff, but at least I had the opportunity to go out and
get um cooperating partners, shall we say? And so out of that, we began to
implement the studies and I, I was on game and fish, whoever is necessary
the key thing to all this and included in the December 8th, 1982
memorandum was that this shall be paid for through power revenues which
took me off books, which was critical because if I had to go through
Congress every year to get an appropriations in the bureau of reclamation
budget, I I worked in the House of Representative, I know how this goes
down and if somebody doesn't like what you're doing, they just don't give
you the money to do it. Having an op an opportunity to use the checkbook
of Glen Canyon Dam and the Color River storage project was the most
critical thing we did. And you see that and if you go up and talk to any
of the folks who work on the Columbia, they'll tell you the same thing,
the fact that we have revenue, dedicated revenue to us from the generation
of hydroelectricity. So all of a sudden it makes the, the hydro piece of
this a partner. And so they want to be engaged and you want them engaged.
But it also gives you opportunity every year to get dollars. That didn't
require me to go through appropriations was that December 1982 decision,
an Act of Congress or a decision by the reclamation. It was a decision by
the Secretary of Secretary. I got, I got a memo in there someplace from
Jim Watt. It has never been rescinded. That's amazing. No, there's,
there's times, I mean, I've between you and me and the, and the fence post
and the recorder. I ran into Jim Lock Gosh where I was in the Salt Lake
City Airport. I wanna say 9697
somewhere in there. And we got to chatting, I went up and reintroduced
myself because the last time I had actually talked with him was he was
Secretary of Interior. I was in the secretary's office and his direction
to me was you're gonna go down there and do environmental studies in the
Grand Canyon, but we're never going to change the way we operate. Glen
Canyon Dam. This is the way we've done things. We're always gonna do it
because I'm in his statement was if I start opening up Glen Canyon Dam to
environmental review, it means I gotta open up all the other dams to
environmental review. They didn't want to do that. No way. No. How,
because all of a sudden it would let a bunch of conservation types, the
David Browers of the world, all all of a sudden have a say in how the dam
is managed and operate. So sitting in front of this fireplace and having
his finger pointing at me, you know, come forward a few years meeting him
in the Salt Lake City Airport and he said I just should have given you a
brown bag full of money and told you to go away, you know, instead of
giving you the access to the, to the um power revenue checkbook. And
because it just, it changed the whole dynamic of how I looked at how we
were gonna do business. Um Keep in mind there was the bureau in this time
was going through a lot of grief trying to get Glen Canyon repaired. Glen
Canyon wasn't the only dam that was negative was having problems. Um So
they were running around the region literally looking for, looking at
other dams because this could happen again. Hadn't Teton Dam just failed a
few times had, had collapsed in 76. I was working for the bureau in
Duchenne when it went down and I got sent to Saint Anthony, uh Idaho to
look at the devastation and that, that put a crimp in um the bureau's gate
, so to speak. But um Glen Canyon was even more because they, it was close
to Glen to lose them. I don't know if you would ever lost the whole dam,
but it would have had a significant impact on a lot of the dam structure
itself and resources downstream, everything downstream. But the dam is, is
a sieve as it is where it's built, it's built in sandstone that, that
leaks and there's nothing you can do about that. At least Hoover Dam is
building granite and it's solid. It's, it, it's gonna go over the top of
Hoover and probably destroy the power plant down below. But the dam will
stay Glen Canyon. Not so much because the, just the way it's constructed
and where it's constructed. But that being said, we began the process in
the about I wanna say 8687.
Um
The sec, the assistant Secretary for then Water and Science. I don't know
if it was water and science, but I think that was the name then called me
up and said um the Bureau is in the Department of Interior is going to
dedicate a couple $100,000 to this new entity called the Water Science
Technology Board of the National Academy of Sciences. We don't have any
clue of what we want them to do. Might you have some idea on how to use
the Academy of Sciences?
And you know, I may be dumb but I ain't stupid. I jumped on that and this
was a brand new board that had been set up. They were looking at issues
with the bureau, the core epa, et cetera. And we had already, I had
already felt that we, our science needed to be bolstered up a lot. Nothing
against people from Arizona game and fish or from the fish and Wildlife
Service or the Bureau. But we were just making up science as we went in
the Grand Canyon and that's not a good way to do science. We had to have a
plan, we had to think about how we were approaching issues. How if our
studies were gonna stand the CRE the the test of credibility. Um So it
really gave me an opportunity then getting engaged and with the, with the
Academy of Sciences to get a broader perspective on how science could be
should be ne was necessary to be done in the Grand Canyon. We got hammered
by the Academy of Science. Oh God, we got hammered because we weren't
doing that good. A science. It was agency science. It was not plan out
hypotheses, do credible um, reviews and development, go out there, collect
it. Um, in a credible manner, in a robust manner, go through peer review
to make sure it was. And we, it took us a couple of years to come out of
our first review from the academy and I've got one of the books in there,
but it's, um, I'm sure you've had access to all those, but it, it made us
better scientists. And so at this point, they had jerked me back to Salt
Lake because they didn't like the fact that I was getting a little too
close to the scientists and they wanted me to be removed from the
scientists. And um so that when, you know, I went back to Salt Lake for a
while from Flagstaff and then con and come back around to George Miller.
Um George Miller was now chairman of the Natural Resources Committee in
the House of Representatives. He had taken over for Mo Udall who has had
just rescinded. Mo was almost ready to pass away. And um George and, and
his staff director first, it was George and his um sub-committee, staff
director, Dan Beard who called me and said the chairman would like to know
more about what's going on in the Grand Canyon. So that's when I first
started interacting more with Dan. I had known him before I met him before
when he was part of the Carter administration earlier on, but I didn't
really work with him. Now, I was starting to work with Dan And then when
Dan got elevated to staff director for the whole Natural Resources
Committee, uh Dan had considerable clout in being able to get George out
in front on issues and he wanted to get George Miller out in front on
issues. So, um we started having these discussions and I could call back
to Washington to brief them probably once every quarter, every three or
four months to go back and just keep the congressman and his folks
informed of what was going on. Is this still 1980? These are the early
eighties, middle, middle to the, well, it was probably 8485 somewhere in
there concurrent with this. And the reason George had George Miller had
moved up to being a powerful person in the Natural Resources Committee.
George was going after the bureau big time in California over the water
issues. And to this day, it's still one of George's pet peeves on how the
bureau of reclamation literally and still does subsidize Westlands water
district and all the big guys who own trend. They're, they're mega
millionaires out there who are getting subsidized federal power and making
huge money over this hand over fist. Plus then we subsidize it for crops
on top of it. So they're just, and George always, and it was always a bur
under his saddle. And so anything that involved the bureau of reclamation
, what was the next thing after California? Well, and California had just
gone through Chesterson Reservoir, the water quality issues out there
where Dave Houston, the, the then regional director was um foot and mouth
disease time and got exposed on 60 minutes for lying about water quality.
And so George was after the bureau, so George adopted me. It's more or
less because I was, you know, I was next r river over I was the Colorado
River. We were working on these issues and we were proven the Bureau had
been operating that dam without any consideration for downstream resources.
We whether it's the Grand Canyon beaches, whether it was archaeological
resources, whether it was endangered fish, whether it was, you know,
whatever was going on downstream, the bureau could care less. The bureau
had also picked a fight with the National Park Service over impacts
associated with the operation of the dam. And then there was a um a
superintendent by the name of Dick Marks. Dick Marks did not like the
bureau because the bureau would never do what the Park Service wanted the
Bureau to do in the, you know, with Glen Canyon Dam to help mitigate some
of the impacts that were going on in the Grand Canyon. And this was the
years where they were fluctuating from highs of 34,000 to lows of 3000 at
night. So you had this huge swings and boats were getting hung up and
beaches were exposed and then cutting away and, and at one point early on
the Glen Canyon environmental studies were to be located at Grand Canyon
National Park. Dick Marks said South Rim South Ramp. He said over my dead
body, will I ever let a bureau of reclamation establish an office at Grand
Canyon? So that's when I have pushed the flight staff. But um so all this
was going on and George didn't like the Bureau Park Service didn't like
the bureau. The bureau had this big study now going on in the Grand Canyon
, Glen Canyon dam issues. We had the flood where we almost lost the dam in
83 was costing three times what the bureau estimated to fix the spillways.
It was just the bureau was out of control and George was gonna use this
le help. So anyway, we're down. I had been jerked back to Salt Lake. Um I
think Rick Gold was assistant regional director. I don't know who was at
that point, but um we were on a river trip downstream with and then I
think Jack Davis was superintendent of the park. Um I think Rick was on
that. Rick Gold was on that trip. I think Ken Maxi from WPA and George
Miller and we were at George was you could, I could just see George
getting more steamed and more steamed as we came downstream from le Ferry.
He just didn't like what the bureau was saying they were gonna do to
these, with these studies. How you know, we were gonna roll this through
and get a NP A done real or no, we weren't gonna do NE A then we're just
not gonna include N EPA at all. And, and how I was gonna remain in Salt
Lake so they could keep control of me and George. We were at Grape Vine
Beach to this day. I will remember this. As long as I live, I brought
Georgetown a beverage and he, he, I could just see that this was not, he
was not happy and he basically walked back up the beach after this
beverage and sat down with guys and said, this is what's gonna happen.
Congress is gonna start more oversight on the Glen Canyon studies. So,
and he is moving back to Flagstaff and if you don't like that, I do have
control over your appropriations of your reclamation and you're gonna
start seeing a lot more, um, things get thrown your way that you're not
gonna like. And so at that point, we all get down to Phantom. Um, what
year was this? I, I'm gonna say this was 86 maybe 87 somewhere in there.
Um, but being what it may, um, I moved back down Flagstaff for the second
time at that point and I was allowed then to start building part of the
staff so we could get after this. Um, George. True to George's word. Kept
this thing spun up in Washington so much so that by 89 the bureau and the
department were in a position where they were gonna get Congress telling
them how to operate Glen Canyon Dam again, they didn't want that. And I
got a phone call late at night from the commi the acting commissioner of
reclamation. He was obviously had had a beverage or too and said, well,
you got your damn EIS and slam the phone down.
Um,
you know, being what it is, we had the EIS we had the direction that we
were gonna do the environmental impact statement. And at this point, you
know, it was clear that the bureau was gonna throw any hurdle they could
in this to not, not make it succeed. So along with the National Academy of
Sciences, I had, let's see, find it real quick. I had initiated a program
where I brought together the representatives of the agencies than what I
call the executive review committee because I could see that I was gonna
get screwed and the studies were gonna get screwed big time if I didn't
have some folks who were above me who knew what we were doing. And the
Academy of Science that you are really should have, you know, some sort of
organizational direction to this. And this is where the executive review
committee, this ultimately became what emerges today as the Adaptive
Management Committee. It was only a group of five at that point and it was
only federal agencies plus Arizona game. And fish. But I didn't have,
there was nothing, you know, adaptive management. I was writing on
adaptive management. At this point, I brought it up to these folks gave
them presentations on it, starting to educate them because I could see
this is where ultimately, even if we, this was pre N A, even if we didn't
do NE A, we had to come up with a better way to manage our patterns of
operations at Glen Canyon Dam. So the executive review committee became my
forum and we met quarterly, either in Albuquerque or Phoenix or Salt Lake
or wherever the it would need it to go um to make sure and the Department
of Interior was involved. So the secretary's office was involved in the
executive review committee and that was Pat Port out of San Francisco,
their regional office in San Francisco. So at this point, and then we
would go back to Washington periodically to give updates and reviews to
the secretary's office and to Congress and to members of Congress. So that
knowing that this was still kind of expanding after we got implemented
into roped into doing the full Nepa compliance that changed the whole
perspective of the program because at that point, science needed to
support the N A and NI A. Um They learned from how I ran the studies that
they didn't want me to begin running the N A two. They knew that they did
not want that, but I still had enough control through the other processes.
So they tried a couple of folks, they brought in a guy from Washington DC
to do the N A. They at that 0.0 I was moved back to Salt Lake again for
this and we actually set up this fella. Um Steve, what was his last name?
I think of it here. Um He was his claim to fame is he was dating Senator
Paul Lack Salt's daughter.
So he would have this and I had a staff of one at this point. I had a
secretary who was assigned to keep watch over me and watch over Steve. Um
They moved us out of the bureau building cause they didn't even want the N
A in the Bureau of Reclamation building in Salt Lake City. We were moved
to the key bank building which is downtown Salt Lake, but it used to be
the old um CCM I area. I, I think it's all been now changed with the
Mormons Church, bought all that and redeveloped it down there, but we were
in the key bank building. So we were physically removed from the bureau.
Um They didn't want us even in the regional office because we were doing
this N A on the sacred thing called Glen Canyon Dam. They knew that if we
started NP A, we're likely gonna have to do some changes. They didn't want
to be in big, big and be involved in that So then Steve didn't work out. I
was actually called over the regional director's office and said we gotta
fire this guy because he's not doing anything. He showed up at 10 was at
the health club from 1030 till two, took a lunch and left at three. So he
was not a good then they brought in somebody from the Bureau of Indian
Affairs to run and they brought in some folks from other agencies to try
to run the and it just completely cratered because they just, you know,
they couldn't work with the bureau system and the bureau does business a
whole lot different than any other federal agency. And you gotta know the
culture and you gotta know what levers to pull, to get things done in the
bureau. So this and we still had the Academy of Science going on too. So I
had that piece going on, we had the science going on. So we were still
looking at now that we are in the ne a process. And because the science,
then the na the National Academy of Sciences had made a recommendation
that I hire a senior level scientist. So I did, I went out and hired
somebody off the committee off their committee, Duncan Patton uh from a su
and his little, he was in a little shopping center um west of main campus
in Tempe. It was a little shopping center place, there was a health club
there and there was a restaurant where we'd go get coffee and, and Paul.
Paul, I can't think of his last name was also, there was two or three
people uh that were part of Duncan's environmental staff there. So I hired
Duncan to be the senior scientist. So Duncan and I began this whole
process of really charting out what the academy wanted to see as good
science, what the bureau wanted to see, needed to have to do in need of
compliance. Now, the way the bureau was hamstring the N A process because
they just slow ball. It, so we had three or four people who came in, they
tried to run N A and it just wasn't going anywhere because the bureau
wasn't gonna throw any muscle behind this and they kept bringing in people
that couldn't do the job. And, but meantime, the science was going on and
about 1991 1990 91 Grand Canyon Trust and a couple of other organizations
and was starting to get upset that this thing wasn't moving faster. It was
started in 89. The N A compliance was, it should be moving along and it
wasn't. So for a lot of reasons. Um And several, there was one big lawsuit.
Uh I should, this is a good point because it actually is one of the
reasons the bureau felt they had to do the NE A I want to say in the
spring of 88 maybe. The middle of 88. Um, a lawsuit was filed against
Western Area Power Administration because the WAP A was reinstituting
power contracts for cr the color of storage project. Every period,
periodically you have to go out and issue new power contracts for people
who are buying your electricity. Um A lawsuit was made against W A that
these contracts impacted how the bureau operated the dam and for a lot of
reasons, of course, the bureau said, no, we operate the dam anyway. We
want to operate the dam because we're the bureau. Wus said, well, we think
we just tell the bureau, we have a contract and this is what you gotta do.
That's what they got pseudo is that those power contracts were really
important to driving how the operations of the dam really resulted in the
, in the hour by hour issue. The bureau said, well, we operate on an
annual basis and on a, on a monthly basis. That's, that's the parameters
we give to WP A and then wap A figures out the hourly by minute by minute
, day by day based on what the power grid needs. And it's really those
contracts that were driving this huge fluctuation that you saw at Clean
Canyon Dam. Well, that's another place where I got sideways to the bureau
because I got called as a witness by the, the people who were suing the
bureau in W A. So here I am, I'm, you know, the courtroom beings being
deposed. And then in a courtroom in Salt Lake City Federal Court, um
basically asking and being asked by the judge do the operations of Glen
Canyon Dam have an impact on the downstream environment, physical
biological recreation. The data was clear, I I can't lie. Absolutely. It
does. And he said, well, can you and I had, we had some videos that we had
taken and slides and such. So I gave this all interesting little tangent
to this. The lawyer for all of this was to plaintiffs for the plaintiffs
was Ty Cobb who is today just been announced as the president of the
United States lawyer. That's the ty com that's representing Donald Trump
right now. Got appointed what? 323 weeks ago. Anyway, Ty and I became
great friends because he knew I had the answer and, and, and he is the
grandson of Ty Cobb, the baseball player and he is pugnacious. He is, he
will rip you a new one and he's very, very good at it. And he's, and, but
we developed a real, a friendship about the same time Grand Canyon Trust
had emerged and Ed Norton was the, the executive director of Grand Canyon
Trust. Bruce Babbitt was one of the founding members of Grand Canyon Trust.
This was right before Mr Clinton was elected president. So Bruce was
involved in this, he was Governor of Arizona. He would come down to, I
would run into him on weekends in the Grand Canyon because he liked to go
hike in the Grand Canyon and he actually broke one of my cable cars in the
Grand Canyon, which he's never paid for by the way. But his secret service
guys or his governor, um, security guy at that point. Um, anyway, it was,
uh, so Bruce was in the Grand Canyon Trust were pushing this, you had this
lawsuit with that, the, the plaintiffs won and wap A had to initiate N A
compliance. Well, that was the death knell for Glen Canyon for the Bureau
because they knew that if they were gonna have to do NP A compliance on
operations that they were gonna get roped into doing N A compliance on
going on the whole operations of Glenn. So that's how the NP A process
really got structured and why they didn't want me to run it because I was
always, I was already on the outer side because I had been called as it is.
Yeah. And so it was always an interesting, I was being, um, cross
examined by a department of justice lawyer while my lawyer was ty up. You
know, it's just, I don't know how all this worked out, but it did for a
lot of reasons. But so the executive review committee was, was trying to
transition out knowing that they'd have to go to A N A process, but they
were still in, they were involved almost all the way through the thing we
had, um, the National Academy of Sciences continuing to put out their
reports.
And then out of all of this, the Grand Canyon Protection Act was born and
it was, its genesis was on a beach in the Grand Canyon. Um, where Ed
Norton, Ed Norton and I actually talked about the need to do a Grand
Canyon Protection Act in the old Howard Johnson's restaurant in Flagstaff
on, uh, route 40 there. Um One evening he told me this talk till three in
the morning, I had a lot of coffee that night over what the, what a Grand
Canyon Protection Act might look like and what did it need to include and
how might that look? And of course, if it had been public that I was
working with Grand Canyon Trust or any of these folks, but Ed and I had,
we had a relation, you know, when you were a staff of and you were on your
own and there was nobody literally to supervise me. Um, I went out and did
what I felt was right. I didn't do it if it was a bureau a or anything
else. I just wanted to get the job done and make sure that we were doing
what was right for the Grand Canyon. And so out of that, the Grand Canyon
Protection Act was, was born, took, took a couple of times to get it
passed. It was finally passed. In 92 as part of a larger omnibus bill. But
that is where the genesis of adaptive management that then became embraced
in the EIS began. And if you go and look at the committee reports and
everything that goes along with it, this concept and we, and keep in mind
that I've been going back to Washington and doing briefings for folks and
I would always bring up, we gotta do monitoring and science different
after we get through this folks because we're gonna have a, we're not
gonna know, we're not gonna be able to know everything going into this.
And I, at that point had already started reading what they were doing in
the Northwest and around the country on this concept at that point of
adaptive management and how we might structure that. And along about 87 I
remember making a presentation to the executive review committee about
adaptive management. This is what they're doing in the North Pacific
Northwest. This is what they're trying to do and these are the reasons why
we, they're doing it there and why we might want to consider it. So George
wanted to make sure George Miller wanted to make sure it was captured in
the Grand Canyon Protection Act, which it was. And um and then it began to
become a focal point in the ne a document ne A process too. So along about
and the reason this had to go is because in here the other part that's
important of the Grand Canyon Protection Act is it, get it give an
endpoint to the ne a process. It said you will be done by the end of 1996.
So that being said it gave us now a timeline, the bureau couldn't wiggle
out of this, even though they could make it look bad, they couldn't get
out of doing Nepa compliance
by just slow balling it still walking it. So the timeline was set. Duncan
Patton had been hired as a senior scientist, Duncan and I met almost every
week down at a su on some issue or another because we were really trying
to ramp up the studies to meet. Now, the ne a need and that's when we got
into this idea of doing interim flows. We needed to have 1011 day periods
of certain flow regimes and have scientists spread out in the canyon to
look at what different flow regime different. Ultimately, they became the
elements of the alternatives that were in the EIS. So we did a whole for a
year and a half. We did various ramping rates, differences, highs, lows,
seasonal, looking at seasonal pieces. And every 10 days, we were up in a
helicopter flying the Grand Canyon, taking pictures as the flows dropped
out to see what the beaches had done, see where backwaters were, see where
different um issues had come, had arisen with rapids. And you know, we
were where rapids were debris flows or looking at the science and how all
this was put together. So I asked for some clarification on that. So um
who provided the authority to force the Bureau to do those flows that the
scientist said we'd like to a great can of protection there, any
protection that gave the endpoint and backing up from when you had to have
a draft done and then when you had to get the science done, we only had a
couple of years to physically get the science that we needed. And Duncan
and I both agreed the only way we're gonna do this if they wanted us to
look at a variety of alternatives was to run a series of alternatives. So
the authority came from the fact that the Bureau had to abide by the Grand
Canyon Protection Act. Now they were under a lawsuit at the other end that
said you will do ne A so it wasn't if they knew that if they didn't do,
but they were going to get sued and now Congress was going to take even
more control if they weren't satisfied. So, and a new administration is
coming in right about that time and lo and behold who becomes commissioner
of the Bureau of reclamation,
staff person for George Miller. Exactly. He had been staff director for
George Natural Resources Committee. So, um Dan went down to be
commissioner. He didn't necessarily, he was offered the position of
assistant secretary. He didn't take that because he said I want a position
where I have some money or I can do something with it. And Dan, being Dan
, um, he's a go getter. He is, he goes in and fixes things. He's always
been a fixer, but he's good for about 2 to 3 years before. Then. He's just
, he gets tired of it and he wants to move on to the next challenge. So he
told me he had two years probably in as commissioner and that, oh, by the
way, you're now working for me as commissioner, even though your paycheck
is, comes out of the regional office. You're, you report to me. So you
wanna know who the authority was? It was Dan Beard and the commission,
they said you whatever you need, you got it. And Bruce Babbitt at that
point was Secretary of Interior. So Bruce was interested in this because
of the Grand Canyon and you know, his relationship with it. Um Secretary
of Interior Arizona boy, um, the Grand Canyon Protection Act was sponsored
by not only George Miller but John mccain. So Senator mccain and I became
very good friends. Um, and his staff, we talked a lot, Senator Bell
Bradley, um, who was in the Senate at that point, um, in the committee
that was over on the Senate side for the same thing. Um Tom Jensen, who
worked for Senator Bradley became very interested in the Grand Canyon more
because he liked to do river trips. Um So we spent a, I spent a lot of
time, I didn't necessarily start out this way, but I ended up this way,
cultivating the beltway so that they supported what we were doing. And
that worked great for a while. But then, you know, you get that phone call
from your boss and friend Dan Beard one day and said, well, I'm leaving.
I've had enough. I don't want to take any more of this because he was
getting a lot of pushback from Babbitt on issues more because Vice at that
point, Bill Clinton was secretary. Um Gore was Vice President, Gore had
instituted a program called the Goldman Hammer Award where he was gonna go
up and clean up the government. You know, get rid of. There used to be the
old Golden Fleece award that William Proxmire had. Well, Al Gore had the
Golden Hammer Award and so he wanted people and Dan Beard was his poster
child cause Dan went through and completely redid how the bureau of
reclamation was managed and created a whole lot of enemies in the bureau
to this day there, the bureau is full of people who hate damn beer because
he changed the way the bureau did business. He got them out, you know, he
closed the human desal plant. So we're done with that quite often we're
not gonna do because it's not cost-effective. It's not, it's never gonna
be cost-effective. It's been a white elephant from day one. It's gonna
always, he did things in California and he took on the Colorado River
issue and there's a lot of people in the bureau who don't still for that.
But I became, again, you know, I was working for Dan. So I was put on the
outside and wasn't necessarily engaged on a lot of the internal
discussions that they were having in Washington. Um, the next secretary or
the next commissioner wasn't quite as engaged. He was from New Mexico but
wasn't as engaged. And Eid Martinez was the, the next commissioner who
came on to replace Dan, nice new guy from New Mexico. If I wanted a
grandfather, he'd be a really nice guy, but just was not purposely, he was
not Dan beard and Bruce didn't want somebody like a Dan beard as
commissioner again. So, um, all of this and so adaptive management and
then the bureau decided they were gonna have the Denver office kind of be
the point on the ne A process. And that's when Tim Randall and that crew
started the physical writing of ne A out of the Denver technical service.
Why did they move it from Salt Lake City? I presume would have been
because they had, they Salt Lake had failed miserably. And in this whole
process in completing the E I and bringing people and trying to hire
people to write the E I. So they just could not get their proverbial act
together and for a lot of reasons and Dan was one of them. They got moved
to Den and Tim Randall and company picked it up and they did, they did a
great job. I think the world. Tim worked for me in the Grand Canyon early
on. So I've known Tim a long time and we're now in the mid 19 nineties.
Yeah, we're in the mid, well, probably in 9394 era in there. How long was
Dan Commissioner to let me see, when did Clinton come in? 90 93 93 he was
two years. So he left in 95 right before um, we got to the real heavy lift
, but it was all right because he had gotten us through the piece we
needed to have cover for and we need a lot of cover in those days because
people were not happy that we were playing around with the flows. Trying
to do the Science. The Academy of Science kept pushing us to do more, uh,
issues associated with that. Congress was becoming more engaged and wanted
to have a dialogue on this for diff for a lot of reasons. And so out of,
and, and the studies have gotten some notoriety because of what we were
doing. People from all over the world. I think everybody wants to go to
the Grand Canyon and see what was going on. And so we were getting a lot
of push on this. And then out of this for three, for two years prior to 96
Duncan and myself and the scientific group said we really need to do a
physical test of adaptive management. We need to do a, we think we need to
do an experimental flood of some sort to redistribute sediments because
the beaches were going in the Grand Canyon at an alarming rate. Um Even
with because of some of it was because of the interim flows that we
instituted some of it because it was just the nature. We don't have any
sediment coming into the system anymore. And the system had caught up in
the mid and when we started the program, after the early before the flood
in 83 the system had been slowly pushing the sediment out of Marble Canyon
at rates and but nobody was monitoring at that point. So we knew the
beaches were getting smaller downstream, but no numbers but no numbers.
After 83 the first flood in 83 there were huge beaches in the Grand
Canyon because all that sediment that was on the bottom of the river got
churned up by 90,000 cubic feet per second and redeposited high. So they
were shouldn't probably tell us, but they were landing airplanes down in
National Canyon. Um There was a lot of stuff going on. This was before the
air rules came in at Grand Canyon National Park. There was ac well, he's
dead now so I can use his name. Martin Litton was well known for flying
his airplane up and down the canyon and dropping, dropping ice cream for
his crew for his, oh God, yeah, Martin and I became great friends in later
life. I have one of his original stories in Durango. So he's, he's was a
mentor to me um in many different ways. In fact, in 19, the fall of 1983
there was a, um, so this was after the big flood, there was a outfitters
meeting at the South Ramp. This is where the concessionaires who have the
contracts for running river trips in the Grand Canyon. They used to get
together every fall, usually December at the south rim of the Grand Canyon
and the superintendent will give them, this is how you're gonna operate in
my park, you know, and it was Dick Marks superintendent. So it was, this
is how you're gonna operate in my park sort of thing. And, um, Martin and
Georgie White, I don't know if you ever heard of Georgie White or um, they
took, they decided they needed to figure out they didn't trust, nobody
trusted the bureau. The bureau was hated by the concessionaires by
everybody for good, probably good reasons. But they decided they needed to
learn a little bit more about the bureau and who I was and whether they
could talk to me. So we closed the bar at El Tovar a couple of nights
running and over many martinis. Um Martin said, well, I don't necessarily
trust the bureau but I trust you. So we're gonna, I'm gonna give you stuff
, I'm gonna feed you stuff a lot of old photographs, things like that, of
what the river was like beforehand. So, um long story short, there were
several people who did that for the studies because they, they appreciate
historical information about the historical, they would never give it to
the bureau. They would give it to the Glen Canyon studies because they saw
that we were down there trying to do our best and we were fumbling around
and we admitted when we fumbled a lot. And so we had to rebuild a lot of
the process that we were and we were learning as we were going, we were
true adaptive management. From day one, we learned as we went, we made
tons of mistakes. We learned from the mistakes and we moved forward. But
out of all of this process, the, the staff of the Glen Canyon studies went
from being two or three of us to I had 100 and 60 scientists around the
country working on this, on this program. So we had, we had exploded and
exponentially in my mind on how we were doing the work to meet up to these
needs. Adaptive management became that focal point of the, of the EIS
because it needed to be there. To be different. And, you know, if you look
, look at the original biological opinions for the Columbia system, they
don't talk about adaptive management. Adaptive management didn't come in
until really in terms of a government dams perspective until now it's
embraced all over the place. And I'm so happy for that because it's, it
needs to. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it gives you a framework of
process. So the first flood, it got shot down the first time because we
just, there were threats of lawsuits got shot down the second time because
trout unlimited was gonna sue the bureau over impacts to the trout fishery
below the dam, even though it's an exotic species in a river below a dam.
But nonetheless, the bureau wasn't gonna go there, but we did get it the
third time. And I remember Bruce Baba calling me up and saying, well, I
wasn't gonna come out, but now that you've gotten your, the court approval
to go ahead with this experimental flood in March of 96 I'm gonna come out
and so literally, I met him, I met Bruce at the whatever the hotel is
right, coming off the auto page on the way to the dam when we had dinner
that night and chat about a bunch of things. But he was, of course, he was
down at the base of the dam in the morning on Good morning America and
whatever you the Today show and rightfully so, Secretary of Material, he
ought to take all the credit for this. And, uh, and so the flood, you know
, it went off. And so he wanted all of a sudden Bruce became very
interested in what was going on below the damn now that he knew we were
gonna, we were gonna finish an EIS so he was gonna be able to report to
Congress on a positive note. We weren't gonna get sued because that had
been put away by the judge saying they can do the flood, so to speak. And
that we were getting a lot of credits all over the world. And he was being
asked to speak on what was going on in the Colorado River and how his
administration was changing the way the bureau did business through Dan
period even though Dan had left by this time. And so Bruce was, you know,
fairly emphatic that we were gonna continue on this. And in fact, the
night before the evening before the floods started, he and I had a long,
we went up, we got off the river. I had taken a river trip with all the
press and everybody from Glen Canyon Dam down to Lees ferry. And there
were a bunch of people on that trip, a bunch of dignitaries and
politicians and um press et cetera. And so Bruce and I, we took a, we
walked up into the cemetery at least ferry pretty sacred spot. It is, to
me, at least, you know, that's where the folks who ran Lees ferry, that's
where they're buried. You know, it's pretty sacred spot. And we had a
discussion that basically said, I'm so happy with what has happened here,
but we want to take what you've done here at the Grand Canyon Studies and
we wanna expand that to become a much bigger program across the Bureau of
reclamation. And we want you guys, you're, we now are gonna have to set up
this Grand Canyon Monitoring Center because that's what he had agreed to
do it. Um And it's gonna be set up in Flagstaff and, but we were gonna
keep your crew together basically to do this adaptive management concept
around the Bureau for a lot of reasons. Uh I won't go into that didn't
quite work out as he had told us it would work out. And at that point, he
Bruce was under a lot of pressure because Congress had flipped and Newt
Gingrich was now speaker of the house, Newt was no way. No. How gonna let
Bruce's biological survey survive? It wasn't gonna happen. So Bruce was
left trying to figure out how to take. And his whole concept was to set up
the biological survey to be a replicate of the US Geological Survey. So
it's gonna be a separate entity. So ultimately, when Gingrich took away
the money, took away the ability for babbitt to do his job, essentially it
forced Babbitt to take the eight regional directors he had already
selected to run the survey and repopulate them in, back into what's now
the US GS. And that's when all the scientists and the park service, fish
and Wildlife Service, the bureau, all those got assimilated into the US GS.
So the science programs and all the agencies got cut off at the knees. So
the all, I mean, it was, it was a bad deal. It didn't, it wasn't Bruce's
fault, but it was kind of his fault that it ended up this way. And
Gingrich and others made sure that science was in my mind forever changed
in the Department of the Interior and, but adapt, we had float, adapt,
manage work. I got called back to Washington a bunch of times to, to uh
talk about it. And uh and for a lot of reasons, we decided to part ways
and, but adaptive management, the first experiment, the first full scale
national experiment for adaptive management was the flood that 1996 March
, March, 1996. And we did, we had more science going on and I had trips on
the river for post and pre post during flying helicopters in and out all
the time. And it was just, it was, it was a great time to be a scientist
because we were really doing, we didn't know what to expect. Nobody had
ever done this before. Nobody. So, you know, we just we had people from
all over the country, all over the world who came to see or participate in
this. The nice thing that we were able to do that they want, they will,
they decided they never would allow this again is that I coupled the power
revenue money with other funds. So I had epa money, I had money from
National Geographic Society. I brought in money from five or six sources
to augment the basic science money. And that really gave us flexibility to
do the, the kind of adaptive management that we felt we needed to do. Was
was that how you got from a handful of researchers and studies to 100 and
60 part of that was bringing in al alternative funding and going out and
getting academia to step up and say, I'll give you options to come on
river trips and do science, the kind of science we need if you'll, you
know, backfill some of the costs for your um for your um research people,
you know, it's so we, we worked out a lot of deals like that, that they,
that they can't do now, they won't do now. So that's just, you know, but
that's what. But again, nobody gave us any direction. But being involved
with the National Academy of Sciences gave me a perspective on how you
could work this because the Academy at this point was working, starting to
work on the Everglades, starting they were doing work on the Mississippi
after the floods in the Mississippi in the early nineties, working on the
Columbia. So I got exposed to a much broader context of scientists working
on these large ecosystem based programs that I never would have if I had
stayed insulated just within the bureau. So to this day, I mean, now I'm,
I'm the academy now has me on their board working on this issue. Um And
specifically, they've asked me to come and work on adaptive management,
but they want to make that a key part of the new Water science technology
board approach is how can we take adaptive management applied elsewhere?
Part of that was because now fast forward, I left the, I left the
Department of the Interior. Um on December 31st, 1996 had my own
consulting firm that I started up where I focused on river engineering and
looking at issues around the world. So I went to Siberia to Japan all over
the world. Looking Costa Rica, looking at Dam, how to re operate dams um
out of that. Then here comes George Miller back into my life. Um We have a
new president who was elected Mr Obama. Mr Obama had George Miller as one
of his transition, folks.
George was responsible for helping to spool up what was gonna be the
Department of the Interior and knowing that um Ken Salazar was gonna be
secretary, so Ken was kind of doing his thing at his level. Um George
wanted somebody to work with on the hill who could be the Conduit for
Congress working on with the agent, somebody who knew the agency. So you
had to know the agencies inside and out, you had to know where the
skeletons were buried. You had to know how to work at that level and how
to be able to communicate with them. Somebody who also knew how to
communicate with the scientific world. So this the National Academy of
Sciences, the Triple American uh AAA S, all the quasi all the
organizations who are on the science side of academia who deal with water.
So George calls me up and says, um the president wants us to make a big
push on this area with Western water issues, specifically Indian water
settlements. We want to look at dam operations and river operations and oh
by the way, we want you to come back to work on the hill. We want and we
want to place you in Congress. So you're on staff so that you have direct
access to all 435 members to help see what we can do in this arena. And so
we did and, and at that point, we also had uh we were implementing the um
Recovery Act. So there was a lot of money that needed to go out into
energy field and the water programs. You know, we're trying to get America
back on his feet again after the debacle of the, of the recession. So that
was on my agenda too. So I came back and said, ok, George, um, you need to
give me some help because I've not worked on the hill. Ho I mean, I've
been to the hill given a lot of briefings, but I've not worked on the hill.
He said, don't worry about it. I'm gonna, I got you covered. So George
was my person on the hill when I first got there. And who are you working
for? I was working actually for the Committee and Natural Resources
Committee. George's old committee. He said, because that's where the
bureau is. Yeah, the House House of Representatives because that's where
the Bureau is physically administratively located under the Natural
Resources Committee. At that point, Nick Rahall had taken over George had
moved over to education, but George and Nick were and still are great
friends. And so Nick convinced George convinced Nick to hire me to come
back and do this. So that's what I did. Did you have a specific position
where
I was, I was staff director, staff director for the, for the water and
power subcomittee
was specifically over the bureau and the Western water settlements and the
programs that are part of Western water in particular. Um So out of that,
I began working with all the members who are interested in this area,
continue the dialogue with the Academy of sciences me the AAA S and
starting to, to bring up our level of knowledge on the house staff side
because I, I hate to say this, but there's very few staff in the House of
Representatives that a know there's a country west of the 100th meridian.
They're just, most of them are east coast policy. They come out of the,
the schools that churn out policy. People in the east or b know that
western water is different than Eastern water and that's managed
differently. There's a whole different set of water laws and that the
native Americans, the Indian tribes have a federal reserve water, right?
And that we, we have an obligation because we established a treaty with
them. And if they're federally recognized, we have to work with them to
make sure they're taken care of. So those were the big areas that I was
asked to jump into right away by any chance. Did you work on the White
Mountain Nepal? And Kirkpatrick was um congresswoman early on in that.
Yeah. Yeah. And Salt River project and others were all. And I, so I, yeah
, I worked on a lot of these issues over the years. So that came on. Um
Then we had another re revolution of sorts in the House and we lost the
house and the Republicans took over. At that point, I was asked to go over
to the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee so I could take what I
was doing with natural resources and apply to the Corps of Engineers EPA F
MA, the other federal agencies. And George again, asked, called up and
said, I would really like you to go over and Nick Ray Hall called up. So
I'd really like you to come with me because Nick had now migrated over to
become the ranking member on TN I. And because um the congressman from
Minnesota had lost his race and T and I transportation infrastructure. So
it gave me this additional national perspective. And so we started to
bring the concept of adaptive management into the Corps of Engineers. Epa
and the other Saint Lawrence City and all the various or Tennessee Valley
Authority was under that subcommittee's
to work with. So as part of that, then I got interested in again adaptive
management. So I had this great group of graduate students of sorts,
although they're much more, they're professional people at the, at the
Library of Congress called the Congressional Research Service. So lo and
behold, I found out one day I could just call them up and say I need you
to do a report for me on this issue or another issue or whatever. And I
did. So I learned and they were constantly coming into my office. They
them and gao to because we had kept asking them to do stuff for us. So out
of that, I commissioned the Congressional research Service to start doing
reviews on adaptive management. Around the world around the country. So it
was like 2010, 2000. Well, this uh this first report came out in October
21st, 2010 adaptive management in ecosystem res restoration initiatives.
So, and Glen Canyon is one of the programs that I had them review, but I
also had them look at the Platte River, Missouri River, um Everglades
Lower Colorado Multi Species program, a whole variety. And then I had them
list the benefits and the difficulties. Let's I wanted to really learn,
get a kind of a lessons learned from this. So um one of the nice things
about being former staff is I can still call up and have them do this, do
these sorts of things as long as I have a member, sign a letter. And so
they're finishing up the second version of this now where I've had them go
back and explore again. Let's te cost, let's cast a broader net over where
adaptive management has been applied because now you, you see it, do you
see those two or two words in almost every N A document now that has to do
with water or environmental management or you're even seeing it now
populate into energy reports, et cetera. So because the energy companies
are getting into it. So what I find is that I have members who I still
consult with on a fairly regular basis in Washington, who are smart people
and I know you gotta get going smart people in your own time, but in on
their own. All right. But they don't understand the concepts of how they,
these things are applied. So I still provide a service to members where
I'll go in and explain things to him. He'll call me up and say, I know
when, when you're in Washington next, can you come in and explain how this
works in simple terms that I'll understand and that's not a derogatory
statement about our members of Congress. This fact, they got so many
things coming at them that to explain to them the nuances of what we wrote
in 92 and what, how it's played out and what it now of how it affects what
they are gonna be taking their little plastic card and voting on at some
point. That's my job still, once a staff are always a staffer, you educate
and continue to educate both them and the and the staff over how these
things are applied. And so this concept of adaptive management is getting
enough air time that it's now becoming part of the discussion again. They
don't understand it all the time, what it means and what its implications
are to a particular issue or project or case. So helping to explain that
for them is what I do. So and now I'm helping students do it. So who are
writing, writing on these issues? So at which universities are you working
with students, I work with students at University of Washington,
University of Minnesota, Colorado State. Um you know, a variety of us, UC
Berkeley. Um So I've had one at uh UC Irvine. She just graduated. So, you
know, in NAU occasionally. So it's just around people are interested. Um
There's the water resource center here on campus, Sharon Megdal and her
group, I lecture to them and I've taken, she's asked me to take a couple
of her students under my wing. So educate them. So, you know, I, I have
the luxury now being able to do that. They can't fire me anymore, even
though I did get fired three times on the Glen Canyon studies and they
kept bringing you back. Somebody kept, I had a guardian angel of sorts,
several of them over the years who kept saying you can't do that. You know
, I have members of uh various administrations who would come on river
trips and perhaps consume a little bit and decide they were Jesus Christ
and decide to walk across the river and go in and rescue them and they
didn't like being rescued. It hurt their self image. So I was fired for
that one. So, um you know, we goes the territory took it personal for a
while, but not anymore. When you're retired, you can afford to be
magnanimous more so than when you're working for a paycheck for. Well,
yeah, though one of the reasons uh they had a little bit of initial push
back with you, Paul, is that as of three weeks ago, there was somebody in
the regional office in Salt Lake who complained about the adaptive
management and the fact that I had gotten it started at Glen Canyon
because it was costing the bureau so much money. The he, you know, so
there's still, even after all these years, people who don't particularly
like what we've done, but I would, I would change a thing. Well, maybe a
few things. Let's take a brief break. We can, uh, grab something to drink
a little bit of water. I'm gonna ask at the front desk if we can extend
our time here in the room, we'll start again. Five minutes. Sure. But I
know it's Friday and you guys probably wanna get back to him. So I'm gonna
stop and we will restart with another file when we continue.