OK. Um So you asked kind of what are some of the key points along the way
? And I would say that to categorize it, there was kind of three prongs on
adaptive management that were moving forward simultaneously from about
1985 forward. This was after we got the first that we first started to
look at um the Grand Canyon and the operations of the dam after the high
flows of 83 and 84 and 85 part of it was, and there's those three prongs
are the scientific prong of it moving forward, the administrative prong of
it, which is the executive review committee and, and the agencies
associated with that. And then the third piece would be the public piece
of that because we, we were educating, we're bringing the public along
with us in this and, and, and especially after NP A was started in 89
after we started to have public meetings and um the public was part of the
process. Now you couldn't shut them out anymore. In fact, for the first um
N A scoping meeting that was held in Flagstaff Arizona by the Bureau of
Reclamation. Got about 10 minutes into it and they had to shut it down
because there was not, the fire marshal came in and said you got too many
people in the high school of Flagstaff High School Auditorium. That was
the interest the public had in this because the public had been pushed
down so long by the bureau, the old adage, the bureau build, the bureau
taketh away continued. That was their philosophy. And so the p so those
were the three prongs. So let me speak to that. First off, I think
scientifically,
the genesis of the adaptive management really began with when we brought
to the National Academy of Science on board. This first report in 1987 was
and it's, it was titled a review of the Bureau of Reclamation's Glen
Canyon Environmental Studies. It was hard on us for all the right reasons
because we had started out in the planning and management of this. Um I to
say uh they, they basically said you're weak on your direct your
objectives and articulating them. You know, things like that the science
could be um improved upon the whole process that you're moving forward on
trying to do good science around this set of questions is not
scientifically supportable, harsh to hear if you're an agency, science
scientist who's been down in 100 and 15 degree heat, pulling nets in the
Grand Canyon, but absolutely necessary. It made us grow up and it became
better organ uh better because of that subsequent
review. And the, and I guess the genesis for adaptive management began
with that because we all of a sudden said we're not gonna be able to
understand and give specifics on everything that the government wants us
to give on. So we're going to figure out a way to how to do monitoring
that will feed back into this. And I didn't use the terms adaptive
management at that point, but that's exactly what it was. We had to start
thinking of that. The next big effort that we did, we held a symposium in
1990 in Santa Fe for the Colorado Ecology and Dam Management. We brought
together again, high level scientists and and um National Academy of
Science folks to not only continue the review of what we were doing
in the Colorado River, but to kind of get us over that next hump. And
that's again. And now adaptive management begins to be talked about in
terminology in that terminology. And then of course, we get into the, the
final one they did for me and they did two more after this but river
resource management in the Grand Canyon and this from a scientific is
where it's embraced, full bore. You know, this is where adaptive
management all of a sudden becomes the element that then ultimately gets
embraced in the Grand Canyon Protection Act in section 1805. So there's
this, this is the science prong of adaptive management. So you ask for
where are the the kind of the documents that articulate that it's there
administratively
began, began the process. This report, this is the final report in 1988.
So this is May of 1988.
I would say the first time as the Grand Canyon Environmental Studies final
report. This no, this is the executive review committee. This is what was
leading us up to the EIS. So this was the executive review committee. It
was all the Department of Interior and I had,
I had put this together because I want the I I kept getting calls from all
the various agencies or regional and these, these were all regional
directors. These were not delegated to some staffer down in the bottom of
the totem pole. The R DS would come to these meetings and be briefed by us.
This is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. Um This is the
people we're coordinating with as an example when Cliff Barrett was
commissioner was, was um regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation in
Salt Lake City, Upper Colorado Region. Once a month, we would take the
Bureau jet uh arrow commander down to L A to meet with Dennis Underwood
who was then head of Metropolitan Water District. You don't think that the
bureau of reclamation, what we did at Glen Canyon was important to
California every month we'd fly down to L A and have a one on one briefing
, regional director to the head of Metropolitan Water District and me
telling him what we're doing on the river and what the implications were
potential implications were to river management. So the administrators
early on knew they had a gut feeling. Once you tip one domino on NP A and
the Colorado River system, it's gonna go upstream and downstream and it
did not only in terms of operations but in terms of the fish programs. Now
, prior to this, when I was working in flat in Fort Collins, going to
graduate school, it was then called the Colorado River fish program. It's
now evolved into the recovery implementation program, but then it was just
the fish program. And there were two of us, Mike Pruitt who did the
Colorado riverside, me who did the Green River side and we were out every
month taking measurements on the Colorado River or the Green River as
related to endangered fish. So ever work with Mink Chuck and Win Wendell.
I know both of them quite well. I knew Wendell when he was still alive. Um
He and I actually flew up to Duncan's ranch in Montana for several
meetings. We like Duncan spent the summers. They have a family ranch that
borders on Yellowstone National Park. Bought it in 5049 or 50. His parents
did and it is right. Yellowstone is across the Madison River and there's
Duncan's ranch. So we met up there for obvious reasons several times. But
anyway, part of this was that the executive review committee, this is
where I started giving and I would be asked to come in and make reports to
these. And then they would go into discussion over how they as a group
would implement what we were asking them to do in terms of flows, in terms
of permitting, in terms of operational packages, et cetera. This is the
group that I first gave a report to on adaptive management in 1987.
So I laid it out to them as an administrator for as administrators,
regional directors for these agencies. This is what the concept is all
about. And we might want to start thinking about how we implement
something. So the Genesis on the administrative side was 1987 and it was
embraced in 88 in this document. So this is coming forward and this
ultimately becomes then the NP A because these are the agencies who are
the elements of the NE A, these are the federal agencies who are the
action agencies for NE A. So the concept that we laid out here moves
forward with that. Go ahead. Can you clarify briefly why you think the
bureau of reclamation was so disinterested in doing N A compliance and
doing a full blown environmental impact state? Simple easy because they
had never, they never done N A on Glen Canyon before and forever David
Brauer and the conservation community had just blasted the Bureau for Glen
Canyon down and they knew and David Brauer was still alive at this point
and doing, you know, David Brower stuff and the public was getting
hammered every boatman of, of any magnitude in the Grand Canyon if they
didn't have a post, a pack of postcards in the Ramo Can when they went
downstream and gave it to every one of their clients who are or customers
who were on the trip and said, send this into the Bureau of reclamation
and we need to do a new change in the operations of the dam or we're
losing our beaches. So some of the biggest champions of getting to N A was
the river community forever. I'll be indebted to the boatman down there
because the ones who really cared, they worked their customers hard to
talk to them about the impacts the dam was having. So you talk about
education, the boatman were educating the public who are on every, on
every river trip. And so the bureau knowingly that knowing that Glen
Canyon dam hits was having such a huge impact downstream. But also knowing
they had the law of the river and all these constraints that they've lived
by for years and years and years and years to operate the dam. And knowing
that no other dam on the Colorado River system had gone through N A
compliance if one does the dominoes start falling. So Flaming Gorge
subsequently has had it. The Kani Units had N A compliance. We've had n A
compliance on almost all the upper basin dams. Now that are, that feed the
system? And is it, is it that the result of doing the scientific studies
on the environmental impacts ends up altering dam management in a way that
the bureau of reclamation simply did not. And, and you go to any of the
old engineers and they'll tell you if this is an inefficient way to run
the dam, the best way to run the dam. And I remember having this
discussion clearly, we were doing the 25th anniversary cliff bear was
regional director at the top of uh Glen Canyon Dam, Rose Monfort was
governor and we're doing this big ceremony up there. And um, I had been
asked to come up and say a few words and I took one of the old engineers
who was there when the dam was first operated. And I said, how did you
come up with what the flow releases should be at the dam? You know,
because they, he said, well, depending on how much water is in the
reservoir, we want to ramp it up to exactly that hot level. So we maximize
the head we have on the reservoir to make the maximum amount of
electricity possible. I said, well, that's great. That makes sense. How
did you determine the low end? Well, if it had, if it was our desire. We
would just turn it off at night, but we couldn't do that because the
environmental folks would go ballistic if there wasn't some water in the
river. So the whole context, we looked over the side until we saw about
the w you know, we could see water coming out of the base of the dam. That
was our minimum flow. That's where 2000 CFS came from. It wasn't some
scientific study. It was some dam engineer looking over the top of the dam
and saying we gotta have something in there. Let's put a little water
looks like e exactly looks like enough. That's so the bur that's the way
the bureau operated. And that's how the damn engineers were looking at
efficiency from their mind, from their perspective. That was the smart way
to run these things up and down, you know, and then you ma you because
it's a peaking plant, you can spool it up real, you can spool up those
generators in three minutes where Navajo generating stations takes 24
hours to spool that, that generator up on the steam plant. Three minutes.
You can bring it from zero to full bar. That's how they should operate.
So you're saying the um the Bureau of Reclamation, which is a irrigation
agency which happens to fund itself through 100 power revenue, but has
completely turned into a power agency by the 19 eighties because that's
what pays the bills. That's what pays the bill. It's the Glen Canyon Dam.
You think of the c storage project as a huge Christmas tree. And there's
a bunch of ornaments out there and those are all the small dams and such.
There's one ginormous ornament that sits right on the very top. Glen
Canyon Dam. That's the checkbook and that pays for everything. So, yeah,
the bureau went from irrigation and they still are to, we can, this is how
we fund our agency and that's exactly how they do it and that's what they
try to maximize and they were very good at it for many, many years. So
essentially any program, including just a research program that threatened
to make their revenue interests less efficient, that threaten to make the
dam less efficient as a revenue generator because electricity to cost more
was something that they would resist, right? And especially on the
Colorado system because all those reservoirs and dams are part of the
Colorado for storage project. So if you are, let's just say you were the
Klamath project, you can't tap into CRSP revenues. It has to be projects
that are pertinent to CRSP. That's why we have the checkbook or access to
the checkbook for CRSP. And then part of this also was in 1977 when Wap A
and the bureau, you know, when they got a divorce, so to speak. And then
the bureau, all the power marketing piece went over to the WP A and the
bureau then just became the operational piece. So there was who populated
WAP A in the 1st 10 years it was just bureau people, people moved across
the street to W A so the mindset, the culture remained the same and it's
the culture of the bureau of reclamation. We're fighting more than
anything else. And that's that culture that has not even though they do
have some good biologists and scientists they brought on board. They are
not, they're there because they have to be there. They're not there
because the bureau wants them there. You know, it's just their culture is
we build dams and we operate dams. That's what we do. We don't do science
, we don't do biology, we don't do this other stuff. We don't manage for
multiple values and multiple resources, multi-purpose in terms of
hydropower and water delivery, but not for recreation. Not for Humpback
chub, not for um houseboats on Lake Powell. That's not part of our
recreational
job. So, is this all part of the story of the 19 sixties and 19 seventies
environmental era in which other values are all changed? They all changed
? Yeah. And, and that's, that goes back to uh I don't want to lose my
train of thought on the third piece. But let me give you this tangent.
This goes back to when I was released from the bureau in 96. The very
first phone call I received the very first phone call was from David
Brauer and he called up and said there's a plane ticket waiting for you at
the, I think it was Delta Airlines and Flagstaff. I want you to come to
Berkeley.
I'm gonna start educating you. Uh What happened back in the sixties,
fifties and sixties. He lived at 40 Stevenson Avenue in the hills above
Berkeley. In fact, his home, I think is gonna actually be on the National
Historic Register now because his kids still own it. They bought it back
and they're gonna do something with it. He had a garage full of David
Brower, Ansel Adams, all that history that he is part of and David being
part of the 10th Mountain Division Sierra Club and all that. So for seven
days I sat in his garage and he would just keep bringing out stuff. He and
his, his wife Ann who is still alive on all the history of the Sierra Club
and his battles on dinosaur and all that piece. Um So getting educated by
David Brower and understanding the context he was coming from in that
world in the six f late fifties, early sixties, Echo Park, Wallace Stegner
, um uh Bernard devoto, all those people and
he, David had all that literature. I think most of it's in the Bancroft
now. I hope it's in the Bancroft. So I know a lot of it is still in the
garage because I talked to Ken Brauer, his son and Ken said there's still
a bunch of stuff here. You really need to come and go through this. So I
gotta do that sometime. But, um, the other piece of this though is in,
after I left the bureau, I started to become outspoken a bit on how the
bureau was continuing to operate the facility and how you couldn't just do
periodic floods and expect that everything's gonna be hunky dory in the
Grand Canyon. What we learned from the flood is that you can move sediment.
But the moment you go back to operations, normal operations, those
beaches are gonna go. There's only so much unless you increase us so out
of all that discussion. Um and Dan Beard pushed me into this to some
extent. He said, you know, you need to go out there and speak on these
issues. So I did, but I began to get, um, on the Dais with Floyd Domini,
often Floyd being the former commissioner of the and to his mind until he
died. Floyd was the commissioner in quotes of the bureau of reclamation.
The bureau's greatest days were when Floyd was commissioner and, you know
, he operated in a whole different world. He, he operated in a sense that
, um, he was bigger than the Secretary of Interior in many respect and he
was building dams all over the place and there was no need but there was
no es a nothing he had to worry about. He just had to build dams. And
Floyd was really good at getting people motivated to build dams. Glen
Canyon being his pride and joy. So we'd often be debating about the value
of Glen Canyon. Well, out of that, we would end every evening, usually at
a bar someplace and we started to have a friendship out of this. So out of
that Floyd invited myself and my wife to his house um in, in the State of
Virginia. And so we go out and probably his house three or four times and
did oral interviews and took him to lunch and he again, he started pulling
out all this stuff about his side of the story. And while Stegner captured
very well or captured the um trip down the Grand Canyon between Brower and
Domini, there's a whole another story of John mcphee.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I got my people mixed up here, but it's, there's the
whole other story that Floyd said before, I would agree to go down the
Grand Canyon with Broer. He had to agree to come to a houseboat trip with
me on Lake Powell for a week and they did that was never written about.
And so Floyd would haul out all these pictures and said, bro, I had a
great time on that trip and we, you know, we, and so there's, there's
these two iconic book ends of the conservation movement that I evolved
into, but they, they were and still are the book ends. You had David
Brauer on one side, you had Floyd Dominey on the other side. And then you
had Martin Litton who was really the spokesperson for David. He wrote most
David's stuff. Martin was a senior editor at the L A. Um What, what is the
newspaper in L A Times? OK. And then he went to become the senior editor
for Sunset magazine in Menlo Park, California. And he wrote all those
travel pieces in Sunset. That's where he got his start in the Grand Canyon
with the dories. He was writing travel pieces and you know, he just got so
Martin was the, the heart and soul of David Brauer. And so that those
three iconic men circled me for a bunch of years. And in fact, when Floyd
turned 100 I hosted his 100th birthday party on the hill. The Department
of Interior would not come to his birthday party because Floyd has a
somewhat soiled reputation in the Department of the Interior. You know, he
was a womanizer and a hard drinker and he came out of that era and he was
a quartermaster in the army during World War Two. He was gonna get things
done and he knew how to do it so they wouldn't come. But a lot of other
people peripheral debt. So we had a full house on Capitol Hill for Floyd's
100%. He made it to 100 and one passed away. But he was an amazing, I mean
, I don't agree with him on what he did but I respect him for what he did
and he was living in a certain set of, of ideals and was given a job to do
and he did it, I would say the same for Brauer. Do I agree with his
methods all the time now? I mean, Brauer could be hard on you and nasty
just as bad as Floyd could be, but he had his own way of doing business.
So to have to have the ability to have interacted with all three of those
men at that point, as I was formulating, what do we do here? So while they
were pulling me in this direction, science and everything else was pulling
in another direction. So now we get back to the third part, which is the
education piece of this. So as the EIS began to evolve out of this, it
became apparent that adaptive management was going to be part of it. And
because of the way we were talking about it, I I started to develop papers
and dialogues that could be done. So there's a number of different things
here, a blueprint for Adaptive management of the Colorado record or
through Glen and Grand Canyon, you know, that was doing these things all
the time. Is that something you wrote back in the eighties? I don't know
what the date is on this one, but this would have, like, it was, it was,
it was a typewriter, I can tell you that it was typewriter. So it had to
be before I had a computer where I was 90. So, you know, things like that.
Um, I, I had the Park service was talking about having adaptive
management. So, and then Steve Carruthers. And have you talked to Steve?
Not yet. We haven't interviewed him. You need to talk to Steve brothers up
in Flagstaff. Is that where he's living now? Well, partly I he's either in
Austin or he's in flag. He's a, he's a man about the country now. Um But
he and I actually did this document in, I don't remember who he gave this
to, but um a man we called it a management opportunity. This was January
92 but here I laid out options for the Colorado River Adaptive Management
and use the Northwest Power Act implementation of Adaptive Management of
the Colorado River. This actually looks computer. So Colorado coordinating
group. Um So I started putting out documents like this. This is what got
fed into Washington. And so ultimately, when you reading people like Ky
Lee at this time, Adaptive Manage, I was anything I could get on this
concept, I was trying to assimilate and bring back in. So ultimately, this
was put together to help explain the Grand Canyon Protection Act because
section 1805 of the Grand Canyon Protection Act calls for long term
monitoring and such and adaptive management is the under, under tote all
of that. So again, this was the education piece of members of Congress and
of the political side of the agenda on why this language is in this bill
at this point in time and what it means to implementation for the long
term. So out of the Grand Canyon Protection Act, then that's where you saw
and, and you'll see this in writings. um were the Everglades when they did
the, when Secretary go or Vice President Gore was working on the
Everglades deal that became part of the dialogue there when they were
working on the Northwest Forest plan that spotted out, it became a part of
that when uh Jack Ward Thomas was for service, he began to, I so there was
four or five of us around the country who were kicking the concept around.
We didn't quite understand what Kylie and others were. I mean, we
understood the concept but actually taking it from that concept and
bringing it into action is what we were all struggling with and not, I
guess struggle is a good, we were just trying to figure out what's that
gonna look like. So, and then they virtually the Platte River and the
Missouri River and all these other things. And now there's a whole
adaptive management network that's out there that, you know, does this
stuff of land managers? Well, land water resource managers, cnet, you know
, it's there's a whole bunch of professionals out there who are now have,
it's become a science of sorts even though it's not science. But it's, you
know, it's a use of science but it's not, it's applied science, it's
applied science. But so I, I guess to kind of tie it all together and then
we can go back to your questions. It was a couple of things that came
together. I would like to think for a reason, but it was, it was Jim Watt
being forced to do the ne A to being forced to do some environmental
studies at Glen Canyon Dam because the public was getting upset that what
was going on and they didn't feel anybody just like today. Nobody listens
to us, you know, sort of thing. It was the flood of 83 that change the
perspective from looking at it from a very narrow perspective on just two
new generators on the river outlet tubes at Glen Canyon Dam to now be the
whole operational. And I know when we played that out the first time, the
regional director said, I don't know what this is, where this is gonna
take us if I all of a sudden say, yeah, we wanna look at the whole
operational regime where this may end, but let's go to. But getting that
call from the secretary's office from um Reagan's people who were in the
White House at that point saying, do you have a use for the National
Academy of Sciences. And again, that money, there was $200,000. I didn't
have to come up with the Department of Interior, came up with $200,000. So
, you know, I had the Academy of Science at my disposal and they, we had a
meeting with them in the Phoenix Airport in the crown room of terminal B
or term, whatever the sec, whatever terminal the delta flies out of.
There's, there used to be a little crown too, but that's where we held the
first meeting with the Academy of Sciences. When I and then from there,
they, they invited me back to Washington to pitch the study to the whole
Academy of Sciences. So here I am fly from Flagstaff Arizona, roll into
Washington DC. Go down to the main National Academy of Sciences Building
on Constitution Avenue. There walk inside see the portrait of Abraham
Lincoln who started the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of the
civil war. And here I am pitching to why the Academy of Sciences should
now take on the Glen Canyon of our Mouse studies and the bureau and what
we're doing. And that to me was one of those one of those moments,
watershed moments where all of a sudden now we got the nation and some of
the best scientists in the nation looking at these issues with us, not day
to day but oversight which was critical then getting to the, to the
lawsuit where wa a Western Power administration was sued by the public
over operational impacts of the way they operate the dam and having the
Bureau have to be implicit in that because they own the dam own and
operate the dam. So, and having I say this Ty Cobb, who was their attorney
um for the plaintiff being the aggressive person, he still is, I assume
that's why President Trump got him to win that case and force the NP A
compliance on the, on the contracts and ultimately on the operation of the
dam to getting the operation of the dam, Eis and having George Miller and
Dan Beard and Bruce Babbitt all come into this at various points to help
be, be the guardian angels. They were to make sure that we weren't done
away with which could have been done three or four times. They should have
pulled the plug on the Glen Canyon environmental studies, but for whatever
reason they didn't. And then we got to 96 and had the experimental flood
and that gained a lot of credibility for the program. Um So man, it goes,
and I'm proud of everyone, the science, most of the scientists who work
for us. So we're all good folks and we all committed to this more as a
deal for the Grand Canyon and for um checking a box on any agencies stuff.
So
I talk to Steve because Steve was, he was the former, um, scientist at
Grand Canyon National Park
in the late seventies. He was the guy that was shooting mules out of
helicopters and that sort of thing. Well, there was a mule problem in
Grand Canyon. Um, and I think Cleveland Amory and friends of the animals
or friends or whatever it was, friends of the mules got on their case.
Anyway, Steve and the park service had a separation. Steve went on to
start his own company SWC A in Flagstaff, which is now nationwide almost.
And, um, but Steve was, um for whatever reason and I'll forever be
indebted to him. He kind of took me on as saying, you don't know much
about the Grand Canyon, but I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna teach you. So he
and the river community, several people in the river community embraced us
and they be, they watched out, they watched out for my scientists in the
canyon. If one of my crews got in trouble, they'd be the first ones to
pull over and help them or they'd call me and say your crew is hung up on
such and such a rock. You need to helicopter in a motor or, you know, or
bring in a new survey rod or something like and the river community as we
gain credibility, they embraced us. Did he ever serve as an official
representative on the Adaptive Management team? Once he became a sort of a
stakeholder group? I think Steve and I were both kind of ostracized from
that whole pro after GCMRC came into being, we were told to go away for a
lottery and some of them valid reason. And
do you wanna talk about that? I don't know if it's important to the
adaptive management story you're telling, it's, it's a story and it's a
long story. So probably not now. But there is. And you can, if you can, I
, I would definitely encourage you to talk to Steve because he was the guy
who um encourage me to keep pushing and writing on adaptive management
just because he knew it was gonna be different. It was gonna be a, it was
gonna be a game changer. And I think if there's one thing in the EIS that
is the game changer, it's adaptive management. It's the embracing of
adaptive management now how it's been applied, I don't necessarily always
agree with, but the original intent and the fact that it's in the Grand
Canyon Protection Act and in the EIS and it's in the record of decision to
me is something that we can all be proud of was Steve involved in helping
to get the Grand Canyon Protection Act introduced. And no, I mean, he's,
he's always peripherally out there. So I would um in terms of the fact
that he and I would get together and go running up, San Fran Humphreys
Peak to relieve ourselves of various stresses. Yeah, I'd say he was, he
was, I would say he was probably one of the most important people who
you'll never hear about in Grand Canyon De Management because of the fact
that the role he's played has always been behind the scenes. But I know I
never would have been able to do what I did without Steve Carruthers in
the background. Absolutely would never have gotten it done because when it
was the low of lows, when I was getting hammered by DC or the agencies,
Steve would always find an encouraging word to say to keep the discussion
going going. He and um, Dottie House who was the librarian at the museum
in Northern Arizona before they let her go, she became Steve's go to
person. He hired her a smart man, smartest movie ever made was to hire
Dottie cause she knew she knows how to write and she can write. E I she
can do everything that Steve needs to have written.
But um, Steve and Dottie, I, I would go to the ends of the earth for them
because of ultimately at the very, if you look at the core of what kept
the egg incubating, it was Steve Carruthers. Absolutely. So you really
need to talk to him. All right. Yeah, we, we, we have uh several more
years of interviews to do and we have a growing list of people to
interview and I will put him on the list. You contact him
um, can I ask you to, um, think broadly about the value of the program
over time? Um, it's so sometimes, um, there's a little controversy over
how much money is being spent on research and what is the value of that
research and what has been accomplished by the program? And I'm, I'm very
interested in leaving a legacy of people who have been around for a long
time, who have something to say about the value of the program over time,
what it's accomplished, why should it be continued? And if so why? Well,
first off, I'll answer your last question. Should it be continued? The abs
, it's absolutely yes. You, you need to understand what the impacts of the
dam are as much as you need to know how that spinning widget in the dam
impacts how much electricity can be made. It's a, to me, it's an
integrated, essential component of any management of a federal facility.
Whether it's a dam, a power plant uh irrigation system, you name it, you
have to have that part of it to see if what you're doing is having an
effect and then understanding what you can do to either mitigate or adapt
to that effect. So the answer is absolutely, it needs to be part of it. Um
Should it go through periodic revisions? Absolutely. Because to be
adaptive, you have to learn as you go and you're gonna learn that some
things uh become more important to either the managers or the public or to
the ecosystem itself than it was when you started out on the journey. So,
as a case in point, um we've spent an awful lot of time, effort and money
on the beaches in the Grand Canyon. Should we continue to monitor them at
the intensity that they've been monitored over the past since 96 I would
say probably not. We've learned a significant amount about the beaches and
we know the processes that are driving their formation and lost their
erosion. Um But, and we know a fair amount about what floods will do. Now
, we learned a lot from 96 never having done one of those ever in the
world before on purpose. So you could have scientists pre during and post
evaluate it. We learned that how we did it was not necessarily the best
way to do it. And we've learned from that and now have adopt adapted to
that. Do we need to continue to do them? Well, I think that's, that's,
that to me is more of a societal question in some respect because do you
want beaches in the Grand Canyon for river runners, et cetera? I can tell
you, I want beaches for the repairing. I want sediment there for the
riparian zone, for the birds, for the lizards. I want them to build
backwaters for fish, et cetera
more than I want them for beaches, for camping on even though beaches for
camping on are great. So it's, it's the societal um desires or objectives
I think need to be looked at periodically and recalibrated. Should we be
putting? You know, now, I think to me the more important portion that if I
were there running it, I'd be looking into is the impact of climate change
downstream. Because, you know, I was just up there and it was in May for
NAU had asked me to come up and talk about adaptive management to a bunch
of Brazilians from who are working on developing an adaptive man program
for the Amazon River. So I went up and I spent the day I went up to the
dam with them. We did a float. I was amazed how much that system has
changed up there because of the um the aquatic plants that are in the
system now that weren't there before what's lost from the system and how
the riparian zone has changed part of that. A large part of that between
the dam and Lee. Very exactly part of that is due to the fact we've had
low reservoir elevations in Powell which has brought warmer water
downstream. Some invasive species have gotten in. Well, Tam for one, I'm
more worried now about quag muscle and a few other species like that.
There's some salamander that Larry Stevens has found up there now that
we're not sure if it's a native or if it's, it's an exotic. So, but to me
the value of having the Adaptive Management program there and the fact
that you're integrating it with what I would consider one of the jewels of
the National Park Service, Grand Canyon National Park sandwiched between
two big reservoirs that are feeling direct impacts of climate change
because of lower hydrology, lower water levels. To me, this is a, this is
an area that we should be nationally internationally embracing for looking
at it in the term, the context of changes that are coming out that are due
to whether it's man or just natural process going on. We need to, we need
to be able to tease these things apart. We have a rich data set to be able
to do that with. So do we need to keep monitoring the beaches as much? Uh
Probably not as much. I think we can get that honed down a little bit.
Should we continue to put effort into the hump impact chub? Absolutely.
It's an endangered fish for a reason. It's limited in where it can live
in the Colorado River system. This is one spot. We wanna make sure we take
care of it and get second population, well established, et cetera, et
cetera. Um Should we continue to do work with the native Americans and the
archaeology? Absolutely. It's there, it's there. I mean, you cannot
imagine the pushback I got from the bureau reclamation for bringing the
eight tribes on board. Absolutely. One of the times I was fired, my boss
out of Salt Lake came down and said, yeah, we brought him down to a
meeting. I think it was at Kos Movie in the Hopi. And he said I never want
to go into another one of those meetings again. I think it's absolutely
worthless. His words to have the tribes involved. All they're gonna do is
cost us money and time and you usually you're not to interact with anymore.
And, and I said, I am gonna interact with them. We're in a need a process.
They are a constituent. They have a right. We've blown them off from the
very beginning. You're damn right. I'm gonna keep meeting with him. He
said, well, I'm gonna have to fire you if you don't. Uh Albanian. So I
called uh I shouldn't say this, but I called George and George did an end
around on some people. And
yeah, but you can't, you can't, well, N A requires you to consult, you
don't get to pick who you consult with. And there are laws requiring
consultation with tribes management impacts their resources and, and the
bureau never even talked to him when you think about Lake Powell, when
they built Glen Canyon Dam, they had what was called a salvage study above
the dam on the north side of the, what would be the reservoir? The
University of, of Utah collected all the stuff they could get as the
waters were literally rising as the theological archaeological cultural
baskets, you know, things like South Side, it was a museum in Northern
Arizona. So you had um um Ned Danson and his crews, they were just out
there picking this stuff as literally as the water was rising. That was to
that, to the bureau that was consultation.
That's fine. You need to, you need to go to window rock and sit through an
eight hour council meeting where they're speaking Navajo and maybe they'll
speak English for two minutes to you at some point. But you need to be
there. You need to, to be let them part of the process but nothing here.
So I think that part of it continues to be important to me and I think it
should be to the nation because the tribes are an integral part of this
part of the, of the country of the world. So it's important. Um a related
question that I had was um what, what did you want to accomplish when you
were involved? But you were unable to.
Well, I didn't know what I, what, what we were gonna accomplish. So I
guess all of it is good. I think how it ended up in terms of structure. Um
I would have done a little differently, but again, what do you mean by
that? Well, I'll just take as, as an example um the um organization of the
Adaptive Management Committee, there were two environmental seats,
there were a whole bunch of seats for the water users, the electrical
users, you know, other folks and main agency administrators, et cetera to
have two people who represented the environmental community to me and
there was nobody there representing the science community. They were part
of the technical work group, but they weren't, they didn't have a voting
seat at the committee. And when was that? Well, that was when they set it
up in 96 and they were starting to set up in 96 implemented in 97. Seems
like things have changed quite a bit since they've changed a bit. I mean,
I don't, I think that the, the users have still more power than the
conservation entities and the certainly more than the science entities do.
Um, I would also say that adaptive, the, the process, like any process
over time will tend to get insulated. And I think that's happened to some
extent. How do you get out of the insulation? The Everglade? Well, we saw
that in the Everglades. What we did is we set up that the re meandering of
the Kissimmee River, that's part of it. But there's, this is actually
getting more water to the ever the river grass. So the unwinding or
winding, rewinding the Kissimmee was core of engineering project, but
there's, there's bigger parts of that. There's the water quality of Lake
Okeechobee is part of that. What we do with Hoover Dike is part of that.
What we do with opening up the ability to move water south to the
Everglades. So opening up roads, building, um elevated roads so the water
can pass through without getting pounded up. It's all part of that. But
what we did there, um, was that every two years the Academy of Sciences
comes in and do the broad oversight of, are we still on the right track?
They're evaluating the science or they're the science and the management,
you know, kind of look at it in a broad 50,000 ft view. I think you need
to have periodic check ins to make sure you're still moving in the right
direction that Congress directed you to do that the science is, is coming
in and showing you to do and that the agencies and the public are
expecting you to do. So, I think periodic resets of sorts would be a value
added to the process. And certainly if you see now other places where
adaptive management is being implemented more successfully, you have
periodic resets. And I don't want to make that sound like you go in and
change everything been maybe two years, five years, 10 years. And I don't
know what the magic number is, but you come in and open yourself up to
peer review just as we as scientists would. If you're writing a paper, you
get outside people to give you input to make sure you're still moving in
the same direction. So I think increasing um exposure of science and
conservation on the adaptive management work group would be appropriate.
And I think having periodic reviews would be two things right off the top
of my head that I would think of a little earlier. You mentioned that
there are three prongs to adaptive management. You mentioned the
scientific research being one prong the administration of the program and
the agency's management actions is another and then public participation,
public participation in education and education. Can you, do you have any
opinions about how the three of those prongs intersect are there times
when one is more powerful than the other? How do you get them to work well
together and integrate because you want the science to inform the
management and you want the public to be satisfied and that doesn't always
happen. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship of those problems
? Well, you're absolutely right. They do kind of jumpstart and some will
be further ahead or further behind than others at certain times. Um Again
, when we were designing this test, this experiment of sorts, uh didn't
have a lot of to go on. So we're kind of making it up as we went. And
that's where Steve played a really key role in this because he would kind
of keep feeding ideas to a certain extent on this or questioning. He, he
was sometimes like biggest critic. Uh what are we trying to do here? And
why are you trying to do that sort of thing? Um But I think all of them
are necessary and it's inevitable that some will have to take precedent
over others at certain points in the process. Uh That being said, I think
if I were to do it over again, I think the science, the scientists were
hard at the beginning, but once you got them on board, they kind of got it
why we're doing adaptive management. And how now that being said we still
have Agency sciences who are driven by the latest co-operative Agreement
requirements, et cetera. So you need to make sure there are scientists
there who think at different levels, some that are at the 5000 ft, some
that are at the 30,000, some at the 50,000, the value of the Academy
science at the 50,000 to kind of get, make sure you're still moving in the
right direction for the right reasons sort of thing. So that science needs
to move forward and there needs to be bridges or intersections back and
forth, the uh the administration part of it, once they were forced to
embrace the concept, then you have to educate them on what it means and
how it's going to impact and be applied. Part of what we ended up doing as
part of the Adaptive Management Program is that every month I would get on
an airplane. Um and I would or drive to get in a car, either drive to page
or to fly to Montrose, Colorado where Western area Power Administration's
offices were still and we would sit down monthly and we talk about this is
what the science needs to have in terms of dam operations for this next
month. Or, you know, we'd look out three months, but we, you know, always
have a three month kind of moving forward average. And we talk about what
that meant to the guy who sits at the control, at the base of at um floor
nine in the control room at Glen Canyon Dam because I wanted to have them
feel they were part of the process.
So, and that was one of the smartest things we did is Dick White who was,
who ran the power office at Glen Canyon Dam. It was his guys who were at
the gauges and he had me come in and talk to him. So they knew why this
bunch of crazy scientists were downstream doing this and why, what they
did was important. Now, did they agree with what we've done? I would say
probably 90% of the time they didn't, but they understood why we were
doing it. So again, on an administrative level, you got to get to the 5000
, the 20,000 and the 50,000 level, the regional directors in the executive
review committee, they have to be working with you and not against you.
And I made a few mistakes and had him working against me on certain
occasions. So that doesn't help. And then the public in the education
prong of this, the public needs to keep you need to keep the public
working with you, not necessarily agreeing with you, but understanding
what you're doing. We had, like I say, when we were sued twice by trout
unlimited for the experimental, first experimental flood because the trout
fishermen were convinced that we were gonna destroy the trout fishery
below Glen Canyon Dam without flood. They had seen what happened in 8383
was a whole different deal than 96. You wouldn't think 13 years would have
that big a difference. But already the ecosystem had changed more because
of how Arizona game and fish was managing the fishery than it had to do
with the flood. The fish moved to the side. They know where to go when
high water comes. They weren't being flushed downstream. But during the
experimental flood, what was the effect on the trout fishery? Very little.
Ultimately, no, what it affected was their food base in terms of the coa
getting picked up and pushed away. Let you know that thing's five minutes
slow. Ok. Ok. We got about 25 minutes before we close. Ok. Thank you.
Ok. Um, so, but so the, the, but to the try of limited pieces, you gotta
keep educating the public as you learn and make sure the information gets
out to them, whether it's in public fluff pieces or N pr or you just, you
gotta keep educating as you move along here through the process. And what
do we gain when all of that is working? You get the public trusting what
the government's doing. Maybe not always agreeing with it but
understanding why they're doing that, there's one important part of this
that I think, um though the, though the being in the government, they
would say you don't need this. But I think you do, I think you need to
have a point person who a spokesperson of sorts, who the public trusts
being able to have that dialogue with the public and with the politicians
and with the scientists. So as hard as it is for a person and if you're
working in the government, the government never wants to have a person, be
the point person, so to speak it, you're all part of the, the broader
group. It's important that you do cultivate leadership in that, in that
arena, somebody who's good, good speaking and who can communicate, it's
critical that they communicate.
So, so we gain trust because uh of the transparency and the collaborative
engagement with stakeholders, that's an important but you have to be
consistent. You can't just show up, you know, for one decision, for one
meeting when you need a decision like the next day and you can't let the p
if the public thinks you're just there checking a box. That's the worst
thing you can do. You've got, they've gotta be, you gotta be working them
way before that. And how about accomplishments? I mean, we, we've got a
couple of decades of, of research and adaptive management. What would you
say, um, has improved as a result of this work. We know more about the
Grand Canyon. We know we have a lot more science. Now. I think there is an
understanding that the agencies will need to work together. They don't
always do that but that there is a forum for them to have that discussion.
Um It's unfortunate in my opinion, my and this is mine alone that um
so depending on the administration and who they have as their secretarial
representative, sometimes it's collaborative, sometimes it's dictatorial.
They want, they, they'll tell you it's collaborative but it's checking
off a box and they're, you know, they're just basically this is how we're
gonna do this no matter what you tell me sort of thing. So you need to be
it. I would say that we've gotten more science. We do have a forum and
it's proven for him now for discussion and dialogue. Um I don't believe
we've fully
embraced everything we should with the tribes yet part of that is we don't
fund the tribes to participate and the tribes got to come up with their
own bucks. Most of these tribes don't have the dollars to participate at
the level of the Fish and Wildlife Service or Western Area Power
Administration or Creta or people who have a checkbook and I have a ch
mcneil and I think that's part of it that if I would have had something to
say in this, that I'd go back and change, it would be that the United
States government would support the native American groups involvement and
engagement in this. You'd like to see that added, I would have put that in
there just because of the role that the United States government has with
our sovereign nations, the tribes just because I see that they don't, they
are often given the credibility or the ability to interface at the level
of Creta or the level of uh the Salt River project or any of the other
stakeholders who have a trained staff who have a checkbook to travel, go
to meetings to be participants. The tribes just don't have that capacity.
And that was the nice thing we started with the Glen cane studies. It
wasn't continued, but where the EPA money came in, we were able to bring
in money from EPA to start training tribal staff because they had the
tribal program and we use that to get the qualify spooled up in their
natural resources department. The Hopi uh the San Juan Pa, that's the
money that started those programs. All was seed money we got from EPA and
we brought it in and just rolled it up and I think that's important as a
result of that increasing uh involvement in collaboration with tribes. Do
you think that uh operations at Glen Canyon Dam have been altered in a way
that is beneficial to archaeological resources or cultural resources in
the Grand Canyon? Um I would say that we're still seeing erosion of a lot
of those resources, slow erosion than otherwise. It's hard to say. I mean
, I think it, it varies. I remember sitting at the Salt Mine Beach below
the confluence of the Little Colorado with Farrell Sekou when he was still
alive and was chairman of the Hopi tribe. We had taken, we were done with
doing a river trip together. Uh Mark Reisner was on a trip with us. Um
Well, another tangent. Mark's first, I took Mark Reisner on his first tour
of Glen Canyon Dam. This was after he had written Cadillac Desert after he
had never been to Glen Canyon Dam before he wrote Cadillac Desert. So, but
, and we became friends after he um wrote the book and we took him on a
river trip. But anyway, Farrell and I were sitting there and you know,
it's just to the, to the Hies, it's not necessarily
a location or a rock or a beach, it's the area. So to him, any change, any
impact the dam is having is a change that is not natural.
So, yeah, it's continuing to impact their resources. Those beaches are
getting smaller.
Um we did, you know, as part of the EIS, we did, we, I had crews that
literally walked from Glen Canyon Dam to Lake Mead on both sides of the
river. Every foot from Glen. Think about that Glen and, and I had Jan
Balsam in the park service, hire people to do this. But that's, they
walked it. Every,
I didn't even think that was possible. You wouldn't think that they did it.
And we had boats. I had so many trips on the water. It was just amazing.
But, um, you know, that level of science has never been done anywhere
else before. So, you think about it, we've, I, is it everything that it
could be? No? Is it better than it would have been? Absolutely. Does it
have promise for the future? Of course. Yeah, we just gotta keep building
on it and keep working it and not let it just become a checkbox, in my
opinion. That's not what we intended when we put the Grand Canyon
Protection Act together. It's called the Grand Canyon Protection Act for a
reason to protect the Grand Canyon for a long, for forever perpetuity.
I think that's a great place to end the interview, don't you? I do pretty
good.