by Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist (read the original in Noozhawk here)
My mom was ahead of her time in the ‘60s, contending we didn’t need to wash our hands if we’d been playing outside. “It’s just good clean dirt,” she’d say. She and my dad still enjoy gardening at 92, testaments to the healthy habit of working in the soil.
Nevertheless, good clean dirt wasn’t the norm in many areas. By the early 1970s the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts made their debuts. With rising living standards, population growth, and the awareness of climate change, maintaining a healthy environment has been a struggle for generations.
The struggle stems from our use of erroneous measuring sticks for cost-benefit analyses. Dr. Charles Wilkinson, one of my graduate professors at CU Boulder, wrote in his “Crossing the Next Meridian: (1996): “It is now clear that there is more in our rivers than we are allowed to see through the lens with which our policies view them.”
Indeed, until the last decade or two, policymakers have largely discounted the crucial “free” services of nature. Water purification, clean air, pest control, natural beauty, energy, erosion and flood control, medicine, food and shelter, pollination, decomposition, carbon storage, and climate regulation form an interconnected, life-sustaining web.
To protect these valuable ecosystem functions, we must protect water, land and air, which are inextricably linked.
New York City discovered this relatively early. After the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act, they needed a solution for the long term. After exhaustive analysis, they realized that preserving the watershed would cost about a fifth the cost of a filtration plant large enough for New York City.
Starting in 1997, they purchased land, shielded reservoirs from pollution, improved existing treatment plants and septic systems, and subsidized sustainable economic development.
Other cities have plunged into watershed management, each with solutions based on their natural resource circumstances.
A forest fire in Los Alamos, New Mexico, forced the town to spend around $17 million in 2000 to clean topsoil and ash from its rivers. Leaders in nearby Santa Fe subsequently began protecting their water source by thinning the forest and burning regular, low-intensity fires.
In San Diego, a federal cap on the region’s share of the Colorado River led officials to incentivize agricultural water conservation. Farmers lined canals and incorporated drip irrigation and micro sprinklers to provide an estimated 37% of the city’s water in 2021.
Last year, the United States issued the first national conservation goal, calling upon land trusts, government agencies, and public-private partnerships to permanently conserve 30% of all lands and waters by 2030.
A keystone piece of legislation will help: the 2019 Great American Outdoors Act. Disbursing royalties from offshore oil and natural gas drilling, the act conserves watersheds identified by the National Park Service, Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Forest Service.
Locally, land conservation and water protection organizations are recognizing opportunities for cross-fertilization. According to ChannelKeeper Board member Bruce Reitherman (also conservation director for the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County):
“There is a natural interconnectedness between water and land,” he said. “When land conservation focuses only on preventing unwanted development, it can leave the ecological quality and function of that land, all of which is so dependent upon water, unprotected … In a world where things are changing so fast, we need to start thinking about better ways to do both.”
On a recent tour of the Andree Clark Bird Refuge, I learned of the city’s plan to implement watershed-based restoration. The bird refuge has suffered water quality and odor issues since the first dredging of the salt marsh in the 1920s.
The plan reestablishes wetlands at the Municipal Tennis Courts, installs native vegetation, and restores dune and salt marsh habitats at the mouth at East Beach. Engineers will also replace the weir gate.
For those of us not on the front lines of restoration, our essential part is recognizing the progress that’s being made and supporting it with our voices and votes. As Dr. Wilkinson urged, “It should not be so hard to mesh the needs of the lands and the waters and the people. They ought to be the same. In the last analysis, they are the same.”
Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist
Karen Telleen-Lawton is an eco-writer, sharing information and insights about economics and ecology, finances and the environment. Having recently retired from financial planning and advising, she spends more time exploring the outdoors — and reading and writing about it. The opinions expressed are her own.