Redwood Reader

SERIES: NORTH COAST: A Kayak Adventure
HEALING A WATERSHED
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/23/MNGCHES76R1.DTL
Paul McHugh SF Chronicle 9/23/05
Chris Larson, Freeman House, Joe Zanone and the Mattole Restoration Council were interviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle in part of a series about kayaking down the North Coast from Crescent City to the Bay Area. The Mattole article laid out the situation and improvement seen in fisheries the last few years. We know the massive amount of work needed without going into details, the main problems still revolve around sediment mostly mobilized by past land practices and heavy precipitation. Most of the back country in Northern California has been logged at some point and thousands of miles of skid trails and roads are funneling peak event runoff, which in turn carves or destabilizes the land down slope. Mattole Restoration Council has worked on road decommissioning for years with BLM in the King Range, And BLM put a road to bed on Larrabee Buttes, and selective sites are or will be at Headwaters, King Range, HRSP and Gilham Butte. We are glad to see some fish numbers, and a little discussion on the estuary. We got a number on per yard costs from the article below, about 2.50 a yard. Eighty million yards would be 200 million. Maybe its just that I’m getting so used to everything in billions that that doesn’t seem like a lot.
An excellent article about putting roads to bed in Humboldt Redwoods State Park’s Mill Creek in Weott in Erosion Control (http://www.erosioncontrol.com/) magazine this month. Written by Ethan Casaday, an engineering geologist with the North Coast Redwoods District, California State Parks, the article covers the setting, background, objective, entire process of planning, funding, preliminary studies, prescriptions, implementation and actions, a detailed post construction analysis of the project and the participants gives a clear idea of issues on the ground, and suggests ways to smooth out the process. This project is in keeping with the philosophy of working on entire sub-basin tributary watersheds at once. It cost $515,272 to close 20.4 miles of road, it cost around 2.50 a yard to mitigate road problems in this project. The setting accurately describes conditions throughout the area, although heavy precipitation is not mentioned. These are the same issues Good Roads Clean Creeks is attempting to fix, although damage is so extensive that only a percentage is likely to see the kind of money needed to return it all to natural contours. The Mattole reaches to ten miles of logging road per square mile.
IN the analysis a point is made about some problems in the wet season. We point out that this process would benefit from an inclusion of glomalin thinking, which needs to be grown back quickly, limiting the exposure to failure causing weather events. While mulching reduces impacts and creates seed catching areas, knocking down trees after the work seems like throwing away the accumulated soil stabilization factor of glomalin and root growth. Taking care not to bury functioning glomalin pockets is another consideration. Future stability of the slopes depends on revegetation and the land will slowly stabilize, with no sediment after ten years of regrowth as in studies by Redwood Sciences Lab. Still, landslides are still possible if soils are buried that were fed by trees removed in the process, the glomalin will decompose over several decades before all the soil glue is gone. Hopefully by then enough new material is being produced to keep the land glued together.
An interesting note in this regard was mentioned by the representative of the noteholders in negotiations with PL/ScoPac.( http://www.times-standard.com/local/ci_3071334; http://www.northcoastjournal.com/092905/news0929.html). They wish to separate Scopacs land holding from PL’s mills, as most other operations have done in the past twenty years, and reinvent themselves along with the current more sustainable views of institutional owners and environmental groups. They recognize the logged over land cannot support neither the debt nor the mills by themselves, and that PL needs to buy logs from more sources. They want new management plans for Scopac more in line with the current array of large landholders, which have switched from industrial owners, to institutional owners, many with no-commercial logging clauses in the title. This is a problem because it precludes development of commercial uses of thinning and fire protection materials and limiting possible uses to lop-and-scatter or pile burning or onsite chipping.
Finally,clear evidence of mankind causing warming is not keeping pace with the actual changes we are seeing. Revelations about the inability to know the effect of changes in the sun itself is throwing everything into question except the facts on the ground. The earthshine, or albedo, is poorly understood. Yet we can see massive change in land use in the last twenty five years, and bare ground stores heat and reflects light while vegetation absorbs light and cools through several mechanisms including transpiration, evaporation and shade. It appears something is happening to cause a ten to thirty percent increase in sun energy influencing climate. It must be remembered the geologists tell us the magnetic field of earth is in flux and that could happen quite rapidly. Finally, Ice Ages appear and disappear much more quickly than previously believed. Miss a couple of years of summer and the glaciers will be back. Wild fluctuations of average temperature in short time periods have occurred in the past, humans are extremely adaptable. The difference this time is infrastructure and political boundaries, centralized agriculture and the sheer size of the human population. An example this year is a thirty percent reduction in European plant net productivity due to drought. This in an area where drought has been going on for five or six years and large swaths of forest burn every year, and it is harder and harder to revegetate because there is not enough timely water. Could be desertification from local use but more likely a shift in weather patterns. We know now a large amount of rainwater is generated from evapo-transpiration over land, and this moisture travels the jet stream, creating rainfall continents away.
One thing nature has worked out is to take advantage of natural resources for environmental modification to take advantage of climatic conditions. The amount of land being devegetated is as much cause for concern as smoke in the atmosphere or vanishing species. More carbon is being added to the mix from glomalin destroying land practices. Not enough attention is being paid for the need to use this rising atmospheric fertilization to stabilize landscapes, provide water storage in the biological zone, increase forest production of gases that lead to particle formation and cloud formation. Destruction of wetlands also reduces our natural defenses against storms and flooding. Coral reefs play a part in mitigating storm surge. All are benefiting from increasing CO2, in many cases with added emphasis in warmer situations. But without it being recognized the process is constantly undermined by the results of our activities.