The Costs of Restoration

The Point Reyes Light published my essay in its March 12, 2025 issue. It was edited for space, and the editor suggested I add what I think of the Seashore ranching situation--that version lost some of the nuances of the first draft, which I present below. I like both versions--the published one I'm happy with, but there are a few elements in the first draft I wish could have been included.

3/28/25 update: In the March 27th issue, a letter to the editor says that my "argument wanders between philosophy, policy, and personal anecdotes without ever arriving at a conclusion." He wouldn't like my blog--wandering between philosophy, policy, and personal anecdotes is a good description of it. It is why I am here and hopefully why you are here on this blog--to gain thoughtful insights. And sometimes conclusions. The letter writer also said my "commentary lacks a clear position or actionable recommendations."  I think the editor's suggestion to add my thoughts on the Seashore situation muddled the point a bit, because my main point wasn't about the Seashore--it was about the commentary that had elements that I disagreed with. I do have a clear position and recommendations for the process--my points are all about the process. Process matters. The outcome will be right if the process is done right. The letter writer said he ended up "confused and lost," to use my words about the other commentary and point them right back at me. Perhaps I could have been clearer, and this page hopefully does that.

Some additional elements I wish I had included:

While both are important, ecosystem function is more important than scenery. I remember when I was an intern with San Luis Obispo County's environmental division of its planning and building department, a new house could be built if it were screened or put in a hole that avoided scenery impacts. But that ignores the ecological impacts and just fills the landscape with hidden houses. I'm not sure that is a good outcome.

In both versions I invoke Aldo Leopold's land ethic, but I left out the equally important definition of ecosystem health: "Conservation is a state of health in the land. The land consists of soil, water, plants, and animals, but health is more than a sufficiency of these components. It is a state of vigorous self-renewal in each of them, and in all collectively. Such collective functioning of interdependent parts for the maintenance of the whole is characteristic of an organism. In this sense land is an organism, and conservation deals with its functional integrity, or health." From Aldo Leopold’s 1944 essay titled Conservation: In Whole or in Part? If I could write this again, I would include mention of the capacity for self-renewal as a metric of a healthy ecosystem. 

I would also mention that a lot of the pain of managed retreat in disaster-prone areas looks like this situation too--where people have developed flood or wildfire-prone areas, and it would be best to remove that development for long-term safety, stability, and ecological health. A disaster is what happens when humans get in the way of a natural process. Removing human communities in the wrong place is hard, but either you plan ahead and manage it in an orderly fashion or you don't and you react, sometimes in chaos and with the loss of property and human lives. Ghost towns across the West are examples of the unplanned version. 

It is a similar philosophical question as what to do with stolen property that has been sold to a new owner--taking it back from that owner makes the first owner whole, but is a disservice to the new owner. The first owner in this example being ecological health and the occupancy and stewardship of the first inhabitants--kind of an important thing to restore, but it doesn't make it any easier. 

And one last thing about Point Reyes that didn't get into either of these versions of my article--just imagine if things had been done "right." What if the ranches and dairies and elk had coexisted in a sustainable way for everyone? What if the dairies had better-managed their water pollution and land management practices? What if they had partnered with NPS to do education and living history, making the ranching a part of the visitor experience? It seems like a lost opportunity--if visitors to Point Reyes had looked forward to milking cows and getting involved with the food production every time they visited their park land, things might have gone a different way with that constituency's enthusiasm and involvement leading to a better outcome. That kind of experiment may have also failed in the long run--mixing cattle and elk seems difficult--but it seems like some out-of-the-box thinking could have resulted in better outcomes. Then again, maybe not--some things about our legal and economic systems are difficult to change.

Here's the first draft:

In the February 19, 2025 Point Reyes Light, Call Nichols' opinion piece was thought-provoking, and I really appreciate the perspectives shared in that article. While he raises important points, the urban environmentalist bogeyman is a bit simplistic, the Nature Conservancy attack is misdirected, and if I apply the point of view advocated for in that article to my work ("...imagine there is no such thing as good and bad, right and wrong..." or "...we have nothing to rely on. Anything we think we can fall back on to make decisions or explain things is of our own fictitious creation" or "...drop our ideals...") I end up confused and lost in a nihilistic world where nothing matters.

But everything matters. For 30 years I have worked for NGOs as a hydroecologist to use cooperative solutions to restore streams and rivers in California. And I've learned that every little thing matters.

When you start with a world that has been severely degraded from its healthy functioning condition, you must go back to look at pristine conditions to understand what the degraded system is capable of. Only then can you determine if it is worth the effort--and human impacts--to restore the system. If it is a lot of effort and impact for a little benefit, it might not be worth doing. If it is a huge benefit, then bigger impacts become more justifiable. There is no one-size-fits-all equation for determining this. Each situation is unique. We all tend to share the same values, but the weight we put on each and how to apply them is where we differ. Laudable goals sometimes conflict. You can't always have it all.

In getting my B.S. degree in Forestry and Natural Resources, I had to take a lot more philosophy classes than I would have expected. The reason is clear--in natural resource management decisions, the decisions are not just about what the land is capable of sustaining, but also about people--people's needs, values, desires. Those decisions always require reasoned, principled, thoughtful analysis, and often are not easy. There will usually be winners and losers, and it will always seem unfair to the losers.

When you start with a near-pristine system, and apply good resource management, you don't get into as much trouble with these trade-offs. If no one depends upon the resource yet, allowing only a truly sustainable portion of it to be harvested hurts no one and maintains ecological health. But all of us were born into a degraded state. In order to achieve long-term sustainability, the degraded systems we have must now be restored to ecological health, and taking away some portion of those resources from people is required in order to do that. That is hard, involves winners and losers, and the right solution can't be determined simply by "some humans are so goddamned impactful" and "the seashore just doesn't seem that degraded." These are good guiding principles, but different people would draw the line in different places, informed by different sources of information. It all comes down to the details.

Take California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) for example. SGMA was a 2014 law that requires overdrafted aquifers to reach sustainability by 2040. In many cases, this means the loss of productive farmland that was pumping unsustainable volumes of groundwater from groundwater basins. The loss of that farmland is not easy--and for some areas of the San Joaquin Valley it looks a lot like what Point Reyes is going through now. But the alternative is unacceptable--continue overdrafting aquifers, damaging subsidence, loss of public and private infrastructure, with impacts to low income communities with dried-up wells and future benefits flowing only to those with deep enough pockets to drill deeper and deeper wells.

There are winners and losers in any natural habitat restoration effort. California's rivers have been so excessively diverted that we've lost 95% of our wetlands, fisheries are going extinct, and the salmon season has been closed two years in a row. Rectifying those problems is not that hard--we know what to do scientifically, and releasing more water can happen quickly because it just takes the turn of a valve. But politically and economically, irrigated agriculture is powerful, and the governor is preventing the State Water Board from doing a good job, distracting them with "Voluntary Agreements" that fail to release adequate flows. Depleted polluted rivers and degraded fisheries will be his and our legacy.

As a long-time rural resident, I too have observed that urban environmentalists can get distracted by enticing projects that have impacts on rural people. My mantra to avoid that pitfall: "Respect the land and its inhabitants." This has served me well for decades. You can't cheat nature in the long run, and we have to align our activities with it. Sometimes this respect will result in an unkindness to people unsustainably depending on an overallocated resource. We should minimize that wherever possible, especially where people without deep pockets have few alternatives. Where we have overextended our extraction of resources from the land, and we retract to something more sustainable, future generations will thank us. But the present generation will have mixed reviews.