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Topics: Environment

What We Have in Common is the Salmon
The Mattole Watershed, California

What We Have in Common is the Salmon. "The Mattole Restoration Council is a coalition of community groups, landowners, and individuals in the Mattole River watershed seeking to restore and sustain the healthy functioning of the watershed's natural systems, such as forests, fisheries, soils, flora and fauna. The council is founded on the idea that the people living here are the ones best suited to work toward these aims." This case study examines local efforts to preserve the Mattole River watershed area as well as the local ranching and forestry industries. Case study plus.

Case Study Plus: What We Have In Common Is the Salmon

Ted Bernard and Jora Young, 1997

Chapter 8 from the book, The Ecology of Hope: Communities Collaborate for Sustainability, by Ted Bernard and Jora Young. (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by the authors. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.

For individual use only. For permission to include this chapter in a course reader, please contact New Society Publishers, P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC, V0R 1X0, Canada. Tel: (250) 247-9737. Fax: (250) 247-7471. E-mail: nsp@island.net. To order a copy of The Ecology of Hope, please send $16.95 plus $3.50 postage to the above address or call 1-800-567-6772 for credit card orders.

Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place, restore its life-supporting systems, and establish and ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of existence within it. Simply stated it involves becoming fully alive in and with a place.

- Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann [1]

The valley is alive. The river sings and swells with life. The land struggles towards health, against odds, always producing marvels. There are other valleys but none more beautiful.

- David Simpson [2]

There are no cities or towns in the Mattole Valley. To get to the tiny villages of Petrolia and Honeydew takes an hour of careful driving on some of the most spectacular of North American roads, wending their way over the Coast Range. When the builders of Highway 1, the coastal route north from San Francisco, encountered the Mattole's mountainous and tectonically alive terrain, they gave up and fumed the road eastward to join interior Highway 101. The Mattole makes Virginia's Eastern Shore seem readily accessible. It's an isolated place, strangely sequestered, a lost coast and a valley of incomparable beauty.

Athapaskan-speaking Mattole and Sinkyone peoples occupied this valley at the time of first encroachment in the early 1850s. Little is known about them, for they were quickly obliterated by settlers, culminating in the massacre of Squaw Creek in early 1864. Survivors were sent to Round Valley Reservation a hundred miles south where they and their language became extinct. "In the span of eleven years, a culture and people which had been in place for hundreds or thousands of years was completely decimated." [3]

Settlers brought cattle, sheep, hogs and a market-driven economy to the valley. Isolated though they were, they found ways to respond to the needs of fast-growing California. Oil wells near Petrolia in the late 1860s raised hopes of quick money but oil deposits proved insufficient and the boom fizzled. A bustling agricultural economy--based on crop agriculture, orchards and stock rearing--emerged in the valley by the 1870s. Fertile soils and ample rainfall brought good harvests. Mattole settlers prospered in a kind of rough-hewn way. They built a school and churches, engaged in a diversity of businesses such as sawmills and gristmills, a slaughterhouse, and, all in all, fashioned a diverse and relatively self-sufficient economy. [4]

At the turn of the century, they briefly shifted to tanoak bark, an early source of tannin for curing leather. Typical of the extractive economy of the day, tanoaks were cut much taster than they could grow back. With diminishing raw material, the tanning factory closed, and the people resumed to agriculture, livestock, trapping and, of course, fishing.

Abundant runs of salmon and steelhead handsomely supported offshore commercial fishers, local river fishing and sport anglers who would converge on the Mattole in winter. The size and scale of seasonal runs were fabled, especially of the king or chinook salmon that returned to the river after four or five years at sea, resplendent 30- or 40-pound adults. During their exuberant runs, horses spooked at crossings and men could simply scoop salmon from the river using pitchforks to load their wagons. [5] Salmon brought to the valley their "utterly exotic intelligence," each and every year. [6]

After the Second World War, loggers moved into the valley. In 1947 more than three-fourths of the watershed was still forested with old-growth—redwoods at the headwaters, Douglas fir in the lower valley. Newly developed bulldozers gave loggers access to steep slopes and serious logging and milling began in the '50s. Between 1950 and 1970, eight sawmills operated out of Honeydew alone. It was a feeding frenzy:

It came out fast ... all in the space of [a] single generation. No one paid any attention to what anyone else was doing. There was no awareness, really, that a whole watershed was being stripped of its climax vegetation all at once.... The trucks taking timber out of the valley were so numerous and frequent that their drivers had to agree on one route out and another one in. [7]

Lowry says "gypo loggers," mostly from Oregon and two or three times removed from the buyers, did the cutting. Working on a very narrow margin, they logged badly, cutting roads with their 'dozers up and down slopes, skidding in the creeks, trying to do the job cheaply. To the ranchers' dismay they left the landscape a wasteland, and virtually all the logging took place before the passage of the Z'berg-Nejedly Forest Practice Act of 1973, California's reforestation law. Once the timber was cut, the land became "stump meadows" for cattle and sheep.

Logging provided good jobs. A generation of men made their living in the woods and mills, and many of them came from ranching families. By the late 1980s the big stands of big trees were largely gone: 91 per cent of the old-growth forests had been cut. [8] Loggers moved on and took most of the jobs with them. What they left behind was an exposed, steeply sloping landscape, subject to frequent tremors and quakes, in one of the wettest places in North America. "For anyone who knows anything about accelerated erosion, this was a formula for disaster," said geomorphologist Thomas Dunklin. The soils quickly found their way into the Mattole.

To make matters worse, in the '60s and '70s many ranchers, especially in the headwaters, subdivided their holdings into 40- to 80-acre tracts for newcomers. Each property required a road or long driveway, most so poorly designed they would annually wash out. By the late 1980s, geologists estimated that 76 per cent of the Mattole's most serious erosional disturbances had some connection to roads. [9] Roads were contributing tons of sediment to the river and its tributaries.

The Salmon Got Our Attention

Salmon now need, more than ever, a strong, informed constituency.

- David Simpson [10]

Places where salmon and steelhead lay eggs and pools where young fish develop--cool, clean gravel beds--were buried in mud. Trees that once provided shade along the riverbank had been cut. Modern Mattole inhabitants, who had in living memory been part of the "dramatic spectacle of life in valleys where salmon run," [12] were alarmed. "Sure, we could see that the rivers here were in trouble," said rancher Lowry. "We blamed commercial fishermen. We could see their boats anchored off the mouth of the Bear River. They used nets and they bragged that they caught their biggest fish at the mouth. Lack of shade for cool water, poor logging practices, a destroyed estuary, disastrous floods in 1955 and 1964, a sea lion population that is out of control, and drift net boats...finished the fish off." [13]

David Simpson, new to the valley in the '70s, told us that king (or chinook) salmon runs, which were reckoned by the Department of Fish and Game to be more than 30,000 in the mid-'60s and were probably a few thousand when he first arrived, had dwindled by the late '70s to a few hundred at most. "The absence of big numbers of fish really got our attention," he said. Though there were forces at sea undoubtedly contributing to the decline, Simpson and a group of newcomers were convinced that the river's bad health was a primary contributing factor. Without places to spawn, they reasoned, the salmon would have no chance whatsoever.

In 1981 Simpson, Freeman House and others formed the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group (now called Mattole Salmon Group- MSG) and pledged to restore the run. With help from fisheries biologist Gary Peterson and a variety of other experts, they became "a volunteer cottage industry in salmon propagation." [14] Peterson, who conceived of himself as "working for the fish," was the perfect technical advisor [[15] ] He contributed not only expertise but also boundless enthusiasm, dedication and "chest wader endurance." Tending fish traps near Ettersburg in 1987, Peterson once stayed in waders for 41 consecutive hours. [[16] ]

"We knew the salmon were leading us into uncharted waters, and we were all novices," said volunteer Rex Rathhun. "But we also knew we had no choice." This was, after all, one of the last vestiges of the original wild mosaic of the valley and a small but perhaps significant component of Pacific salmon genetic diversity. Our response, wrote co-founder House, was to take it on, to attempt to puzzle it through, to learn whatever needs to be learned in order for people who lived in the valley to do what was necessary to make the king salmon population viable once more. [17]

The Salmon Group soon realized their naivete. The salmon had many lessons to teach. Among the most important was that salmon are an integral part of the entire riverine ecosystem that actually extends to the outermost edges of the watershed.

Though the number of king salmon spawning in the Mattole was 1000 or less, perhaps genetically a hopeless bottleneck, the Salmon Group conceived a plan. They would try to boost hatch-to-fry ratios without endangering the natural imprint of the river upon the salmon. Using techniques perfected in British Columbia, they captured a small number of adult fish as broodstock in winter. They extracted, fertilized and artificially hatched their eggs, then reared salmon fry to fingerling size in hatchboxes carefully lined with selected clean gravels and fed by filtered water directly from tributary creeks. The ecological conditions of the Mattole would thus be firmly imprinted in the salmon fry.

With experience, they consistently achieved egg-to-fry survival rates of 80 per cent or more, compared to less than 15 per cent in the river. [18] Since incubators could accommodate 30,000 fish, they believed they could significantly enhance the spring outflow of salmon to the sea. In theory, four or five years later, after these juveniles had matured in the North Pacific, fall runs would improve considerably. Unfortunately, it wasn't this simple.

For one thing, it became obvious that the Mattole estuary, which closes in spring behind a huge sandbar at its mouth, was contributing to high mortality of juvenile salmon. They were either being sent to the ocean too small and vulnerable or they were trapped in the estuary, which in summer would fatally "cook" them. [19]

After tries at trapping naturally spawned juveniles in the headwaters failed and an attempt to create deeper, shaded pools in the estuary proved inadequate, they devised a "rescue rearing" strategy, just as ingenious as the original hatchboxes. In spring MSG volunteers net up to 6,000 naturally spawned downstream migrants, then release them to rearing ponds at Mill Creek near the mouth of the river. These naturally imprinted fish are carefully tended through the summer in cool freshwater pools. There they grow to 120 mm or more, the optimum for ocean survival. When the bay mouth sandbar opens, they are released to the lower river. [20] The Mattole Salmon Group also learned something about centralized resource management, for it seemed to them that bureaucratic blockades were thrown up at every turn. The lesson here is not to be discouraged, for in the long run what may emerge is an improbable, though thoroughly amicable, partnership. It would not have appeared so at first.

Officials of the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) denied permits to nonlicensed civilians trapping and incubating wild fish. [21] One prickly bureaucrat even insisted that only qualified fisheries biologists could drive vehicles transporting live fish. Ultimately, enthusiasm and knowledge overcame official doubt and the Salmon Group was not only given permission for the hatchbox program and other stream-centered work but also DFG funding and praise.

"What we have accomplished in partnership with agencies is remarkable, but we and they can do more," asserts David Simpson. "We have to recognize that these agencies have spent 20, 30, up to 100 years doing their thing. They're not going to suddenly deconstruct just because grassroots organizations are doing some stream work. But they can start to listen and they can develop mechanisms to incorporate grassroots input. Then we will have accomplished something." Simpson's wife, Jane Lapiner, adds: "It seems like the agencies at the top want change and a lot of people in the field want change. But there's this whole middle level in the offices who don't know how. I'm not exactly sure how either, but it is the crucial level to influence."

Between 1981 and 1994, in addition to Department of Fish and Game grants, the Mattole Salmon Group also received funding from foundations and memberships as well as from a unique Salmon Stamp Program devised by the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman's Associations. [22] In this program commercial fishers levy a tax on themselves, or more precisely on each pound of salmon caught offshore. Revenues from the stamp program are then poured back into salmon restoration projects--an economic device that ensures nature is being paid for its service, as neat an arrangement of this sort as we've encountered in our travels. [23]

Not counting thousands of volunteer hours (many contributed by out-of-work commercial fishers), the Mattole salmon rescue program costs about $40,000 a year, most of which goes directly to trapping, surveying, spawning, and raising juvenile salmon. In the fourteen years of the program, more than 500,000 king salmon have been released, a per fish cost of less than a dollar, which besides being far below the cost of raising salmon in high-tech hatcheries, maintains genetic purity in the run. [24]

In spite of uncertain funding, the Mattole Salmon Group continues its work. At least as important as hatching salmon, everyone agrees, is making people aware of their watershed identity. By involving school children each year to help raise juvenile salmon and release them to the river, a whole generation of kids now knows about the biological, ecological and cultural significance of salmon to people, who, like themselves, have the good fortune to live alongside a free-flowing natural river that empties into the North Pacific. "With the children, many good seeds have been planted," said Jane Lapiner. "Who knows where this will lead?"

One of the obvious advantages of building a restoration ethic through hands-on work "is that working together provides people with...common experiential information," Freeman House told the editors of Turtle Talk. [25] While this is certainly true of Salmon Group volunteers, they still represent a relatively small slice of people who live in the watershed. Though ranchers were never systematically excluded, most were never included either. Consequently, some ranchers still think of the Mattole Salmon Group as an exclusive environmental club.

Has all this salmon work actually made a difference? In the first ten years of the hatchbox program, numbers of both chinook and coho salmon declined. Less than 200 chinook salmon spawned in the entire Mattole in 1990. However, recently salmon numbers seem to be on the rise. In 1995, 750 to 1,000 king salmon made it upriver, the biggest run since 1987-88. [26] The numbers of large salmon observed and the average size of fish trapped both increased too. Yet short-term trends will not determine the survival and good health of salmon runs here or anywhere in the North Pacific.

Many residents believed that saving our salmon runs was simply a matter of a few years of operation of a few hatchboxes. This was never the expectation of the Salmon Group. We felt right from the onset that making a difference in a watershed that had been as heavily impacted as the Mattole was going to require work not of years but of decades, even generations. [27]

The fate of salmon that spawn in the Mattole also depends significantly, as rancher Lowry asserted, upon what happens once they swim to sea. Salmon in the North Pacific are under extreme pressure from trawling and incidental catches, international gill and drift netting, weather, disease and water pollution. As a consequence, in the 1990s salmon fishing regions in California have become economic disaster zones and sport fishing has been severely curtailed.

In spite of all this, "the Salmon Group's hatchbox program has been very important," concludes Freeman House. "Without their efforts, the salmon would probably be gone." For Mattole salmon who, in their time at sea manoeuvre around gill- and driftnets and avoid trawlers at every turn, the end of their journey is now somewhat more reassuring, though their muddy home river continues to be far less than ideal.

Gary "Fish" Peterson cautions, "While we celebrate the gains that Mattole salmon are making, we must keep in mind that only by exercising the utmost care in our land-use practices in this watershed do these gains have any prospect of continuing." [28]

Beyond the Hatchboxes

The Mattole Restoration Council is a coalition of community groups, landowners, and individuals in the Mattole River watershed seeking to restore and sustain the healthy functioning of the watershed's natural systems, such as forests, fisheries, soils, flora and fauna. The council is founded on the idea that the people living here are the ones best suited to work toward these aims.

- Mattole Restoration Council Brochure

Over the decade of its life, the council has engaged a broader cross section of watershed residents (though mainly still "back-to-the-landers" rather than ranchers), has taken controversial positions on logging and logging practices, has been a timber-watch group, and has engaged in a wide range of river restoration activities. These range from serious study of geomorphology and the sources of erosion to in-stream erosion control and tree planting, seeding, and slope stabilization. Recently, the MRC has also been a "watershed witness," monitoring and mediating forest harvest plans in the still uncut reaches of the Mattole, and engaging in road improvement and decommissioning on Bureau of Land Management property.

In 1989 the Restoration Council published Elements of Recovery, an extraordinary local geography, rich in cultural, historical, ecological and geomorphological detail, a handbook for watershed restoration. The Mattole is subdivided into 12 units, each a grouping of tributaries covering 50,000 acres or less. A small battalion of resident surveyors, trained by Redwood National Park geologists, then went into the field to plot sites and sources of erosion in every reach of the river. This information and an earlier survey of salmonid habitat form the basic templates for MRC work.

Topographic maps and aerial photographs plaster the walls of the Restoration Council office. In imagining how a new kind of resource management will actually be put into force, this is reassuring testimony of the importance of local geography in any community-based initiative. "It's clear that you can't begin to work without detailed knowledge of the place," said House. Janet Morrison, Council Director in 1994, said that Freeman House's co-ordination of mapping the Mattole for the erosion survey was the very base upon which everything else has been built.

Among the most impressive maps is a two-color poster comparing forest cover in 1947 with that of the late 1980s. Besides graphically portraying the post-Second World War timber splurge, the map and the act of its creation empowered the MRC with information to tackle both the most seriously scarred landscapes and to protect the remaining small patches of old growth. By 1996, dozens of high priority erosion scars had been healed and about two-thirds of the small area of remaining old-growth forests had in some way been protected. [30]

These impressive accomplishments would not have been possible without a base of verified data. Fervently committed to the concept of "watershed identity," the MRC tagged all other information--salmonid habitat, land ownership, roads, building sites, land cover, forest harvest plans--to drainage units. This locally conceived and controlled manual geographic information system itself speaks volumes about the importance of local geography in reconnecting humans to the ecological systems they inhabit and reinhabit.

Freeman House puts it this way:

By spending the time to reorganize biotic, geologic, and demographic information into a watershed context, we are ritually reanimating a real place that had become totally abstracted. Our maps of salmonid habitat, of old-growth distribution, of timber harvest history and erosion sites, of rehabilitation work, our creek addresses for watershed residents, become, when distributed by mail to all inhabitants, the self-expression of living place. [31]

The Restoration Council goes from season to season with part-time directors and staff. They receive funding from the state, the Bureau of Land Management, foundations, and direct marketing companies who donate trees for planting to offset the paper they consume (another economic device to pay nature for services rendered). In 1995, they took in $336,000, mostly for contract work. From this they paid almost $48,000 in wages and $217,000 to independent contractors for rental and operation of heavy equipment and for consultation. [32]

The council has been going through growth pains--but "good growth pains," according to Janet Morrison. In 1995 they signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bureau of Land Management that will open doors and release funds for a wider range of restorative activities, especially in Honeydew and Bear Creek watersheds. As a start in this new relationship, in 1995 and 1996 the Restoration Council decommissioned 3.5 miles of "a road to nowhere" in the King Range, a road that had the potential to contribute significant amounts of sediment to the river. [33]

Besides transacting partnerships with government, MRC also crossed the bridge in 1994 to a new kind of collaboration with rancher Sanford Lowry and Pacific Lumber. At Lowry's invitation, MRC did a baseline survey for his timber harvest plan. Sierra Pacific, which did the logging, and MRC monitored river-borne sediment and road-related erosion before, during and after the cut, for in Lowry's opinion, it's important to know what the salmon can tolerate. [34] As the first tangible partnership with a big landowner in the ranching community and with industrial timber, MRC believes it is breaking new ground.

In the last analysis, the MRC has taken major strides in repairing the wounds of the watershed. Though there is still some logging and associated road construction, there are now more jobs in the valley in restoration than in logging.

From Chaos to Consensus

The basis of consensus, the ground on which it rests, is trust. Without trust, consensus really hobbles along. But it also engenders trust. It's a sort of circle.

- Caroline Estes [35]

Consensus has discouraged us. After all, we are not all Quakers.

- Sanford Lowry [36]

When the endangered spotted owl virtually shut down the California timber industry, "brushfires of emotion" swept through the community, culminating in Redwood Summer of 1990, a series of rallies, blockades, tree- sits and the like, protesting planned cuts of the last big stands of big trees. [37] As the summer of 1990 drew nigh, everyone along the north coast of California became tense. People in the Mattole, base camp for Redwood Summer, remember cordiality fuming to hostility. "It was nerve wracking even to go to the general store in Petrolia," remembers Freeman House. Fuelled by the concept of "zero net sediment," the brushfire in Mattole exploded into a major blaze.

Here's how it happened.

In the highly-charged atmosphere following Redwood Summer, the California Department of Forestry called a series of public meetings to air new regulations requiring zero net sediment from logging operations. These regulations, prompted by sister agency, Fish and Game, made the connection between deteriorating salmon habitat and careless logging practices. But agency timing could not have been worse.

On a cool, foggy day in January 1991, 150 people gathered in Ferndale at the second of two meetings on "zero net discharge of sediment." According to Dan Weaver, a homesteader who would soon play a large role in the watershed: "everybody wanted to protect his own stake, fearing that the meeting's outcome might be detrimental to his own property. The atmosphere was highly charged; clearly there was a feeling among ranchers that 'hippies,' who had been associated with MSG and MRC, were 'pointing fingers.' The timber companies were skittish too."

The meeting started calmly but soon became tumultuous, recalls Weaver. "It was a long meeting with lots of angry tirades and people threatening to walk out or settle things in age-old ways." Though the meeting came close to dissolving in chaos and resentment, at the very end, a small ember for dialogue glimmered. After most of the ranchers had walked out in protest, the meeting's facilitator, a University of California extension forester, called them back saying, "Hey, you can't leave us. Why don't you just form an agenda committee, leave the government out, decide yourselves what you want to deal with." "Leaving the government out" apparently appealed to some. Hard-core rancher Anne Smith suddenly grabbed environmentalist Rondal Snodgrass's hand and held it high above her head. "We'll be on the agenda committee," she shouted, much to the surprise of Snodgrass. That's all it took. The agenda committee, comprising Smith and Snodgrass and a cross-section of other volunteers, promised to lay out a plan for another public meeting. People who an hour earlier were virtually at war went home with hope in their hearts.

As a retired navy pilot relatively new to the valley, Dan Weaver had both leadership and mediation skills and experience. He and his wife, Tally Wren, had even crossed lines in their short time in the Mattole-they had friends among both ranchers and homesteaders. Wren remembers that "everybody felt comfortable with Dan. He had already volunteered to be on the agenda committee; he became the logical choice as facilitator." A couple of weeks later, the committee met and "was a little tight at first," said Weaver, "but we just basically kept talking. By the end of the third meeting, we got beyond hearsay and found some common ground and we were excited. With the help of Freeman and others, we broke through the polarity fence and started talking about how to make the Mattole a healthy and productive place."

There were 11 of us, representing all shades of opinion. Anne Smith, a woman born and raised in the Mattole, from an old family, hosted the meetings. She was very open-minded and played a significant role, when most people had not really developed trust in one another. Among others, were Rondal Snodgrass and Freeman House, who have always been associated with the environmental community; Richard Bettis, from Pacific Lumber, a key figure because he was able to see the value of working with diverse interests; Russell Chambers, a rancher in his eighties who made eloquent statements on how degraded the river had become; and Sanford Lowry, a pivotal figure.

"You have to have people from each of the poles of opinion," Weaver explained, "people who are trusted by their communities and are willing to come to the middle." Lowry was such a person.

In spring 1994, we met Sanford Lowry at a noisy roadside coffee shop in Fernbridge. As orders and aromas of country breakfasts filled the air, we settled into conversation. To easterners like ourselves, he fit our image of a California rancher: a handsome, burly man, sixtyish, wearing a big leather stetson, jeans, cowboy boots, talking straight and sincerely.

It quickly became clear why he was pivotal. He's been chairman of the Wool Growers and Cattlemen's Associations, has been active in community and church, is an officer in the Farm Bureau. He's a respected third-generation rancher. But he's also uniquely a bridge person; on his own volition he's attended a sustainable futures conference at Humboldt State University, participated in California bioregional forums, and is a board member of the Mattole Restoration Council.

When we got to talking about the "agenda committee," he said he volunteered to participate partly on the neighborliness principle, partly on the notion of "tending home." "When you get right down to it, everybody who lives here - the ranchers, the enviros, fishermen, the timber companies-are neighbors by virtue of sharing the same place," Lowry said. "If we don't manage our own affairs, someone else will. As a landowner, I've got to be involved. I don't want to stand idly by. I want some say because I expect to keep my ranch intact and the land is important to me and to my children."

The agenda committee prepared a consensus statement and called a public meeting on April 21, 1991. Well attended, the meeting had the cordial air of collaboration. Those present, again representing a cross-section of opinion, accepted the statement, officially appointed a coordinator (Dan Weaver with help from University of California extension forester Kim Rodriguez), and, a month later, gave birth to the Mattole Watershed Alliance: "a diverse group of residents and landowners working together to improve the health of their watershed and their quality of life through communication, co-operation, and education."

Without bylaws or official structure, the Alliance has met regularly at different sites around the watershed, making all decisions by consensus. So far the Alliance has primarily made recommendations about resource use in the valley. Among these:

• Sport fishing regulations (which were accepted by the California Fish and Game Commission).

• Estuary restoration for summer "overrearing" salmon in partnership with Bureau of Land Management, timber companies, the Mattole Salmon Group, and the Mattole Restoration Council.

• Changes in driftnetting and offshore fishing (position statements were produced).

• Restoration of Mattole Salmon Group's funding through the salmon stamp program and the Department of Fish and Game.

• Bureau of Land Management road repair and decommissioning.

• Paving a Mendocino County road, paralleling the Mattole River headwaters, which was contributing sediment to headwaters.

• Helped convince county road crews to haul landslide spoils to stable sites rather than pushing them into the nearest waterway.

Whatever its shortcomings, the alliance is the first truly cross-cutting coalition in the Mattole. It includes not only all land users and interest groups but also representatives of industrial logging (Pacific Lumber and Sierra Pacific Industries), the Bureau of Land Management, and the University of California Co-operative Extension Service. The California Departments of Fish and Game and Forestry have so far been invited only as consultants.

Like most new collaborative efforts of this kind, the Mattole Watershed Alliance is fragile and clunky. "The alliance sometimes resembles a cart with 16 wheels, four of which are always flat. A different four on different occasions. It's a slow process." [38] Sanford Lowry is similarly discouraged, both with the slow process of consensus, and with the ongoing impression he senses that ranchers, timber owners and timber companies are the villains. "My dream of us all working together because we are all neighbors sometimes looks impossible," he wrote in May 1996. [39] But so far he has not dropped out. Perhaps because of its fragile state, the Alliance did not meet from late 1993 to mid-1995.

"Once we got away from the salmon, we were on thin ice," Weaver said. Discussion of post-fire salvage procedures caused some attenders to walk out and file suit. A timber company representative then stayed away for more than a year. Richard Bettis from Pacific Lumber, who feels so strongly about the alliance that he would continue to attend even if his company told him to pull out, defended industrial timber's paranoia: "What do you expect? We got blindsided by a suit after a forest harvest plan was discussed at an Alliance meeting."

Seth Zuckerman, a journalist who has written extensively about the Mattole and who now chairs the Mattole Restoration Council board, countered by saying, "Unless they give up the right to log without the alliance's approval, they shouldn't expect participants in the alliance to give up our right to bring suit to enforce the law." He went on to tell how limited the alliance can be:

As soon as you start talking about forests and sediment, it gets personal. It's coming off everybody's land, everybody's roads, everybody's building sites. These are matters of people's everyday lives and livelihoods. Consensus disappears. Another reason for this is people's concept of private property values here. Everyone agrees that the salmon is common property, but people can't see the trees as everybody's forests.

Tally Wren believes that a lack of tangible projects stalls the Alliance With a few small successes, Wren thinks the Alliance would be stronger. Its most successful endeavor, she believes, was the estuary project in 1992, a time of remarkable collaboration:

Lots of ranchers, the BLM, a timber company, the Salmon Group, the Restoration Council, and the Alliance--all spending a weekend working on improving salmon habitat. It was almost comical to see the ranchers competing for the driver's seat of the Cat, almost knocking down one another to work on the project. There was lots of donated material, equipment, food; when it was done, everyone felt good.

At the end of the day, everyone credits MWA with raising consciousness and helping chill-out the emotions of Redwood Summer. At alliance meetings, people are more likely to perceive each other as good human beings and to listen to each other's viewpoints. Linda Roush, area manager in the Bureau of Land Management's Arcata Resource Area Office, thinks of the alliance as "a great avenue to get to know people well and also to put some fears to rest that the government may be doing something that they don't know about." Lowry thinks the alliance has "cleared the air" for the Mattole Salmon Group and the Mattole Restoration Council to do their work. In other words, it has enabled the ranching community to understand that their work accomplishes community good rather than threatens private property rights.

As to the future, Freeman House thinks that the new California Department of Forestry designation of "sensitive watersheds," which some residents of the Mattole advocate, may re-energize the alliance or may cause it to come unstuck. Sanford Lowry fears that sensitive watersheds will just add another layer of bureaucracy that people who make their living from the land will have to pay for. [40]

"We don't need 1991 all over again," said Dan Weaver in 1994, "but some of the crisis-driven energy has dissipated." The alliance has survived both a hiatus and some "fairly divisive" lawsuits. "There are still fears out there," he concludes, "but most would rather be making decisions locally. We have not been able to take on tough issues like timber harvesting practices, yet we've developed a common language and with each meeting trust builds. We need to go on."

From Wathershed Alliance to Reinhabitation

Times have changed and the salmon seem to be coping.

- David Simpson [41]

Counting children, maybe a quarter of Mattole residents have so far engaged in this experiment, inspired by the salmon as a powerful symbol of reinhabitation. "It turns out," says Freeman House, "that no one is antagonistic to salmon. If you can make people aware that salmon is what you're helping, almost no one can say no." [42] That people are doing their own resource management rather than leaving it to agencies in Sacramento or Washington is testimony to the power of "home." Out of such work comes confidence that the valley may again become good salmon habitat and continue to be a healthy environment for people, too.

Endnotes

1. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, "Reinhabiting California," in Home! A Bioregional Reader, ed. Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant and Eleanor Wright (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 1990), 35.

2. David Simpson, Meat (Petrolia, CA: Privately Published, n.d.), 8.

3. The Mattole Restoration Council, Elements of Recovery: An Inventory of Upslope Sources of Sedimentation in the Mattole River Watershed (Petrolia, CA, December 1989), 11.

4. Elements of Recovery, 10-11.

5. Elements of Recovery, 12.

6. Freeman House, "To Learn the Things We Need to Know: Engaging the Particulars of the Planet's Recovery," in Home! A Bioregional Reader, 112.

7. Freeman House, "Dreaming Indigenous: One Hundred Years from Now in a Northern California Valley," Restoration and Management Notes, 10, no. 1 (Winter 1992), 60.

8. Mattole Restoration Council, "Distribution of Old-Growth Coniferous Forests in the Mattole River Watershed," Map (Petrolia: MRC, 1988).

9. Elements of Recovery, 6.

10. David Simpson, A Report From the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group," Mattole Restoration Newsletter, 9 (Winter 1994- 95), 6.

11. House, Dreaming Indigenous, 61.

12. House, "To Learn the Things," 111.

13. Sanford E. Lowry, personal communication, 1 May 1996.

14. House, "Dreaming Indigenous," 61.

15. William Poole, "For the Sake of the Salmon," This World Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 June 1987, 9.

16. Gary Peterson, Mattole Salmon Runs Show Improvement, The Mattole Spawning News (Winter 1996): 4.

17. House, "To Learn the Things," 111.

18. House, "To Learn the Things," 112.

19. David Simpson, "A Report From the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group," Mattole Restoration Newsletter (Winter 1994- 95): 6.

20. Simpson, "Report from MSG," 6.

21. House, "To Learn the Things," 112.

22. House, "To Learn the Things," 117.

23. Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society (New York: Wiley, 1971).

24. Simpson, "Report from MSG," 6.

25. Freeman House, "Salmon and Settler: Toward a Culture of Reinhabitation," In Turtle Talk: Voices for a Sustainable Future, ed. Christopher Plant and Judith Plant (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 1990), 110.

26. David Simpson, telephone interview, 12 February 1996.

27. Simpson, Report from MSG," 6.

28. Peterson, "Mattole Salmon Runs," 4.

29. House, "Salmon and Settler," 108.

30. Freeman House, "Watersheds as Unclaimed Territories," In Boundaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment, ed. Doug Aberley (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 1993), 36.; Mattole Restoration Council, Mattole Restoration Newsletter, 10 (Winter 1995-96): 3.

31. House, "To Learn the Things," 116.

32. MRC, Mattole Restoration Newsletter (Winter 1995-96): 2.

33. Thomas Dunklin, The Road to Nowhere Disappears," Mattole Restoration Newsletter, 10 (Winter 1995-96): 1.

34. Sanford E. Lowry, personal communication, 1 May 1996.

35. Caroline Estes, "Consensus and Community," In Turtle Talk: Voices for a Sustainable Future (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 1990), 99.

36. Sanford E. Lowry, written communication, 1 May 1996.

37. Freeman House, "There Must Be a Better Way," Natural Resources News, University of California Extension Service (June 1993): 7.

38. House, "Better Way," 7.

39. Sanford E. Lowry, 1 May 1996.

40. Sanford E. Lowry, personal communication, 1 May 1996.

41. David Simpson, "The Mattole Mouth Opens to a New Age," The Mattole Spawning News (1996): 4.

42. House, "Salmon and Settler," 112.

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