This river was born to run.

I just started writing this blog on freshwater conservation, so I should be talking about river flows and floodplain fisheries and such. But last night I saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform in Cleveland and I can’t get it out of my head.

In his words, Springsteen was continuing the “lifelong conversation” he began with his fans more than 30 years ago.  And it was the kind of conversation you’d have at a joyous family reunion in which the patriarch embraces 20,000 sons and daughters and cousins in an ecstatic bear hug. Then the reunion got a little out of hand as Dad climbed on the piano and started belting out Jackie Wilson and Elvis songs (really, it happened, but I digress).

So what does this have to do with river conservation?  Beyond the fact that The River is one of his seminal songs and albums, this is about the power and the joy and the dignity of trying.

I’ve been a fan of Springsteen since about the 7^th grade, and back then (mid-80s) I came across a decade-old interview with Bruce. In it, he was talking about what drives him to give marathon shows in which he pours out everything in an attempt to raise up, even for a moment, each person in the audience. “You can’t save everybody,” he said, “but you gotta try.”

That quote has always stuck with me for some reason, mostly as a summation of why I’m drawn to him. He has never stopped trying: trying to make a difference, trying to say something meaningful about people’s lives. At the height of his career he eschewed easy commercial records to put out collections of spare songs that force listeners to contemplate the lives of those left behind by America’s economy, or giving names and dreams to otherwise faceless immigrants slipping through the shadows of our country trying to help their families. He dedicates a portion of each show to organizations that fight hunger, like last night’s tribute to the Cleveland Food Bank. And if you’ve ever seen him perform live, the man tries like no one else.

And last night, that quote came back to me.  Thinking about those words while watching his incredible effort—exuberant and raucous, yes, but a massive effort nonetheless—I realized how Springsteen’s approach to work can guide our own efforts.

Working in conservation, it often seems we face long odds, and we must accept the reality that we can’t save everything.  And I know that we can’t–even shouldn’t–attempt to save everything. There must be sober analyses, prioritization and quantifiable measures of success. That is a necessity for the responsible use of limited resources and the best way to advance our objectives.

But while all that is essential—akin to the long hours that Springsteen or any performer puts in behind the scenes, making choices, scrapping things that don’t work, endless repetition—it is not what drives the work.

What must drive the work is the burning conviction that we must try. We’re not gonna save everything, but we’ll try to save as much as we can. And in that trying, there is pride and strength and joy.

(Image courtesy Jeff Opperman/TNC.)

1. Seems fishy, but overall U.S. water consumption has declined in the past 25 years — despite a growing population and increasing water use. Huh? Tina Casey at CleanTechnica says it’s because of more efficient ag irrigation systems and better cooling schemes for power plants (which still amount to 50% of U.S. water use).
2. Barcelona climate talks update: Jeff Tollefson at Climate Feedback says the E.U. might accept a political agreement on climate at Copenhagen rather than a binding legal treaty. (Trust me: You need to know what that means.) Grist reports that European climate negotiators say success at Copenhagen is up to President Obama.
3. In case you missed it, a U.S. Senate committee passed a climate bill yesterday, with all Republican committee members boycotting the vote.  The Vine yawns, saying the real action on the bill will be separate negotiations between Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham.
4. Where could coastal wetlands go when sea level rises? Um…nowhere, says a new report in Environmental Research Letters — more than 50% of the land along the U.S. Atlantic coast that could have been used for inland wetlands migration is developed or soon will be. (Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)
5. Speaking of on the move, half of 36 Atlantic Ocean fish stocks have moved north as ocean temps have warmed, says a new study by NOAA researchers. Some species have left U.S. waters altogether! Just wait until Glenn Beck gets wind of these treasonous climate-change dodgers!! (Hat tip: Yale Environment 360.)

Naturally we in the Cidade Maravilhosa are delighted to have beaten out the Windy City and snatched the 2016 Olympics from under the nose of the not-quite-glamorous-enough First Couple of the United States: even Obama can’t compete with Copacabana when it comes to wowing Olympic committees.

But now that the cheering has died down along with the hangovers, a sober consideration of what the Olympics will mean for the world’s most interesting and biodiverse urban environment is in order.

You don’t normally associate biodiversity and conservation with cities, but Rio de Janeiro is an exception. Its extraordinary topography means that steep hill slopes and mountainsides are still forested: not the least of the issues associated with the growth of favelas, Rio’s hillside slums, is that their expansion corrodes this green mantle.

Rio’s forests are a remnant of the Atlantic Forest that once covered most of coastal Brazil and stretched as far inland as Paraguay. Only 7 per cent is left, making it much more threatened than the Amazon and even more biodiverse, since the surviving fragments act as refuge areas for species that once had much wider ranges. This makes what survives of the Atlantic Forest extraordinarily important. One of Latin America’s oldest national parks, Tijuca National Forest, lies entirely within the city’s boundaries, a natural treasure greater than any of its beaches. What does the Olympics mean to all this? In short, a mixed bag.

There will be big environmental benefits. The thing that first strikes visitors arriving at Rio’s international airport, after the dilapidation of the airport itself, is the stench when you step outside the terminal. This toxic olfactory cocktail comes from the chemical plants and oil refineries that line Guanabara Bay, together with the sewage produced by the 5 million inhabitants of the Zona Norte, where tourists never go but half Rio’s population lives. Gagging on your way into town is an appropriate introduction to the contradictions produced by our glamorous international profile.

With the eyes – and, more to the point, the noses – of the world upon us, something will finally be done: serious sewage treatment and pollution control is coming. Maybe by 2016, for the first time in generations, it will even be possible to swim in the bay. One shudders to think what will happen to the yachting crews otherwise.

But beyond the bay, things are more ambiguous. The coming construction boom will provide alternative employment to the young men in the favelas who would otherwise move into our biggest growth industry after oil: narcotráfico. This boom will damp down violence from criminals and the police (there’s a big overlap between the two). The easy headlines about the risks posed by violence in Rio are misleading: nobody, from the drug lords down, has any interest in choking off the multidimensional bonanza the Olympics promises to be.

And therein lies a problem: after having been stable for 20 years, the city’s population is likely to jump again as the boom attracts migrants from all over Brazil, which means expanding favelas and more human pressure on that precious Atlantic Forest.

This will be most acute in the southern beachside neighbourhoods of Barra, Recreio and Vargem Grande, which were booming for years even before the Olympics. Many of the new sporting facilities in Rio’s bid, including the Olympic village, will be built here. As recently as the 1970s this area was still largely undeveloped, the stupendous beach of Barra fringing an unspoiled expanse of mangroves, coves and headlands ending in Barra da Sepetiba, a scalloped and shifting promontory of dunes and beaches pointing twelve miles into the Atlantic and the glorious (now rapidly overdeveloping) coastline south of Rio.

This oasis of nature so close to a megacity couldn’t last. From the late 1970s, a gigantic real estate boom saw Barra transformed into a depressingly Americanized complex of malls, highways, condominiums and apartment blocks. As the only reasonably flat area with land available anywhere in the city, it was inevitable this area would be earmarked for Olympic development, but the key issue is what impact this will have on the coast’s surprisingly strong zoning and development controls.

Rio’s governments, appalling as they often are, occasionally get some things spectacularly right – the 40% drop in driving deaths since a well-enforced ban on alcohol and driving began last year is a current example. In the late 1990s, in the nick of time, a municipal park called Prainha put the coast immediately south of the real estate boom off limits to developers, preserving the two stunning beaches of Prainha and Grumarí and linking them up to the still pristine coastline around and including Barra da Sepetiba, long preserved by the Brazilian Navy, to whom the promontory belongs. Ironically, a few months before the success of the Olympic bid, the developers had managed to get the zoning laws in Prainha relaxed. Now, with blood already in the water, the level of development is about to spiral. It could well spiral out of control — and if it does, the last piece of properly preserved coastline within the city’s boundaries will go.

Those of us who know and love Rio feel torn. On the one hand, there’s no denying this is a great city with a great talent for spectacle, and it has all the potential to stage a great world event like the Olympics, perhaps more memorably than has ever been done before. But Rio is a memorable place in other, less positive ways. Many local politicians would shock even Tony Soprano, and their corruption and incompetence has mismanaged the city into the ground. Many of its well-known problems are directly traceable to the city’s dreadful politics. With Brazil’s international image on the line, the federal government may have to step in.

The stakes for Rio’s environment are even higher. An image taking a hit is, in the final analysis, a trivial thing –  but once a coast or a forest goes, it almost never comes back. Fingers crossed.

(Image: Prainha, Rio de Janerio, Brazil. Credit: Rodrigo_Soldon/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

It’s Election Day in the United States — get out and vote! Then immediately get back on your smartphone and check out the hottest in online green this morning — including what might possibly be the best green name ever…

1. Mt. Kilimanjaro’s ice cap is disappearing — but is that climate change’s fault? Two research teams are disagreeing, reports The New York Times, with one blaming a decline in moisture rather than rising temperatures. (No word on which side of this debate the band Toto — which had the 1982 smash hit song “Africa,” which in an eerie coincidence mentions both Kilimanjaro and “the rains of Africa” — comes down. We’ll keep you posted.)
2. Meanwhile, Nepal’s cabinet plans to meet on Mount Everest to show the world how global warming is melting Himalayan glaciers, reports Associated Press. (No need for oxygen tanks — they’re only going to base camp, not all the way up.)
3. The leader of Orthodox Christianity — Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who calls himself “the green patriarch” — is in Washington this week, talking up the spiritual importance of environmentalism, reports the Washington Post.
4. Speaking of the Post, check out their great infographic tool that tracks total national per capita CO2 emissions since 1950. (Hat tip: Treehugger.)
5. Which societies will survive climate change best? Gaia Vince (which has to be one of the great green names in history) surveys the field at Yale Environment 360 and likes…Laos, among other places.

(Image: Mount Kilimanjaro. Credit: Picture_Taker_2/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

[View with PicLens]

[Click the individual images to see them at full size, or click the "View With PicLens" link to see a slideshow.]

Volunteer photographer Rick McEwan just finished an assignment for The Nature Conservancy, shooting wetland restoration work in the Conservancy’s Williamson River Delta Preserve in Oregon. It’s a place he just can’t bring himself to leave.

Sure: He gets cramped in the small hide while photographing birds, his boots get sucked up by mud on his way to capture the evening’s indigo night and the bugs gravitate towards his kayak as if it were made entirely of bright light and sugar. But he loves his work. And frankly, so do we.

Click on the gallery images above from Rick’s trek to see them at full size. Then read an excerpt from his journal.

Phew, that was a furious Blog Action Day ‘09 yesterday — with more than 13,000 blogs posting 27,000 blog posts in 24 hours on climate change in 155 countries to almost 18 million readers. (The Nature Conservancy and Cool Green Science were thrilled to be partners in the effort.) But the sun has risen again — and this day brings new word of disappointment for extremely rare turtles, a decrease in American driving, and bad news for freshwater species. Consume it all below:

1. It’s back to the, er, drawing board for the last female Yangtze giant soft-shelled turtle in the world (see video) — she (known by the nickname “China Doll”) laid 188 eggs this year, but none of them hatched, reports EcoWorldly.
2. Why is Senator Lindsay Graham now supporting a climate change bill? The Vine says the South Carolina Republican has  been swayed by the climate-change-is-a-national-security argument and by South Carolina hunters who are seeing the effects of climate change on the landscape. Kate Galbraith at Green Inc. says his constituents are giving him heat for his new stance.
3. More ice, please! Bright Green Blog reports that the Arctic ice cap is melting so fast, it will be gone during summers in a generation, says a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge.
4. Has driving jumped the shark? Fifty percent of American drivers are driving less than usual, says a new Harris poll reported in Environmental Leader, with 18 percent walking to places more than they did six months ago. (Self-powered scooters don’t show up as an option in the poll, even though they’re seemingly everywhere these days.)
5. Finally, some cheery news for the weekend: Freshwater species are the most threatened on Earth, reports Mongabay, with their extinction rates four to six times that for terrestrial and marine species. Even worse, say scientists, the problem is being completely ignored at the policy level.

Boys fishing the Zambezi River behind a crocodile barrier

How do you convince people that a river they’ve known their whole lives is not the river it once was…or could be?

That turned out to be my challenge last week, when I traveled to Zambia in support of The Nature Conservancy’s new project to restore the Zambezi River.  After several days of meetings with our partners — including WWF and universities and government agencies from Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique — I finally got to spend some time on the river itself, in Lower Zambezi National Park.

This was my first experience in an African wilderness, and I was awestruck by the sheer abundance of hippos and crocs and the throngs of elephants, buffalo, antelope and baboons brought to the river’s edge by the blazing heat and parched hills that marked the end of Zambia’s long dry season (see below for a slideshow of the river, dam and wildlife).

While the wildlife had left me with a childlike sense of wonder, it was our dinner companion that night that brought home for me the importance and challenge of this project.

We sat down to dinner amidst a throbbing insect soundtrack, a slow-burning fire glowing in the foreground with the Zambezi a sinuous darker void in the darkness beyond. Joining us was Kevin, a Zambian who manages the lodge where we were staying.  Conversation turned to the health of the river and he told us the majority of his guests were anglers lured by the aptly named tiger fish, a fearsome predator with teeth right off the costume rack of a B-horror movie.

Kevin mentioned that fish numbers were down and had been going down for a while. This seemed a natural opening to talk about one of the specific objectives of our Zambezi project: working with dam managers to improve how they release water from the massive upstream Kariba Dam (called “environmental flow releases”), in part to promote the productivity of fish in this part of the river.

My Conservancy colleague suggested this: “You know,” he said, “some people think the fish decline is because the river no longer has high water during the rainy season because how the dam is operated.”

Kevin, nothing if not blunt, shook his head and said: “Nah, that’s crap. The real reason is that people in the villages take too many fish — they use nets with a small mesh that catch everything in the river, even the smallest fish. That’s why the fish numbers are going down.  But what can you do? You can’t simply tell people not to fish, they have nothing else. What will they do then, come and rob you at night?” He went on to relate his skepticism that the operation of Kariba Dam should, or even could, be altered; it just seemed risky to him.

In this one riposte, Kevin succinctly framed both the need and challenges for the Zambezi project.

First, although the river appears healthy — its water is clean and its banks are wild and rich in wildlife — appearances can be deceiving.  The river is not healthy, or at least not the same healthy it once was. Kariba Dam — big enough to store every drop of water flowing in the river for two years — has tamed it, made it a different river. Before the dam, the river ran high during the rainy season and very low in the dry. Today, the big reservoir behind Kariba captures the floods and evens out the flows throughout the year

Though we don’t have fisheries data from before Kariba, if the Zambezi is like most other big rivers, much of its fish abundance would have been produced in the floodplain grasslands and wetlands when they were inundated by high flows. Now the Zambezi mostly stays in its banks.

Second, the challenges for conservation and of people are intertwined. Overfishing is hurting the Zambezi and, ultimately, the people that depend upon it. The people who live here need some combination of better fisheries management, alternative sources of income and protein, and more fish in the river (one of the goals of the environmental-flows project). These livelihood challenges are inextricably linked with nature conservation and restoration.

Finally, even potential beneficiaries of changes can be skeptical of deviations from the status quo, because the risk of disruption looms larger than the as-yet-unproven possibility of benefits. Thus, the benefits must be clearly analyzed, demonstrated, and communicated.

Kevin’s conviction that overfishing, not flow regime, is the cause of fish decline is partly right — it is a problem for the river as it is today, this river. But this river is different from the river it once was. It’s not surprising that Kevin doesn’t suspect the flow regime; the current river is the only river he’s ever known.  Kariba was built in 1955, and so the only people who can really remember how the river previously worked — let’s say those at least 12 years old then — are nearly 70 years old today.  For everyone else, this river is the river.  And this Zambezi is being overfished.  But perhaps some aspects of the old Zambezi can be restored.

It’s clear we need good communications tools.  If Kevin — who has much to gain from a new flow regime — was skeptical of changes to the river’s management, what would other people say?

Fortunately, we got some practice at that communication later in the conversation. Kevin mentioned that the anglers know they need to fish near the river’s edges, where it flows next to or through downed logs, grasses and other vegetation. “Not out in the middle of the river,” he said. “The water’s too fast and the fish don’t like it. The fish are along the edges.”

I explained that what we talked about before — environmental flows to restore the connection between river and floodplain — was really the same thing as creating lots and lots of such “edge” habitat. Rather than just being restricted to the sides of the river, the shallow, calm, and vegetated “edge” habitat would cover an extensive plain — the difference between grazing cows in a strip of grass along a highway versus a vast meadow.

Kevin nodded his head thoughtfully.  I don’t know if he was convinced, but we’d found some common understanding and vocabulary of how the river worked.  We have much work ahead of us.

(Photo credit: Jeff Opperman/TNC.)

1. A new iPhone app helps track climate change and melting glaciers in the Swiss Alps – visitors to the region can rent the device while they hike among glaciers that have retreated rapidly in recent years.
2. Electricity from switchgrass instead of coal? That’s what power company NRG Energy hopes to achieve with its pilot project in Louisiana that uses dried, shredded grasses instead of coal to produce power.
3. The local and federal government, Native American tribes and environmental groups have hotly contested the future of dams on the Klamath River for decades. Now an agreement has been reached that proposes removal of four dams on the river starting in 2020.
4. A three-year-survey of Chinese paddlefish in the Yangtze has turned up nothing — no fish — leading researchers to believe the species is on the verge of extinction. 
5. The hot news of the day? The Senate’s climate change bill, introduced at a rally on Capitol Hill yesterday. The bill is similar to the one passed through the House earlier this year, with some notable exceptions, including: the Senate bill aims for 20% emissions reductions by 2020 over the House’s 17%.

1. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to climate change has cost it another member – power company Exelon is the third major utility to pull out of the chamber in the past week.
2. Most talk about tropical rainforest focuses around deforestation — how to keep forests standing. But scientists at the 2009 Association of Tropical Biology and Conservation conference asked another big question: Will tropical trees survive climate change?
3. Want to know what America’s 10 greenest brands are? Marc Gunther points out that until “green” is defined, there’s no real way to answer that question. But a new survey of consumer opinions offers a list of what buyers think are the greenest companies.
4. Scientists have created a meandering river in the lab in order to study best practices for stream restoration. The artificial river, built in a 17-meter-long basin, started with one bend but over time developed five bends, functioning much like a meandering stream in nature.
5. The elephant in the room for conservationists has always been overpopulation — how can we save habitats and wildlife if population growth isn’t limited? But an editorial by Fred Pearce in the New Scientist says the real problem is overconsumption. Population, says Pearce, regulates itself. (Hat-tip: Treehugger.)

Kids love the ecosystem services provided by rivers.

I was tucking my five-year-old daughter into bed and, as kids tend to do, she launched into a series of questions  — part curiosity, part stalling tactic. Her topic that night was employment, and she asked why various people did what they did, such as: “Why is Aunt Amy a doctor?”

I mustered a response and then added: “You know, Daddy’s a doctor too,” with a tongue-in-cheek tone — presumably lost on her — that acknowledged Americans’ different perceptions of M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s.

The difference evidently was not lost on her. She responded: “Yeah, but you’re not the kind of doctor that makes people feel better.”

Ouch. An unexpected reminder of how some occupations are widely regarded as helping people, while the value of my job — conservation of rivers — is not always obvious. In fact, I’m sure my daughter isn’t my only family member who doesn’t really “get” what I do.

Which isn’t just a problem for me. It’s a problem for conservation.

And it’s not just those who share my genes. I’m reminded of a decade-old interaction while I was in graduate school.  Out in a San Francisco bar one night, I found myself talking to a very pretty woman.  Searching for a way to describe what I did (and sensing that ‘riparian ecologist’ — and one just in training, no less — might somehow fail to impress) I seized upon a recent Congressional authorization to restore watersheds that support salmon.  If Congress devoted $50 million to what I do, I reasoned, it must signal some sort of importance.

When I told her about the Congressional appropriation, she clutched her stomach as if she’d been hit. “Doesn’t that make you sick?” she said.  Hmm, not quite the reaction I was looking for, unless perhaps she thinks that’s an insultingly paltry sum for such important work. She finished her thought: “I mean, just think of what that money could do for education or sick children.”

People: 1; Salmon (and my prospects): 0.

I wish I’d had a snappy reply such as, “Would you rather that $50 million go for a quarter-mile of a new four-lane highway” (reflecting the staggering per-mile cost of many highway projects), but a beauty contest between all the ways our society chooses to spend money isn’t really the point. A better response would have been to explain that, in California alone, the annual economic value of the salmon fishery — a mere remnant of its historic might — can be measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Investing in healthy, functioning ecosystems often supports people’s livelihoods and grows the economy.

These two conversations are instructive.  As many writers for Cool Green Science have pointed out, conservationists must do a better job describing the linkages between their work and the well-being of people. This linkage is a theme that I’ll try to weave throughout my postings on this new blog, which will focus on water and the conservation of freshwater ecosystems. Rivers, lakes and wetlands provide some of the most impressive examples of how healthy ecosystems provide direct benefit to society.

For example, the Mekong River supports the largest freshwater fishery in the world, valued in the billions of dollars annually and providing the primary source of protein for 60-70 million people in Southeast Asia. What makes this crucial harvest possible? The fact that the Mekong is a relatively healthy, free-flowing river. Fish can migrate long distances to spawning habitats and, every year, the monsoon rains inundate vast  — and phenomenally productive — floodplains along the river. This incredible environmental, economic, and cultural resource is now threatened with plans to build 11 large hydropower dams on the Mekong, and fish biologists say that there is no way the fishery can be maintained if those dams are built.

While conservationists should emphasize these economic values of healthy ecosystems, this concept — that conservation and the well-being of people go hand in hand — must not rely only on dollars-and-cents comparisons. That may work for the Mekong or California’s salmon fishery, but nature’s values are myriad and at times difficult to capture with traditional economics. Conservationists shouldn’t apologize for advocating vigorously for those cultural, spiritual and aesthetic values.

Expecting nature to always pay its way, in a strict sense, would be no different than suggesting that the National Gallery should sell its most valued paintings to private collectors because the most economically efficient use of those hundreds of millions of dollars would be to reinvest them in health care or education.

While jobs and dollars are important, beauty, serenity and inspiration are also essential to our well-being. From jobs to clean water to joy and reverence, there are many ways that the conservation of nature makes us feel better.

Even if people still don’t “get” what I do.

(Image credit: Jeff Opperman/TNC.)