Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
16.4 Linking the First Step to the Big Picture
This beginning framework for attaining sustainable watersheds is like an open electrical
plug—it still needs an outlet to complete the circuit. The larger picture (or outlet) is repre-
sented by the status of watershed management in the United States, so before completing
the circuit, it makes sense to appraise the current state of affairs.
A large quantity of academic literature exists along with a large reservoir of technical
documents detailing professional watershed management experiences. A few key themes
emerge:
• Watersheds are landscape units defined by topographic boundaries; they contain
multiple political units with formal boundaries not coincident with the watershed
boundaries. As a result, communities with control over their land use decisions
act primarily in their narrowly bounded self-interest and do not plan for the ben-
efit of the entire watershed.
• There is not enough attention paid to or money spent for implementing nonstruc-
tural changes within watersheds. Most of the water management is performed
by federally and locally contracted engineers who implement predominantly
structural controls. Many of these structural controls, especially channelization
measures (Chapter 12), create a variety of problems for attaining sustainable
watersheds.
• Land and water management are separated in the United States. At the federal
level, the National Resource Conservation Service, Bureau of Land Management,
and the U.S. Forest Service (among others) manage public lands, while the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Army Corps
of Engineers manage water resources (among others). Many states also have dis-
tinct agencies for addressing land and water issues. This separation impedes the
progress of watershed management efforts by increasing bureaucracy.
• Response to environmental problems in the United States is reactive, rather than
proactive. As a result, it takes a major disaster to catalyze change, such as the Santa
Barbara, California oil spill, which helped provide the impetus for passing the
National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (Hedgpeth 1973).
• There is an urgent need for public education about all aspects of watershed
management.
It would be easy to prescribe treatment for these problems. For instance, the boundary
mismatch between watersheds and political units could be addressed by creating a gov-
ernance system at the geographic scale of the watershed to implement watershed man-
agement priorities. This measure, however, would likely meet widespread resistance. For
example, Section 208 of the Clean Water Act during the late 1970s and into the 1980s pro-
moted voluntary regional land use planning efforts for improving water quality. Though
voluntary, local communities reacted negatively to the “command and control” efforts by
the federal government to impose land use decisions. These planning efforts were usually
housed within regional councils of government, and most failed. Communities were eager
to assume local control of their land use decisions (Malone 1990; Kaufman 2000).
Instead of specifying what
needs to be done
with respect to these broad watershed man-
agement issues, our approach is to focus on what
can be done
now with the beginning
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