Keeping Our Feet Dry - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 201

The commitment has to be well funded and sustained for at least a hundred years.
“That's the way the Dutch think: work withnature, and think very long term,” Bea ob-
serves. “They've been doing this since the thirteenth century. We have a lot to learn from
them—if we're willing to listen.”
As Congress dithers, and the Corps refuses to listen to outside advice, some people
have built innovative solutions on their own.
THE BIOENGINEER
One day I stepped aboard the TuleQueenII,a forty-foot-long aluminum catamaran
captained by Jef Hart , to see how he has developed a soft-engineering approach to
restoring Sacramento Delta levees that could be a model for other projects. Hart is a
tall, bearded, fifty-eight-year-old Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist and the son of
a Sacramento River farmer. He runs Hart Restoration, a nursery that sells “California-
friendly” plants, which require minimal maintenance, are drought tolerant, and are be-
neficial to wildlife and insects.
“It is to nobody's advantage to let the levees go,” he said. “It could lead to ecological
and economic disaster for California.”
Hart lives next to a levee, in Steamboat Slough, and sees the Delta levees being tested
every day. Some stressors are natural, such as river flow, tidal action, or flooding. Some
stressors are man-made, such as boat wake, tree cutting, and roads built on top of levees.
Most of the Delta levees were not carefully engineered but were built informally by
farmers and laborers. Some were built on top of natural silt deposits—narrow, some-
times infirm spits of land that were enhanced with piles of sand, dirt, and rocks during
150 years of reclamation. Maintaining this fragile “coalition” of materials is a constant,
expensive challenge.
Sensitive to criticism that poor maintenance contributed to the breach of the Delta's
Jones Tract in 2004, and New Orleans' levees during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the
state of California and the Corps have been “armoring” Delta levees against erosion
by dumping boatloads of rock along the levee walls. But the rock is expensive, costing
about $8,000 to $10,000 per linear acre-foot, Hart said, and while it looks imposing, it
is ultimately only a stopgap.
Furthermore, the Corps has threatened to remove vegetation along hundreds of
miles of levees in the Delta (and across the nation), believing that plants weaken the
earthen berms. Classically trained “engineers abhor nature,” Hart said. “To them, plants
are the enemy. They argue that the roots go all the way through a levee and weaken it.
That's not true for all plants. You don't want really big trees growing out of your levee,