Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
watershed related to timber harvesting, grazing, floodplain conversion, channel
straightening, fire suppression, road construction, and the installation of associated
fish passage barriers (National Research Council 1996).
Ecological, social, and political dynamics collided with the listing of spring, sum-
mer, and fall Chinook salmon runs in 1992 through the Endangered Species Act
(ESA), followed by summer steelhead runs in 1997 and bull trout in 1998. Social and
economic impacts of the listings were sudden and dramatic, altering land uses in a
county where agriculture and wood products accounted for nearly half of all employ-
ment. The 1992 ESA listing of Chinook salmon resulted in a nearly two-year cessa-
tion of timber sales on national forest lands in Wallowa County. Prior to the anadro-
mous fish protection, federal timber sales accounted for 60 to 70 percent of the
county's annual harvest. The loss of this supply led to closure of three sawmills, the
county's largest private sector payroll providers, in 1995. Two of the three sawmills
reopened in 1996 on one shift and struggled for several years before closing perma-
nently in 2001 and 2007. Wallowa County's unemployment rate trended at or near
the state's highest level for years following these changes.
Fish habitat restoration in Wallowa County meant taking on numerous complex
challenges, including the provision of county-level leadership for addressing basin-
scale ecological degradation and a national-level policy response; integrating the
needs and values of the local county population with those of the Nez Perce tribe,
which retained treaty rights to local fish and game populations, as well as with those of
various nonlocal interest groups and agencies; and finding ways to operate across a
patchwork of private and public lands to address restoration needs at a watershed
scale. Wallowa County and the Nez Perce tribe, working with private landowners, lo-
cal organizations, and state and federal agencies, responded to fish habitat concerns
in advance of the Chinook ESA listing. They produced a Salmon Habitat Recovery
Plan in 1992 (updated in 1999) that outlined management options for forests and
grasslands designed to maintain and improve fish habitat. This plan is formally
adopted within the County's Comprehensive Land Use Plan and is referenced in the
permit approval process for any new construction or renovation projects. It was hoped
that this preemptive effort to address fish habitat restoration would create more flexi-
bility from the federal regulatory agencies and a stronger partnership working toward
anadromous fish recovery. This was not achieved.
The effort invested in the Salmon Habitat Recovery Plan, its goals, process, and
initial results were the subject of research on collaboration in the late 1990s (Waage
2001). The work concluded that institutional, socioeconomic, and ideological pres-
sures limited the collaborative's impact on resource management decisions and ac-
tion. However, the relationships formed in this process have sustained collaborative
restoration and stewardship over time, and the Salmon Plan continues to guide land
use decisions within the county. Wallowa County's experience with the Salmon Plan
and with subsequent management planning demonstrates community-led restoration
in a contentious social, economic, ecological, and policy context, with on-the-ground
progress building from a framework of collaboration, trust building, and a shared vi-
sion for land stewardship.
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