Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
restoration becomes more popular, efficiency and technological complexity will
trump participation and community as guiding principles (2005, 161). Such shifts
also account for the apparent contradiction, discussed earlier, between the percep-
tions among some practitioners that support for restoration was diminishing while the
actual overall funding levels were increasing. The move toward fewer, larger, more
technologically complex projects suggests that an efficiency-oriented system is gain-
ing prominence over more integrative forms of ecological restoration. Is this a desir-
able pattern of change? What trade-offs and differing conceptions of the meaning of
restoration are entailed by these shifts? As the Humboldt County restoration system
continues to grow, such questions will be of increasing interest and concern.
Restoration and Community
Restoration contributes significantly to the North Coast economy. However, restora-
tion in Humboldt County represents much more than jobs and money. A vibrant ele-
ment of community and personal activism has been woven into the restoration system
since its inception in the early 1970s. For many of the people involved, commitment
to restoration springs from a passionately held vision of healthy watersheds, reinvigo-
rated salmon runs, and well-stewarded working landscapes. This vision often emerges
from a deeply rooted sense of place, from a desire to have a meaningful relationship
with the natural environment, and from close connections with other like-minded res-
toration practitioners and conservationists. These very ideals inspired those who, dur-
ing the 1970s, pioneered many of the restoration practices and techniques that are
commonplace today in Humboldt County and the surrounding region. Often work-
ing on shoestring budgets or sometimes on a volunteer basis, these individuals were
the early innovators of community-based fish-box hatcheries, in-stream restoration
techniques, and monitoring methods and technologies. For many, the idea of actually
earning a living from restoration work came as an afterthought.
While restoration in Humboldt County has become institutionalized in the last
thirty years, the early visions of communities working toward a more harmonious inte-
gration of people, watersheds, and working landscapes can still provide a powerful
ideological and practice-based anchor for the restoration system. Community engage-
ment with the restoration process serves to build community, as well as connections
between people and the natural environment, while simultaneously enhancing eco-
logical conditions. Freeman House, writing about community, place, and restoration
in the Mattole River watershed in southern Humboldt, conveys this notion in the fol-
lowing manner: “Engaging the lives of wild salmon in a single watershed has created
a situation wherein the peoples of our place have begun to experience themselves as
functional parts of the place itself. Engaging the lives of any part of the wild in any
self-defined natural area will lead to the same experience” (House 1999, 198). This
approach is rooted in the understanding that environmental stewardship entails active
engagement with ecosystems and landscapes. Carol Vander Meer, executive director
of Friends of the Dunes, an important restoration nonprofit organization in Hum-
boldt County, echoes this sentiment when she writes that, “By participating in resto-
