Quagmire, Diversion, or Our Last, Best, Hope?
Interactive Environmental Decision-Making and the Movement for American Restoration.© 2002
By Peter M. Lavigne,
Senior Fellow of the Watershed Management Professional Program
Executive Leadership Institute Portland State University, Portland, Oregon;
President, The Rivers Foundation of the Americas www.riversfoundation.org

published by the Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute,
Georgetown University School of Law, Washington, D.C., 2002

excerpt from Section II.Interactive Decision-Making and the Movement for American Restoration

"Balance"should be "the watchword of his stewardship". Senator Malcolm Wallop (R -WY) cautioning presidential nominee Bruce Babbitt at his Senate confirmation hearing in 1993. When Mo Udall was asked to participate in a political compromise by his opponents, he often retorted "The lion and the lamb can lie down together but the lamb won't get much sleep". Advocates of the IDM process for environmental problems often start, however, with the premise voiced by rural sociologist Jonathan Kusel, that "Traditional adversarial approaches aren't working so we need to try other options". Kusel's perspective, like that of many others involved with IDM projects, is informed both by personal experience and careful examination of ecosystem and environmental trends for the last two decades. Indeed when one looks at important indicators of environmental health in the United States over the last thirty years the trends are alarming. The unprecedented attention paid to environmental issues since the first Earth Day in 1970 has not reversed environmental degradation. At best, the wall of environmental law enacted in the 1970s remains a finger in the dike, tremendously valuable at slowing disaster, but ultimately not enough without additional systemic changes.

While there have been dramatic improvements in elimination of visible pollutants in the air and in many rivers since the original passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and their numerous amendments since the 1970s, endangered species listings continue to grow , more species go extinct every year, views in Big Bend National Park have deteriorated , and rivers systems throughout North America are still highly degraded.

Most river systems are deteriorating again as the gains from the provisions of the Clean Water Act are overwhelmed by population growth, the negative effects of urban sprawl and associated increase in paved and other impervious surfaces, oil and metal filled stormwater runoff, and vast increases in legal discharges of industrial pollutants due to the vibrant economy of the last decade.  The Willamette Riverkeeper organization, for instance, reported in April 2000, that permitted discharges of toxic chemicals to the Willamette River have nearly doubled since 1995, as have discharges of toxic chemicals from publicly owned sewage treatment plants.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, "The cumulative impact of all forms of disturbance to [North American] aquatic systems is staggering. Within the United States alone, 67 percent of freshwater mussels and 65 % of crayfish species are rare or imperiled; 37% of freshwater fish species are at risk of extinction; and 35 percent of amphibians that depend on aquatic habitats are rare or imperiled. These numbers do not include the twenty-seven species of freshwater fish and ten species of mussels that are known to have gone extinct in North America in the last 100 years." And it is well-known that the Colorado River no longer reaches its delta in Mexico most years as it trickles out in the desert on the way to the Gulf of California.

Given the grim environmental trends we face at the turn of the Millennium, what could interactive environmental decision-making possibly offer to bolster our current systems of environmental law and policy? Former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, in a speech before the National Press Club in 1995 , called the emerging efforts at community based environmental protection the "third generation of environmental activism" . He expressed his hope as he described "hands-on work directed at their own communities, an activism focused at reclaiming their known heritage, their local landscapes, their sense of place which reminds them where they are and therefore, who they are." Babbitt described this "third great environmental movement" as the "voice of Americans rooted to their land", the era of "American Restoration" asserting "We can do better,We can use these laws. We can do more than just stop our waters and soils from declining." Babbitt continued, saying "I [see] Americans crossing the threshold from Prevention into Watershed Restoration. They are building upon the current framework of laws, giving form and content to abstract, clumsily worded codes, getting results beyond the expectations of the legislators who wrote our laws back in the 1970s."

Babbitt elucidates five principles for government's role in the emerging interactive restoration processes. First, he pledged government to be a 'full partner in the process'. Second, he promised to "use laws creatively". Third, he proposed to "listen to local needs". The outcome of all this would be (Fourth), "empowering local communities" and fifth, "sharing the costs of Restoration". Babbit singled out cooperative efforts in the Pacific Northwest, the Everglades, the San Francisco Bay Delta, the Blackstone River Valley in New England and the Chesapeake Bay; he characterized those efforts as sharing these working principles in common. They are:

Babbitt's ideal involved gathering sometimes "tens of thousands of people, but the essential nature is all those people coming together, working in harmony, listening to one another, looking inward towards their community in search of a common solution, and getting to yes." Much of Babbitt's roller coaster tenure as Secretary of Interior has revolved around this tension he evinces between wanting to restore and preserve the West of his youth and his eagerness to bring along the extractive industries which have dominated Western politics for nearly a century - one way or another. Babbitt's travails aside (and there were many in his eight years as Secretary), his vision is widely shared in the environmental community.  The energetic Alaskan environmental scientist, organizer and former gill-netter Dr. Riki Ott, represented the sentiments of the IDM movement in a presentation on her experiences with the Copper River Watershed Project saying:

"Community based conservation projects are providing the driving energy in conservation now. Energy from thousands of communities has infused conservation with an emphasis on sustainability, or the integration of environmental, economic and social capital to provide long-term wealth, health and prosperity. As external conditions continue to change and worsen socially, environmentally and politically, organizations working towards sustainability increase. We are witnessing the emergence of a new form of global leadership from below, grounded in a love of life, and a capacity for deep compassion."