H2ONCoast

Oil rig. Photo courtesy of Billy Hawthorn, Creative Commons Licensing, 2008.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the 2009 PNW Water Conference organized and sponsored by a variety of state agencies, research institutes, the Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Agriculture, and the three land-grant universities in the Pacific Northwest (WSU, OSU and Idaho).  It was a marvelous conference–full of good ideas and a nice linkage between land use and water, something that is often neglected by people working in both camps.

At the conference, OSU colleague Todd Jarvis gave a compelling final talk to an almost packed house on “Peak Water Meets Peak Oil: Moving Towards Unitization of Shared Groundwater.”  You can view it here:

The talk brought up a gnarly, uncomfortable truth about groundwater. Namely, ground water managers could learn a lot from how oil companies manage the world’s oil fields.

“Say what!?” you may exclaim. The crowd of generally sympathetic water wonks was also pretty uncomfortable with the comparison. Global oil is purportedly running out, and water is renewed each day by a familiar-to-every-grade-school-kid water cycle. Not so says Jarvis, associate director of the Institute for Water and Watersheds.  While we may very well see a day soon when oil is no longer used as extensively as we do today, since the 1970s, oil extraction has been carefully planned and managed so that wells don’t interfer with each other, and so that oil fields are sustained for the future instead of collapsing when the oil is drained. Furthermore, well fields are managed as market-controlled common-pool resources–where petroleum companies buy into them the same way that shareholders would any type of publicly-traded company (e.g. Microsoft, Ford Motor Company, or Proctor and Gamble). To extract, a company simply buys a right to the field, then has responsibilities for maintaining it in the long run. This is called “unitization” and could quite possibly be the next big thing with managing groundwater.

At present, however, the world’s groundwater is far from unitized.  In the Western United States, for example, our approach is generally to extract it without considering what happens when wells are too closely spaced (they interfere with each other), or if the over-extraction leads to damage (such as collapse of the rock and soil layers when the water is removed from between them). And with few exceptions, U.S. water law engages well owners in a race to the bottom of the proverbial bucket with each other. The bigger pump and the bigger user often wins, while at the same time the millions of exempt (unregulated) wells owned by individual property owners leads to a “death by a thousand cuts” for a whole aquifer and the collective group’s ability to extract more water in the future (see my recent post on that subject). Lastly,  wells have frequently been abandoned and left as open pathways for pollution into the community aquifer, not to mention the myriad other ways for groundwater to be polluted by storage tanks, septic systems or leaching from above.

Abandoned wells are pathways to groundwater contamination. Perhaps making them an aquifer shareholder problem would help? Photo courtesy of Gail Glick-Andrews, OSU.

In fact, in most aquifers worldwide, extraction of water is quite similar to nonrenewable oil in that it is extracted much faster than it can be replenished by natural recharge. Pumping of groundwater from aquifers in my native desert Southwest exceeds natural recharge by millions of years since the “fossil” water deposited into some of Arizona’s alluvial basins arrived with the last few ice ages and could not be replaced by the 7-17″ of annual rainfall without a few more million years (of no extraction and normal rainfall patterns)! Even aquifers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and the groundwater of the  Coast Range valleys may not be replenished at the same rate as the extraction takes place. Wet climates are not at all immune from over-extraction. Professor Robert Glennon from the University of Arizona has written about this phenomenon in his excellent book Water Follies.

In fact, say Jarvis, there are already several cases local and global where groundwater management looks a lot like oil field management. Time will tell, but it just might work to help slow the race to the pump that is vexing groundwater-dependent regions of the world.

So if you’re a groundwater watcher, look for more mention of unitization. Todd has certainly made a splash with his presentation and a short accompanying piece in the “Green Inc.” blog hosted by the New York Times. Perhaps the hard lessons of petroleum geologists and the boom bust cycles of the oil industry will work as well for groundwater managers, large and small.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” –George Santayana

It’s enough to make a biologist, bear, or fisherman shake with anticipation!  Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife   just posted this video to the web (with thanks Michelle Long for spreading this around). The minute and a half long video is worth viewing for the momentary interlude it provides as well as to remind ourselves that the cycle of life continues for these amazing fish in our beautiful rivers. Enjoy!

“When you feel neglected, think of the female salmon, who lays 3,000,000 eggs but no one remembers her on Mother’s Day.”  –Sam Erwing

West of the Cascades, we Pacific Northwesterners are accustomed to thinking we have abundant water resources. We deal with floods with a frequency that makes them seem almost passe.  But reality is that it is only in our collective perception that water resources are abundant.  Rivers run low in the spring, summer and fall.   Much of our water is delivered at the whim of the atmosphere, not just the tap, headgate, or treatment plant.  Even this year, our moderate El Niño conditions mean a potentially drier than normal winter rain and snowfall.

And underneath it all–literally–lies groundwater that is sometimes of dubious quality and quantity.  More importantly, some relatively archaic laws govern groundwater to an extent that draw down of aquifers is a real danger in many places.  For an excellent summary of a PNW case-in-point, check out the most recent High Country News article on “Death by a Thousand Wells” in Kittitias and Kittsap counties, WA.

A wellhead exposed. What institutions govern it and its neighbors? Photo: R. Emanuel.

It’s good to remind ourselves that Elinor Ostrom’s prodigious research-fueled rise to earn a Nobel Prize in Economics began with a study of groundwater extraction in the Los Angeles Basin many years ago as the population of that region skyrocketed along with the fortunes of Walt Disney, Ray Kroc, and a few thousand real estate developers.  Groundwater is one of those very common pool resources that Lin Ostrom and many other who followed her demonstrated need robust institutions to govern them.

So warning–you think Washington has it bad–look at the case of exempt wells in Oregon.  Virtually the same rules apply to 230,000+ wells in this state. According to the Oregon Water Resources Department, an estimated 3,800 new wells are drilled in the state every year!  At the very least, OWRD has begun to map the extent of the wells in the state, though funds have been cut in the budgetary crisis since.

But I must ask, do we have the kind of institutions that will govern the groundwater commons to the extent that it we won’t follow the Kittitias County example somewhere in Oregon?  According to Ostrom (1990), the conditions for a stable common-pool resource (CPR) arrangement are:

1. Clearly defined boundaries
2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions
3. Collective-choice arrangements allowing for the participation of most of the appropriators in the decision making process
4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators
5. Graduated sanctions for appropriators who do not respect community rules
6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms which are cheap and easy of access
7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize (e.g., by the government)
8. In case of larger CPRs: organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small, local CPRs at their bases.

Unfortunately, Western and Oregon water law as well as societal norms don’t meet even a significant fraction of these eight conditions.  The answer then to my question about avoiding the “tragedy” of  the groundwater commons draw down is “probably not!“

Back in the 1990s, I was a graduate student studying the social and behavioral science behind how people managed natural resources.  I had lots of company, some of it quite a bit more visionary than this particular grad student. But part of the benefit of being a graduate student is the chance to study along side some of these visionaries. One of them was for a brief period in the summer of 1999 with Dr. Lin Ostrom of Indiana University. I was attending a summer exchange program at the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change at IU.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t make any impression on her, but her work was monumental for me. Ostrom studied something called “common-pool resources.”

I was thrilled this morning to hear that Dr. Ostrom (along with another economist named Oliver Williamson) won the Nobel Prize for Economics. It is much deserved because Ostrom’s work reworked an old tale that’s been bouncing around in natural resources theory and economics for a long time.

So what is a “common-pool resource“?  To simplistically put it, a resource is common-pool if it is either too big, costly, harmful or difficult to manage by a single individual or firm.  Examples include the atmosphere, streams, oceans, the Internet, highways, police and fire services, broadcast airwaves, irrigation systems, forests, soils, or fisheries.  Another name for these special resources is “common property.” The problem of managing common property is an important one in economics. When common property is poorly managed, it can be over-exploited, leading to conflict.  Economists, ecologists, anthropologists and historians have written extensively about how over-fishing, pollution of lakes and streams, or over-grazing of rangelands can be caused by poor common property management. This problem is referred to as the tragedy of the commons.

Common-pool resources are global. Photo courtesy of NASA.

The tragedy of the commons is commonly invoked to describe all kinds of resource abuses.  But a BIG assumption follows that there are no institutions, ethics, or regulations to govern that commons or common-pool resource.  Dr. Ostrom as well as a raft of others who followed in the economics and allied fields showed that this was simply not true. Instead, societies around the world have governed common pool resources more or less effectively based on the strength and flexibility of their institutions. In some cases, these institutions are not just governments or markets but also religious in nature.

A communal irrigation system in Sonora, Mexico. Photo by R. Emanuel.

For example, irrigators in Bali, New Mexico, and Chile have effectively regulated their scarce water resources through various social institutions with minimal conflict.  [This was the topic I worked on for my graduate research in Mexico a few years ago.]  In another example, lobster fishermen off of Maine have managed their fishery without collapse for decades using a careful system of seniority and self-regulation.

Meanwhile, other systems have collapsed under their own weight, abuse, or ineffective governance. A classic example is the nearly complete loss of the cod fishery off the New England and Maritime coast. Other examples include the excessive extraction of water out of Lake Baikal in the former Soviet Union or unsustainable groundwater mining from any number of Western U.S. aquifers.  Look at the unfolding fight over water in the Georgia, Florida and Alabama as another text-book example of common-pool water conflicts (thanks to OSU colleague and WaterWired’s Mike Campana for keeping us up to date on that opera).  Last but not least, one could easily make the argument that a lack of regulation or global market institutions is behind the “tragedy of the commons” that is human-induced climate change.

So, congratulations to Dr. Ostrom for the long overdue recognition of her vital work. And if anyone would like to see the vast amount of publications on the subject of common-pool resources that she and others have gathered together at Indiana, check out the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis as well as the Digital Library of the Commons hosted there.

Tags: Common-pool Resource, Economics, Elinor Ostrom, Irrigation, Nobel Prize

According to the latest from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center, a weak El Niño continued during September 2009, as sea surface temperature anomalies remained nearly unchanged across much of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Sea surface temperatures are the most important indicators for changes in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle (abbreviated as ENSO). ENSO can be defined as anomalous warming in the eastern Pacific ocean; a reversal of oceanic surface temperature changes where the eastern pacific is relatively warm and the western pacific is relative cool. Like an engine warming, this action impacts the air (and water vapor) above it, sending currents of warm moist air in particular directions.

Courtesy of NOAA.

Expected El Niño impacts during this fall and early winter include more precipitation over the central tropical Pacific Ocean and drier-than-average conditions over Indonesia. For the lower 48 United States, potential impacts include above-average precipitation along the Gulf Coast and below-average precipitation for the Pacific Northwest. The Midwest could be warmer and drier than normal while the Southwest may get some above-average precipitation this winter.

But remember, these are all just predictions based on long-term trends, not on day to day forecasts of weather. Some El Niño years have seen monstrous storms delivered to our region, but overall, the trend is towards drier conditions.

According to the National Drought Monitor, the Northwest quadrant of Oregon is already abnormally dry. So the news of a predicted drier than average fall and early winter is not good for farmers, water providers, well owners and fish managers. Our relatively dry, mild fall weather is in keeping with this prediction, but again, nothing is completely certain when you are working with averages in climate prediciton, except that over time, this phase of ENSO tends to be drier than normal. Even so, keep your boots handy and your emergency supplies stocked.

The upside of this prediction is that for parched California, Texas and the desert Southwest, things might look up if the storms deliver their hoped-for payloads this fall and winter months.

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years.  It was always that way.” –John Steinbeck, East of Eden, 1952

Water wonks are all atwitter (sorry–bad pun) about this relatively well-researched series on water quality just published in the New York Times (as of last week). Those of you who haven’t already seen it, check it out here: http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters.

My only small criticism of the accompanying interactive maps–especially the map focusing on discharge violations– is that the database from which it is drawn (the Environmental Protection Agency & Google) seems to have errors in it for locations on the N. Coast.  Despite that, one fun exercise is to look closely at the dense number of violations in NY state and then move over to Oregon–and then think about how good we have it here! On the other hand, we have our work cut out for ourselves to keep this state from looking like NY someday.

Kudos to the Gray Lady for their reporting on this relatively marginalized issue for mainstream media outlets, especially in a time when infrastructure and environmental quality are getting a second look in both the halls of power and on main streets nationwide.

Photo by R. Emanuel, OSU.

A trench drain leads to rain garden. Photo by R. Emanuel, OSU.

I have blogged a lot about Low Impact Development (LID) on H2ONCoast.  LID is a stormwater management strategy that emphasizes conservation and use of existing natural features along with a network of small-scale stormwater controls (e.g. rain gardens, roadside swales, pervious pavers) to more closely mimic natural hydrologic patterns in residential, commercial and industrial settings.  When it comes to curbing pollutants from the urbanized portions of watersheds, LID applications have been shown to be very effective in the long run–and cheaper! These techniques also slow down the pulses of stormwater that cause flooding and damage to receiving streams.  As one county professional in rural Boardman, OR puts it, the practices conform to “cowboy logic” by letting nature take over what is normally a very expensive, very engineered set of solutions (to pipe stormwater and send it “away”).

Last week, I spoke to the Association of Oregon Counties “County College” for new and returning elected county commissioners on the subject and wanted to share the slide presentation on the subject.  Download Introduction To Low Impact Development for AOC 9.17.09

Directly related to this, the Pacific Northwest Water Program, partnered with WSU Extension’s video department, and brought us a glimpse of what private citizens, local governments, and agencies are doing to prevent polluted runoff from rushing to water resources.  The video tour traveled to two high desert communities and a Puget Sound island to document strategies used in those diverse climates to manage rain and snow melt runoff.Three PNW experts then discussed the case studies and fielded questions from the audience.

Ten Tillamook County residents participated from our offices here on the North coast. You can still check out the tour by going to the WSU Conference Services website (though I confess I don’t know how long the video will be archived at the site–so if you are interested, don’t wait too long).

Tags: LID, stormwater, video

This seems to be the summer of the invasive species–prevention, control, and early detection, that is!  In addition to PRISM’s, Master Gardener trainings and aquatic invasive species workshops, Early Detection and Rapid Response is now getting a second, intensive exposure on the North Coast.

Early Detection and Rapid Response (EDRR) is an approach to invasive species management that focuses on surveying and monitoring areas to find infestations at their earliest stages of invasion.  Monitoring can be either passive (during normal work or recreation), or active (by searching a particular area repeatedly for invasive species).

Once found, control of a new invader is begun rapidly to prevent its establishment and spread. After prevention, EDRR is the most successful, cost effective, and least damaging means of invasive species control.

The biological invasion curve showing that detection and prevention make the most sense from monetary, environmental and effectiveness perspectives.

Yesterday, another invasive-focused partnership launched with the first training of the Clatsop County Early Detection of Invasive Species Network (CCEDIN). Included in that supporting group are the National Park Service (represented by the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park), The Nature Conservancy, Oregon State Parks and Recreation Department (represented by Ft. Stevens State Park), OSU Extension Service Clatsop County, Oregon Sea Grant, Oregon Department of Agriculture, and  Dave Ambrose of the Clatsop Soil and Water Conservation District who hatched the great idea in the first place.  Many thanks to all who helped make this training happen.

August 19th, CCEDIN trained volunteers throughout this far North coast county to comb parks, public lands, and trails for 8 relatively new invaders including: Old Man’s Beard (Clematis vitalba), False Brome (Brachypodium sylvaticum),  Common Reed (Phragmites australis), Herb Robert (Geranium robertianum), Shining Geranium (Geranium lucidum), Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), Spurge Laurel (Daphne laureola), Policeman’s Helmet (Impatiens glandulifera).

The Nature Conservancy’s Tania Siemens and Bruce Campbell as well as myself and Jackie Russell from OSU developed an set of identification cards for the volunteers to use in the field. See resources below.

Resources from the training that I’m making available here include:

• The MS PowerPoint slideshow we used in the training (slideshare)
CCEDIN Invasive Species Early Detection 8.19.09
• More reporting forms (pdf)

Below are a list of links that we encourage CCEDIN volunteers (and others) to visit:

• Noxious Weeds in the State of Oregon:
  http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/PLANT/WEEDS

• Neighboring states/provinces:
  http://www.nwcb.wa.gov/index.htm
  http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca/cropprot/weeds.htm
  http://www.cal-ipc.org
  http://idahoweedawareness.net/index.html

• Photos and control information:
  http://www.invasive.org

• General invasive species information and resources:
  http://emswcd.org/weeds
  http://www.opb.org/programs/invasives
  http://www.kingcounty.gov/environment/animalsandplants/noxious-weeds.aspx
  http://www.invasivespeciesoforegon.com
  http://www.westerninvasivesnetwork.org
  http://plants.usda.gov

• Reporting Invasive species:
  http://www.oregoninvasiveshotline.org

We will have more EDRR trainings as CCEDIN expands. Stay tuned to H2ONC for more information. For those outside of the county, look for opportunities to do EDRR locally–they’re out there. If not, contact me here and I will help you get started.

Tags: Early Detection Rapid Response, Invasive Species, volunteers

During the last week of June and the first of July, eight Tillamook County OSU Master Gardeners and other volunteers pitched in to complete the last of three demonstration rain gardens in Tillamook County. This last rain garden was installed in Bay City near the intersection of 7^th and Main.  Other gardens have been installed in Pacific City and downtown Tillamook at Hoquarton Slough Park.

Mick Dressler and Gary Albright dig into the Bay City rain garden site, June 29th. Photo by R. Emanuel.

A rain garden is a sunken garden bed that collects and treats stormwater runoff from rooftops, driveways, sidewalks, parking lots and streets.  Rain gardens work like a native forest, meadow or prairie by capturing and infiltrating stormwater from rooftops, driveways, and other hard surfaces.  They can be planted with attractive native and horticultural varieties of perennials, grasses, sedges, shrubs and trees.

Rain gardens are a great way to add beautiful landscaping to your yard as well as protect our overloaded urban stormwater system and precious water resources!  Why are rain gardens so important?  When the Pacific Northwest was covered with forests and prairies, rainfall dripped through branches and vegetation, seeped through duff, and sank into underground aquifers as it slowly flowed to nearby water bodies. As our landscapes become developed, the rainfall that lands on hard surfaces drains to pipes, ditches, and storm drains and is routed directly to streams or into the sewer system.  Water that once took days, weeks or months to reach a stream now gets there in a matter of minutes. The result is too much water all at once. As a large pulse of fast-moving water flows down the stream system, it scours and erodes the stream bed, moves gravel downstream and degrades habitat for life in the stream.  In addition, the runoff picks up pollutants like chemicals, fertilizers, and oil from parking lots, and in some places, carries it straight to streams without being treated. Too much water arriving in a short amount of time and carrying pollutants negatively affects the health of our streams, lakes and estuaries. Rain gardens help restore the natural flow and treatment of water in the landscape which is critical to ensure healthy streams, even in towns.

A backhoe makes easy work of the site, digging out our ponding basin. Photo: R. Emanuel, OSU.

Tillamook County OSU Master Gardeners Andrea and Larry Goss, Chris Bolger, Phyllis Holmes, Carla Albright, Kathie Reames, and Evelyn VonFeldt, plus Gary Albright and Mick Dressler pitched in for three days of hard work. The volunteers began by installing silt fence to keep sediment out of nearby Patterson Creek, and then watched as a skillful backhoe operator from Bay City let his machine do most of the digging.

Volunteers Gary and Carla Albright, Chris Bolger, and Kathie Reames plant in the rain garden. Photo: R. Emanuel, OSU.

Once the main basin of the rain garden was dug, volunteers set to work grading the ponding surface, constructing berms, placing rocks and mulching.  Together, they planted more than 100 native and non-invasive grasses, sedges and sedums around the garden.  While the weather was unusually warm, everything has survived their initial transplant into the new garden. On the final day of work, several volunteers drove down to Tillamook Bay where they selected a spectacular piece of driftwood to finish the garden.

Proud volunteers (Chris Bolger, Larry Goss, Andrea Goss and Mick Dressler) standing behind their newly constructed rain garden in Bay City, OR on July 1, 2009. Photo by R. Emanuel, OSU.

The Bay City rain garden represents the culmination of three years of research and development around North coast appropriate stormwater management by local water resources and community development faculty Robert Emanuel. It also marks the last of three major demonstration projects funded by Oregon Sea Grant.  Now it’s up to community members around Tillamook County to try out these attractive options on their own residential and commercial properties. This winter, OSU will publish the Oregon Rain Gardens Guide to help coastal residents and others around the state to assess, design and install the gardens themselves.  Contact the OSU Extension Service Tillamook County for more information.

If you would like more information on rain gardens, Ecoroofs, pervious pavers and other green stormwater management techniques, be sure to attend the free video tour “Stormwater Management: One Back Yard at a Time” hosted at the OSU Extension Service office on September 15 from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM.  I will be on hand afterwards to answer questions and talk about how rain gardens and other stormwater solutions work on in Tillamook County.

Tags: Bay City, bioswale, rain garden, stormwater, volunteers

What I call the “knotweed complex” (made up of Japanese, Giant, Himalayan and Bohemian species or their hybrids) has been proving itself to be the most intense invasive species to hit Western Oregon, particularly on the North Coast. Watersheds up and down the Coast Range are seeing infestations that grow from a few isolated patches into complete miles-long monocultures in a matter of seasons. Locally, members of the Tillamook County knotweed working group (now the Tillamook County Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management)  has recorded a 300% increase in one such infestation along the Wilson River in Tillamook County.  Knotweed easily garners the tag “superweed” by its relentless growth, rapid reproduction and persistence in the face of a variety of control methods. The plants are so strong that they can ruin concrete and asphalt by growing through it and are so tenacious that they can persist in underground roots for decades.

Oregonians are not alone in dealing with the invader. The United Kingdom has been battling the knotweed since 1906 when it was first introduced as a garden ornamental. While England has made some strides in integrated control, their struggles look awfully similar to ours.  According to the British newspaper the Guardian, however, Britain might have a serious biological control on the horizon. Biocontrols are organisms that are native to the plant’s home ecosystem. Their feeding on the plant in that environment keep it in check.  Cinnibar moths, for example were introduced to control Tansy Ragwort with much success in Oregon.  If introduced to the new environment, they may work to balance the plants growth–but also pose serious risks to the new home as well. In another local example, Asian grass carp were introduced to control Eurasian watermilfloil, only to become invaders themselves by wreaking havoc on local ecosystems.

In this case, the Brits have studied a Japanese psyllid, an insect called Aphalara itadori that feeds on plant juices. Within about a year, the insect might be released into the countryside to see how it works to control the non-native knotweed.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked about biocontrols for knotweed.

So my answer to the persistent question is: yes there’s something on the horizon.  How long that horizon lasts, is another question I cannot answer. Likely, it will be measured in years, not months.  Recently, a Pacific Northwest Knotweed Biocontrol Consortium was formed to look at how insects like these might perform around here.  OSU is a partner in the effort with a quarantined facility to test the organisms.  In the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed and our eyes on the UK to see what happens when or if Aphalara itadori becomes its newest immigrant. Check out the full Guardian article here.

Another, more scientific analysis of the psyllid and its potential can be found in a very recent paper by Richard Shaw, Sarah Bryner and Rob Tanner published in Biological Control, Volume 49 (May 2009).  An abstract for that article can be found by clicking here.

Those needing local knotweed control information, contact me directly using the comment function below.

Tags: Aphalaria itadori, biocontrol, fallopia, Invasive Species, knotweed, psyllid