Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council named in top 25 innovations in government

May 042013
 

Waterhouse_canoeLast week, our partners at the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council (YRITWC) were named one of the top 25 innovations in government by Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

These government initiatives represent the dedicated efforts of city, state, federal, and tribal governments and address a host of policy issues including crime prevention, economic development, environmental and community revitalization, employment, education, and health care.  “These Top 25 innovations in government offer real, tangible ways to protect our most disadvantaged citizens, educate the next-generation workforce, and utilize data analytics to enhance government performance,” said Stephen Goldsmith, director of the Innovations in Government program at the Ash Center. “Despite diminishing resources, these government programs have developed model innovations that other struggling agencies should be inspired to replicate and adapt to their own communities.”
The  Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council (YRITWC)  was recognized for its work towards environmental revitalization and its international governance model to protect the Yukon River and ensure its water is drinkable for generations to come.

Jon Waterhouse (S’Klallam, Chippewa, Cree), Executive Director of Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council (YRITWC), was honored as a 2012 Ecotrust Indigenous Leadership Award finalist for his tireless dedication to the restoration and preservation of the Yukon River Watershed. Jon’s work serves as a model for indigenous peoples around the world, as they attempt to restore, protect and preserve their watersheds, while using traditional knowledge as a foundation for achieving their goals.

This summer, Ecotrust will be working with Jon and the YRITWC to support the Council’s water policy work in the Yukon as well as in the Copper River Basins.

The Innovations in American Government Awards was created by the Ford Foundation in 1985 to shine a light on effective government programs. Since its inception, over 400 government innovations across all jurisdiction levels have been recognized and have collectively received more than $22 million in grants to support dissemination efforts. Such models of good governance also inform research and academic study. The Center also recently announced 13 programs as Bright Ideas, an initiative of the broader Innovations in American Government Awards program.

 

Digging deeper on restoration jobs

May 182012
 

Traditional measurements of success in stream and river restoration, such as numbers of acres treated or stream miles improved, don’t tell the whole story.  While they’re valuable indicators of results from all the tree planting, culvert replacement, and stream channel opening that goes on in restoration, they don’t highlight the important socioeconomic impacts that these projects deliver in communities — especially rural ones where a few extra jobs go along way.

A restoration team replaces an undersized culvert on Battle Creek, in Oregon's John Day basin. Photo courtesy of Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

At the recent River Rally hosted in Portland, OR, we highlighted a new case study we conducted on restoration projects completed in the southern Oregon counties of Coos, Curry, Douglas, Jackson, and Josephine over the ten year period 2000-2009. In summary, we found that expenditures of approximately $54 million dollars likely contributed an estimated $97 million to $126 million of economic output and supported an estimated 616 to 865 jobs.

Previous studies in Oregon have shown that the majority of benefits from restoration occur locally, with approximately 80 cents of every dollar in project expenditures remaining within the county, and 90 cents out of every dollar of  expenditures remaining within the state of Oregon.

Oregon is fortunate to have significant funds going towards watershed restoration every year under the Oregon Plan and ballot measures that have appropriated lottery revenues to restoration activities resulting in hundreds of millions of state, federal, and private funds spent on restoration so far. And the University of Oregon Ecosystem Workforce Program has undertaken extensive work tracking Oregon’s restoration economy. They’ve found that each restoration investment of $1 million can support  19 jobs on average, and upwards of 24 jobs for labor intensive restoration work such as native planting and invasives eradication. And what’s more, other studies have found even more encouraging numbers, with employment effects of restoration investments well surpassing those observed for other sectors.

In this election year, you’ll hear plenty of job creation estimates of various sorts put on the table. In Oregon, at least, we’re finding the gains from restoration work are real.

Ecotrust has published both a summary and a longer analysis of restoration work in southern Oregon.

Salmon and resilience: Beyond simple fixes

Apr 272012
 

By Joseph Cone

Excerpted from the preface to Pathways to Resilience: Sustaining Salmon Ecosystems in a Changing World (Oregon Sea Grant, 2012).

What is the path we’re on if it’s not a path to resilience? The path of the status quo tries to get the most out of — “optimize” — some element of a system. The essays in Pathways to Resilience, a new volume about salmon challenges from Oregon Sea Grant, present views of a profoundly different paradigm — that of resilient whole systems.

steelhead at Salmonberry Falls, OR

Steelhead leaping at Salmonberry Falls, Oregon (Photo by Melissa Tatge)

Although the essays are devoted to salmon and, importantly, represent key insights by the first generation of scientific experts who have thought deeply about salmon and resilience, the reader of today — and also of the future — is encouraged to see this work in its broader significance. A time capsule from today would reveal a world fitfully struggling to come to terms with ecological and social systems that are dangerously vulnerable to major shocks: global climate change, international terrorism, polarized and fractious publics in nation-states, an interconnected global economy that rewards the few but effectively punishes the many.

Where is the wisdom of resilience, of attending to the dynamic whole that would sustain these linked systems? If such wisdom were acquired easily, presumably it would have been broadly achieved by now. But it has not been, which is one reason why the example of the essays are valuable to anyone concerned about a sustainable future.

Those who take the challenge of trying to understand our human relationship with Earth as a totality describe that totality in terms of a complex, interrelated system. This so-called human-nature (or social-ecological) system is ever-changing and multidimensional, but the problem today with this human-nature system is that we have been the perennial receivers in the relationship and nature the giver, and while our demands for what economists call nature’s “goods and services” continue to increase with burgeoning population and hu­man aspirations, nature is broadly being depleted.

Many in the United States have been concerned with this depletion over many years, and concepts of conservation, stewardship, and, more recently, “sustainability,” have enjoyed many adherents. These are good and valuable concepts, but these ideas have not shown themselves sufficient to shift our understanding, much less our collective behavior.

We tinker with pieces of the whole, trying to be more focused or more efficient, to gain from this or that component of the system some particular advantages in this or that place: more salmon for fisheries through hatchery production; better fishery management through maximum sustained yield calculations; greater timber production and profit through clearcutting and replanting monocultures… such approaches in the Pacific Northwest have had undesired consequences to the broader social-ecological system of which they are parts.

Taken as a whole, the essayists in Pathways to Resilience believe in a holistic view that embraces complex social-ecological systems and a perspective that helps those systems anticipate and avoid major shocks, and where the shocks are unavoidable, be able to respond and adapt to them. In short, the resilience of the system needs to be in view.

“Resilience holds the key to our future. It is a deceptively simple idea, but its application has proven elusive,” wrote Jane Lubchenco, the Oregon State University marine biologist who became the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under President Obama. Truly, the goal of resilient coastal social and ecological communities will not be easy to achieve. The concept is still emergent and is not well understood, appreciated, nor in the cultural mainstream. But we in Oregon Sea Grant believe resilience thinking is a good compass to guide us into the future and help us be of public service.

Joseph Cone is the assistant director of Oregon Sea Grant; this piece was edited by Rick Cooper, managing editor of Oregon Sea Grant.

Generation Restoration

Apr 102012
 

Today’s young people are carrying on the work started by Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, the 1933 New Deal program that put young men back to work restoring our nation’s forests. Current programs, such as Northwest Youth Corps, now provide tens of thousands of young women and men with job skill training through reforestation, trail building, and habitat conservation work.

Public agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are coordinating across jurisdictions to restore habitat, and they depend in part upon these youth corps to do the hard work of cultivating native plants and fighting back invasive species. So youth corps’ work provides the heart and soul of restoration work — the on-the-ground sweat equity invested in more resilient forests, streams and salmon populations that will pay dividends for generations to come.

This video from the BLM shows youth corps and Ecotrust staff in action working on the recovery of endangered salmon and steelhead, including work on Ecotrust Forest Management land on Waldron Creek in Oregon’s Tillamook County.

Kate Carone is program coordinator for Ecotrust’s Whole Watershed Restoration Initiative.

Innovation Space

Mar 052012
 

Beginning in 2011, Ecotrust staff have had the opportunity to spend a couple days a month on new and innovative projects for the organization that interest them. A group of us are ready to share one of our first projects.

This idea of allowing time for good ideas to percolate and come from anywhere within the organization isn’t new. Google’s 20% time was popularized in recent years and 3M developed the idea of 15% time for their engineers back in the 1950s. But having time isn’t enough, as many point out. You need a culture of sharing, a ‘marketplace of ideas’. At Ecotrust, we are fortunate to have that within the organization, which is constantly pushing for transformative ideas, and within our building, the Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center (below), which features a whole suite of businesses pursuing a new, restorative economy.

For Ecotrust’s first innovation project, our software team joined with one of our extraordinary cartographers to develop a new workflow for creating and sharing online maps and the data behind them.  We wanted it to be simple, we wanted to allow our developers to work more closely with our cartographers and program staff, and, above all, we wanted beautiful interactive maps that felt less like tools and more like stories. As Ric Young, an Ecotrust Canada board member, once said, “the best story wins.”

We didn’t have to look far for the building blocks to make our idea come to life. Our good friend and former Ecotruster Dane Springmeyer has been doing amazing work with the folks at Development Seed on a project called TileMill, an open source design studio for creating rich interactive maps. Combining TileMill with complementary tools like Modest Maps, Wax and TileStream gave us a complete workflow for publishing maps online.

With our new mapping tools in place we connected with the Whole Watershed Restoration Initiative, an Ecotrust program which brings together federal and state agencies to fund high-priority salmon habitat restoration projects. Together we created an interactive project map that allows people to see WWRI-funded restoration work and to find out whether they fall within a priority area and are eligible for a WWRI grant.

Close-up of interactive map

This first map is just a start and we see a lot of potential for enhancing it further, including incorporating project audio, video and photographs. Going forward we envision using this new suite of tools to showcase Ecotrust’s work across the Pacific Northwest landscape. And there’s huge potential for other organizations to use the tool for geo-based storytelling.

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