Laserfiche WebLink
<br />000719 <br /> <br />Another fundamental question raised by the effort to forge a new balance between developmental <br />and ecosystemic values is what will count as success. The goal, after all, is some measure of restoration <br />of biological services; the watershed is simply the medium for working toward that goal. But the goal <br />itself is far from clear, and it is kept unclear, among other things, by the ESA's focus on jeopardy <br />avoidance, and its ambiguous posture toward recovery. There are few precedents here thus far, the most <br />advanced perhaps being the final resolution ofthe National Audubon case.9 One issue that I hope will be <br />discussed in this meeting is the progress that has been made in determining what we are managing <br />watersheds to achieve beyond avoidance of jeopardy opinions. 1 0 <br /> <br /> <br />The Endangered Species Act is perhaps the most prominent example ofthe wondrous <br />complexity, multiplicity, and paradoxical nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged under the label <br />of watershed management. At one level, the Act has been a powerful lever generating a comprehensive <br />_ approach to resource management that one could hardly have imagined even a decade ago. Indeed, in <br />some settings, where HCPs (Habitat Conservation Plans) and MSCPs (Multiple Species Conservation <br />Plans) are in process or in place, the Act seems capable of producing by indirection achievements in <br />planning, in inter-agency cooperation, and in cooperative federalism, that no Congress could ever have <br />remotely achieved through direct legislation. Indeed, the very word planning (as those who remember the <br /> <br />9 See Decision 1631, California State Water Resources Control Board (1994); Order No. 98-05, <br />id. (1998). <br /> <br />10 A footnote to considerations of the new riparian ism is the case of the Salton Sea.. It has no <br />claims tracing to natural watershed features. It exists by virtue of out-of-watershed agricultural return <br />flows, and it is threatened by proposed efficiency improvements in that irrigation, and by marketing of <br />some of that irrigation water to out-of-basin municipal use. No notion of restoration or return to <br />"normalcy" will save the Salton Sea (and its now significant ecological values). Only some yet-more- <br />unnatural technical fixes can do that. The Salton Sea is only the most obvious example of how <br />dramatically we have changed the natural landscape, and how extensive the adaptations to it are. Among <br />. the central issues in watershed management (of which "restoration" is a prominent element) is wharour <br />,baseline is to be. <br /> <br />5 <br /> <br />5 <br />