Rewilding our rivers - cultivating common ground: John Carlon at TEDxChico

twenty-one years ago I took a short-term job with an environmental organization working to restore the Sacramento River my assignment as a farmer was to work with ecologist and try and help them cultivate riparian habitat that's the forest that grows in floodplains along rivers what we were attempting was a whole new approach to conservation we were trying rather than fighting others to stop destroying habitats we were working to create it and at the time none of us had a clue if this was going to work or not we didn't even know if we could get the seeds of these riparian trees to germinate let alone grow but the seeds did germinate and these trees did grow and we took this plants and we began to convert flood prone farmland back into riverside forests what had started out as a short-term assignment for me turned into my full-time career in 1998 another farmer and I started a nonprofit with the sole mission of rewilding rivers we were an unlikely group of ecologists and farmers hell-bent on River conservation and we didn't know it at the time but this would be the first step in a long journey of building collaborative partnerships why focus only on rivers because rivers provide us with clean water and they bring our communities together since the beginning of the gold rush we've been trashing our rivers the 49ers turn them inside out with dynamite and hydraulic mining a hundred years later we built dams for Shasta than Orville and now we've completely replumbed our rivers so that we can sell water like a teenager with a credit card we have been on a spending spree with our ecological cap it's been all about us spend now pay later our young organization wanted to reverse his trend we wanted to try and get our rivers healthy again but how is a small nonprofit from Chico going to attack an environmental problem this big we plant trees a few at first and then hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands and we would continue to plant trees until all the wildlife that depend on these fours for their survival or safe from extinction when most people think about rivers they think about flowing water but rivers are also floodplains the land where River is now has been in the past or will be in the future and flood plains serve really important functions they filter out pollutants they slow down and disperse flood waters and they recharge our aquifers they are also one of the most biologically productive places on the planet and our floodplains are literally teeming with wildlife the birds that migrate here from this far away as the Arctic Circle and Argentina and there's resident wildlife species that can be found no place else like Canaries in a coal mine when these birds start to disappear our rivers are in trouble ninety five percent of California's riparian habitat is gone and the last remaining blocks of old forests when they die they don't come back the natural processes that rejuvenate these forests have been altered and our rivers can no longer heal themselves this sculpture titled altar to Wetlands intentionally misspelled and created by two artists John Valentino and Diane London does an excellent job of illustrating this problem it's a school of eleven mechanical fish atop a highly altered wetland that swim only as long is there someone underneath them continuously cranking on handles without constant human attention will these wetlands disappear and the fish die the artists house all attempts to regenerate riparian habitat in California without constant human attention have failed when we tried to just retire farmland and let the forest come back on its own all that grows back is weeds so armed with the belief that we could get native plants to grow we started planting back for us one tree at a time the challenge was nobody could tell us what these four should look like so we began to experiment we started taking different species of trees and randomly planting them across our fields and just monitoring the response we figured out what trees grew best in which soils under what conditions we expanded our operation with our new plant design our trees grew faster and bigger and they died less often so we planted more our hope was that if we could get a big enough patch a habitat established out along the river wildlife would move in so the first wildlife to respond to our newly planted forests they were Gophers and voles and they ate almost everything we planted so we survived the attack but we learned a really Porton lesson that day about restoration ecology you have to be really careful who you invite to dinner once we were confident that we could get riparian trees to grow and survive we wanted to go big our goal was to plant back twenty thousand acres of forest and in order to do this we were going to have to plant hundreds of acres of habitat a year something that had never been done before with riparian species utilizing modern agricultural practices we went to work we tried different methods of planning we built customized farm equipment we tried different ways of controlling weeds and different ways of irrigating the trees but most importantly the single most important thing we did was as as ecologists and farmers we learned how to work together our organization now has the capacity to rewire the floodplain in three years in year one we clear the ground for planting prepare the fields install the irrigation system and plant back the native trees shrubs and grasses in years two and three we keep the plants irrigated and control the weeds and by the end of the third growing season we have trees that are 30 feet tall that are able to survive on their own without any further human attention so after months and months of hard work of getting the funding and getting the permits and clearing the land and getting these fields planted what's the most frequent question we get when people pull up to one of our newly planted sites for the first time they ask us if it's a pet cemetery as our force started to mature our focus shifted to wildlife are they really utilizing the habitat that we're creating to help us answer this question we invited biologists to come in and start monitoring our fields and working together we learned how to arrange different combinations of plants into different into groups that would attract different kinds of wildlife so if we plant cottonwood trees we'll get yellow bill cuckoos if we have grasses on the edge of a wetland great blue herons will show up and if we plant cattails and two leaves will be providing habitat for marsh wrens we continued to adapt and modify our designs and continually change this and Wildlife poured into our projects fields that had four different species of birds living there when we started three years later had 53 different species utilizing the same piece of property thank you larger mammals moved in as well and on one of our newly rewilding sites we had so many mountain lion sightings that we had to provide a mountain lion safety training class and equipment to our employees so they wouldn't get attacked by mountain lions when we finished our first hundred acres of habitat we attracted the attention of the local agriculture community the farmers were worried that all this wildlife we were attracting was going to damage and eat their crops and they were fearful of government regulators and didn't want to share their fence lines with an environmental organization that harbors endangered species so when they started showing up at public meetings and opposition's to our projects we knew we had a problem before we put another tree in the ground we met with all of our neighbors and we listened to their concerns and I think it helped that we spoke farming but I was still amazed by the results working together we were able to design projects where we could take the trees we were planning and create a buffer and protect their farm fields from flood damage and in exchange they could help us implement our projects almost everywhere we work is inside a designated flood way that's a land along a river inside two different levees between two levees so after we had finished a thousand acres of habitat the flood control community became alarmed and like the farmers before him they started showing up at public meetings in opposition to our projects flood control engineers were worried that we were endangering Public Safety by clogging flood ways with vegetation and these trees that we were planning they would grow wild and out of control and make their job of keeping the flood channels clear much more difficult fearful of government regulators they were reluctant to share their levies with an environmental organization that harbors endangered species sound familiar so our new challenge was how could we design a forest that we could safely plant in a flood way and still provide high quality habitat for wildlife to meet this challenge we needed the help of engineers and it was really challenging at first but working together we identified some remarkable opportunities it turns out that these riparian trees that have evolved in flood ways have a lot of them have really flexible stems and they just bend over during big flood events unless and allow floodwaters to pass over them unimpeded also all this land that we're taking out of Ag and putting into habitat we're basically taking that land out of harm's way and providing a place to divert floodwaters unlike the property owners before us we're willing to Park thousands of acre feet of floodwater on our property this is not only good for wildlife this is great for public safety and one of the lessons we learned working with flood control engineers is that one of the best ways to protect your community from flooding is to rewilding rêveur twenty-one years ago we're trying to get seeds to germinate and today we can plant a thousand acres of habitat a year from San Diego to Redding we've got songbirds coyotes foxes and deer living in the forests that we create and some of the people that used to be our biggest critics are now some of our best clients working together with farmers ecologists biologists and engineers we've planted nearly 2 million trees and restored over 8,000 acres and those disappearing birds they're even starting to come back this Lee spells Vario a bird that had not been seen in the Central Valley for over 60 years built its nest and fledged its young in a tree we planted thank you so we've come a long ways but we still have a lot of work to do to restore the health of our rivers if we ever want to stop cranking on those handles of the altar to wetland sculpture we have to reconnect our rivers to their floodplains and significantly improve in-stream flows restoring natural processes to our rivers will not only benefit wildlife it will also benefit all of us by keeping our supply of water clean and dependable truly rewilding our rivers is going to take more than ecologists and farmers and biologists and engineers working together it's going to take all of us thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 11,880

Rating: 4.9407406 out of 5

Keywords: ted talks, John Carlon, United States, tedx talk, ted x, Business, English, Rewilding, TEDxChico, Restoring Habitat, Sustainability, Wild Rivers, ted talk, TEDx, Habitat Restoration, ted, tedx talks, River Conservation, tedx, 2013, Science

Id: Ggbs0f4WM7o

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2013