Salt Creek
Worky worky has had me by the gills the past couple of weeks. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but my time has been accounted for on planes and in cars, mostly at meetings and just sometimes in my office.
Sitting in a college classroom around a collection of tables arranged in a big U-shape, facing each other and our hard work projected on the screen, 20-some scientists sought consensus on objectives and questions, next steps and the big unknowns. It’s a fascinating process, if a bit frustrating at times. But even the frustrating conversations are ones that were worth having. There is the pupfish expert, the algae expert, the bird expert, the everything expert. There are the specialists and the generalists, all focused on the fate of a seemingly doomed ecosystem in the Colorado Desert.
Another day, another 30 people, this time expounding knowledge on the sulfur cycle, primary production in eutrophic saline lake systems, and the hydrologic cycle, while occasionally wandering into the waters of Colorado River politics, or is it policy…
Receding Shoreline (and a dissolved dead fish)
Being immersed in the process is, well, fun. There is a sharing of knowledge layered on knowledge. Abstract figures displaying complex ecological realities are presented and refined - to the best of our collective understanding - showing weak linkages and critical resources. The atmosphere is one of communal constructivism: all ideas are everyones idea’s, there is no bad question, no wrong thought. To really convey the complexity would be an endeavor into the blackness abyss, so each expert is content with the conceptual model - the set of boxes and lines presenting parameters and processes, simplified but still so complicated.
At the end of the day (which is a couple/few months out), all those thoughts of all those people will be boiled into a few simple pages, telling the world what we know and what we don’t, how we should collectively spend a few million dollars gathering and analyzing data, which questions matter most, which uncertainties most influence the prognostications and recommendations of the future of one of the Pacific Flyway’s most important resources (for some species, at least).
Some time from now, hopefully sooner than later, the State’s politicians will hammer out a recommendation, dig deep into their (i.e. our) pockets to fund one of the alternate futures on the table - all containing some amount of constructed saline habitat, designed to mimic high quality habitat, while avoiding the pitfalls of compounding disease and ecological risk.
With political authorization, then the real work can begin, a process of building rather than planning, of managing change rather than reacting to its effects, of measuring success rather than documenting demise. And it’s all just for the birds.
American White Pelicans
P.S. Other folks are working on the socioeconomic aspects of the project, and others still are working on the more hard-core engineering pieces of some alternatives - the part of the project for people.
