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Rural System? Just Dreaming …
A For-Profit Conglomerate for
Meaningful Jobs
Healthful Communities
and Improved Natural Resource Management
by Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
2007
Chapter 21. The Crescent Crew, Working for Water
Dreaming: Just a stage, …stage right…speak up to the back row…lower your head, speak faster, more loudly, more clearly…only the lines…use your tongue, lips, and teeth…everyone change the words here…improvise, improvise…work with her!…whose line is that!?…pay no attention…don't let that get in the way…tired to illness…another rehearsal…the curtain, the curtain! Just Dreaming …
| An alternative to the "watershed" is "crescent." Tauting is the word for managing the total water budget of a working platform starting in the headwaters of rural communities. |
When young, I respected the work and workers of the past. They were "my elders" as taught by my parents. I had been taught the techniques that they had used, learned of projects conducted, and read inspiring papers and books about the need for watershed management. I had restored small watersheds, addressed such management for strip-mined areas, attended watershed conferences held annually and heard, annually, of the needs for watershed management. I've seen laws passed and improvements in water quality. The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently adopted a "watershed approach" as if it were a conceptual breakthrough. Now 50 years have passed and there are the same but more strident messages about the needs for watershed management. What we were doing (2007) is not working!
With no special effort, we spent two hours in our in-house library just to avoid missing any key points and concluded that we did not need new surveys of "issues" because we were dealing with the most fundamental of human needs. (We knew we could add "wants" later and that they would make little difference in the major decisions if the needs had been satisfied.) We knew that the general public did not understand watershed management. That was probably true because few professionals could agree on its meaning … but more importantly, could not name 10 actions that they would take as examples of what would be included under their jumbled definition.
The human need (see objectives of Chapter 7) was: Adequate quantity and quality surface and ground water (inseparable, for quality can be changed by the quantity available - dilution of pollution) where needed for rural people in a timely fashion. After that statement was seen for its ecological significance (output/unit space/unit time), other objectives, issues, or problems were mere attachments and conditions put on it. These, of a different type of objective, were: stability (related to timeliness and to dimensions of the scenic value), global warming (temperature effects on evapotranspiration of the county water budget), total maximum daily sediment and toxicant loads (water borne erosion effects), livestock needs (a specific use of the desired daily quantity and quality), landscaping (another specific use for plants), human and industrial waste transportation, fish and the fishery (meeting "biodiversity" premises, and needs for angling), and ranging (chapter 18).
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| Elements and relations of the hydrologic cycle. |
Maybe it was a speech, maybe a series of visits, maybe a newspaper controversy over a development beside a scenic stretch of the river …the reason for the startup of the Crescent Crew was unclear. A group began to form to address the water resource. Their leader had realized that small grants available would do little good and could not stabilize a program of study or work that was needed for an entire county (and then the region) for at least 150 years. They were fed up with non-response to "citizen inputs" and regular meetings in which the only decisions were tri-partite -- (1) the agenda, (2) the time of the next meeting, and (3) the place. Local agency staff were quiet, awaiting program budget cuts and layoffs and fearful of political interventions. The work and time required for grant proposals and their high probable rejection (thus wasted energy and time) were excessive. Studies were not needed now for this area, only action. (More studies could be done later after successes and after needed answers had become very specific.) The loose group knew that something new had to be done.
Crescent
They had heard about Crescent. There is not much new in the world, mostly new arrangements, new perspectives, re-formulations and syntheses of things seen and known. Crescent is just the name of a mapped rectangle that includes the area of concern for management. It may be a watershed or several of them but it is the area in which water quantity and quality must be controlled. It was if interest to a specific group of people. It typically includes more area than within a conventional watershed for that may be (and often is) as important as the area within the boundary. Precise watershed boundaries in most topography are difficult to mark and map precisely and, as a result, analyses of yield per acre are highly suspect.
Tauting
"Tauting" is about 20 things put together in new sequences and arrangements and used in ways that other people have not used them. Tauting is a new word derived from and implying tightening up and being well run, as in "a taut ship." The group knew that the results could be new. They defined tauting as a cautious, modern, sophisticated for-profit approach to practical decision-based work toward controlling rural regional surface- and ground-water quantity and quality. They knew that what they had to do was so different that it needed a new name for the freedom that it gave for innovative techniques, challenges to forgotten meanings of over-used words, new uses of technology, and for avoiding misconceptions and barriers created by past definitions, assumptions, and policies about "watersheds" or "watershed management."
Many things, particularly water and things affected by gravity, are well-studied within watersheds. Bears, bees, butterflies, and birds are not. Perhaps beavers (Castor canadensis) are usefully studied and planned on a watershed basis, but even their population dynamics are more a function of fur market forces than of hydrologic or forage-availability forces. Even groundwater is not well studied within the watershed because it follows fractured geological layers and channels that may bear few relations to the surface, to runoff, or to rainfall. An artesian spring may be recharged by water several watersheds away. Few people know how to analyze and depict karst topography, that of limestone areas with numerous sink holes and cavern-influenced land forms and disappearing streams. Crescent was the three-dimensional unit for mapping, analysis and design.
Alpha Units
One place where tauting diverged from past activity was in an answer to: Why should we average and aggregate and group knowledge of land when we now have detailed data on every 10 meter x 10 meter piece of land in the tract (every alpha unit)? The North-facing slope is well known to be very different from the South-facing slope of a typical watershed. There are big differences between evaporation near the ridges and down in the valley. Why assume that they are about the same throughout an area for runoff, percolation, or transpiration and then average them? We must let the computer do the data processing for us for understanding these units, each of which is probably unique. These spots (easily related to the 10-yard-line spans on a football field) are the alpha units for each of which there are now stored and available about 200 known facts. The linkages that can now be made among these facts and those gathered from the land have never been possible … but that has now changed. With ability to estimate conditions within any alpha unit within any watershed boundary and at its edges, it seems silly to add or calculate averages for this information gathered and stored at such high costs. The results are probably wrong or misleading. We need not lose ability to transform our precise data into ecologically or economically relevant information. We know that fog drip, for example, is capable of causing differences in perceived precipitation of 10-25 inches within local forests. Fog drip is moisture harvested from the air by tree needles and leaves. It is conspicuous as beautiful hoarfrost in winter. The drip under a tree stand is likely to show very different "precipitation" volume than that from an adjacent pasture receiving the same reported rainfall. We can keep data separate as long as possible within the computer, and then use models to synthesize factors into key decision alternatives and prescriptions for action.
Crescent or Watersheds?
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| An alternative description of the hydrologic system with emphasis on snow, one part of precipitation. |
A small group of people hearing and reading about tauting being applied to Crescents saw that it was an important strategy for achieving their needs from the regional water resource. They, talked, invested some money, hired a retired person for part-time work for coordination, and started calling themselves the Crescent Crew. They described their work to others and they began isolating the differences. One was that area was more important than forest or pasture type or age in determining benefits potentially derived from the land. Even a very low production of any resource on an average acre, when multiplied by 100,000 or more acres, can be a very big number. The number of acres in an age class or the number of acres in a forest type or the number of acres treated is usually more important than the characteristic of the site.
| Tauting uses the rationally robust approach advocated by Giles and other (Giles, R. H., R. G. Oderwald, and A. U. Ezealor. 1993. Toward a rationally robust paradigm for agroforestry systems. Agroforestry Systems 24:21-37; also chapter 4). This is a managerial perspective on data collection and analyses that is part of taking a systems approach to topics, being very cost effective, and being always ready to apply corrective feedback. |
The stream or river measures seem to be the performance measure of past working land systems. Tauting changes emphasis and operation from downstream to upstream, from the water's edge up to the crests, to the unique alpha unit. It models the functions of each such unit or map cell. Each is unique, personal … but adjacent to four others…and knowing these neighbors is as important to knowing the function of the alpha unit as knowing the "facts" interior to the cell itself. While re-vegetation has been the emphasis in past watershed management, tauting addresses the soil as well. New computer-produced maps of pseudosoils, a practical use-oriented "soils map" combined with a map based on a modified universal soil loss equation computed for every alpha unit in the region were used. Tauting addresses the phenomena of soil as well as vegetation being affected by minerals, acidity, air pollution, fires and the effects of other change agents. The pseudosoil maps provide low cost insights into lands for which their soils have previously been unmapped (e.g., remote forest areas).
The characteristics, the processes of each alpha unit are important. A road-bank soil slippage, though very small, can trigger massive changes downstream. A failed earthen dam can change water relations for centuries. These events are not rare, even though they may seem to be. Wildfire, wind throw, and landslides are common and expected. Five hundred unique forested headwater channels are the healing wounds of the land yielding water to the river just like the farm gully.
Tauting tended to emphasize water as a resource with benefits magnified. It shifted discussions about it from services it performed to benefits derived from it because of human interest and incentives.
Tauting is now possible because of computer mapping capabilities. Global positioning satellites allow workers to locate themselves correctly, locate specific alpha units, make field observations of all types, take samples from the correct places and compare observations to data previously collected from those same exact spots. Precision agriculture, now practiced, has rarely been applied to large-area water resource management.
Generalized information about the water coming into the Crescents, the basis for realistic water budgets, is now made site specific. Of course rainfall remains variable, patchy. But now two types of effective precipitation are judged, one for plant community use (the top 6 inches) and the other for potential groundwater infiltration (below 6 inches). Precipitation is combined rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog drip, and dew drip. These vary regionally. If 40 inches of rain fall on a steep, southwest facing slope with little vegetation, half of the time within a week of a previous rain, there will be less than 15 inches of effective rain. Twelve inches is a condition called "semi-arid"! Precipitation is variable - daily, seasonal, regionally - and the amount available for plant use varies with the topography and that influences the soil, some of which can absorb and hold water, others which tend to shed water. On top of these relationships, the Crew knew that as part of tauting knowledge, sequence of events was more important than amount of precipitation (e.g., freezing before or after rain; seed rain before or after fire or precipitation). Using computer models to integrate these phenomena was essential for comprehensive Crescent understanding, predictions, and prescriptions. Even with computer aids, the region was too large, too variable, and the costs of data collection for great precision were exorbitant. Tauting used rational robustness and concentrated on the statistical ranges, not central tendencies (averages and variances).
Tauting activity was based on an assumption that water temperature was part of the "total maximum daily load" limits set by regulators for water quality. For specific biological populations, brief low or high temperature peaks are death dealing.
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Averages or totals do not spell death. Streams can be depicted by annual hydrographs and thermographs, both of which are primarily determined by the surface geologic and geomorphic setting and vegetation cover of the stream-sides (the so-called riparian areas).
The Crew quickly realized the enormous task ahead of them to achieve their stated objectives, still poorly see by their local governments. "Watershed management" had been too general and politically neutral to have gained funding and thus staff. It sounded like "someone else's job." The needs had increased stealthily. The Crew members began to develop a corporation because they realized that the major premises of Rural System had to be used. These were: diversity, synergism, value added, distant planning horizons, stable funding, intensive computer use, improvement of the production units (in this case the lands and waters of the region), and being sure that financial returns were evident to local people.
The New Markets
They incorporated under their name and developed an organization with staff and paid memberships. Although conservation and environmentally oriented, it was clearly not "non-profit" and was in business to make money for essential incentives, avoid governmental delays, be politically active if necessary, achieve independence for rapid work, and achieve major gains in the pair -- water quality and quantity. They had no one to copy. The Crew built the local staff to conduct paid seasonal tours of the river and large tributaries. These were independent, but later united with the Rural System Tours group. They quickly developed bus and boat specialty tours throughout the US related to dams and water projects of all types. One tour took in the Chesapeake Bay water issues. One tour was a night-time float trip having along infra red and night-vision equipment. One explored TVA advances with it lake management, another visited staff dealing with Colorado water distribution issues. One inquired about Willamette River (Oregon) water resource "services."
The computer maps that they developed for their analyses were beautiful things and within 3 years 80 percent of the residents had bought a framed one for their home. Unique maps began to be developed and these were displayed for sale to visitors, part of the "ecotourism" emphasis from other groups while ranging was being discussed. A special computer project produced land use maps with a landowner's home at the center. These were "pricey" but unique, contributed to pride of ownership, and everyone knew that the money spent was eventually heading in their own direction.
A coffee-table book of computer maps and photographs of local water-related landmarks and wildlife sold well within the area but became a tourists' "must-have." Many photos were of cascading waters among hemlock-held banks. The Eastern hemlocks were being decimated by and soon to be lost to the wooly adelgid … an invading insect since 2002, it having found improved living conditions in the regionally-warming climate.
One map within the book, sold separately, displayed evapotranspiration (Klopfer 1998) - the amount of water evaporated from an area along with that which was pumped off by plants in the same area. Resulting from millions of dollars of prior research, the map was the key to ecological functions through the region. Correlations of this complex function with tree growth and crop production at every one of the thousands of sites throughout the region were made almost monthly. The map was central to understanding the increasing warming of Earth, and the Crew sold a booklet with maps of site-specific analyses of the results of computer simulations of what would happen given stated changes in temperature… a driving variable in the equations computing evapotranspiration.
They sold a checklist of the birds of the region, highlighting those that were water related. They knew that few people knew that half of the species in western Virginia depend upon water (other than for drinking) in their life history … all of the waterfowl, many furbearers, amphibians, etc. They conducted a contest (with entry fee) for people to have seen all of the fauna of the region (similar to bird watcher life-lists). As the contest heated and local retailers joined in, guide services were offered.
A Crescent Master group was organized. Each public area was named and numbered and people could buy "rights" to it and the Crew would supply much information about it. The Masters would challenge each other in an annual contest for who had the best analyses of their area, could make the best public displays, and could contribute the most to regional knowledge about the alpha units within their boundaries. Most were on public lands but some absentee owners saw the value in people being on their area irregularly and learning about and teaching them about their lands and waters. Several Masters were attracted from the Nature Folks group.
An engineer in the Crew developed a hand-held device for measuring the sediment in a water sample. Numbers from the device and estimated stream flow rate that were entered into a field lap-top computer gave a good estimate of the total daily sediment load … and the distance from regulated total daily maximum loads. He was working on getting a patent. The device had a surprisingly large potential market because of EPA and state requirements for keeping sediments in check. The data were used the next day with data from other samples to map the remaining untreated probable sources of the sediment.
They sought out flood plain maps for the area. They flooded areas were conspicuous for the river, but few people knew about the maps showing the probable 50 and 100 year flood reach elevations. They began attempting to gain two affiliates among the insurance agents who would explain the full implications of the plains and the appropriate insurance, not only to clients but to developers of zoning codes and to realtors (Chapter 25).
Working with The Fishery, the Crew devised quick analyses of toxicants in fish flesh and could add an attractive computer-printed report to fish taken from a pond and sent by currier to two major restaurants in the area. The "Crescent-clean catch-of-the-day" became a notable addition to the local table.
A local attorney was strongly in favor of the Crew's work and had been to many of their first meetings. He was willing to investigate how "community service" time required by the courts could be spent on Crescent projects such as forest road culverts improvements (reducing a major sediment source), building headwater stream barriers, seeding exposed banks in towns, cleaning reaches of the scenic river, planting vegetation along stream banks, building gully-plugs, and mapping wetlands and spring seeps. He explored the potentials of placing convicted non-violent computer-enthusiasts into the practical, meaningful work of the Crew's computer activities both in jails and youth work crews.
The Crew developed a "standards of learning" aid for the local schools centered on comprehensive Crescent work - including diverse topics of the history of water use, streamside biology, health and public water filtration systems, and the mathematics of soil-loss equations.
The Crew, as others within Rural System knew that there was no limit other than legal, to the sources of profits. They would use the local measured financial impact of their company as the "worth" of scenic waters and the so-called environmental intangibles. Any impairment of their income and employment of their staff would be an assault on capitalism and the free-market system.
They developed and promoted village winter ice skate areas, a water-related activity. Their profits did not have to come from "water" topics. Sustained profits were the objective. With Rural System's Official Avi, the bird watching sport, they developed a boating bird-golf course.
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Staff gave free lectures and demonstrations (as marketing devices) but soon developed a foundation so that they could receive donations and begin to seek research grants for the questions that began to be uncovered in their modeling work. They needed good personal estimates of coefficients and functions when they began, but realized that it was time to seek specific models to produce such estimates. They devised a score for water quality in an area and displayed it in a central store window like a large western-state fire-danger rating sign. Local TV stations began reporting it monthly on the evening news along with the weather.
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Developing the Sechy first bothered some people in The Fishery group a little. It was a device lowered into pond or lake water to determine the turbidity of the water (algae and or sediment).
To owners of small fenced ponds with below-dam watering devices, a floating plastic cover was sold to reduce evaporation.
A separate organization was formed (with paid memberships) for people interested in describing the phenology of the region. Phenology is the study of the timing of biological events like leaf-fall or flowering. Emphasis was along the local waterways but was region wide and attracted many back-yard gardeners, observers, and bird watchers. Similar clubs exist in Europe. Internet communication offered new possibilities for taking a special look at the ever-changing parts of ecosystems …and how they relate to water yield for areas.
Deeply concerned about the future availability and costs of essential phosphorus fertilizer, and concerned about varying levels found in the "load" carried by waters and being lost to the Crescents of the region, a phosphorus project was begun. The high energy costs of gaining and distributing the heavy substance was a growing practical local problem, beyond those of its interrupted source from war-torn areas. The region was well mapped within a geographic information system and soil was collected and analyzed within a specially-designed kit. (Other soil analyses were encouraged and low-cost arrangements for doing so were offered.) Publications were sold on cost-effective additions to and management of phosphorus applied to pastures, cropland, and gardens. Cooperative arrangements were made with fertilizer suppliers.
With a local river-side camp, the Crew promoted (for a percentage of the income) a special fishing tournament for members (not in competition with existing tournaments).
A regional conference was held every other year. With advertising, equipment displays, contest awards, and sales of Crew books, documents, and maps, it became a significant source of funds.
No single activity was profitable enough to support the system to achieve the Crescent Crew objectives. All were combined to make enough profit to maintain a data base, advance on some of the problems, and begin to address some of the specific sediment sources and to find where evaporation could be reduced to achieve the desired yields. The Crew needed a detailed model of the regional watersheds, a simulator that also showed the factors to which yield was most sensitive. The other major model was an optimization. Specific answers for how to achieve objectives needed to be selected cost effectively from the thousands of options available to affect any water budget. The board of the Crew began encouraging building financial backup for the enterprise because it realized its greatest challenge was to sustain a database and information system about the waters of the region …for many uses.
The Crew learned that through computer analyses, the best species of grass could be specified for every pasture alpha unit. Desirable grazing intensity could be specified based on slope, aspect (the compass direction down hill), elevation, and soil texture. It knew that major sediment problems were spot specific but the real lasting problem was across-the-land sediment loss, sheet soil erosion. It was a water-centered working enterprise but it knew that to achieve its mission it would have to enter the world of the beef producer or inspire cooperation.
It had already faced the complex input and output environments of agricultural watersheds that make nutrient budgets difficult to estimate and realized that it is impossible to estimate weathering and deep seepage of nutrients. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium mineral quantity estimates are dominated by crop and livestock removal. Nevertheless it could master a computerized water budget for a farm or the entire region.
It developed for sale a modern "revised soil-loss-equation"- based map of the region. It along with soil erosion control ordinances were suggested to counties that had not enacted them. With it and other maps, the Crew identified and located map units to which the several performance measures of the streams of the county would be most sensitive. From it, and along with a map of roads, and a satellite map of pasture and fallow lands, it could mark map cells that needed to be visited with land owners to see if soil loss could be addressed immediately. Local visits were best; telephone contacts to absentee owners worked well. Where an owner's eroding soil entered another person's property, the threat of legal action was helpful. The Crew's main approach was that of showing the owner how the improved area could be more profitable (and by what amounts) than it is currently. It offered a "land repair" service, with a high-odds guarantee of the identified units(s) being more-profitable-than-at-present. (Forest areas were safe bets at 6 to 12 %.)
Forest Work
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| Floyd County, Virginia, showing streams and all areas of northeast facing slopes in green. Each slope has different evaporation and transpiration rates, thus runoff and groundwater percolation, as well as suitability for select forest species and fog drip. |
The Crew taught two bull dozer operators the principles of forest road waterbar construction and the needs for out-sloping such roads and having no or few up-slope and inside drainage runs. It began marketing their services to landowners. The 12% maximum slope of the road center line seemed reasonable, both to reduce vehicle wear and tear as well as to reduce water velocity running off the road scouring out sediment. They developed a quick installation procedure of French drains for home owners with road runoff problems. Like working with livestock producers to solve water runoff and percolation needs, the Crew was now farther into forestry activities than it had ever intended. Perfect solutions to the water and sediment issues of the pasturing world would be as nothing if forest water issues were not well addressed. The Crew knew of the forest road and stream-crossing sediment problems. It could cite needs for fish and biotic diversity and creatures dependent upon ancient forests. It knew riparian volume protection by restricting tree removal bothered many loggers. They, as everyone, could see that the larger trees were nearest the stable soil moisture. The Crew had to get with The Forest Group or hire its own specialists because the problems were mixed. Some were subtle such as the fog-drip phenomenon that varied with whether land was covered by pasture or trees … but trees of what type and size and at what elevations in what seasons? Forest type and age have primary influence on water responses and thus a forester's prescription for the pattern and timing of tree harvests is essential for achieving the infiltration and desired runoff from the forest acres of the region, at least those of the large landowners. Given the average farm size (180 acres), it is preferable that collections of cooperative land owners attempt to provide the desired mixes of land in various forest ages. (Imagine the consequences to water of a wood price peak and 80% of all old trees on private lands in a region being cut! Imagine two forest types dying completely within 10 years as a result of increased temperatures and soil moisture stress!). The Crew had to gain control because when trees are removed that:
Headwaters
The Crew took longer than expected to understand the local forest water yield and problem. There has been little reported sediment loss from forests. It was going downhill silently and secretly, some under the leaf layer, some after fires, and some from stream banks, and had been rounding the local hills under the influence of rainfall and snow melt from off the edge of the Pleistocene glacier from Ohio for about 11,000 years ago. There were fires and open areas and very large trees, some not very good for lumber. Beavers built dams, flooded areas and trapped sediment moving down the stream channels. Today's "flats" beside streams and rivers remain testimony to their historic influence. Young beavers, kicked out of home, always move up stream. There is innate animal pressure to create dams. There was, before settlement, a naturalistic, on-going process resulting in small waterfalls, stairs in the stream channels. Even the beavers' dams could not handle the pressures of all rainfall densities. Dams were washed out, sediment loads flowed and there was continual shifting and collecting, and redistribution…but always downward. Gravity ruled…and still does. Upward migrating beavers stopped when the water supplies and topography were not right for their dam building. They could sense stream velocity and what it would take to build a sustainable dam. They moved back down stream in the face of high velocities from several causes. The headwaters of streams never received beaver dams. Yet there were stairs in the stream channels. Most of these have disappeared and replacing them is now seen by the Crew as an essential mission. In ancient times, large old trees fell, crisscrossing the land. The trees fell across slight stream channels and those that were wet were visible for years, some as much as a century if partially buried and water-logged. Termites and other forest biota took care of the dry and damp wood, part of the cycle known now by all school children. The trees in the stream produced stairs in the channel. They slowed the water, oxygenated it while falling, and trapped sediment of all sized behind them. They slowed the water velocity and its scouring power and prevented the stream forming the deep V-shape cross-sections, now well known. Without large trees, all water running off the land goes to stream channels and these channels have now all been re-shaped by direct flows downward, water carrying abrasive stuff to scour faster than in ancient times. The message now seems clear. We have to re-develop stairs in stream channels. Big dams will not do the job, not one that we can afford. Beaver cause excessive costly problems so we cannot hand the problem back to them, though they seem willing to try.
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| Riparian buffer strips when well designed, implemented, and managed have many uses and benefits. They too, as other communities of nature, have predictable transitions. |
Stream barriers built by fisheries experts "for fish" have rarely produced more fish but they have never been acknowledged as they could have been as major powerfully useful devices in regulating the velocity, dissolved oxygen, and the sediment loads of upper elevation streams. More such barriers made of logs and gabions (rock-filled wire cages) need to be built and for the right reasons. The unseen consequence is that, if successful, the stream cross-sections will change from V to U shapes. Base flow will increase and less water will drain from the water table of forested hillsides and pastures making them more productive. Base flow is the seasonal top of the underground water table and is marked by the last place in a channel, upstream, where water ceases to flow in the summer.
Relations
The Crew soon realized it could not do all that was needed and simultaneously manage itself (payroll, insurance, legal, applications, news, accounting) and turned to Q Works for service. It turned to The Forest Group for intensive forest management, to the Pasture and Range Group for pasture knowledge and management, and to the Fence Group. It knew that abundant, stable supplies of high quality water were needed year-around for local herds. The sites at which such water has been supplied to animals have been major sources of disease and soil erosion. It developed a small specialty crew, an "attack force," to prepare paired, raised and graveled watering sites with devices allowing rest-rotation of their use by herds. This was done along with plans and with gate and fencing options for rotating animals on and off pastures for their grazing.
As poorly designed and maintained roads are the major sediment source in the forest, grazed streambanks are the pasture equivalent. The Crew's concept of the stream is that of a volume, a long irregular one (length separated into "reaches") with height (grass, shrubs or trees), width (both sides of the stream channel called "the riparian zone"), the stream itself, depth (the wet volume under the stream's area called the hyporheic zone), and the air over the specified width. The Crew worked to get pastures fenced back from the edge of the streamside vegetation. (The distance away was a function of soil and slope, not some imaginary vegetation width.) A loss of pasture surface area is balanced by the resultant saving of soil, shade from protected trees in the volume, and scenic values and later potential recreational, wildlife, and biodiversity values suggested by Rural System within ranging options.
The Crew put pressure on the Pasture and Range Group to reduce fertilizer use, producing a squabble just like those between government resource agencies. The Crew knew that the move would produce some heat, but it felt compelled to try to get some time allocated to the problem, hopefully for a joint project that might result in some financial savings for land owners. Commercial fertilizers tend to be used in amounts greater than those taken up by plants. The remainder infiltrates into the soil and potentially into groundwater. Not only do we not want loss of the expensive stuff, we certainly do not want it in our drinking water from the wells. Conventional highly desirable intensive management can reduce water runoff and sediment from pastures. Practices can increase organiv matter in the pasture soil. The practices can also retain fertilizer on the ground. Those substances then have longer to percolate to ground water. The groups have to get together to find a model for appropriate tradeoffs allowing abundant high quality grass forage to be produced with fertilization, and runoff to be kept low and sediment free, and groundwater to be abundantly recharged without harmful fertilizer elements. Work can begin with improved soil knowledge for each alpha unit, selective use of lands for pastures, intensive pasture management with adequate fencing and rest rotation, and site specific prescriptions for mixes, amounts, and timing of treatment with fertilizers on lands properly cultivated to receive the specific amounts. The work hardly sounds like modern groundwater management, but it is, and is essential for beginning to take seriously the objective of having and maintaining a superior high quality groundwater resource.
Groundwater
Groundwater is fancy talk, an impersonal name for our children's well water. The region, mostly forested and agricultural, was poorly recognized by the people living within it (and not at all recognized by others) as their major water infiltration surface and ground water recharge area. The Crew was surprised to learn that EPA only regulates public water systems and does not have the authority to regulate private drinking water wells. Approximately 15 percent of Americans rely on their own private drinking water supplies, and these supplies are almost unregulated. There are no experts regularly checking the water's source or quality. "Good, clean water" is a belief statement.
The Crew sought out data on groundwater status in the region. They gained them from state and federal sources and a few partially-cooperative well-drillers (who are not yet required to report their work). They sought state funds to develop a series of monitoring wells placed in a new strategic sampling pattern. With water level data analyzed for such wells over sufficiently long periods, fluctuations and trends become more valuable as demands increase on groundwater. It had dawned on them that preventing water quality loss was their only hope, for doing anything positive after contamination was impossible. Perhaps automated monitoring will be required some day for all users of groundwater followed by rationing but that does not seem too positive and too remote to inspire action today. Generations would have to wait on dilution. While precipitation is a major and evident contributor to flows, ground water contributions may be vast and from unknown, outside-the-watershed sources. Baseline data were essential for evaluating losses or gains. Data were to be entered into existing models and new ones recently developed for three-dimensional pictures of the probable underground water volumes. Baseline values are few and they are now essential to protect the rural areas from excessive groundwater withdrawals by water-hungry expanding urban areas and industries. Increasing demand for interbasin transfer of water looms. Financial gains now increasingly suggest that formerly- prohibitively-expensive subsurface waters can now be used. (Such gains may be off set by increasing discoveries of polluted systems.)
Large areas of the region were clearly "karst topography," limestone lands with sink holes, cave openings, rounded hills, and underlain with caverns and solution channels. Such land, especially when within large watersheds, present unresolved problems in watershed analyses and thus management. Tauting methods included mapping the land features (sink-hole like), withdrawing them from analyses of their surrounding water budgets, and treating them collectively as a separate Crescent with estimated water runoff from within them going to an unseen hypothetical numbered groundwater sink. Over time, their combined apparent volumes would be compared with flow of springs, trace dyes added to water, and the hypothetical groundwater table (computer produced from baseflow mapping for stream channels throughout the area). Springs and artesian flows would be monitored.
The analytical work required (and resulting models derived for others) is that for a university team. The Crew began pressures for such practical studies with their region as the first study area. Ongoing were their efforts to improve zoning to prevent housing and industry developments in such unstable and easily contaminated areas. They relied upon their education efforts combined with marketing but knew that eventually they would have to find funds to clean up past debris and solid waste dumping in these depressions. They were mini "brown-fields" pock marking the region and contaminating in innumerable, deteriorating conditions the potential water supplies for people now and later centuries.
Their experts saw how to add new on-site data and satellite information to make long-term estimates of change. Given observed or likely changes on a tract (and their interpretations by experts) it may be possible to appraise natural variations, the significance of proposed land use changes, and thus may assure neighbors and the public that activities on the site are not harmful to or are improving the groundwater of the area. Planned activities should clearly not deplete or lower the quality of this essential resource of local citizens.
The Crew saw that meeting the food requirements of a growing population had been over emphasized. Meeting the water needs exceeds those for food. In the US, agriculture uses 85% of all water consumed. The Crew continued to work on a total approach to balancing the competing uses for water within forestry and agriculture and those likely for future industry and exported for urban uses. They saw their work as not just tending the invisible underground "tank farm," (an oil-field image) but being sure that it was refilled regularly with clean water. That required clean slow water on the land surface; little of the fast run-off water counted as re-charge.
On stormy afternoons the Crew discussed the future Crescent Crew. Superior work on a few Crescents, good for a few hundred people, was hardly worth the human life energies of five people. There had to be more Crews working on areas more critical and more contentious than on the one where they evolved, and they discussed how that might come about … between lightning bolts.
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