The Sierra Nevada is a patchwork of dwindling old
growth, imperiled species and degraded lakes, streams and rivers.
But the seedbeds of its salvation are still intact, according to
two reports released this summer, one by a group of scientists, the
other by a regional business council.
Both
conclude there are many reasons for hope in the 400-mile-long
mountainous backbone of California that John Muir called the “range
of light.”
“Most of the problems of the Sierra
can be solved,” concludes the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project
Report. “Reduction of damaging air pollution could occur in a
matter of days. But restoration of complex forest structure might
take a century, and recovery of degraded river channels even
longer.”
The Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Report, a
$6.5 million study commissioned by Congress in 1993, is the most
comprehensive ever conducted. More than 100 scientists worked on it
for three years, and their conclusions will eventually run to more
than 3,000 pages when released later this
year.
Among the scientists’ recommendations are
stopping the stocking of alpine lakes with trout that have pushed
the mountain yellow-legged frog to the brink of extinction,
protecting 1,500-acre pockets of old-growth forest in every
watershed in the range, making modest changes in the management of
river flows to help restore riparian ecosystems, and establishing
an economic mechanism for reinvesting in the
region.
The value of commodities taken from the
Sierra, mainly water and timber, “is enormous at $2.2 billion,”
says Don Erman, a University of California biology professor and
leader of the ecosystem science team. “But reinvestment is
vanishingly small” at less than 2 percent. “Put in a business
sense,” Erman says, “you can’t run a plant without making
reinvestment. The same is true of an ecosystem.” His team suggests
that a tax or fee on water exports to the rest of California be
used to fund watershed restoration in the
Sierra.
A second report, the 48-page Sierra
Nevada Wealth Index, is designed to complement the environmental
study and provide a periodic checkup of the region’s environmental,
economic and social well-being. It was produced at a cost of
$40,000 by the Sierra Business Council, a group of 388 businesses
ranging from small retail stores and bed-and-breakfast
establishments to timber companies and Lake Tahoe casinos. The
report tracks 42 indicators of the region’s wealth, ranging from
water quality to employment and school test scores. The indicators
will be updated periodically and every seven years the report will
be revised.
Both studies have set the stage for a
vigorous debate about the region’s future.
“The
thing I’m most concerned about is population growth,” says Lucy
Blake, executive director of the Sierra Business Council. “Are we
going to grow in a way that’s sensitive to natural systems or
continue to pretend they don’t exist? There is almost no
understanding of natural resources and conservation in county
plans. We need leadership to get these concerns integrated into
county planning.”
The 48-page Sierra Nevada
Wealth Index is available for $11 from the Sierra Business Council,
P.O. Box 2428, Truckee, CA 96160, e-mail: SBC@sierra.net,
(916/582-4800). An order form for the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem
Project Report, in its various printed forms, from a 22-page
executive summary to the entire report at more than 3,000 pages, is
available from the Centers for Water and Wildland Resources, 1072
Academic Surge, University of California, Davis, CA 95616-8750,
e-mail: snep@ceres.ca.gov, or leave a message with your name,
address and fax number at 916/752-7992. The SNEP report is
gradually being put online at
http://www.ceres.ca.gov/snep.
* Jon
Christensen
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Two reports set the stage for Sierra Nevada’s future.
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