NAME Jeff Mount
VOCATION Geology professor
AGE 52
HOME BASE Davis, California
KNOWN FOR Pointing out that building
houses below sea level and surrounding them with weak levees is a
recipe for disaster
MOST RECENT
EXPLOIT On a dare from his son, giving up his
raft to kayak the Grand Canyon this summer: “I saw a lot of the
canyon from the bottom side (of the Colorado River).”
Twenty-three years ago, geology professor Jeff Mount spent most of
his time peering at rock, in an effort to reconstruct the
environment circa 500 million BC. Then one day, a couple of
students paid a call to Mount’s office at the University of
California at Davis. Describing that visit, the professor sounds
like a trash-talking river runner:
“These snot-nosed
punks came over and said, ‘We think you should teach a class
on the Tuolumne River.’ I said, ‘Why?’ and they
said, ‘Because we can’t get a permit.’ ” Mount
rose to the bait. “It was an El Niño year,” he says, “so the
water was just immense.”
Mount came back from his first
river field course hooked, got certified as a whitewater guide, and
ever since, he’s been taking his geology students for epic
trips on rivers like the Colorado, the Skeena in British Columbia,
and the Copper River in Alaska. “Rivers can teach us a lot of
fundamentals about the kinds of processes that sculpt the surface
of the earth,” he says. They also taught Mount a lot about how
humans affect natural processes. “Along the way, I began to speak
publicly about how the way we manage rivers is in direct
contravention to the way they actually work. We spend vast amounts
of money to make rivers do things they don’t want to do, and
at the top of that list is making them hold still.”
In
1995, he published the formidably titled California Rivers
and Streams: The Conflict Between Fluvial Process and Land
Use, which is now something of a Bible for river folks in
the state.
Then, in 2002, Mount’s life took a new
turn when then-Gov. Gray Davis appointed him to the State
Reclamation Board, an obscure body charged with overseeing the
thousands of miles of levees that keep the waters of the San
Francisco Bay-Delta from pouring into the farmland surrounding
Sacramento.
There are 7 million acres of cropland in the
Delta, and about 23 million people depend on it for drinking water.
Today, the farmland is increasingly being covered by housing
developments — there are currently plans for roughly 120,000
new homes in the Delta — and the Delta’s levees, like
those in Louisiana, are not up to their task. Facing a raft of new
development proposals, Mount and other members of the board began
to publicly question the wisdom of building houses below sea level,
in the path of danger.
Mount also spoke about his
concerns that human efforts to straitjacket the Delta were killing
it. All of the levees in the Delta have, he says, “frozen it in
place, so it can’t adjust to changes in runoff and changes in
sea level. It’s so out of equilibrium that eventually
you’ll cross a threshold and it’ll reorganize itself.
And it’s teetering on that point right now.”
But
last September, less than a month after Hurricane Katrina burst New
Orleans’ levees and flooded that city, Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, R, sacked the entire board. “It was a Saturday
night massacre,” says Mount. “We were all booted and a very
pro-development board put in place.”
The incident and the
ensuing fallout helped make Mount’s name and his views more
widely known. “It’s like when an actor dies; it’s a
good career move. I even got profiled in The New York Times,” he
says. “But that’s not my career. My career is here, writing
papers and teaching classes.” Even though Mount’s off the
reclamation board, however, he still speaks out frequently in the
press about the plight and dangers of the Delta. He’s also
preparing to take another class out on the water next summer
— this time on British Columbia’s Taseko, Chilco and
Chilcotin rivers.
This article was made possible
with support from the William C. Kenney Watershed Protection
Foundation and the Jay Kenney Foundation.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Getting out of the office, and into hot water.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
