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Wild and Scenic Rivers: An American Legacy

The National Wild and Scenic River System was created by Congress in 1968 to preserve rivers with outstanding natural, cultural and recreational values in free-flowing condition for the enjoyment of present and future generations. It’s an act that balances protection with use. It helps support local communities– that’s why it’s still much beloved in an era of beleaguered legislation– and it is a work of policy art. Good evening, and welcome to the Seventh Annual Jordahl Public Lands Lecture. I’m Paul Robbins, I’m the director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Thank you all for joining us, it’s great to have you here, we have a wonderful crowd. 2018 is the 50th anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Here in Madison, that topic is particularly near and dear to us, in fact, when we talk about Wisconsin’s environmental legacy and leadership regarding anything, this act is like home turf. The Nelson Institute’s namesake, the late US senator and Wisconsin governor Gaylord Nelson, was a leading figure in the passage of the act.

Bud Jordahl, who I’ll say a little more about in a moment, namesake of this lecture series, and another great Wisconsin environmental leader, was a champion of the act, and UW-Madison’s very own emeritus professor Fred Madison, who is in the house, was an architect of the act. His fingerprints are literally all over the pages of that act. My office of strategic communications, I should say, ran a whole interview with him, asking him about the oral history of the act, and I think you can go to our website and find it. Fred has a lot to say, he has a better memory than I do. So we’re really excited to have Tim Palmer here. Tim Palmer is the award-winning author of 26 books on rivers, conservation, and the environment. Is that right, 26? Give or take, 30. He is an accomplished photographer, which is a gross understatement, with one of the most complete collection of photos of the rivers of the United States.

If you want a picture of any river, Tim has already taken it. For over 40 years, Tim’s writing and photography work have braided together his love of rivers and nature, with his drive for creative expression and his deep commitment to conservation. An inveterate river lover, Tim has canoed or rafted on more than 300 rivers in the United States and western Canada. He lived for 22 years as a nomad in his van, traveling throughout the country to do research, writing, and photography for his book projects. Tim is currently an associate at the Pennsylvania State University’s Riparia Center, and a visiting scholar at Portland State University. We’re absolutely thrilled to have him here this evening. Please, give me a warm welcome for Tim Palmer.
(audience applauding)
– Thank you.
– Thank you.

– Thank you.Thank you and let me get rid of this mic, and I’ll just use the other one. I’m totally psyched to be here. It’s such an honor to be in front of you tonight. I’m honored that you’ve all decided to spend some time here with us tonight. I want to thank, certainly, Paul and Emily Reynolds of the Nelson Institute, and I’d like to thank Rebecca Wodder and Steve Born for kind of pointing out the path here for me. And of course, I’d like to thank Bud Jordahl and Senator Nelson for their fundamental role in this wonderful institute. I’d like to tell you a little bit about the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. It’s the 50th anniversary, as Paul said, and my own involvement with this program began when I was at an institution very much like this one, Penn State University.

I was a landscape architecture student, and in the end of my junior year, I developed a bicycle trail plan for the State College region in Pennsylvania. At the end of the term, I presented that. It was essentially a greenway plan, before we even had the name for that. But I presented the plan to a group of townspeople, and when I was all done, out of the audience, walked an older gentleman who introduced himself as Dr. Peter Fletcher of the Forestry College, and he said, “Tim, how would you like to work on an ecology-based watershed protection plan for a stream being studied for the National Wild and Scenic River System.” And I didn’t know what any of that meant. (audience laughing)

But it all sounded good, so I was in. And I spent my whole senior year working on planning studies for Pine Creek, one of the initial 27 rivers being studied for addition to the Wild and Scenic Program. And that led to many other things, including a job as a county planner for 10 years, and then, to my writing career, and all the time I stayed quite close to this system of nationally-protected rivers as a citizen activist and as a board member of several organizations, and as a writer. And so, for the 50th anniversary, I produced a photo book. I meant to bring one up as a prop, but I forgot to. You can see it outside in the reception area. It’s called Wild and Scenic Rivers: An American Legacy. So I’d like to show you just a little bit of what I got to learn, or got to see about this program while I was doing the book and tell you a little bit about what I was able to learn.

I think we all know that from mountains and grasslands and forests all over America, the rivers are the lifelines on which so much else depends. Recognizing the value of the finest natural rivers that were left, citizen conservationists and some enlightened bureaucrats in the federal government, and congressional members, all banded together in 1968 to pass the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. We’ve gone from eight major rivers to over 300 in this program. So this might be a good time to just kind of take stock of what has happened here and consider how that happened. And to also address the future and what that might hold for these finest rivers in America, and for others that are equally deserving. It’s a good time to do that. It’s the 50th anniversary of the program. As we like to say, it’s the teachable moment, so let’s just take a look at what has happened here. Back when the idea was first formulated, in the 50s and the 60s, it was built on two threads of knowledge. One was that natural rivers are incredibly valuable for many different reasons, and I’m not even going to get into what those are, I think you all understand them. The second is that they were threatened in many ways, and back then, the big threat were large dam proposals.

70,000 large dams had been built across our country, another 10,000 were planned or proposed or under construction. The problem went way back. Even Henry David Thoreau lamented the loss of this river, and the Atlantic salmon. This is the Concord River in Massachusetts, when Billerica Dam was built, still standing today. We lost many of our finest natural rivers from the Tuolumne here at Hetch Hetchy Valley where John Muir fought his final losing battle. O’Shaughnessy Dam was built, flooding the only valley that was similar to Yosemite Valley itself. So from the West Coast to the East, here on the Allegheny River, where the Seneca Indian nations had a treaty that was signed by George Washington, but then broken to build Kinzua Dam.

So for a time, these dams made economic and hydrologic sense, but virtually all those sites were built upon, by the 1970s, and even before that, and what were left were rivers at risk that had incredible fish populations and migration routes, like for Chinook salmon, here in Oregon, fabulous wildlife corridors were being flooded, whole communities were being drowned out by unnecessary reservoirs, and yet, the building continued on and on and on, with even more projects proposed. Back in the 40s, a dam was stopped at this site. This is the Smokey Range site on the North Fork of the Flathead River in Montana. And it was very rare for any dams to be stopped back then. This one was halted, really only because it would have flooded into Glacier National Park. That didn’t really faze the Army Corps of Engineers, they simply moved the site over to the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, but that ended up being a very fateful move in the history of river conservation, because these two guys, John and Frank Craighead. How many of you know the Craighead brothers?

Twins, okay, quite a few people here. Twin brothers, pioneering wildlife biologists, these guys invented the radio collar for tracking large mammals. They did all the initial research on the grizzly bears in the northern Rockies. They knew the Middle Fork of the Flathead as the wildest river in Montana, and so they fought that dam to a standstill, but more important, they realized that protecting the finest rivers that were left would be an endless battle of catch up and rearguard fights, unless we had a program to set aside the very best in a proactive way.

So they bounced that idea up through the bureaucracy, and it ended up on Bud Jordahl’s desk. It ended up on Senator Nelson’s desk, and it came to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, here, appointed by President Kennedy as the Interior Secretary, later serving through the Johnson administration. Here’s Stewart pointing out the wonders of nature to Lady Bird Johnson on the Snake River in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And of course, Lady Bird had her own amazing passion for the natural environment and for its protection. So, I had the great fortune to interview Stewart a number of times before he died several years ago, and in my main interview with him in 1983, he said, “Tim, let me tell you about my own personal transformation.” He said, “I went to Congress from Arizona, and you cannot do that and not be in favor of dams. So I voted for every one that came along, including Glen Canyon Dam of the Colorado. But once I became Secretary of the Interior, had to recognize a greater responsibility to the people of the whole nation, and in doing that, I realized that we had done a very poor job of balancing our development of rivers with the protection of the finest that were left.”

And so, Stewart became a very eager supporter of this program, and of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The act was drafted by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho. Part of it was, and he took the courageous stand of doing that from the extremely conservative state of Idaho, the act was supported and broadened significantly by Senator Nelson, here, who recognized, and with the help of Fred Madison, who actually wrote the language for the act in this respect, it was broadened to include rivers of the East, of course, Senator Nelson was a big Saint Croix enthusiast, and he probably got a lot of that love of the Saint Croix River from Bud Jordahl. And he was a big champion of its protection as governor in Wisconsin. He carried that love of the Saint Croix on to the Senate, and became determined to broaden the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to include rivers of the East, not just the pristine, wild rivers of the West, the ones like the Craigheads knew so well, but the other rivers that had more development on them, that are no less deserving of protection here in the East. So, the Saint Croix was added to the system. The recreational rivers were added as a category that allowed more development, and the program was significantly broadened by the foresight and the vision here of Senator Nelson and by Fred, thank you so much. So the act moved along, President Johnson included river protection, a very eloquent statement about river conservation in his State of the Union Address in 1965, and so the act was passed in 1968, with, get this, a unanimous vote in the Senate and a 265-to-7 vote in the House of Representatives. (audience applauding)

Thank you. Back in the good old days when bipartisanship was evident if you had a really good idea. So the initial act designated eight major rivers right off the bat: the Middle Fork of the Feather, in California, the Rogue River in Oregon, the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho, the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and of course, the Namakagon and Saint Croix in Wisconsin and at the border with Minnesota, yes. As Senator Nelson told me in one of my interviews with him, he said, “Tim, we got a river east of the Mississippi, it wasn’t very far east of the Mississippi, but we got one in.” And it’s this fabulous stream, I don’t know how many of you have canoed on the Namakagon, quite a few people, I put in at Namakagon Lake two years ago and paddled the whole way down it and then down the Saint Croix on 130-mile trip, was just an outstanding outing here in the upper Midwest.

I actually included that river in my brand-new book, which is called America’s Great River Journeys, and it’s an outstanding river trip of the north Midwest. You start on this tiny little stream through the boggy northern woodlands there, and it gradually grows and becomes a great recreational river here, for canoeing and swimming and it’s a very interesting case in that the Namakagon has two significant, but not super big dams on it. Those were grandfathered into the system by Senator Nelson, and then on the lower Namakagon, it goes through wonderfully wild country and it’s amazing in that it’s not very far from development or farmland, but that river corridor is wonderfully protected by the National Park Service, with open space acquisition and easements that were done after the designation so that we have this magnificent natural riverway for over 100 miles until it flows into the Saint Croix, and then on down the Saint Croix, as it becomes this major river of the upper Midwest, with all of its recreational use along it. So the Namakagon-Saint Croix is actually the longest designated reach of river in the lower 48, only the rivers of Alaska are longer.

So it’s a wonderful addition to the system, and the Wolf River was also included in the original act. Unfortunately, no Wisconsin rivers have been added since then, but we’ll talk about that in a minute. The act also explicitly recognized that the system should grow. Congress recognized this fact and admitted they didn’t have the studies necessary to move other rivers forward at that time, but that it should happen, and it named 27 for specific studies, including Pine Creek, that stream that got my start, where I got my start in river conservation. To be designated, a river has to meet only two requirements. The first is that it be free flowing in the reach that’s being designated, and it has to have one or more outstanding natural values. These can include geology, water quality, fisheries– Check out the Chinook salmon here on the Rogue River– wildlife, hydrology– The amazing spring flows here on the Smith River of California– archeological sites, historic sites, scenery and recreation of many kinds. Any one of those qualities make a river eligible. So what’s it really mean, then, to be included in this program?

Well, the first thing it means is no new dams. And dams were actually even proposed, more dams, on the Namakagon and Saint Croix by the Northern States Power Company, way back, earlier in history. The ban on new dam construction was especially important on this river, this is the White Salmon in Washington, where a chain of seven hydroelectric dams were planned but then stopped with its designation. The other thing that the act does is it requires the managing agency to prepare a management plan, and in that, they address issues of recreational use and facilities and also land use along the river corridor. The federal government cannot regulate private land development, only local governments can do that, but the planning process sets the stage for working with local communities and counties so that we don’t see this kind of development on the flood plain, which occurred on the Allegheny River before it was designated.

So the Wild and Scenic System really changed our fundamental outlook on rivers in America. We went from a point of view and a philosophy of developing any dam anywhere, at any cost, to one of saving the very best rivers that were left. The program was meant to grow, that didn’t necessarily mean that it would, and in fact, it didn’t, for a few years. And so, a group of conservationists met in Denver and formed an organization called American Rivers, whose single purpose at that time was to expand the membership of this program, to add rivers to the Wild and Scenic System. They hired Bill Painter straight out of the University of Michigan as their first director, for $400 a month.

Bill set up a one-room office on Capitol Hill, and he adopted as his initial project one that any reasonable person would have considered a hopeless situation, and that was the New River of North Carolina. On the New, a private hydroelectric consortium had all the federal permits they needed. They had bought all the land, they kicked the Appalachian residents out, they tore the buildings down, the bulldozers were figuratively lined up, ready to go. But somehow, Bill and his little band of river aficionados, a few hundred at most, convinced the governor of North Carolina that the river should be protected, and ultimately, it was, so that we can go there today and see the New River just the way it always was.

Another really interesting addition early in the system was Hells Canyon of the Snake River. And here we are at that extremely rugged border between Idaho and Oregon. Half of Hells Canyon had already been dammed. The other half was slated to be flooded by a 600-foot-tall dam. An Idaho boater got wind of this proposal. He went to the closest Sierra Club office at the time…which was in Seattle. He knocked on the door, a cold call. A young lawyer by the name of Brock Evans answered. And Brock became convinced that Hells Canyon should be protected. He filed the paperwork to appeal the Federal Power Commission permit for this dam, minutes before the due date of midnight. That delayed the approval for two years, and in that time, Idaho and Oregon conservationists were able to go from flat zero in political momentum, to Governor Cecil Andrus of Idaho declaring that Hells Canyon Dam would be built, “only over my dead body.”
(laughter)

So with commitments like that, Hells Canyon, also, was protected and we can go there and see it, just like it always was. So my favorite little story about rivers being added to this program is in California. Northern California has five amazing wild river systems at the northern end of the state. Northern Californians love their rivers. They managed to get a state law passed protecting them in a state scenic river system. But Governor Brown, first time around, back when he still had hair, Jerry Brown, very astutely realized that Southern California had way more people than Northern California. They could overturn that state law at any time. And in fact, people wanted to do that. But Dos Rios, on the Middle Fork of the Eel River, Southern California water interests had a dam proposal ready to go. So Governor Brown, very astutely, realized that he could follow an alternate path toward federal protection because they’re state protected rivers, he could request designation of all of them by the Secretary of the Interior. So he did this in the summer of 1980. A team of planners in Sacramento went to work, and with the federal agencies went to work with rivers like the Klamath here, free flowing for 200 miles, the Trinity, its largest tributary, the Eel River, the river of the redwoods in California, all of these at stake. They went to work on the EIS, working night and day.

Nobody thought you could do an environment impact statement for 1,500 miles of river in six months. Meanwhile, another team of lawyers in a way fancier office in Sacramento went to work, these are the lawyers for the California Water Development and Northern California timber industries, went to work. They didn’t have to win a thing. All they had to do was delay the approval of the EIS for six months, because the election was coming up, Jimmy Carter was running against Ronald Reagan. So the months went by and worked down to weeks, and then the weeks worked down to days, and indeed, Ronald Reagan was elected president. Everyone knew that he would not support federal protection of these rivers. Ronald Reagan asked all of Jimmy Carter’s cabinet secretaries to resign the day before inauguration, and they all did, except for one.

And that one was Cecil Andrus, now Secretary of Interior under Jimmy Carter, and Andrus said, “I’m staying till the very end.” And as it turned out, 15 hours before inauguration, the final judge approved the final EIS. A courier rushed over to the Interior building, Cecil Andrus signed the papers, declaring 15 miles of river protected for all time in Northern California. One of the great victories in river conservation.

This is the Delaware River, a river in the East, that got designated early, really, as a way of stopping Tocks Island Dam. Much like the New River, it was ready to be built. It was halted in legislation, and planners with the Park Service recognized that here in the East a whole different approach was needed, because much of the land was privately owned, and of course, you’re in that situation here in Wisconsin as well. So they very cleverly crafted a program that’s now known as the Partnership River Program, where the management plan is done before the designation, not after, and that way, private landowners know exactly what they can expect with the designation. They involve local communities and local governments from step one of the process on these rivers that sometimes are much more urban in their orientation, with lots of recreational use. And so this partnership program ended up being a way forward in the East, where proposals for river protection were otherwise blocked by landowners and others who simply did not want any engagement of the federal government. So the Delaware was really a model case in that regard. Here, the Clarion, another river in the East that was included.

In Oregon, a whole different approach was taken. The federal agencies do land management plans on a routine basis, and now, because of an appeal brought by American Rivers, they have to consider the eligibility of all of their rivers for Wild and Scenic designation as part of their land management plans. So that doesn’t mean they’ll do anything with those eligibility determinations, and they usually don’t, but in Oregon, river conservation groups went through those plans, they picked out 50 of the best rivers that were found eligible. They packaged them into a bill. Senator Mark Hatfield championed this, and it went through the Senate and Congress, and was signed into law, designating 53 new rivers at once, the biggest single addition ever to the Wild and Scenic Program in 1988.

We even protected three rivers in Puerto Rico in 2002. But along about that time, the rate of growth of the program slowed down and this shot illustrates one of the reasons for that. This is the Stanislaus River of California. At the time, it was the most floated whitewater in the West, it was the deepest limestone canyon on the West Coast, it brought people joy in a way that no other place on earth could possibly do. And yet, New Malones Dam was proposed. Friends of the river in California fought that, they lost, the dam was built, they continued to battle, trying to keep the dam from being completely filled, and they lost that battle too.

Little did we recognize, in this defeat, that the Stanislaus would be the last dam fight fought at the epic scale in America and lost. All of the others since then have been won. This is where we turned the corner in the era of big dam construction in America. So the good thing about that was it allowed other issues of river conservation to rise to the surface like toxic waste, like farmland waste and feedlot runoff, like clear cut logging on slopes that are way too steep, like flood plain development, which is the greatest single cause of loss of natural river values in America today. And of course, the source of many private and public economic losses, as well. So these other issues really raised to the front of river conservation, Wild and Scenic Rivers were kind of, they kind of dropped back, but they were never really forgotten. And then, for the 40th anniversary of this program, American Rivers launched a campaign to designate 40 new rivers. Many people thought that was impossible, but there were great players active at the state level, like the big guy on your left here. This is Bill Sedivy of Idaho Rivers United, who did what no one thought was possible. Bill engaged the ranching community in an extremely rural and remote area of the desert of southern Idaho, to support river conservation, because their water rights would also be protected with the designation of the Bruneau River here, and the Owyhee and others.

And likewise, in Wyoming, this guy, Scott Bosse of American Rivers, recognized that this wonderful suite of rivers in Jackson Hole and the Upper Snake River, were unprotected. They were extremely valuable. The Snake itself is the great icon of river and mountain scenery in the West. It had been recommended for Wild and Scenic status back in the 1970s, but that was blocked by local ranchers. Scott did a little bit of research and he found that Senator Craig Thomas of Wyoming actually grew up on a dude ranch at the edge of Yellowstone, so he went to see him. And he convinced him that these rivers of the Upper Snake River Basin should be protected, in order to protect the entire economy of that region, which, of course, is tourist based. So Craig Thomas, again, in a very conservative state, Wyoming, brought along the rest of the delegation, and they passed 16 new rivers there in 2009.

So where does all of this take us? What does all of this really mean, as far as rivers of America goes? Well, to me, the most significant gain here is protection of those rivers that would have explicitly been lost to dams and reservoirs if they had not been included in this program. Rivers like the Tuolumne here in California, the Delaware in Pennsylvania, the Niobrara in Nebraska, the Red River in Kentucky, the Rio Chama in New Mexico, the Kings in California, and many others. Here’s a map of the program. You can’t see much detail here. But you can see that most of the dark blue lines are on the far west, indeed, the four western Pacific states have 70% of the rivers in the program. Some parts of the country are very poorly represented. For example, Utah, has classics like the Green River here, 400 miles free flowing through the deserts of the Southwest, much like a little Grand Canyon itself, still unprotected. The Deep South has very few rivers included, even though the streams there have amazing biological diversity. The Great Plains has very few protected rivers. Here in Wisconsin, other than those initial three that were designated, the Wolf, the Namakagon, and the Saint Croix, no other rivers have been added. We have wonderful streams like the Flambeau here.

Small stream like Kinnickinnic, the Kinnickinnic here, right near the Twin Cities area. The Ontonagon River, a short but really beautiful wild reach in the northern end of the state. No rivers added to the program. And I should also mention here that you don’t necessarily have to have Wild and Scenic River status to protect the river. There are many other means of doing that. And your Rivers Alliance of Wisconsin here is working on alternative programs that will do that, that will protect the finest streams you have left here. You don’t necessarily have to have federal Wild and Scenic status, although that is the best way, and the most secure way to do that.

So here in the world we face today, and in the decades coming ahead, we have the greatest challenge of all that we have ever faced, which is global warming, and rivers play very prominently into that problem, because headwater streams like what we see here, coming from areas of heavy snowmelt and even from glaciers in some of the western states, are very important to the waters down below, that need those cold water additions to their flow to protect the fish there and to protect the water quality for human use as well. Likewise, streams that have not been logged or clear cut are very important in the age of global warming, because those waters are clear and cold and pure, and they flow on down to nourish bigger streams below, like this one, is Ukonom Creek, flowing down to the Klamath River of California, which needs that cold water desperately for the salmon and steelhead there that are struggling to survive. Streams with heavy spring flows are very important, likewise, for the cold water they provide to native fishes like the westslope cutthroat trout, here in Montana.

So that’s one of the big challenges we face, and another is one we never really envisioned a decade ago, and that is a Congress that would want to take rivers back out of the Wild and Scenic System. And we face that threat here on the Merced River, the river of Yosemite, where an irrigation district wants to raise a dam. They can’t do that without rescinding the lower part of the Merced’s Wild and Scenic designation. A bill twice passed the House of Representatives to do just that, it was blocked in the Senate. Fortunately, but that remains a threat, and it’s a reminder that protection of anything requires constant vigilance by the people who care about these places. Another challenge we have is that beyond the immediate corridor that’s protected with a Wild and Scenic designation, we have watershed areas that remain unprotected, and still vulnerable to problems like those presented by the Mining Law of 1872. Which here, at the headwaters of this stream, this is the North Fork of the Smith River in California, headwaters are not protected. A international mining consortium wants to develop strip mines for nickel, much like some of the threats you face here in Wisconsin from mining. Much like some of the threats that your Rivers Alliance of Wisconsin is working on, and so we need additional action to protect those headwater areas. The gal on your right, here, Barbara Ullian, has spent a lifetime trying to block those mining proposals on the Smith and the Rogue and the Illinois, and other streams of the Northwest.

We’ve got a temporary hold on new mining claims there, but we need to make that permanent, with congressional designation. Our delegation, Peter DeFazio here on your left, Jared Huffman on your right, are both supporting that legislation, but of course, they can’t get it passed in the Congress that we now have. We need a different congress to move that law forward.
(audience applauding)

Thank you. We all know that. So, where does this bring us today? The good news is that after 50 years, we’ve gone from eight major rivers in this program to over 300. The Wild and Scenic System remains the premier program for protecting natural rivers in America, and for that matter, in the world. Whether you’re out for a really crazy exploratory, like we were here, with inflatable kayaks on the Chetco River through the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon, or a lively day of whitewater here on Wilson Creek in North Carolina, or a kayak lesson on flat water like the Allegheny of Pennsylvania, we all need these rivers, and we need them for the next generation. And of course, for all the generations to follow.

We need these rivers for the pure water that they provide to us. We need them because they offer us a chance to escape again to the natural, real world that’s still out there along our rivers. We need them because they nourish our spirits and our psyches in a way that no other places can possibly do. We need them as lifelines to entire ecosystems.

So think about what rivers mean to you. Think about what they meant to Fred Madison, here in our audience, to Senator Gaylord Nelson, to Bud Jordahl, to all these other people I’ve talked about in my program here. Think about what they mean to the next generation, like all these high school kids I met on the Namakagon River. Maybe you recognize somebody in this photo, bunch of high school kids I met paddling down there for a week. Think of what rivers will mean to them, and to all those generations to come. And join with all these others who have acted with courage and passion and commitment to protect the rivers and the places that they love. Each and every one of us can engage in the future of a worthy river, wherever we happen to be.

Thank you so much for joining me here tonight.
(audience applauding)

Thank you.