Collaboration: A Catalyst for Restoration
The Joseph Creek watershed, in remote and rural Wallowa County, Oregon, begins in the rolling hill country north of the county’s main agricultural valley before dropping through deeply dissected canyon terrain on its way to the Grande Ronde River. Once an
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Collaboration: A Catalyst for Restoration Nils D. Christoffersen
The Joseph Creek watershed, in remote and rural Wallowa County, Oregon, begins in the rolling hill country north of the county’s main agricultural valley before dropping through deeply dissected canyon terrain on its way to the Grande Ronde River. Once an important fishing site for the Wallowa Band of the Nez Perce, and later the setting for extensive homesteading, agricultural development, livestock grazing, and commercial logging operations by Euro-American settlers and their descendants, Joseph Creek today is the site of innovation in community-based ecological restoration. This chapter describes how rural community members responded to sudden changes in their ability to access and benefit from local lands by taking a lead role in gathering information about, and setting priorities for, ecological restoration needs. Doing so required extensive collaboration across traditional jurisdictional boundaries as well as across traditionally adversarial interests. The case of the Upper Joseph Creek Watershed Assessment demonstrates that national interests in ecological restoration can be constructively met through the active engagement of people at the local level. Aligning restoration goals with local benefits helped to foster community engagement, creative problem solving, and sustained interest and dedication in achieving restoration outcomes.
Background For thousands of years prior to white settlement of the interior Northwest, the people of the Nez Perce and allied Plateau tribes depended on the region’s runs of anadromous salmon and steelhead as the key component of their diets and livelihoods (Marshall 1977; Walker 1967). The Imnaha and Grande Ronde subbasins, in the region now known as Wallowa County, Oregon, were particularly important fisheries for the Nez Perce; in fact, the name “Wallowa” refers to a kind of instream trap the Nez Perce used to catch fish returning to the county’s waterways to spawn. By the end of the twentieth century the county’s historically abundant salmon runs had all but vanished as a result of habitat loss stemming from dam building on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, dredging and filling of the Columbia River estuary, and effects higher in the D. Egan (eds.), Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, 93 The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_7, © Island Press 2011
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pa r t i c i pa ti o n : c o lla b o r a t i o n
watershed related to timber harvesting, grazing, floodplain conversion, channel straightening, fire suppression, road construction, and the installation of associated fish passage barriers (National Research Council 1996). Ecological, social, and political dynamics collided with the listing of spring, summer, and fall Chinook salmon runs in 1992 through the Endangered Species Act (ESA), followed by summer steelhead runs in 1997 and bull trout in 1998. Social and economic impacts of the listings were sudden and dramatic, a
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