Regional Support Team for Biocultural Restoration of Riverscapes
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Our regional partnership will expand a prototype biocultural riparian stewardship system to enable community-based riverscape restoration in four focus areas. We enable a network of well-trained site stewards leading voluntary site restoration efforts. We integrate restoration with workforce development, school programs, and community tending and gathering to make stewardship of resilient and biodiverse riverscapes a locus of community life.
Our existing riparian restoration efforts are insufficient to achieve salmon recovery and riverscape resilience. We need more private participation in riparian management. This proposal expands a riparian community-led stewardship system to augment our existing restoration industry. This is the only initiative of its kind, and offers an innovative approach to adaptive and participatory reach-scale planning to support community-led restoration, monitoring, and adaptive management that aims to scale independently of agency staffing.
The riverscapes of lowland Puget Sound form a massive landbase of over a million acres. With all our industry capacity it will take over 100 years to apply a single vegetation treatment to 10% of these lands. We see a fundamental mismatch between the scale of need, and the capacity of our public industry. Private landowners don’t have the labor. We must realize a broad community-led movement capable of the stewardship of riverscapes
A “riverscape commons” already exists, but is not recognized or valued. Our public trust interests are represented by a bewildering mishmash of public ownership, deed restrictions, regulations, and incentives. Riverscapes have provided public goods and common pool resources for millenia–a riverscape commons. Communities can invest in riparian areas and get a return on investment in the form of ecosystem services, community identity, and household harvest. However we lack the deep cultural knowledge to do this work well.
Biocultural Restoration is “the science and practice of restoring not only ecosystems, but also human and cultural relationships to place, such that cultures are strengthened and revitalized alongside the lands with which they are inextricably linked”. We propose that our ability to do riverscape restoration, resilience, and adaptation at scale will depend on a slow process of cultural transformation that restores direct relationships and revitalizes our culture. This strategy changes on-the-ground riparian restoration from a capital project to a community and cultural development activity.
This is not about “environmental education”, but rather a strategy for directly mobilizing and empowering community-based management. Through hosting volunteer organized multi-day field stations our pilot efforts have generated a very high efficiency of skilled volunteer labor mobilization, with very low agency involvement. We are providing workforce development experiences for students entering riparian revegetation. A cohort of repeat participants are interested in developing a deeper relationship with riverscapes.
Using planning and design charrettes and community-led field stations as the crucible, we propose to expand and experiment with persistent restoration activity to protect and restore biodiversity at sites over time–a capability critically lacking in our industry.
This proposal expands our efforts in four different landscapes. We will stabilize and build out the Skykomish model to operate in the Lower Skykomish Valley, moving towards complete reliance on a cohort of local private site stewards. We will replicate this improved model in South Puget Sound on an Incubator Site in the Lower Deschutes River in Thurston County. In addition we will host planning charrettes to define focus areas in the Chimacum Valley in Jefferson County and the Skookum Valley in Mason County. In each case, while we monitor, restore, and maintain acres, and complete tasks and provide deliverables, our goal is to create the enabling conditions for culturally-motivated tending of riverscapes that creates household value, and can scale independently of agency staffing.
Through this award and expansion we will establish regional “Backbone Operations”--an interdisciplinary regional design team capable of integrating restoration, forestry, ethnobotany, agroforestry, and traditional practices required for long-term riverscape management in a modern regulatory and ownership regime.
