Bozeman Municipal Watershed Project

Snow covers Hyalite Reservoir in the Gallatin National Forest on March 22, 2010. Bozeman receives 80 percent of its municipal water from both Hyalite and Bozeman Creeks; both drainages flowing into the city's water intakes will be part of the Bozeman Municipal Watershed Project and subject to forest thinning and prescribed burning to mitigate potential water contamination from a large forest fire.

Thanks to Derek for these.

Here’s an editorial from the Bozeman Chronicle:

Editorial: Protecting Bozeman’s water supply is our best long-term plan

Posted: Sunday, January 22, 2012 12:00 am

Right on cue, a trio of environmental groups has again challenged a plan to protect the main Bozeman municipal water sources from catastrophic wildfire.

The plan calls for treating 4,800 acres of the Hyalite and Sourdough creek drainages with timber harvests, thinning and controlled burns to reduce the amount of potential fuel for a wildfire that will certainly burn through the area at some point in the future. A catastrophic fire in these drainages in their present condition would produce ash and silt and trigger erosion that could overwhelm the city’s water system.

Challenging the proposal for the third time, The Alliance for a Wild Rockies, the Montana Ecosystem Defense Council and the Native Ecosystem Council contend the plan will disrupt lynx and grizzly habitat and eliminate cover for elk.

Though it will probably fall on deaf ears, here’s a different argument to consider for abandoning this challenge:

People are moving to Montana. They are buying up what was once agricultural land and turning it into housing developments. Much of the open space we all value so much as part of our quality of life is being consumed in the process.

The best way to combat this trend is to concentrate this immigration of new Montanans as much as possible – in cities. Bozeman is the best location on the northwest corner of the Yellowstone ecosystem – among blue-ribbon trout rivers and in between major wilderness areas – to accommodate as much of this population growth as possible.

To do that, though, the city needs water. And protecting the city’s primary sources of potable water is one of the best ways to ensure that Bozeman can accommodate smart growth. If the environmental groups hamper the city’s ability to maintain and increase its water supply, they will be forcing new population out into the countryside where more valuable open space will be consumed.

Make no mistake: Montana’s population is going to grow, whether we like it or not. And it is incumbent upon the state’s cities to accommodate that growth by building up, not out.

Environmental groups can help the cities accomplish this by working with them – not against them – as they seek to responsibly protect and expand their municipal water supplies.

Here’s an article from earlier in the week.

Conservation groups challenge watershed plan for third time

CARLY FLANDRO, Chronicle Staff Writer | Posted: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 12:15 am

Conservation groups on Tuesday challenged a proposed thinning and prescribed-burn project in forests south of Bozeman that aims to protect the city’s drinking water.

It’s the group’s third time challenging the proposal.

“Simply stated, the agency’s proposal breaks a number of laws and this time around is no different,” said Michael Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

The Gallatin National Forest’s plan, called the Bozeman Municipal Watershed project, calls for burning, harvesting and thinning 4,800 acres in the Hyalite and Bozeman Creek drainages. Those drainages supply more than 80 percent of the Bozeman community’s water, and thinning efforts there are intended to reduce the extent of any potential wildfires.

A severe wildfire could put so much sediment and ash in the creeks that the treatment plant couldn’t handle it and would have to shut down, according to Marna Daley, forest spokeswoman.

Montana Ecosystem Defense Council and Native Ecosystems Council joined the Alliance for the Wild Rockies in challenging the plan.

The groups say the project would log federally designated lynx critical habitat and core grizzly bear habitat, and that it would remove elk hiding cover and destroy habitat for other old-growth-dependent species. They also worry the logging and road building would add sediment to creeks containing the native westslope cutthroat trout, which is listed as a “species of special concern.”

“Those same creeks also supply Bozeman’s municipal water,” said Steve Kelly, a board member for two of the conservation groups. “The best thing we could do for wildlife, fish, opportunities for backcountry recreation and solitude, and our drinking-water supply, would be to back away from this foolish project and enjoy the forest’s many enduring gifts.”

Garrity also alleged that some areas affected by the plan have been inaccurately designated as wildland-urban interface zones.

Daley said she has not yet seen the challenge but said the Gallatin National Forest is committed to moving forward with the project.

“We’re very confident the decision is a good decision,” she said of the most recent proposal. “We look forward to moving toward the implementation of the project in the near future.”

Daley said the challenge will go to the regional forester for review, and he’ll decide in about six weeks whether to uphold the forest’s plan.

The city of Bozeman partnered with the Gallatin National Forest to produce the watershed plan.

It’s interesting to me that we’re only hearing one side of the story from the article..

For the curious, here’s the site of information on the project, including a video.

Here’s a part of the ROD about sedimentation

Sedimentation concerns from our actions or no action
The Forest fuels specialist and hydrologist modeled the current vegetative and fuels conditions in the two drainages, and showed that a wildfire in average humidity and wind conditions could generate an increase in sediment of 250% over natural conditions (FEIS, p 3-40). A wildfire in more extreme weather conditions could cause even higher increases in sedimentation. The City of Bozeman water treatment plant currently can handle only small increases in sediment and ash and certainly not levels modeled for a wildfire under moderate or more extreme conditions.
Our effects analysis also showed that the vegetation treatments in Alternative 6 could reduce potential fire size by 54% when a wildfire occurs in the project area (FEIS, p 2-29 and p 3-29). Further analysis showed that a 4,000 acre fire in the project area after implementation of Alternative 6 would likely increase sediment 30% above natural in the Hyalite Creek drainage, and increase sediment 54% above natural in the Bozeman Creek drainage. The same size fire without treatment would produce sediment increases of 56% and 105% in those same drainages, respectively (SFEIS p. 172). A 2,000 acre fire after implementation of Alternative 6 is predicted to increase sediment by 18% over natural in Hyalite Creek and 32% in Bozeman Creek versus 31% and 57%, respectively, without treatment. The Bozeman Municipal Water Treatment plant is challenged to efficiently treat water when sediment levels exceed even 30% over natural, so 50% or greater increases could result in multiple day reductions in plant efficiency. This analysis convinced me that Alternative 6 will be effective in meeting the purpose and need for the project, and that the no action alternative, is not acceptable when the drinking water of an entire community is at stake.

Maybe I’m missing something, but if seeking safe drinking water makes people “break laws”, then what would be the proposal to meet the purpose and need that would not “break laws”?; if there is no such proposal conceivable, then it would appear that something is wrong with our framework with laws and regulations (or case law)..

Ski Area Water Rights Litigation

“Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.”

– This quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, but until the attribution can be verified, the quote should not be regarded as authentic according to this Mark Twain quotes website.

There have been many stories about this out in the press recently. I have tried to stay away from it as it is a fairly specialized issue, involves water law (which I know enough to know is very complicated), plus is officially under the cone of litigation silence. However, I bet there are others on this blog who know enough to be able to ensure that we hear both sides of the story. This from Courthouse News Service (note that these folks simply describe the situation as the plaintiff sees it, without an attempt to hear the other side). I do wonder to what degree the cone of litigation silence allows people to get a first impression of a case that is negative to the agency. Also, it may be interesting to see how our usual discussion over the tactics of using litigation as a tool is influenced (or not) by the agenda of the group litigating.

One of our readers called and wondered why I hadn’t posted, so I rethought and here it is.

DENVER (CN) – The National Ski Areas Association claims the U.S. Forest Service illegally seized privately owned water rights without compensation from 121 resorts on federal lands, via a “stunning and unprecedented directive.”
U.S. ski resorts generated $2.6 billion in revenue in 2009, according to IbisWorld, a market research group.
In its federal complaint, National Ski Areas Association says the Forest Service and Department of Agriculture have no authority to demand water rights that resorts must acquire under state laws “at great expense and effort.”
The Lakewood, Colo.-based trade association, established in 1962 “to foster, stimulate and promote growth in the industry,” represents 321 resorts, which account for more than 90 percent of annual ski and snowboard visits nationwide. Of its members, 121 must periodically obtain special use permits to operate on National Forest System lands, according to the organization’s website.
The Forest Service directive, issued in 2011, added a 7-page clause – Clause D-30 – to its handbook and “dramatically alters the settled legal regime governing water rights at ski areas on National Forest System lands,” according to the complaint.
The directive forces ski area permit holders to assign permanently or quit claim to privately owned water rights without payment; prohibits resort operators from selling their water rights to anyone except a future resort operator; and significantly reduces the economic value of water rights that the owners acquire, the association says.
It also forces permit holders to grant the Forest Service power of attorney so that the agency can execute documents to seize, control, and transfer the permit holders’ water rights, and requires permit holders to waive any legal claim for compensation from Uncle Sam.
The directive, the nonprofit ski association says, was adopted without public notice and violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the National Forest Management Act and the 5th Amendment.
“No legislation authorizes the Forest Service to use its ski area special use permit authority to exercise dominion and control over water rights arising under state law,” the association says.
Special use permits, generally issued for 40-year terms, terminate automatically upon a change in resort ownership.
Winter Park Resort and Steamboat Ski Resort in Colorado, Brighton Ski Resort in Utah, Sierra-at-Tahoe Snowsports Resort in California and others will be hurt by the directive, the complaint states.
“[T]he Forest Service may purchase water rights from their owner if the Forest Service wants to obtain them for use on National Forest Systems lands,” the association says.
This winter, lack of snowfall has forced resorts across the county to rely heavily on what they are able to produce.
The association seeks a nationwide injunction to enjoin the Forest Service’s application of the directive.
It is represented by Exekiel Williams with Ducker, Montgomery, Lewis & Bess.

A Tale of Two Watershed Assessments

This weekend, I ran across two news stories that reflect two different watershed assessments. Since both stories came out at the same time, it might be confusing. Forests to Faucets is one, and Watershed Condition Assessment is the other. F2F is about drinking water, and WCA is based on a broad range of indicators found here.

This news story is about the Forests to Faucets map here.
Excerpt:

SAN ANDREAS – New maps posted online this month by the U.S. Forest Service pinpoint where the nation’s drinking water is most jeopardized by wildfires and other threats to high-country forests.

One of the hot spots, according to the maps, is the headwaters of the Mokelumne River in the high Sierra east of Stockton.

The new mapping effort is called Forests to Faucets. The data behind it is why water utilities in some western cities now help pay to maintain portions of nearby national forests.

While this article, about the Helena National Forest, I think is about the watershed condition assessments found here. Here’s the user’s guide.

Excerpt:

HELENA, Mont. — A U.S. Forest Service report identifies the Helena National Forest as having the worst watershed conditions of all national forests and grasslands in a region that includes Montana and parts of Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota.

“We knew we had issues because of the history of the Helena forest,” said Meredith Webster, a soil scientist for Forest Service Region 1, which produced the report. “When the Forest Service acquired those lands, there had been a lot of heavy use on them. So while the results weren’t surprising, it certainly got our attention.”

The heavy use includes a century of mining, logging, fire suppression and other human activities.

The report looked at forest watersheds and classified findings such as water quality and quantity, aquatic life, roads, trees, vegetation and soils. From that a watershed received a rating of Condition Class 1, 2, or 3. A CC rating of 1 meant the watershed was fully functioning, while a CC rating of 3 meant a watershed that needed serious help.

The report found the Helena National Forest had 28 watersheds in need of serious help. Most other forests had zero to six. Most other national forests in Region 1 had from 57 to 158 watersheds in the category 1 rating. The Helena National Forest had 15.

More on Ski Area Water Rights- from Bob Berwyn

Following the hearing (see previous post here) , Bob Berwyn did this story explaining the water rights issue that was discussed at the hearing.

National Ski Areas Association charges Forest Service with ‘takings’

By Bob Berwyn

SUMMIT COUNTY — A decades-old water-rights struggle between the U.S. Forest and the ski industry flared up again this week, as the National Ski Areas Association charged that the agency wants to make an end run around state law and “take away” water rights worth tens of millions of dollars.

The accusations came during a Nov. 15 hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee, as Boulder attorney Glenn Porzak testified on behalf of the ski industry, asking Congress to intervene in the matter. Porzak’s written statement is online here.

“All water rights owners should be concerned,” Porzak said, claiming that the change would require ski areas to transfer ownership of several types of water rights to the Forest Service.

“Ski areas would lose the ability to control future use of those water rights … they would have no guarantee on future use,” Porzak said, explaining that ski areas collectively have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in water rights used for snowmaking, lodging, restrooms, culinary purposes and irrigation.

At issue is a water-rights clause in the standard ski area permit that specifies who owns the water flowing down from public national forest system lands both within and outside ski area boundaries. The current language has been in place since 2004 and the ski industry says it’s been working well.

Under the 2004 clause, ski areas exercise almost absolute control over all water rights associated with ski area operations — to the point that a resort could potentially sell at least some of the water rights, potentially leaving a future ski area permittee high and dry.

The Forest Service is replacing that clause with new language that would prevent such a sale, but the ski industry claims the new clause goes far beyond that, and amounts to a takings of private property.

After the hearing, a top Forest Service official said the 2004 permit language wouldn’t stand up to a legal test in Colorado and possibly other states where ski areas operate under permit from the agency.

The agency is seeking to sustain resorts operating under permit for the long-term by ensuring that the water rights stay with the ski area even if there is a change in ownership or some other unforeseen circumstance, according to Jim Bedwell, director of the agency’s recreation and heritage resources programs.

Bedwell said the agency recognizes that the value of ski areas is tied at least in part to the associated water rights.

“If there’s a change of ownership, the buyers will know they have continued ownership of the water rights, They can’t be parted out,” he said.

The new clause would clarify and define ownership of various water rights associated with permitted ski areas, he said, adding that the language in the 2004 clause was not legally viable because ownership of the water rights was not clearly defined.

Porzak disagreed.

“In a nutshell, it takes away all the important water rights,” he said.

Via email, NSAA public policy director Geraldine Link explained it this way:

“The (new) clause requires certain on-site water rights (arising on permit) applied for before 2004 to be held solely by the US, and some water rights that arise off-site as well.

“The Forest Service wants ownership of these water rights in the future so it can control them. USFS should honor state law and state adjudication of water rights rather than making this end run via permit conditions,” Link said.

No Forest Service officials were invited to testify during the session, but former agency chief Mike Dombeck was there, and was asked if the Forest Service wants to take away ski area water rights as a way to exert more control.

“The land managers committed to the resource,” Dombeck said. “I see it as the desire of the agency to do the right thing for the land,” Dombeck responded when Republican Colorado Congressman Scott Tipton accused the agency of wanting to exert more control over the ski industry.

The Forest Service and the ski industry have tussled over the issue of federal reserved water rights on and off for decades, and the latest shift in the tide may reflect philosophical differences between the former Bush administration and the current Obama team, according to Mark Squillace, director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado.

Squillace said that the issue isn’t unique to the ski industry, referring to a well-publicized case involving a federal attempt to subordinate its own water rights in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. In the end, a judge ruled that the federal government can’t do that, he explained.

“I think it’s smart policy,” he said, referring to the Forest Service’s position on water rights. “From the federal government’s standpoint, they need to make sure the water rights stay with the land,” he said. “It would be a disaster if the ski areas walked away and sold off the water rights separately, he added.

“This is not a takings,” Bedwell added, emphasizing that the Forest Service has been working with the ski industry on the issue for a year.

“We tried to honor the spirit of the 2004 clause,” he said, adding that, from his perspective, work on the new clause is done.

Porzak said Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell indicated that there may be some additional room for negotiation. Failing that, the ski industry will continue to ask Congress for intervention, and as a last resort, the permit condition could be litigated, he concluded.

River-restoration guru to target creek in Colorado’s Hayman wildfire area


From the Denver Post here.

DECKERS — The U.S. Forest Service has deployed a river-restoration guru in a $4.5 million gambit to accelerate recovery on a first segment of the South Platte tributaries ruined a decade ago by a massive human-caused wildfire.

The project launched this week by foresters and private-sector partners will try to rework the altered flow of Trail Creek to make it more natural.
For Fort Collins-based hydrologist Dave Rosgen, this also is a chance to demonstrate techniques increasingly in demand worldwide.
The problem is that the aftermath of the Hayman fire unleashed torrents of sediment — sand and decomposed Pikes Peak​ granite — that slumps from barren mountainsides into an estimated 157 miles of streams.

Before the 2002 fire, for example, Trail Creek carried 1,200 tons of sediment a year. Now foresters say 20,000 tons a year course through the creek, which flows into West Creek, Horse Creek and then the South Platte River​, which is the major source of water for people in the Denver metropolis.
Denver Water managers’ struggle to manage the sediment in both Cheesman and Strontia Springs reservoirs is driving up monthly water bills. At Strontia Springs, the utility is involved in a $29 million project to dredge out 675,000 tons of sediment.
Enter Rosgen.
“This is how Mother Nature does it,” he said Friday, describing his plan to stabilize what has become a sluice for corrosive sediment.
The steep banks will first be reshaped, and fallen tree trunks will be used to reinforce the new channel. Then, the stream bed will be raised by about 7 feet so water carrying sediment disperses into a willow studded plane instead of racing down stream.
“We’re going to basically go back in here and re-establish a braided, meandering channel,” Rosgen, 69, told a gathering of county and federal employees.
Amid budget-cutting, federal environmental stewards have turned to private-sector partners for help containing the damage. The National Forest Foundation and the Coalition for the Upper South Platte coordinated funding, with contributions of $750,000 from ski goliath Vail Associates, $500,000 from Aurora Water and $200,000 from the Gates Family Foundation.

Rosgen has developed formulas for calculating rates of erosion, enabling detailed analysis of mountain slopes, fire impact and hydrology. His team at Wildland Hydrology Inc. has restored dozens of damaged streams in Argentina, Costa Rica, Tanzania and around the western United States.

Ever since the Hayman fire, heavy rains have led to increasingly severe flooding across the scorched burn area. Foresters and volunteers have tried to address this, planting 3.5 million tree seedlings.
“But it seems that 137,000 acres doesn’t heal as quickly as we’d like it to,” said Pikes Peak District Ranger Brent Botts.
Eroding mountainsides and clogged streams eventually would stabilize on their own, Rosgen said, but not until the whole area burned by the fire is reforested — a process expected to take 80 years. Meanwhile, the growing Front Range​ population demands water and healthy mountain fisheries for wildlife and recreation.

That forces a decision of whether to intervene by re-engineering key tributaries, Rosgen said. “We’ll work with the river, not against it” with a goal of “getting back to a natural rate of erosion that is acceptable,” he said.
Over the next year, his crews with heavy machinery “will come as close as we can to duplicating the stable natural form of the rivers and their processes,” Rosgen said. “We will become a copycat of nature.”

Link to Forest Service Watershed Condition Maps

Some have told me they had trouble finding these; here’s the entire Secretary’s press release and here are the maps.

June 3, 2011– Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced the release of a new map that characterizes the health and condition of National Forest System lands in more than 15,000 watersheds across the country. The U.S. Forest Service’s Watershed Condition Classification Map is the first step in the agency’s Watershed Condition Framework, and is the agency’s first national assessment across all 193 million acres of National Forest lands. Vilsack made the announcement at a USDA event in Washington highlighting the United Nation’s International Year of Forests.

“Clean, healthy forests are vital to our efforts to protect America’s fresh water supply,” said Vilsack. “Our nation’s economic health, and the health of our citizens, depends on abundant, clean and reliable sources of freshwater. The Watershed Condition Framework and map will help provide economic and environmental benefits to residents of rural communities.”

The map establishes a baseline that will be used to establish priorities for watershed restoration and maintenance. The national Watershed Condition Framework establishes a consistent, comparable, and credible process for characterizing, prioritizing, improving, and tracking the health of watersheds on national forests and grasslands. The Framework also builds added accountability and transparency into the Integrated Resource Restoration program which is included in President Obama’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year.

The Framework uses three watershed condition classifications:

Class 1 watersheds are considered healthy.
Class 2 watersheds are relatively healthy, but may require restoration work.
Class 3 watersheds are those that are impaired, degraded or damaged.

Additional benefits to the Framework are the opportunities it provides to current and future partners in watershed restoration and maintenance. It also increases the public’s awareness of their local watershed conditions and the role they can play in improving them. The Forest Service expects that as the map gains more widespread use, it will promote the department’s “all-lands” approach to managing the nation’s forest and landscapes.

Water’s Power- A Guest Post by Char Miller

Char’s post today is written in support of Change.org’s Blog Action Day, which this year is focused on water.

The monsoonal rains this summer came down so hard, so fast, that when they finally stopped, much of Pakistan was inundated.

No one doubts but that the speed and amount of rain overwhelmed the capacity of the land to absorb it all; the surging floodwaters, and the devastation they wrought, were a direct consequence of nature’s clout.

But humans had a distinct and heavy hand in the stunning devastation: for the past decade or more, Taliban fighters in the northwestern Swat Valley ignored Pakistan’s environmental regulations with every swing of their axes: “Employing termite-like efficiency,” the Los Angeles Times reports, “the militants felled and carted away vast swaths of Himalayan cedar, blue pine and oak, leaving mountainsides dotted with stumps.” They ripped out the timber to fund their political agenda and military campaigns that have so unsettled the region. Just as consequential is the denuded terrain they left behind; local farmers and Pakistani environmentalists are convinced that these illegal harvests contributed significantly to the floodwaters’ overwhelming force. Observed Ghulam Akbar, director of the Pakistan Wetlands Program: “Deforestation played a tremendous role in aggravating the floods. Had there been good forests, as we used to have 25 years back, the impact of flooding would have been much less.”

Akbar’s assertion of a tight link between environmental devastation and downstream flooding, and the related claim that maintaining forest cover would have mitigated the resulting damage, is not just an early twenty-first-century argument. It also was central to the creation of a powerful environmental movement in nineteenth-century America. One of its key architects was George Bird Grinnell,

a shrewd rhetorician and skilled organizer, who through his bully pulpit as publisher of Forest and Stream transformed how his fellow citizens conceived of their place in and responsibility for the landscape that sustained them.

Consider his seminal 1882 editorial, “Spare the Trees,” (page 19, here) a brilliant articulation of the ineluctable connection between water and forests. Speaking to his audience—which consisted of hunters and anglers, conservationists, politicians, and scientists—Grinnell challenged them to stop what he called “tree murder.” To succeed in this struggle, however, required them to appreciation the complex interactions between resource exploitation and forested ecosystems. Regulatory action could achieve only so much, he noted: “All the protection that the law can give will not prevent the game naturally belonging to a wooded country from leaving it when it is deforested, nor keep fish in streams that have shrunk to a quarter of their ordinary volume before midsummer.” To insure the “the proper and sensible management of woodlands” Americans must think in terms of habitats, Grinnell declared, a declaration that led him to close his commentary with a succinct, bumpersticker-like refrain: “No woods, no game; no woods, no water; and no water, no fish.”

Grinnell used his words to alter the political landscape. Through his magazine columns, social connections in New York City and Washington, D.C., and backroom lobbying along the nation’s corridors of power, he helped build a political consensus around the need to protect high-country watersheds. One outcome of which was congressional legislation that in 1891 gave the president the power to establish forest reserves on the public domain in the west. Known officially as the Land Revision Act of 1891, it granted the chief executive the authority to “set aside and reserve…any part of the public lands wholly or partly covered with timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial value or not.” Under its provisions, President Benjamin Harrison declared upwards of 13 million acres to be protected forests, the first of which was the Yellowstone National Forest; his successor, Grover Cleveland, added another five million. What is striking about the acreage they set aside is where it was located. Although the 1891 Act did not specify which lands qualified—outside of its claim that they have some kind of growth on them—those these two presidents designated were wrapped around and along mountainous watersheds. Grinnell’s claims had achieved legislative sanction.

They secured even greater authority six years later when Congress enacted what is now known as the Organic Act of 1897. It resolved a critical set of related questions about which the 1891 law had been silent: if some public lands became forest reserves, what were they reserved for? How, if they were to be managed, would they be managed? The new act answered these queries: it gave the Secretary of the Interior the authority “to improve and protect the forest within the reservation,” with a particular goal in mind: “securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” Note that water flows preceded timber supplies, that the regulation of forest-cover in watersheds was the legislation’s preeminent concern.

The dynamic link between water and forests received even greater impetus with the passage of the Weeks Act of 1911. Initially proposed in the 1890s in response to intense logging in New Hampshire’s White Mountains,

and to similar depredations within the southern Appalachians, it took nearly 15 years for the legislation to clear Congress.

One reason for the delay was that the bill for the first time would grant the president the ability to use public funds to purchase private lands, a power that its opponents declared to be unconstitutional. They also rejected the proponents’ demands that the president use the power of the purse to protect the aesthetic qualities of the lands then under an axe-attack. Snorted Speaker of the House Joe Cannon: “Not one cent for scenery.” (yes, this is the Cannon for whom the Cannon House Office Building was named- sf).

Chastened but unbowed, conservationists revised their tactics and rhetoric, ripping a page from the George Bird Grinnell playbook: they wrote countless editorials and delivered innumerable speeches that explicitly tied cutover mountainsides to the flashfloods that ripped through industrial cities lining the banks of the Merrimack River that rose out of the White Mountains; they circulated innumerable photographs that illustrated these and other damaging ramifications of unrestrained logging in North Carolina and New England’s northern tier.

This is actually the 1936 Flood, but this is emblematic of the flooding that routinely surged down the Merrimack River, and which conservationists and business leaders were convinced was a partial consequence of heavy logging in the White Mountains.

And they redrafted what would dubbed the Weeks Act, named for its savvy floor manager, John W. Weeks,

a successful banker then representing a suburban district outside of Boston. The new version made no mention of the preservation of landscape beauty, as is captured in the legislation’s official (and leaden) title:

AN ACT TO ENABLE ANY STATE TO COOPERATE WITH ANY OTHER STATE OR STATES, OR WITH THE UNITED STATES, FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE WATERSHEDS OF NAVIGABLE STREAMS, AND TO APPOINT A COMMISSION FOR THE ACQUISITION OF LANDS FOR THE PURPOSE OF CONSERVING THE NAVIGABILITY OF NAVIGABLE RIVERS

Nothing could have been more utilitarian and yet nothing less would have persuaded Speaker Cannon to allow the legislation to come to the floor for a vote. It passed, and on March 1, 1911, President William Howard Taft signed the Weeks Act into law. With his signature, the national-forest system became fully national in fact, and watershed protection became the unifying policy mandate.

That concerns over water and watersheds were the driving agents behind the crafting of early U. S. environmental regulation may be a boon to contemporary Pakistani conservationists. Here’s hoping that they can turn the recent disastrous floods into a powerful campaign for the rigorous protection of upstream forests.

Char Miller is director and W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College, Claremont, CA. He is author of the award-winning Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism and editor most recently of Cities and Nature in the American West and River Basins in the American West.