Messy Restoration
By Chris Grose
Fueled by the good intentions of the regulatory sector and the financial incentives of compensatory mitigation, the aquatic restoration arena attracts engineers, consultants, landscape architects, contractors, and financial managers. There is little doubt that much of the restoration work being performed is generally beneficial. However, are we hindering the potential for true restoration by limiting our thinking and methodologies to fit into a regulatory framework designed for checklists and scores?
The extreme hydraulic forces imposed by the urban watershed, coupled with many physical and regulatory constraints, required that RDE design the new stream bed of Smith Branch to be robust, static, and organized by a sine-generated curve
Boulder weir, typical of the flow diversion structures favored by many regulators and resource agencies for the fish habitat they create. Designed by others, photo credit unknown.
As the farmer-poet Wendell Berry wrote, “We have never known what we were doing because we have never known what we were undoing. We cannot know what we are doing until we know what nature would be doing if we were doing nothing" (from Preserving Wildness). Natural processes gradually restore impaired systems to a more functional state. If we did nothing, what would nature do to restore our riverine ecosystems? Would it be the few geomorphic forms that have become synonymous with stream restoration, e.g., single-thread channels with riffle-pool sequences? These certainly have their place, but streams undisturbed by man (although arguably non-existent) are not the nice, tidy channels we like to see in our minds eye. Nature finds organization in the messiness of chaos.
Nature-based solutions, such as beaver dam analogues and engineered woody jams, are attempts to mimic this messiness. They are inherently resilient structures not because of their permanence but because of their plasticity. Unfortunately, this plasticity contradicts the currently accepted philosophy of stream restoration, which strives to construct a channel that is geomorphically immutable, satisfying some performance standard rubric in perpetuity. The difficulty in garnering acceptance for nature-based solutions over the current state-of-practice approaches is not because the former represents a flawed approach but rather because nature-based solutions do not fit nicely into the regulatory framework.
With few site constraints in the newly renovated Hyatt Park, the City of Columbia offered RDE the freedom to design woody jams within a messy creek corridor.
Beaver Dam Analogue by WildEarth guardians
In their defense, regulators have the unenviable job of authorizing and monitoring the sale of restoration credits for financial gain. Their struggle is how to keep the playing field even and ensure that those performing the projects place ecological goals above economic ones. Messy restoration, no matter how imitative of nature it may be, simply does not work within this contrived system of approvals and monitoring. Nature-based solutions change over time, sometimes often and drastically, and as a result, defy attempts at objective assessment. This propensity to change and create resiliency seldom allows for “one-size-fits-all” rule-making. The real challenge for restoration professionals is not to prove that nature-based solutions are worthwhile and historically present in nature, but rather to create new ways to allow the regulatory community to embrace the mess.