Embracing Watershed PoliticsEvery watershed has a physical landscape-a complex terrain of landforms, water resources, vegetation, animals and their habitats, human beings and the structures they have built. Every watershed has an institutional landscape, too-a complex but largely invisible terrain of rules and organizations that govern and affect human choices about the making of decisions, the use of resources, and the relationships of people to nature and one another. This book considers the institutional landscapes of watersheds, not in isolation from the physical world but in connection to it, recognizing that watersheds have both physical and institutional landscapes.
Complex LandscapesWatersheds and InstItutIonsCompLex LandsCapesThe Santa Ana River Basin.1 CompLex LandsCapes water quality are the most frequently mentioned causes of the decline in the sucker population and its current threatened status, but in fact no one is certain whether those factors alone have caused the decline, or whether and how they have interacted with other causes. After all, the sucker has vanished from all other urbanized Southern California streams in which it was once found but has remained in certain stretches of the Santa Ana River, which is sometimes described as the most urbanized watershed in North America.In addition to puzzling over why the sucker population continues to decline in the Santa Ana (and, just as intriguing, why it has survived there despite dying out everywhere else), scientists have yet to determine exactly what water quality and riverbed conditions the sucker requires in order for its decline to be arrested and its recovery to begin.No consensus exists, therefore, on what the indicators or targets for sucker recovery policy should be. What is almost certain is that the water quality and river condition indicators and targets that will be appropriate for the goal of sucker protection and recovery will differ from those indicators and targets that have been developed and used for the flood control, conjunctive management, wastewater treatment and disposal, and drinking water protection practices in the watershed to date. Combining the policies and practices for species and habitat protection with the current and longstanding watershed management practices will add complexity but also increase uncertainty, that is, greater prospects in the watershed for surprise, for unanticipated population shifts and other state changes.The Santa Ana River watershed has been changing from a hydraulically managed watershed, where the emphasis was on physical control of the water, to a watershed that also has to be managed as an ecosystem, with all that implies in relation to complex adaptive systems. Even though the particular circumstances of each watershed are distinct, in some respects the case of the Santa Ana River illustrates how watershed management has been changing in the United States and elsewhere for the past couple of decades, adding not only to its complexity but also to its uncertainty. These changes raise i...
