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State of the Rockies Kicks off with ICS Keynote

State of the Rockies Kicks off with ICS Keynote

Aug 31, 2015 | Featured, News

ICS Principal Scott Campbell kicked off the 2015-2016 Colorado College State of the Rockies Project, The Scales of Western Water, as its keynote speaker. Campbell christened the thematic undertaking by examining landscape-scale approaches local, state, and national conservation groups are taking with respect to river management—approaches that attempt to holistically address the needs of cities, agriculture, and nature.

His talk, Surface Tensions: Large Landscape Conservation and the Future of America’s Rivers, shows how these approaches embody a radical change in thinking about rivers—from the 20th century belief that harnessing and controlling flow was in the best interest of society (an idea that emerged following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the subsequent national Flood Control Act of 1928) to our 21st century scientific understanding of the importance of natural flow variability in river systems.

Campbell shows how flood control in the Mississippi River and its tributaries reversed sedimentation regimes that, over thousands of years, helped build the Mississippi Delta. With that reversal came the loss of delta lands—more than 2,000 square miles sinking into the Gulf of Mexico since the 1930s—and the greater susceptibility of cities like New Orleans to storm surges precipitated by tropical storms and hurricanes.

Underscoring how ill-equipped we are to fully understand and appreciate the economic value of river ecosystem services such as sedimentation processes, Campbell highlights how the 500 lives and 130,000 homes lost to the Flood of 1927 pale in comparison to the 800,000 housing units and 1,833 lives lost in Hurricane Katrina—a hurricane whose devastating effects were in part due to the disappearance of the Mississippi Delta as a natural storm surge barrier.

He then goes on to examine how the increasing effectiveness of land and water conservation groups—combined with better scientific understanding, the ability to voluntarily bank water in storage facilities to create pulse flows, and new technical tools such as engineered sediment diversions—offers promise to restoring America’s rivers…not at a localized scale that has no systemic impact, but at a basin-wide, watershed scale.

ICS-Harvard Engage the West’s Farmers & Ranchers

ICS-Harvard Engage the West’s Farmers & Ranchers

Jun 30, 2015 | News

In a semester-long course of study at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, ICS Principal Scott Campbell led planning and design students in a for-credit, hands-on exploration of private-sector land and water conservation efforts. Students explored the inherent potential land trusts and other private sector conservation groups demonstrate in addressing some of the world’s toughest land use and water management challenges. The independent study course, Large Landscape Conservation and the Future of America’s Rivers, examined efforts spanning several major U.S. watersheds, culminating in a trip to Colorado for an exploration of conservation, land use planning, and water management projects in the Arkansas River Basin.

Local, state, and national land trusts have protected as much land in the United States as is encompassed by America’s national parks (approximately 50 million acres) and protect an additional 2,000,000 acres every year. They create parks and trails for growing cities, preserve expansive tracts of farms and forests, safeguard the nation’s foodsheds, and design and execute land use projects driven by conservation, economic, and aesthetic concerns. Unbound by conventional political boundaries, land trusts are becoming increasingly effective regional planning agents, focusing on large geographical areas. They are natural and cultural resource preservation agents in ways that planning, zoning, and environmental regulators are not; and they have the capacity to support community self-determination in ways that government environmental programs often do not. Their success has tremendous implications regarding carbon sequestration, climate change mitigation, sustaining ecological functioning at scale, and building resilience in human communities.

In Colorado, students visited the BX Ranch, a 25,000-acre property bordering the City of Pueblo that was conserved by a for-profit timber investment management company (TIMO), a B-Corporation looking to expand its sustainable forestry work into America’s grasslands and work with the cattle industry to improve grassland health. They visited Steve Wooten, Vice President of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and owner of Beatty Canyon ranch, and visited with farmers whose communities face economic and environmental decline precipitated by municipal “buy-and-dry” practices (a municipal water appropriations practice where cities buy interests in farm properties, then fallow those farms to divert the water for municipal use). The visit concluded in a series of meetings with land trust leaders, water experts, and planning officials to explore the ways in which conservation groups can influence local and regional planning to recouple land use with water management. Read the syllabus here.