One of the biggest debates over environmental stewardship is whether a degraded ecosystem is best left completely alone to recover or whether it should instead be restored by increasing human intervention and management.
A perfect example of this is the conifer forests of California, extending over nearly 30,000 square miles. For millennia, lightning strikes ignited fires that routinely thinned the underbrush and most of the smaller trees, a process that was essential to maintaining a healthy ecosystem. But California’s forests have been transformed. Forest fires have been suppressed, which has caused these forests to develop tree densities 5–10 times greater than historic levels. More recently, environmental regulations have suppressed human activities—logging, grazing, prescribed burns, and mechanical thinning—that mimic the role that natural fires used to play.
As a result, California’s forests are tinderboxes, and the wildfires that aren’t immediately suppressed become catastrophic rather than quickly contained. Hence, the debate grows: do we permit activities that manage California’s forests or adopt a completely hands-off approach and trust ecosystems to eventually rebound?
Corrupting this debate is the perpetual claim that climate change is driving most of the observed ecosystem dysfunction. But if climate change is indeed a significant problem, it ought to strengthen the argument for more aggressive ecosystem management. Manage the density of the forests. Bring back logging and grazing. Allow landowners to harvest timber, and allow them to cut and burn off underbrush.
Another permanently altered ecosystem is California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Over a century ago this massive, 1,100 square mile floodplain was channelized, with levees surrounding dry land that subsided as the peat bogs dried up. With much of this land now at or below sea level, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta cannot possibly be restored.
But here again, environmentalist regulations have stopped activities that were helping maintain this altered ecosystem. For decades after the levees were built, farmers regularly dredged the channels adjacent to their land. This not only helped prevent flooding, but the deeper channels created habitat friendly to the native salmon, helping them successfully migrate while avoiding the introduced species of bass predators that prefer warmer and shallower water.
Today, apart from a few ship channels, dredging has come to a complete halt in the delta. It’s not the cost of doing the actual work of dredging. That expense is insignificant compared to navigating the gauntlet of local, regional, state, and federal agencies, all staffed with environmentalist bureaucrats who demand far more analysis, reports, and permit fees than any private landowner can hope to afford.
Everywhere on earth, permanently altered ecosystems are typical in the 21st century. In some cases, setting aside areas for complete nonintervention can be an effective choice. But there are glaring examples where doing nothing is a terrible choice. Two examples hold immediate relevance: the Aral Sea and Lake Chad.
In both cases, these bodies of water are disappearing, and in both cases, the primary cause is diversions for agriculture, although, of course, the conventional environmentalist wisdom is that the shrinkage is primarily due to climate change. Again, however, even if climate change is the primary cause, that only strengthens the case for intervention over a hands-off approach. And the most decisive intervention—interbasin water transfers—is likely to make an environmentalist’s head explode. That does not mean it isn’t the most practical solution, if not the only practical one.
Big new infrastructure in the form of interbasin transfers of water could rescue from oblivion two of the world’s biggest manmade environmental disasters. In Central Asia, diversions from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers to irrigate cotton fields caused the Aral Sea to dry up. At 26,000 square miles, it was the third-largest inland lake in the world, eclipsed only by the Caspian Sea and by Lake Superior. Today, it is almost gone, reduced to barely 1,200 square miles. Its estimated volume has shrunk from nearly 900 million acre-feet to less than 20 million acre-feet.
If destroying the agricultural economies of Central Asia is not an option, there are other possibilities. Water from the massive Ob-Irtysh watershed drains 330 million acre feet into the Arctic Ocean in an average year. A system of pump stations and canals moving 10–20 million acre-feet per year could be diverted from an upstream tributary south through Kazakhstan to refill the Aral Sea.
There are other possibilities, equally ambitious but equally possible. Water from the Volga watershed flows into the Caspian Sea at an average rate of over 200 million acre-feet per year. A percentage of this flow could also be tapped to refill the Aral Sea. If necessary to compensate for the loss, a series of tunnels and canals could transport water from the Black Sea eastward into the below sea level Caspian Sea.
Another disappearing lake, also affecting temperature, rainfall, fisheries, soil, and air quality on a near-continental scale, is Lake Chad in the heart of the African Sahel. Again, irrigation diversions have shrunk this lake from nearly 10,000 square miles to less than 200 square miles. Its estimated volume has dropped from not quite 150 million acre-feet to less than one million acre-feet. But there is a remedy: the mighty Congo River.
Flowing less than 1,000 miles from Lake Chad is the Ubangi River, a northern tributary of the Congo. Well upstream from its confluence with the Congo, the Ubangi sustains a flow of over 100 million acre feet in an average year. Diverting less than 10 percent of this flow northward would be more than enough to refill Lake Chad.
Projects this big are not beyond serious consideration. In 2004, a team of Russian scientists proposed to revive the plan to divert a portion of the Ob-Irtysh to refill the Aral Sea. In Africa, a coalition of nations in the region has been deliberating over various diversion designs to transfer water from the Ubangi to Lake Chad. In both cases, the economic development along the canal corridors would be tremendous, as would the prospects economically and ecologically if these lakes were restored.
In California, where projects of comparable scope already exist in the form of the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project, government is so paralyzed by bureaucracy, corruption, litigation, and environmentalist fanaticism that the very idea of building even more infrastructure to remedy environmental challenges is anathema. That’s unfortunate, because California has its own shrinking sea.
Less than 200 miles from downtown Los Angeles is the sprawling Salton Sea, a 350-square-mile artificial lake that was created by accident just over a century ago when the Colorado River was diverted for nearly two years into what had been a dry, below-sea-level basin. Farmers in the Imperial Valley used to drain their irrigation runoff into the Salton Sea, a process that both prevented it from drying up and also gradually contaminated the water with pesticide and fertilizer residue. Now that Imperial Valley farmers are selling more water to San Diego for municipal use and converting to drip irrigation, the Salton Sea is drying up. But there is a solution. Build a tunnel from the Pacific Ocean just north of San Diego to transport water into the Salton Sea. Since the Salton Sea is 230 feet below sea level, the descending water could generate electricity, which could be used to desalinate it.
For a California bureaucrat today, the very idea of such a project is laughable. For a public servant back in the 1950s, however, such a project might have already been built, had the need arisen back then.
Manmade environmental challenges, whether they concern forests, deltas, or shrinking inland lakes, can be successfully addressed with approaches that embrace intervention rather than avoid it as much as possible. Big infrastructure can be part of an interventionist package. If it weren’t for big infrastructure, the megapolis called Los Angeles would not exist. Nor, for that matter, would most of the territory of the Netherlands, where hundreds of miles of dikes protect farms, cities, and millions of people from the North Sea.
In a world profoundly altered by human civilization, choosing to actively manage ecosystems can often be the best option. In many cases, dogmatically ruling out intervention including massive investments in new infrastructure can do more harm than good.