Meet Janie Raindrop. Janie is a hydrologist for the Forest Service. Her responsibility is to advise her agency on how to keep the water clean, swimmable and drinkable, and make sure habitats for salmon and steelhead are abundant and robust. Janie notices that the main sediment sources in her district are roads, mostly the older ones in low slope positions with inboard ditches and big stream crossings. Janie thinks about what happened 30 years ago in the last big flood and wonders what might happen in the next big one - she knows it's coming. The roads again are where the risks look greatest.

Janie proposes to restore the worst offenders, and her engineer collaborator has found a good replacement location; high and dry. Janie sees getting after the high-impact, high-risk roads as an important program worthy of her time and congruent with her responsibility.

She announces a proposal to close and restore the road. What happens then is a surprise to poor Janie Raindrop. A great flood of objections and obstacles burst forth: `We can't do this because, there's not enough money, people use that road, we need it for fire control, it's still useful for recreation, you'll do more harm that good, the public will be irate,' and so on. All sorts of reasons not to do it, yet for water quality and fish habitat, the need was very clear. It would be an uphill battle all the way.

Janie became discouraged. The technical challenges of restoring the road seemed tough enough; but the socio-political-institutional challenges looked much worse.

Running into walls was is not Janie's idea of fun, so she instead proposes to plant some grass on a landslide scar and cable some logs into the stream. No objections at all come up to this, and her boss likes the PR possibilities. Janie knows this is not the physical or biological priority, but it would look more like restoration than a messy road removal. Removing what many see as a public investment looks like the fast track to unpopularity. So Janie has a choice to make. She can have satisfyingly attractive greening of ugly brown scars, and create nifty looking gizmos in the creek, and probably have fun doing it; or she can stay focused on the real priorities and try to convince people of the need for road restoration, and get on with it. What would you do?

According to the Chinese calendar, we are now in the Year of the Rooster, but for Pacific Northwest forest watershed managers it is the year of the Fish. The news is all the way out that our anadromous fish stocks are in deep trouble. Recent efforts to resolve the deadlocking environmental conflicts in Pacific Northwest forests have sharpened the concern and provided some preliminary road maps toward solutions. The problems facing anadromous fish stocks are summarized by the four H's: Hydropower, Hatcheries, Harvest, and Habitat. Habitat is where watershed management gets into the picture.

The relationships between watershed processes and habitat for anadromous fishes is dauntingly complex. Yet discerning the most common cause of habitat damage is not; it's the roads. We've known this for a long time - scientific opinion is unanimous here. Yet most of our fish habitat restoration efforts have been focused on the manipulation of habitat elements in-channel, the results of which have often been disappointing. Why are we avoiding the real problem? Simple I think; in-stream structures for fish are popular and showy, even heroic, while road restoration is unglamorous and unpopular in a country built around the automobile. Proposals to close or remove an open road will almost always meet with objections from people who need or want the option for motorized access. Mostly we've always deferred to the transportation need, only doing restoration on roads already washed out. The prevailing model has been, "We build 'em, God takes 'em out, and restoration gets rolling after the worst has already happened." That won't do.

We've built many thousands of miles of roads. We certainly do not need, nor can we afford to maintain them all. Those we do need and can afford should be configured to be watershed and fish friendly. Those we don't should be decommissioned or obliterated. We'll need to build teams of earth scientists, fish biologists and engineers to get on with the job, and be persuasive about the needs and stewardship responsibilities that come with having built roads. Tough job maybe, but far from impossible. We can secure the habitats needed to recover our anadromous fish stocks.

Shall we get on with it? -Ed.