Clay Brandow

"Slip sliding away, you know the nearer your destination the more you're slip sliding away." Mother Nature her did stuff. A lot of people suffered a lot of sorrow and loss. The storms of January 1997 tried to drown parts of northern California and western Nevada and bury other parts with landslides and debris flows. Folks of the Pacific Southwest got a taste of what folks in the Pacific Northwest and along the mighty Mississippi have been going through episodically over the last few years. Mother Nature is showing who is ultimately in charge of watershed management.

I say we work with her. I say we make Mother Nature an ex officio member of the Watershed Management Council, in charge of passing judgment on all the practices, activities, rehab and remediation we do in watersheds while she's resting. All those in favor vote aye, all those opposed ...had better move to high ground, preferably bedrock.

"Give Rivers Room To Roam, Some Experts Now Say" read a front-page headline in the Sacramento Bee (2-27-97). "We treat our rivers like ditches and that is exactly what they are not," said Jeffrey F. Mount, chairman of the Geology Department at the University of California, Davis. "We are asking one of the most dynamic physical systems to remain static. And I wager that there is not a person left in the (Sacramento/San Joaquin) Valley who does not now appreciate the power of a river or the ability of a river to undo our great works."

Jeff, I'm not so sure everybody gets it, yet. In fact, I'll take a few thousand on that wager. But, we all get the point. Rivers, particularly western rivers, need room to roam. When Old Man River is charged with the energy of floodwaters, he becomes a teenager again and wants to dance a wild and exuberant river dance. We need to set those levees back and dedicate those floodplains to give Old Man River and Mother Nature room to dance during flood times and room to raise their riparian and wetland young during quite times.

By the way, Jeff Mount is Author of "California Rivers and Streams: the conflict between fluvial process and land use" (University of California Press 1995). You can hear Jeff Mount speak on this very topic at the California Watershed Symposium: "Whose Watershed is it?" April 23-25, 1997 at the Sacramento Hilton. WMC is a cosponsor and WMC members get a discount. Contact Wendy Wickizer at NorCal SAF (800) 738-TREE for general info, or William Hull of the Wildlife Society (510) 465-4962 for registration details.

Old Man Arroyo is celebrating the retirement of one its own. Robert F. Blecker, hydrologist with the Forest Service for 27+ years, retired from the Los Padres National Forest September 3, 1996, where he has been Forest Hydrologist since 1972. Bob received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Soils and Water in 1967 from Cal State University at Fresno, and his M.S. Degree in Hydrology in 1969 from the University of Arizona. From 1969-1972, he was the hydrologist on the Cleveland National Forest. A true chaparral rat, an unnamed dry wash will be named in his honor: Arroyo Roberto. Has a nice ring, don't you think?

Bob and his wife Kenlyn will be maintaining their residence in Buellton, California, for the foreseeable future. They plan to travel and use their RV more than they have been able to do while Bob was working. He plans to continue his work on Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation (BAER) Teams and looks forward to keeping up his contacts with coworkers and friends he's made over the years in the Forest Service and other agencies.

Speaking of the revolving door, Bill Stewart became the new chief of the Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP) of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF), my current professional home. Bill is an economist, with degrees from Stanford and Ph.D. from Berkeley. Formerly with Pacific Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Oakland, California, Bill is known widely for his work on the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP). A broad thinker and a quick study, Bill has a particular interest in watershed, the values of water from wildlands, and in hydropower. One day Bill was working (on a contract research project) for me, the next day he was the boss. In hydraulics they call that a sudden flow reversal. These can cause pipe-damaging water hammer effects. But, I'm happy to report the transition went smoothly and rapidly, and I really enjoy working for Bill Stewart.

Professor Bill James of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering, University of Guelph, Canada is looking for mentors for engineering hydrology seniors. Bill writes: "This year I am making heavy use of the web to teach hydrology to engineering undergrads in what is otherwise a regular full-time undergrad course. For something entirely different, I would like to provide them a list of email addresses of experienced hydrologists (mentors) who would be willing to respond to a few email queries from interested students." Bill can be reached by email at james@net2.eos.uoguelph.ca. Their website is www.chi.on.ca. (Editor's note: This site has the best list of links related to watershed topics I've seen; check it out). While it might be too late for this year's students, you might want to contact Bill about volunteering next academic year.

Professor James' email tag line said: "...all models are wrong! Some, occasionally, may be useful; the trick is not only to know how, but when, and why..."

This reminds me of another great quote from a Canadian hydrologist V. Klemes. His classic paper published in by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 1986 is titled "Dilettantism in Hydrology: Transition or Destiny?" It's a must read for current and future model builders. The paper is witty and full of insight about hydrology as a profession. About modeling, Klemes writes wryly: "Had computers been available at the time (of Copernicus) so that a more refined fitting of the Ptolemaic model could easily be implemented and adding another epicycle would mean just going once more through a DO-loop, (the Earth-centered) model of the (universe) could still be with us today and space exploration would still be only a fantasy." Fact is that with computer models we can easily trick ourselves into thinking we know something about which we are still profoundly ignorant. That's worse than ignorance, that's arrogance, and it often comes before the fall. File that under the Empire Strikes Back, the former British Empire that is.

And, from another corner of the former empire, this arrived some time ago via the net from our member down under, Allen Kearns. The amazing thing about email from Australia is that it often arrives half a day before it is sent. Funny things happen to those electrons when they cross the international dateline in the direction the Earth is spinning.

Allen writes: "I was pleased to get a copy of the Watershed Management Networker today! Especially as I was just talking about environmental flows in the San Francisco Bay and Delta today. You know, two subscriptions have chased me around the world, WMC and the Ali Akbar Khan School of Music in San Mateo. The WMC is now a lot more relevant to me than the sweet sounds of Indian music so I read on with enthusiasm. We are undertaking a great deal of work in our Division of Wildlife and Ecology at CSIRO that would be of interest to your group, judging by the conference coming up in October. If you wish to check out the website http://www.dwe.csiro.au/research/forest/bbproj you will see what I mean. We also have a pattern analysis software package that would be very useful for analyzing the data sets that people were talking about in the magazine. You can visit it now for a DOS version but we are developing a Windows 95 version due out in December 96. The website for PATN is http://www.dwe.csiro.au/research/patn/patn0.htm

I am undertaking a really interesting project on the environmental valuation of future water supply options in the Australian Capital Territory. My group (Applied Resource Ecology) is preparing a resource ecology context for water resources and their use in the ACT. I sort of defined the idea of applied resource ecology to mean the ecological consequences of natural resource use, ecological costs of conventional economic development scenarios and the ecological benefits of ecologically sustainable development.

We are also undertaking an interesting project on the use of a landscape ecology approach to ecosystem rehabilitation on 15 minesites in Australia. I have managed to offend a few people by referring to many previous attempts at minesite rehabilitation as agronomic engineering. Apart from being vilified in public I realized that if I get under their skin then maybe I am onto something. Funny, when I worked for industry the researchers called me an intellectual pygmy. Now I work for the researchers, the industry calls me intellectually arrogant! Maybe what they meant all along is that I am an intellectually arrogant pygmy?"

Mother Nature, Old Man River, and Young Baby Hydraulica: Six Rivers National Forest hydrologist Carolyn Cook brought beautiful Kaila Joy Cook into the world on July 26. With Mom being a waterworker and avid kayaker, folks there have taken to calling baby Kaila "Hydraulica." It's a new world.

Anyroad, whether you're an intellectually arrogant pygmy or a dumb humble giant, if you've reached a watershed in your career or have an interesting tidbit of watershed news, let your colleagues know about it. Drop a line to;
Name Stream & Tributaries
c/o Clay Brandow
1528 Brown Drive
Davis, CA 95616
or call me at (916) 227-2663.

DG address is C.Brandow:R05K.- Internet email is best. Send your items my way at: clay_brandow@fire.ca.gov