Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Fire for Watersheds

News Feed
Friday, April 26, 2024

Originally published by BioGraphic. Fire is not coming easily to the pile of dried grass and brush. Four college students fuss with the smoldering heap while Ron Goode, a bear-like man with a graying braid, leans on his cane and inspects their work. Crouch down low, he tells them. Reach farther into the brush with the lighter. Tentative orange flames spring to life and a student in a tie-dyed t-shirt blows gently, imploring them not to die. It’s a clear November day in the western foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada near the town of Mariposa. The students, visiting from the University of California, Berkeley, are here to help revitalize a patch of live oaks that belongs to Goode’s wife’s family. Goode, the chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, is here to teach them how. Now in his early 70s, Goode and his Tribe have worked for decades to restore neglected meadows and woodlands on private property,  reservations belonging to other Tribes, and on their own ancestral homelands in the Sierra National Forest. And restoration, in these dry hills, calls for fire. Dressed in cotton shirts and pants, the students feeding the thread of smoke in the oak grove look more like landscapers than a fire crew. “We’re not firefighters. We’re burners, professional burners,” Goode explains. “And we’re using Native knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, from centuries ago.” This approach, employed by Native peoples across the world, is known as cultural burning. Once the fire is rolling, the students use pruning shears to cut more naked stems of Ta-ka-te, or sourberry (Rhus trilobata), down to the ground and toss those onto the now crackling pile. The next morning, after the flames have devoured this fuel, Goode’s grandnephew Jesse Valdez will coach the students on how to mix the cooling ash into the soil with rakes, to fertilize the roots below. After piles are burned and extinguished, fire practitioners will rake the ash into the soil to fertilize the roots below. Photograph by Ashley Braun Cultural burning is a kind of gardening. This Indigenous stewardship tradition of clearing, landscaping, and burning mimics natural disturbances, which create a diverse mosaic of habitats and trigger beneficial growth patterns in certain plants. Goode, Valdez, and other practitioners use small, targeted fires to help reshape and rejuvenate landscapes, both for the overall ecological health of the land and for specific cultural purposes, from cultivating traditional foods to sustaining ceremonial practices. Fire, for instance, stimulates Mo-nop’, or deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens), to explode with flowers. Nium people, as the Mono call themselves, use these flexible flower stalks to weave watertight baskets coiled and patterned like rattlesnakes. And towering Wi-yap’, or black oak (Quercus kelloggii) yield bushels of healthy acorns — once a staple in many Native Californian diets. Low-intensity fires discourage competing conifers, smoke out pests, and clear fuels that threaten to carry flames into the oaks’ more vulnerable crowns. Fire also improves fruit production in berry patches — another key food source for people and animals. Acorns were once a staple among many California Natives, accounting for up to 50 percent of Indigenous diets in the state. Photograph by Ashley Braun Before foreign colonizers arrived and suppressed the practice, Native Californians often lit low-intensity fires to realize benefits like these. Frequent, low-intensity fire also inoculated the landscape against the kind of destructive megafires that regularly scorch the West Coast today. In fact, fire was so endemic in pre-colonial times that the total area burned in California each year was far greater than that burned by modern megafires. But instead of leaving a blackened moonscape largely devoid of life, the low-intensity fires revitalized the land. Now, Indigenous peoples across the United States are reclaiming traditional fire stewardship practices, from California and Oregon to Minnesota and Texas. They are reviving their connections to their cultures and homelands, restoring ecosystems, boosting biodiversity, and reducing wildfire risk. In California, they’re even using fire — counterintuitively — to bring water back to the parched land. “Let’s go way back in time,” Goode says, beginning a Nium story. “Tobahp — Land — married Pia — Water — and they had a mischievous child named Kos. And Kos is Fire. Kos liked to run around out in the forest and leave a trail, and wherever Kos went, his father Pia would follow him and sprinkle water on his trail, and his mother Tobahp would come along and plant flowers and plants.” The ancient allegory describes wildfire in the Sierra, Goode explains: After flames pass over the land, “Water is everywhere, and the first thing that starts popping up are all the cultural plants and the flowers.” Learning to harness fire and its benefits over millennia allowed Native Californians like the Nium to create and maintain open, park-like landscapes. They wanted clear sightlines to watch for danger and protect their villages and families. And the grassy oak savannas and meadows that they tended with cultural burning were ideal for gathering food, medicines, and other supplies, as well as for travel and hunting. Meadows are good for more than just people, says Joanna Clines, a Sierra National Forest botanist who has worked with the North Fork Mono on restoration. These wetland ecosystems are often-spring-fed and boast “a huge explosion of diversity,” Clines explains, including dozens of species of sedges, rushes, and grasses,  which in turn provide cover and forage for deer, birds, frogs, snakes, and other fauna. Wildflowers like common camas hide delicious bulbs beneath the damp soil and produce blooms that attract native butterflies and bees. Comprising just 2% of the region today — historically they may have covered more than four times that — meadows “are the gems of the Sierra Nevada,” Clines says. But from the late 18th to the early 20th century, colonists violently removed Indigenous stewards from their meadows, and from the land. Fires were snuffed out or never lit. Indigenous people in the Sierra and beyond were killed in droves, forced to assimilate, and corralled onto reservations. Spanish missionaries were first to ban cultural burning, followed later by the U.S. government. After a devastating complex of wildfires burned 3 million acres in the Northern Rockies in 1911, Congress passed a law establishing a national forest policy of fire prevention and suppression. The Bureau of Indian Affairs later adopted it on reservations. The land and people are still recovering from their forced separation from fire. Fifty miles east of Mariposa, Goode surveys a meadow within the North Fork Mono’s homelands, where fragrant native mint and soaproot toast in the autumn sun, alongside a muddy spring. The meadow is part of the 1.3-million-acre Sierra National Forest. For a long time, the Tribe tended deergrass and other resources here, Goode says, but in the early 1980s, many began to feel that the national forest no longer welcomed them in this place. Without the Tribe’s ministrations, ponderosa pines marched in, along with aggressive European invaders like Scotch broom, shading out what had been the largest deergrass bed in their homelands. In 2003, Dave Martin, a friendly new Forest Service district ranger, invited the North Fork Mono back to this meadow. When the Tribe returned, they found it unrecognizable. But with initial help from an environmental nonprofit and local volunteers, the Tribe chopped brush and selectively logged to mimic what fire would have accomplished had it been allowed. They also performed three cultural burns between 2005 and 2010. Some pines were too large for them to cut or burn, but the utility company PG&E serendipitously felled them later as it cleared space around its powerlines to avoid sparking wildfires. Freed from thirsty conifers, the meager spring began gushing through the summer. Within a few years, Goode says, these five verdant acres were once again worthy of the label “meadow.” A stately black oak — a favorite tree among many California Tribes — drops acorns at its margin, and Goode points out the sprawling hummocks of returned bunchgrasses, their green glow fading to straw. “These are all the fresh deergrasses,” he says. “They go way up, all the way to the farthest telephone pole now.” The link between fire and water is well-recognized among fire-dependent Indigenous cultures worldwide, says Frank Kanawha Lake, a Forest Service fire ecologist who collaborates with Goode on research. Historical records suggest that Tribes throughout California, for example, have long known that burning brush makes springs run better and helps save water, according to research by Lake, who has family ties to the Karuk and Yurok. Even in swampy Florida, the Seminole Tribe has a long history of burning in marshes and other damp ecosystems to encourage cultural and medicinal plants that require a higher water table. The Maar-speaking Indigenous peoples of southeastern Australia, meanwhile, tell a story about a vengeful cockatoo who sets a grass fire that prompts a musk duck to shake its wings, filling lakes and swamps with water. Western science is just starting to catch up with this kind of Indigenous knowledge. Tucked beyond the iconic monolith Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, north of Goode’s restored meadow, Illilouette Creek rushes past streaked granite and patches of charred pines. For almost a hundred years, federal land managers suppressed every blaze in the creek’s fire-adapted basin. Then, in 1968, the National Park Service acknowledged fire’s ecological role with a new policy of “Natural Fire Management.” The policy allowed lightning-caused wildfires to burn in zones where they didn’t threaten human health or infrastructure and where natural fuel breaks contained their reach. By 1972, Yosemite had applied the approach to granite-flanked Illilouette Creek Basin. In the following four and a half decades, wildfire remade the landscape, though not in the way of the megafires that often grab headlines today. Instead, the blazes were more frequent, smaller, and burned with varying degrees of severity — likely aided at first by the cooler, wetter climate of the 1970s and ’80s. Using aerial photography, ecohydrologist Gabrielle Boisramé and a handful of collaborators discovered that Illilouette Basin’s forest cover shrank by a quarter, more closely approximating historical conditions.  New holes appeared in the canopy, filling in with shrublands and meadow-like fields, which have more than tripled in area since 1972. In 2019, Boisramé published a model-based study that suggested these changes have made the basin modestly but notably wetter. “In the more open areas — which are maintained open by fire — you get deeper snow, and it sticks around longer,” in part because more of it reaches the ground, says Boisramé, who’s now based at the nonprofit Desert Research Institute in Nevada. “That means that water from the snowmelt is getting added to the soil later into the dry season, which is better for vegetation, and can help maintain some of those wet meadows” — as well as boost streamflows and groundwater in a region often grappling with drought. Her previous modeling also shows that fire’s return brings as much as a 30% spike in soil moisture during the summer. The extra water stored and the smaller number of trees competing for it seem to have helped Illilouette’s trees weather the state’s worst drought in centuries, even as trees in the adjacent Sierra National Forest died in droves, Boisramé says. And the type of fire diversity now found in Illilouette is connected to better long-term carbon storage and greater biodiversity, with documented benefits for bees, understory plants, bats, and birds. Teasing out fire’s precise and myriad influences on hydrology is challenging, given the many variables involved for any particular place or circumstance. However, Boisramé’s studies are part of a small but growing body of work that suggests frequent fire has long-term hydrologic benefits for ecosystems adapted to such blazes. In the mid-20th century, pioneering fire researcher Harold Biswell found that the prescribed burns he conducted on cattle ranches in the Sierra Nevada foothills helped revive summer-parched springs. That aligns with research in the western U.S. showing that some watersheds — particularly those without substantial groundwater stores to feed waterways — see more water in streams after fire, likely thanks to fewer thirsty plants. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, recently published a paper suggesting that European colonization of southeast Tasmania created the region’s dry scrublands and devastating megafires by suppressing Indigenous burning that had maintained waterlogged heathlands. Fire has less direct benefits, too. Inspired by the knowledge of Indigenous burners in the Karuk Tribe, have shown that wildfire smoke can block enough solar radiation to cool rivers and streams by nearly 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit. In some cases, that could offer localized relief to cold-water species like salmon during the changing climate’s hottest summer days. As more scientists and conservationists recognize the ways Indigenous people shaped ecosystem biodiversity and resilience with fire, there’s an opportunity to return reciprocity to management, says Lake — and to reconnect people and place. “What is our human responsibility, and what are our human services for that ecosystem?” he asks. “How do we prescribe the right amount of fire today, fire as medicine? Traditional knowledge can guide us.” There is little question that the land needs help. Of the more than 8,200 meadows that the Forest Service has documented in the Sierra Nevada, the agency has listed 95% as unhealthy, or worse, no longer functioning as meadow ecosystems. The North Fork Mono have taken on the task of reviving some of these places in addition to the deergrass meadow that Goode showed me. Working alongside the Forest Service, they’ve begun restoring at least five others in the Sierra National Forest since 2003. In 2018, and again last year, Goode signed five-year agreements with the Forest Service that he hopes will allow the Tribe to restore many more. Those agreements explicitly acknowledge their authority to carry out Indigenous fire management. But their traditional management practices have been challenging to implement. Goode and his team have so far assessed nine meadows for restoration — and eventually, for cultural burning. They and the Forest Service are working to cut down encroaching conifers and shrubs, clear dead and fallen trees and other vegetation, create piles for burning, remove noxious weeds, clear gullies, and build structures to stabilize eroding soil. All paving the way for vibrant meadows that will hold onto water. As some elements of those projects move forward, Goode’s team has so far hit a roadblock when it comes to lighting the actual fires. According to Goode, under the agreements, “it’s us putting fire on the ground, and them participating if they wish.” But the Forest Service won’t allow someone to set a fire unless they have a “red card” obtained through rigorous firefighter training. “The forest is in dire need of restoration, and cultural burning is certainly going to be a key component going forward,” says Dean Gould, Sierra National Forest supervisor. But the agency wants to operate as safely as possible, he adds. Fire practitioners must work in forests laced with buildings and infrastructure, under unprecedented climatic conditions and huge fuel loads. For his part, Gould blames the delay mostly on a lack of capacity. Several recent historic wildfires within the national forest have kept its staff from building a more robust prescribed fire program, which would coordinate cultural burns. The COVID pandemic added other delays, as did a slew of onerous new nation-wide recommendations for prescribed fire that the Forest Service issued in 2022 after losing control of two such burns in New Mexico. Tribes hoping to implement cultural burning on federal lands commonly face challenges like the ones the Nork Fork Mono has come up against. “[B]oth state and federal agencies lack an adequate understanding of Tribes and cultural fire practitioners, their expertise and authority, land tenure, and the requirements of cultural burns,” write the authors of a report put together for the Karuk Tribe. That, in turn, has led to “confusion, delay, and red-tape,” as well as interference with tribal sovereignty. “Either we do cultural burning the way it’s supposed to be done, or we’re not going to do it,” says Goode, whose team has more than a hundred small piles of brush prepped and waiting in two Sierra National Forest meadows — ready for them to light and tend the fires before snow falls. Indigenous fire stewardship also includes cultural rituals such as burning sage, which is sacred to many Native communities of California and Mexico. Photograph by Ashley Braun Traditional practitioners often see requirements like red cards as inconsistent with cultural burning, explains Jonathan Long, a Forest Service ecologist who has worked with several Tribes on the issue. Part of the problem is that cultural burning adopts precautions in fundamentally different ways than typical agency burns do. Their intentions and practices, for example, make for safer burns as a general rule. Practitioners tend to ignite only small patches of lower-intensity fire; they welcome both youth and elders to teach and learn; they manicure away risky fuels; and they tend burns closely enough to reduce impacts on cultural resources like deergrass, as well as other plants and wildlife. It’s akin to a city installing bike lanes and traffic-slowing measures so parents can transport kids safely to school by bike, instead of strapping them in car seats inside bulky SUVs. Either way, kids arrive in one piece, but the approaches are vastly different. There’s also not yet an official playbook for cultural burning within the Forest Service to help guide agency staff, which holds the process back. But Gould says he is part of a regional effort to draft such a policy and that his staff are thinking about how to apply that in the Sierra National Forest. “I think people are trying to work through, how do we craft the system in ways that will distinguish cultural burning from the wildfire suppression and large prescribed fire events where the risks are different?” says Long. Still, Long sees more opportunities for traditional fire practices opening up, especially in California, where in recent years the state has rolled out new policies that ease barriers to cultural burning on state and private lands. And at the federal level, in late 2022 the U.S. Forest Service announced 11 major agreements to jointly manage lands with Tribes, including one that allows the Karuk Tribe to conduct cultural burns in partnership with the Six Rivers National Forest in California. The White House followed that announcement with the first-ever national guidance on Indigenous knowledge for federal agencies. The document explicitly recognized the North Fork Mono Tribe for collaborating on research examining cultural burning and climate resilience. In December, Goode’s grandnephew Valdez trained the Tule River Indian Tribe and Sequoia National Forest staff during a cultural burn at that forest. Sierra National Forest staff also attended, hoping to use the event’s success as a springboard in their own forest, according to Gould. But Goode, now facing serious health issues, is losing patience with the plodding government agency overseeing his Tribe’s homelands, and is even considering legal options for enforcing his Tribe’s right to burn. “You’re not doing it fast enough, not just for the Tribe’s benefit, but for the land,” he says. As the light retreats after the first day of burning near Mariposa, Goode and Valdez, both of whom also work as tribal archaeologists, gather the students next to a wide meadow. Goode’s wife’s property, where they’ve been working, lies within the ancestral territory of the Miwok people,  and a few years ago, Goode, Valdez, and a large volunteer contingent worked with some Miwok to clear and burn this portion of the land. These burns represent an intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture, a core part of the practice and key to its continuity. While the sky turns citrus, the group stands atop a massive slab of granite bedrock that emerges from the sea of amber grass like the back of a gray whale. It’s pockmarked with deep, perfectly round holes, some filled with rotting leaves and recent rainwater. Here, the pair explains, the Miwok women who lived in this place at least as far back as 8,000 years ago milled acorns with stone pestles, their daily rhythms grinding permanent impressions into the stone. “They need to be cleaned and cleared out,” Goode says of the mortars. “Right now these are all deteriorating.” Like the meadow here that needed burning, even features as immutable-seeming as these bedrock mortars need tending. They need the Indigenous stewards whose hands shaped them; and people today to remember how to sustain the land. After the archaeology lesson, everyone piles back into trucks to return for dinner: foil-wrapped potatoes, roasting in the embers of today’s fire. Previously in The Revelator: Wildfires Ignite Mental Health Concerns The post Fire for Watersheds appeared first on The Revelator.

To bring more water to the landscape — and fight the growing risk of catastrophic wildfires — a Tribe in California helps to reshape fire management policy. The post Fire for Watersheds appeared first on The Revelator.

Originally published by BioGraphic.

Fire is not coming easily to the pile of dried grass and brush. Four college students fuss with the smoldering heap while Ron Goode, a bear-like man with a graying braid, leans on his cane and inspects their work. Crouch down low, he tells them. Reach farther into the brush with the lighter. Tentative orange flames spring to life and a student in a tie-dyed t-shirt blows gently, imploring them not to die.

It’s a clear November day in the western foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada near the town of Mariposa. The students, visiting from the University of California, Berkeley, are here to help revitalize a patch of live oaks that belongs to Goode’s wife’s family. Goode, the chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, is here to teach them how. Now in his early 70s, Goode and his Tribe have worked for decades to restore neglected meadows and woodlands on private property,  reservations belonging to other Tribes, and on their own ancestral homelands in the Sierra National Forest. And restoration, in these dry hills, calls for fire.

Dressed in cotton shirts and pants, the students feeding the thread of smoke in the oak grove look more like landscapers than a fire crew. “We’re not firefighters. We’re burners, professional burners,” Goode explains. “And we’re using Native knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, from centuries ago.” This approach, employed by Native peoples across the world, is known as cultural burning.

Once the fire is rolling, the students use pruning shears to cut more naked stems of Ta-ka-te, or sourberry (Rhus trilobata), down to the ground and toss those onto the now crackling pile. The next morning, after the flames have devoured this fuel, Goode’s grandnephew Jesse Valdez will coach the students on how to mix the cooling ash into the soil with rakes, to fertilize the roots below.

After piles are burned and extinguished, fire practitioners will rake the ash into the soil to fertilize the roots below. Photograph by Ashley Braun

Cultural burning is a kind of gardening. This Indigenous stewardship tradition of clearing, landscaping, and burning mimics natural disturbances, which create a diverse mosaic of habitats and trigger beneficial growth patterns in certain plants. Goode, Valdez, and other practitioners use small, targeted fires to help reshape and rejuvenate landscapes, both for the overall ecological health of the land and for specific cultural purposes, from cultivating traditional foods to sustaining ceremonial practices. Fire, for instance, stimulates Mo-nop’, or deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens), to explode with flowers. Nium people, as the Mono call themselves, use these flexible flower stalks to weave watertight baskets coiled and patterned like rattlesnakes. And towering Wi-yap’, or black oak (Quercus kelloggii) yield bushels of healthy acorns — once a staple in many Native Californian diets. Low-intensity fires discourage competing conifers, smoke out pests, and clear fuels that threaten to carry flames into the oaks’ more vulnerable crowns. Fire also improves fruit production in berry patches — another key food source for people and animals.

A closeup of an acorn cupped in a man's hand with a blurry background
Acorns were once a staple among many California Natives, accounting for up to 50 percent of Indigenous diets in the state. Photograph by Ashley Braun

Before foreign colonizers arrived and suppressed the practice, Native Californians often lit low-intensity fires to realize benefits like these. Frequent, low-intensity fire also inoculated the landscape against the kind of destructive megafires that regularly scorch the West Coast today. In fact, fire was so endemic in pre-colonial times that the total area burned in California each year was far greater than that burned by modern megafires. But instead of leaving a blackened moonscape largely devoid of life, the low-intensity fires revitalized the land.

Now, Indigenous peoples across the United States are reclaiming traditional fire stewardship practices, from California and Oregon to Minnesota and Texas. They are reviving their connections to their cultures and homelands, restoring ecosystems, boosting biodiversity, and reducing wildfire risk. In California, they’re even using fire — counterintuitively — to bring water back to the parched land.


“Let’s go way back in time,” Goode says, beginning a Nium story. “Tobahp — Land — married Pia — Water — and they had a mischievous child named Kos. And Kos is Fire. Kos liked to run around out in the forest and leave a trail, and wherever Kos went, his father Pia would follow him and sprinkle water on his trail, and his mother Tobahp would come along and plant flowers and plants.” The ancient allegory describes wildfire in the Sierra, Goode explains: After flames pass over the land, “Water is everywhere, and the first thing that starts popping up are all the cultural plants and the flowers.”

Learning to harness fire and its benefits over millennia allowed Native Californians like the Nium to create and maintain open, park-like landscapes. They wanted clear sightlines to watch for danger and protect their villages and families. And the grassy oak savannas and meadows that they tended with cultural burning were ideal for gathering food, medicines, and other supplies, as well as for travel and hunting.

Meadows are good for more than just people, says Joanna Clines, a Sierra National Forest botanist who has worked with the North Fork Mono on restoration. These wetland ecosystems are often-spring-fed and boast “a huge explosion of diversity,” Clines explains, including dozens of species of sedges, rushes, and grasses,  which in turn provide cover and forage for deer, birds, frogs, snakes, and other fauna. Wildflowers like common camas hide delicious bulbs beneath the damp soil and produce blooms that attract native butterflies and bees. Comprising just 2% of the region today — historically they may have covered more than four times that — meadows “are the gems of the Sierra Nevada,” Clines says.

But from the late 18th to the early 20th century, colonists violently removed Indigenous stewards from their meadows, and from the land. Fires were snuffed out or never lit. Indigenous people in the Sierra and beyond were killed in droves, forced to assimilate, and corralled onto reservations. Spanish missionaries were first to ban cultural burning, followed later by the U.S. government. After a devastating complex of wildfires burned 3 million acres in the Northern Rockies in 1911, Congress passed a law establishing a national forest policy of fire prevention and suppression. The Bureau of Indian Affairs later adopted it on reservations.

The land and people are still recovering from their forced separation from fire.

Fifty miles east of Mariposa, Goode surveys a meadow within the North Fork Mono’s homelands, where fragrant native mint and soaproot toast in the autumn sun, alongside a muddy spring. The meadow is part of the 1.3-million-acre Sierra National Forest. For a long time, the Tribe tended deergrass and other resources here, Goode says, but in the early 1980s, many began to feel that the national forest no longer welcomed them in this place. Without the Tribe’s ministrations, ponderosa pines marched in, along with aggressive European invaders like Scotch broom, shading out what had been the largest deergrass bed in their homelands.

In 2003, Dave Martin, a friendly new Forest Service district ranger, invited the North Fork Mono back to this meadow. When the Tribe returned, they found it unrecognizable. But with initial help from an environmental nonprofit and local volunteers, the Tribe chopped brush and selectively logged to mimic what fire would have accomplished had it been allowed. They also performed three cultural burns between 2005 and 2010. Some pines were too large for them to cut or burn, but the utility company PG&E serendipitously felled them later as it cleared space around its powerlines to avoid sparking wildfires.

Freed from thirsty conifers, the meager spring began gushing through the summer. Within a few years, Goode says, these five verdant acres were once again worthy of the label “meadow.” A stately black oak — a favorite tree among many California Tribes — drops acorns at its margin, and Goode points out the sprawling hummocks of returned bunchgrasses, their green glow fading to straw. “These are all the fresh deergrasses,” he says. “They go way up, all the way to the farthest telephone pole now.”

The link between fire and water is well-recognized among fire-dependent Indigenous cultures worldwide, says Frank Kanawha Lake, a Forest Service fire ecologist who collaborates with Goode on research. Historical records suggest that Tribes throughout California, for example, have long known that burning brush makes springs run better and helps save water, according to research by Lake, who has family ties to the Karuk and Yurok. Even in swampy Florida, the Seminole Tribe has a long history of burning in marshes and other damp ecosystems to encourage cultural and medicinal plants that require a higher water table. The Maar-speaking Indigenous peoples of southeastern Australia, meanwhile, tell a story about a vengeful cockatoo who sets a grass fire that prompts a musk duck to shake its wings, filling lakes and swamps with water.

Western science is just starting to catch up with this kind of Indigenous knowledge. Tucked beyond the iconic monolith Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, north of Goode’s restored meadow, Illilouette Creek rushes past streaked granite and patches of charred pines. For almost a hundred years, federal land managers suppressed every blaze in the creek’s fire-adapted basin. Then, in 1968, the National Park Service acknowledged fire’s ecological role with a new policy of “Natural Fire Management.” The policy allowed lightning-caused wildfires to burn in zones where they didn’t threaten human health or infrastructure and where natural fuel breaks contained their reach. By 1972, Yosemite had applied the approach to granite-flanked Illilouette Creek Basin.


In the following four and a half decades, wildfire remade the landscape, though not in the way of the megafires that often grab headlines today. Instead, the blazes were more frequent, smaller, and burned with varying degrees of severity — likely aided at first by the cooler, wetter climate of the 1970s and ’80s. Using aerial photography, ecohydrologist Gabrielle Boisramé and a handful of collaborators discovered that Illilouette Basin’s forest cover shrank by a quarter, more closely approximating historical conditions.  New holes appeared in the canopy, filling in with shrublands and meadow-like fields, which have more than tripled in area since 1972. In 2019, Boisramé published a model-based study that suggested these changes have made the basin modestly but notably wetter.

“In the more open areas — which are maintained open by fire — you get deeper snow, and it sticks around longer,” in part because more of it reaches the ground, says Boisramé, who’s now based at the nonprofit Desert Research Institute in Nevada. “That means that water from the snowmelt is getting added to the soil later into the dry season, which is better for vegetation, and can help maintain some of those wet meadows” — as well as boost streamflows and groundwater in a region often grappling with drought. Her previous modeling also shows that fire’s return brings as much as a 30% spike in soil moisture during the summer.

The extra water stored and the smaller number of trees competing for it seem to have helped Illilouette’s trees weather the state’s worst drought in centuries, even as trees in the adjacent Sierra National Forest died in droves, Boisramé says. And the type of fire diversity now found in Illilouette is connected to better long-term carbon storage and greater biodiversity, with documented benefits for bees, understory plants, bats, and birds.

Teasing out fire’s precise and myriad influences on hydrology is challenging, given the many variables involved for any particular place or circumstance. However, Boisramé’s studies are part of a small but growing body of work that suggests frequent fire has long-term hydrologic benefits for ecosystems adapted to such blazes. In the mid-20th century, pioneering fire researcher Harold Biswell found that the prescribed burns he conducted on cattle ranches in the Sierra Nevada foothills helped revive summer-parched springs. That aligns with research in the western U.S. showing that some watersheds — particularly those without substantial groundwater stores to feed waterways — see more water in streams after fire, likely thanks to fewer thirsty plants. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, recently published a paper suggesting that European colonization of southeast Tasmania created the region’s dry scrublands and devastating megafires by suppressing Indigenous burning that had maintained waterlogged heathlands.

Fire has less direct benefits, too. Inspired by the knowledge of Indigenous burners in the Karuk Tribe, have shown that wildfire smoke can block enough solar radiation to cool rivers and streams by nearly 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit. In some cases, that could offer localized relief to cold-water species like salmon during the changing climate’s hottest summer days.

As more scientists and conservationists recognize the ways Indigenous people shaped ecosystem biodiversity and resilience with fire, there’s an opportunity to return reciprocity to management, says Lake — and to reconnect people and place. “What is our human responsibility, and what are our human services for that ecosystem?” he asks. “How do we prescribe the right amount of fire today, fire as medicine? Traditional knowledge can guide us.”


There is little question that the land needs help. Of the more than 8,200 meadows that the Forest Service has documented in the Sierra Nevada, the agency has listed 95% as unhealthy, or worse, no longer functioning as meadow ecosystems. The North Fork Mono have taken on the task of reviving some of these places in addition to the deergrass meadow that Goode showed me. Working alongside the Forest Service, they’ve begun restoring at least five others in the Sierra National Forest since 2003. In 2018, and again last year, Goode signed five-year agreements with the Forest Service that he hopes will allow the Tribe to restore many more. Those agreements explicitly acknowledge their authority to carry out Indigenous fire management. But their traditional management practices have been challenging to implement.

Goode and his team have so far assessed nine meadows for restoration — and eventually, for cultural burning. They and the Forest Service are working to cut down encroaching conifers and shrubs, clear dead and fallen trees and other vegetation, create piles for burning, remove noxious weeds, clear gullies, and build structures to stabilize eroding soil. All paving the way for vibrant meadows that will hold onto water.

As some elements of those projects move forward, Goode’s team has so far hit a roadblock when it comes to lighting the actual fires. According to Goode, under the agreements, “it’s us putting fire on the ground, and them participating if they wish.” But the Forest Service won’t allow someone to set a fire unless they have a “red card” obtained through rigorous firefighter training.

“The forest is in dire need of restoration, and cultural burning is certainly going to be a key component going forward,” says Dean Gould, Sierra National Forest supervisor. But the agency wants to operate as safely as possible, he adds. Fire practitioners must work in forests laced with buildings and infrastructure, under unprecedented climatic conditions and huge fuel loads. For his part, Gould blames the delay mostly on a lack of capacity. Several recent historic wildfires within the national forest have kept its staff from building a more robust prescribed fire program, which would coordinate cultural burns. The COVID pandemic added other delays, as did a slew of onerous new nation-wide recommendations for prescribed fire that the Forest Service issued in 2022 after losing control of two such burns in New Mexico.

Tribes hoping to implement cultural burning on federal lands commonly face challenges like the ones the Nork Fork Mono has come up against. “[B]oth state and federal agencies lack an adequate understanding of Tribes and cultural fire practitioners, their expertise and authority, land tenure, and the requirements of cultural burns,” write the authors of a report put together for the Karuk Tribe. That, in turn, has led to “confusion, delay, and red-tape,” as well as interference with tribal sovereignty.

“Either we do cultural burning the way it’s supposed to be done, or we’re not going to do it,” says Goode, whose team has more than a hundred small piles of brush prepped and waiting in two Sierra National Forest meadows — ready for them to light and tend the fires before snow falls.

A man in a wrestling tshirt holds burning sage while two other people can be seen in the background
Indigenous fire stewardship also includes cultural rituals such as burning sage, which is sacred to many Native communities of California and Mexico. Photograph by Ashley Braun

Traditional practitioners often see requirements like red cards as inconsistent with cultural burning, explains Jonathan Long, a Forest Service ecologist who has worked with several Tribes on the issue. Part of the problem is that cultural burning adopts precautions in fundamentally different ways than typical agency burns do. Their intentions and practices, for example, make for safer burns as a general rule. Practitioners tend to ignite only small patches of lower-intensity fire; they welcome both youth and elders to teach and learn; they manicure away risky fuels; and they tend burns closely enough to reduce impacts on cultural resources like deergrass, as well as other plants and wildlife. It’s akin to a city installing bike lanes and traffic-slowing measures so parents can transport kids safely to school by bike, instead of strapping them in car seats inside bulky SUVs. Either way, kids arrive in one piece, but the approaches are vastly different.

There’s also not yet an official playbook for cultural burning within the Forest Service to help guide agency staff, which holds the process back. But Gould says he is part of a regional effort to draft such a policy and that his staff are thinking about how to apply that in the Sierra National Forest.

“I think people are trying to work through, how do we craft the system in ways that will distinguish cultural burning from the wildfire suppression and large prescribed fire events where the risks are different?” says Long.

Still, Long sees more opportunities for traditional fire practices opening up, especially in California, where in recent years the state has rolled out new policies that ease barriers to cultural burning on state and private lands. And at the federal level, in late 2022 the U.S. Forest Service announced 11 major agreements to jointly manage lands with Tribes, including one that allows the Karuk Tribe to conduct cultural burns in partnership with the Six Rivers National Forest in California. The White House followed that announcement with the first-ever national guidance on Indigenous knowledge for federal agencies. The document explicitly recognized the North Fork Mono Tribe for collaborating on research examining cultural burning and climate resilience.

In December, Goode’s grandnephew Valdez trained the Tule River Indian Tribe and Sequoia National Forest staff during a cultural burn at that forest. Sierra National Forest staff also attended, hoping to use the event’s success as a springboard in their own forest, according to Gould. But Goode, now facing serious health issues, is losing patience with the plodding government agency overseeing his Tribe’s homelands, and is even considering legal options for enforcing his Tribe’s right to burn. “You’re not doing it fast enough, not just for the Tribe’s benefit, but for the land,” he says.

As the light retreats after the first day of burning near Mariposa, Goode and Valdez, both of whom also work as tribal archaeologists, gather the students next to a wide meadow. Goode’s wife’s property, where they’ve been working, lies within the ancestral territory of the Miwok people,  and a few years ago, Goode, Valdez, and a large volunteer contingent worked with some Miwok to clear and burn this portion of the land. These burns represent an intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture, a core part of the practice and key to its continuity.

While the sky turns citrus, the group stands atop a massive slab of granite bedrock that emerges from the sea of amber grass like the back of a gray whale. It’s pockmarked with deep, perfectly round holes, some filled with rotting leaves and recent rainwater. Here, the pair explains, the Miwok women who lived in this place at least as far back as 8,000 years ago milled acorns with stone pestles, their daily rhythms grinding permanent impressions into the stone. “They need to be cleaned and cleared out,” Goode says of the mortars. “Right now these are all deteriorating.”

Like the meadow here that needed burning, even features as immutable-seeming as these bedrock mortars need tending. They need the Indigenous stewards whose hands shaped them; and people today to remember how to sustain the land. After the archaeology lesson, everyone piles back into trucks to return for dinner: foil-wrapped potatoes, roasting in the embers of today’s fire.

Previously in The Revelator:

Wildfires Ignite Mental Health Concerns

The post Fire for Watersheds appeared first on The Revelator.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

A rare glimpse inside the mountain tunnel that carries water to Southern California

In the 1930s, workers bored a 13-mile tunnel beneath Mt. San Jacinto. Here's a look inside the engineering feat that carries Colorado River water to Southern California.

Thousands of feet below the snowy summit of Mt. San Jacinto, a formidable feat of engineering and grit makes life as we know it in Southern California possible. The 13-mile-long San Jacinto Tunnel was bored through the mountain in the 1930s by a crew of about 1,200 men who worked day and night for six years, blasting rock and digging with machinery. Completed in 1939, the tunnel was a cornerstone in the construction of the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct. It enabled the delivery of as much as 1 billion gallons of water per day.The tunnel is usually off-limits when it is filled and coursing with a massive stream of Colorado River water. But recently, while it was shut down for annual maintenance, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California opened the west end of the passage to give The Times and others a rare look inside. “It’s an engineering marvel,” said John Bednarski, an assistant general manager of MWD. “It’s pretty awe-inspiring.” The 16-foot-diameter San Jacinto Tunnel runs 13 miles through the mountain. While shut down for maintenance, the tunnel has a constant stream of water entering from the mountain. A group visits the west end of the San Jacinto Tunnel, where the mouth of the water tunnel enters a chamber. He wore a hard hat as he led a group to the gaping, horseshoe-shaped mouth of the tunnel. The passage’s concrete arch faded in the distance to pitch black.The tunnel wasn’t entirely empty. The sound of rushing water echoed from the walls as an ankle-deep stream flowed from the portal and cascaded into a churning pool beneath metal gates. Many in the tour group wore rubber boots as they stood on moist concrete in a chamber faintly lit by filtered sunlight, peering into the dark tunnel. This constant flow comes as groundwater seeps and gushes from springs that run through the heart of the mountain. In places deep in the tunnel, water shoots so forcefully from the floor or the wall that workers have affectionately named these soaking obstacles “the fire hose” and “the car wash.”Standing by the flowing stream, Bednarski called it “leakage water from the mountain itself.”Mt. San Jacinto rises 10,834 feet above sea level, making it the second-highest peak in Southern California after 11,503-foot Mt. San Gorgonio.As the tunnel passes beneath San Jacinto’s flank, as much as 2,500 feet of solid rock lies overhead, pierced only by two vertical ventilation shafts. Snow covers Mt. San Jacinto, as seen from Whitewater, in March. At the base of the mountain, the 13-mile San Jacinto Tunnel starts its journey. The tunnel transports Colorado River water to Southern California’s cities. During maintenance, workers roll through on a tractor equipped with a frame bearing metal bristles that scrape the tunnel walls, cleaning off algae and any growth of invasive mussels. Workers also inspect the tunnel by passing through on an open trailer, scanning for any cracks that require repairs.“It’s like a Disneyland ride,” said Bryan Raymond, an MWD conveyance team manager. “You’re sitting on this trailer, and there’s a bunch of other people on it too, and you’re just cruising through looking at the walls.” Aside from the spraying and trickling water, employee Michael Volpone said he has also heard faint creaking.“If you sit still and listen, you can kind of hear the earth move,” he said. “It’s a little eerie.”Standing at the mouth of the tunnel, the constant babble of cascading water dominates the senses. The air is moist but not musty. Put a hand to the clear flowing water, and it feels warm enough for a swim. On the concrete walls are stained lines that extend into the darkness, marking where the water often reaches when the aqueduct is running full. Many who have worked on the aqueduct say they are impressed by the system’s design and how engineers and workers built such a monumental system with the basic tools and technology available during the Great Depression.Pipelines and tunnelsThe search for a route to bring Colorado River water across the desert to Los Angeles began with the signing of a 1922 agreement that divided water among seven states. After the passage of a $2-million bond measure by Los Angeles voters in 1925, hundreds of surveyors fanned out across the largely roadless Mojave and Sonoran deserts to take measurements and study potential routes.The surveyors traveled mostly on horseback and on foot as they mapped the rugged terrain, enduring grueling days in desert camps where the heat sometimes topped 120 degrees.Planners studied and debated more than 100 potential paths before settling on one in 1931. The route began near Parker, Ariz., and took a curving path through desert valleys, around obstacles and, where there was no better option, through mountains.In one official report, a manager wrote that “to bore straight through the mountains is very expensive and to pump over them is likewise costly.” He said the planners carefully weighed these factors as they decided on a solution that would deliver water at the lowest cost. VIDEO | 02:45 A visit to the giant tunnel that brings Colorado River water to Southern California Share via Those in charge of the Metropolitan Water District, which had been created in 1928 to lead the effort, were focused on delivering water to 13 participating cities, including Los Angeles, Burbank and Anaheim. William Mulholland, Los Angeles’ chief water engineer, had led an early scouting party to map possible routes from the Colorado River to Southern California’s cities in 1923, a decade after he celebrated the completion of the 233-mile aqueduct from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles with the triumphant words, “There it is. Take it.”The aqueduct’s design matched the audaciousness of the giant dams the federal government was starting to build along the Colorado — Hoover Dam (originally called Boulder Dam) and Parker Dam, which formed the reservoir where the aqueduct would begin its journey.Five pumping plants would be built to lift water more than 1,600 feet along the route across the desert. Between those points, water would run by gravity through open canals, buried pipelines and 29 separate tunnels stretching 92 miles — the longest of which was a series of nine tunnels running 33.7 miles through hills bordering the Coachella Valley.To make it possible, voters in the district’s 13 cities overwhelmingly approved a $220-million bond in 1931, the equivalent of a $4.5-billion investment today, which enabled the hiring of 35,000 workers. Crews set up camps, excavated canals and began to blast open shafts through the desert’s rocky spines to make way for water.In 1933, workers started tearing into the San Jacinto Mountains at several locations, from the east and the west, as well as excavating shafts from above. Black-and-white photographs and films showed miners in hard hats and soiled uniforms as they stood smoking cigarettes, climbing into open rail cars and running machinery that scooped and loaded piles of rocks.Crews on another hulking piece of equipment, called a jumbo, used compressed-air drills to bore dozens of holes, which were packed with blasting power and detonated to pierce the rock. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Water District of Southern California) The work progressed slowly, growing complicated when the miners struck underground streams, which sent water gushing in.According to a 1991 history of the MWD titled “A Water Odyssey,” one flood in 1934 disabled two of three pumps that had been brought in to clear the tunnel. In another sudden flood, an engineer recalled that “the water came in with a big, mad rush and filled the shaft to the top. Miners scrambled up the 800-foot ladder to the surface, and the last man out made it with water swirling around his waist.”Death and delaysAccording to the MWD’s records, 13 workers died during the tunnel’s construction, including men who were struck by falling rocks, run over by equipment or electrocuted with a wire on one of the mining trolleys that rolled on railroad tracks. The Metropolitan Water District had originally hired Wenzel & Henoch Construction Co. to build the tunnel. But after less than two years, only about two miles of the tunnel had been excavated, and the contractor was fired by MWD general manager Frank Elwin “F.E.” Weymouth, who assigned the district’s engineers and workers to complete the project.Construction was delayed again in 1937 when workers went on strike for six weeks. But in 1939, the last wall of rock tumbled down, uniting the east and west tunnels, and the tunnel was finished. John Bednarski, assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, stands in a water tunnel near the end point of the larger San Jacinto Tunnel, which carries Colorado River water. The total cost was $23.5 million. But there also were other costs. As the construction work drained water, many nearby springs used by the Native Soboba people stopped flowing. The drying of springs and creeks left the tribe’s members without water and starved their farms, which led to decades of litigation by the Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians and eventually a legal settlement in 2008 that resolved the tribe’s water rights claims.The ‘magic touch’ of waterBy the time the tunnel was completed, the Metropolitan Water District had released a 20-minute film that was shown in movie theaters and schools celebrating its conquest of the Colorado River and the desert. It called Mt. San Jacinto the “tallest and most forbidding barrier.”In a rich baritone, the narrator declared Southern California “a new empire made possible by the magic touch of water.” “Water required to support this growth and wealth could not be obtained from the local rainfall in this land of sunshine,” the narrator said as the camera showed newly built homes and streets filled with cars and buses. “The people therefore realized that a new and dependable water supply must be provided, and this new water supply has been found on the lofty western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, a wonderland of beauty, clad by nature in a white mantle of snow.”Water began to flow through the aqueduct in 1939 as the pumping plants were tested. At the Julian Hinds Pumping Plant, near the aqueduct’s halfway point, water was lifted 441 feet, surging through three pipelines up a desert mountain. March 2012 image of the 10-foot-diameter delivery lines carrying water 441 feet uphill from the Julian Hinds Pumping Plant. (Los Angeles Times) From there, the water flowed by gravity, moving at 3-6 mph as it traveled through pipelines, siphons and tunnels. It entered the San Jacinto Tunnel in Cabazon, passed under the mountain and emerged near the city of San Jacinto, then continued in pipelines to Lake Mathews reservoir in Riverside County. In 1941, Colorado River water started flowing to Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Compton and other cities. Within six years, another pipeline was built to transport water from the aqueduct south to San Diego.The influx of water fueled Southern California’s rapid growth during and after World War II.Over decades, the dams and increased diversions also took an environmental toll, drying up much of the once-vast wetlands in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. John Bednarski, assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, walks in a water tunnel near the end point of the larger San Jacinto Tunnel. An impressive designToday, 19 million people depend on water delivered by the MWD, which also imports supplies from Northern California through the aqueducts and pipelines of the State Water Project.In recent decades, the agency has continued boring tunnels where needed to move water. A $1.2-billion, 44-mile-long conveyance system called the Inland Feeder, completed in 2009, involved boring eight miles of tunnels through the San Bernardino Mountains and another 7.9-mile tunnel under the Badlands in Riverside County.The system enabled the district to increase its capacity and store more water during wet years in Diamond Valley Lake, Southern California’s largest reservoir, which can hold about 260 billion gallons of water. “Sometimes tunneling is actually the most effective way to get from point A to point B,” said Deven Upadhyay, the MWD’s general manager.Speaking hypothetically, Upadhyay said, if engineers had another shot at designing and building the aqueduct now using modern technology, it’s hard to say if they would end up choosing the same route through Mt. San Jacinto or a different route around it. But the focus on minimizing cost might yield a similar route, he said.“Even to this day, it’s a pretty impressive design,” Upadhyay said.When people drive past on the I-10 in Cabazon, few realize that a key piece of infrastructure lies hidden where the desert meets the base of the mountain. At the tunnel’s exit point near San Jacinto, the only visible signs of the infrastructure are several concrete structures resembling bunkers. When the aqueduct is running, those who enter the facility will hear the rumble of rushing water. The tunnel’s west end was opened to a group of visitors in March, when the district’s managers held an event to name the tunnel in honor of Randy Record, who served on the MWD board for two decades and was chair from 2014 to 2018. Speaking to an audience, Upadhyay reflected on the struggles the region now faces as the Colorado River is sapped by drought and global warming, and he drew a parallel to the challenges the tunnel’s builders overcame in the 1930s. “They found a path,” Upadhyay said. “This incredible engineering feat. And it required strength, courage and really an innovative spirit.” “When we now think about the challenges that we face today, dealing with wild swings in climate and the potential reductions that we might face, sharing dwindling supplies on our river systems with the growing Southwest, it’s going to require the same thing — strength, courage and a spirit of innovation,” he said. A steep steel staircase gives access to a water tunnel near the end point of the larger San Jacinto Tunnel, which carries Colorado River water to Southern California.

Officials to Test Water From Ohio Village Near Cold War-Era Weapons Plant After Newspaper Probe

Authorities in Ohio plan to test the water supply across a small village near a former weapons plant after a newspaper investigation published Friday found high levels of radioactivity in samples taken at a school, athletic field, library and other sites

LUCKEY, Ohio (AP) — Authorities in Ohio plan to test the groundwater supply across a village near a former weapons plant after a newspaper investigation published Friday found high levels of radioactivity in samples taken at a school, athletic field, library and other sites.However, The Blade in Toledo said its tests showed radioactivity levels 10 times higher than normal in water from a drinking fountain at Eastwood Middle School, 45 times higher than normal at the Luckey Library and 1,731 times higher than normal at a water pump near athletic fields.“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” said Lt. Col. Robert Burnham, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Buffalo District, which oversees the cleanup.Nineteen of the 39 samples collected by the newspaper from well water across Luckey — at homes, businesses, and public places — showed radioactivity at least 10 times greater than what the federal government calls normal for the area, the newspaper said. The Blade hired an accredited private lab to conduct the testing.The radioactivity detected was primarily bismuth-214, which decays from the radioactive gas radon-222. Experts agree that high levels of bismuth-214 suggest high levels of radon are also present.Radon exposure is the leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers.The testing also found low levels of radioactive cobalt-60, a man-made isotope, in two wells. Experts called that finding extremely rare.Taehyun Roh, a Texas A&M University scientist who specializes in environmental exposures, said regulators should also conduct air and soil testing to assess the extent of the contamination and identify the source."Since this area likely has high radon levels, testing for radon in both air and water is advisable,” he wrote in an email. “A safe drinking water advisory should be issued, recommending the use of bottled water until further assessments and mitigation measures are in place.”The Corps of Engineers has long maintained that residential drinking water was not being contaminated by the removal work. Burnham and others said they still believe that to be true, citing thousands of their own soil samples.The state Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Health will lead the testing. In an email, Ohio EPA spokesperson Katie Boyer told the newspaper the contaminant levels in the public drinking water are still “within acceptable drinking water standards.” She said any concerns raised by the state testing would be addressed.The 44-acre industrial site — 22 miles (35 kilometers) south of Toledo — was long crucial to America’s nuclear weapons program. In the 1940s, farmland was replaced by a sprawling defense plant that produced magnesium metal for the Manhattan Project. In the 1950s, the plant became the government’s sole source of beryllium metal for nuclear bombs, Cold War missiles and Space Race products, including a heat shield for Project Mercury.“Things that happened generations ago are still affecting us,” said Karina Hahn-Claydon, a 50-year-old teacher whose family lives less than a mile from the site. “And that’s because the government didn’t take care of it.”Private drinking wells, unlike municipal systems, are not regulated, and responsibility for testing is left to owners. The Blade’s testing took place from April 2024 through January.Radioactivity has been linked to an increased risk of various cancers, including blood and thyroid cancers.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

UK spending watchdog censures water firms and regulators over sewage failings

NAO finds regulatory gaps have enabled overspending on infrastructure building while not improving sewage worksWater companies have been getting away with failures to improve sewage works and overspending because of regulatory problems, a damning report by the government’s spending watchdog has found.Firms have overspent on infrastructure building, the National Audit Office (NAO) found, with some of these costs being added to consumers’ bills. The Guardian this week reported Ofwat and the independent water commission are investigating water firms for spending up to 10 times as much on their sewage works and piping as comparable countries. Continue reading...

Water companies have been getting away with failures to improve sewage works and overspending because of regulatory problems, a damning report by the government’s spending watchdog has found.Firms have overspent on infrastructure building, the National Audit Office (NAO) found, with some of these costs being added to consumers’ bills. The Guardian this week reported Ofwat and the independent water commission are investigating water firms for spending up to 10 times as much on their sewage works and piping as comparable countries.Bills in England and Wales are rising by £123 on average this year, and will go up further over the next five years, so that companies can fix ageing sewage infrastructure and stop spills of human waste from contaminating rivers and seas. Several water firms have complained to the Competition and Markets Authority because they want the regulator to allow them to increase bills even further.Only 1% of water companies’ actions to improve environmental performance, such as improving sewer overflows, have been inspected by the Environment Agency, the authors of the NAO report said. They also found there was no regulator responsible for proactively inspecting wastewater assets to prevent further environmental harm.The report, which audited the three water regulators, Ofwat, the Environment Agency, and the Drinking Water Inspectorate, as well as the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, also found the regulators did not have a good understanding of the condition of infrastructure assets such as leaking sewers and ageing sewage treatment facilities as they do not have a set of metrics to assess their condition.Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: “Given the unprecedented situation facing the sector, Defra and the regulators need to act urgently to address industry performance and resilience to ensure the sector can meet government targets and achieve value for money over the long term for bill payers.”Despite the huge costs of infrastructure, the water companies have moved slowly meaning that at the current rate, it would take 700 years to replace the entire existing water network, the report found. Regulatory gaps and a lack of urgency about replacing old and malfunctioning infrastructure has caused a “rising tide of risk” in the sector, which is contributing to increasing bills for customers, the report warned.It also criticised the lack of a national plan for water supply and recommended that Defra must understand the costs and deliverability of its plans, alongside the impact they would have on customers’ bills.Several of the issues raised by the NAO, including concerns about weak infrastructure, have come to the fore in the debate over the future of Thames Water, the country’s largest water company with 16 million customers. Thames, which is under significant financial pressure with almost £20bn in debt, needs to secure fresh investment within months. Questions over the state of Thames’s infrastructure and regulatory punishment it could face for its failures have dogged the process of winning fresh funds. Meanwhile, Ofwat has also rejected its requests to raise bills by as much as 59%, instead allowing a 35% increase over the next five years.The government set up the independent water commission (IWC) last year to investigate how the water industry operated and whether regulation was fit for purpose.Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Tory chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said: “Today’s NAO report lays bare the scale of the challenges facing the water sector – not least the real prospect of water shortfall without urgent action.“The consequences of government’s failure to regulate this sector properly are now landing squarely on bill payers who are being left to pick up the tab. After years of under-investment, pollution incidents and water supply issues, it is no surprise that consumer trust is at an all-time low. Having not built any reservoirs in the last 30 years, we now need 10.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion“Consumers rightly expect a water sector that is robust, resilient and fit for the future. Defra and the regulators must focus on rebuilding public confidence and ensure the sector can attract the long-term investment it desperately needs.”An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We recognise the significant challenges facing the water industry. That is why we will be working with Defra and other water regulators to implement the report’s recommendations and update our frameworks to reflect its findings.”An Ofwat spokesperson added: “We agree with the NAO’s recommendations for Ofwat and we continue to progress our work in these areas, and to contribute to the IWC wider review of the regulatory framework. We also look forward to the IWC’s recommendations and to working with government and other regulators to better deliver for customers and the environment.”A Defra spokesperson said: “The government has taken urgent action to fix the water industry – but change will not happen overnight. We have put water companies under tough special measures through our landmark Water Act.”Water UK, which represents the water companies, has been contacted for comment.

Water firms admit sewage monitoring damaging public trust

The industry says powers to self-monitor water quality should be handed back to the regulator.

Water companies should no longer be allowed to monitor their own levels of sewage pollution, the industry body has told the BBC exclusively.Instead they are proposing a new, third-party monitoring system to build consumer trust.The recommendation is part of a submission made to the UK government's independent review into the water sector.Campaigners have long complained the companies' self-reporting has prevented the true scale of pollution in UK water being revealed.A third-party system could add more pressure to the regulators, which have also been criticised for not holding the companies to account. A report from the National Audit Office is expected to say on Friday that the Environment Agency does not currently have enough capacity to take on any new monitoring.David Henderson, CEO of industry body Water UK, told the BBC: "We absolutely accept that self-monitoring is not helping to instil trust and so we would like to see an end to it, and in place of it a more robust, third-party system." As part of their permitting arrangements water companies are expected to regularly sample water quality to identify potential pollution, and submit this data to the Environment Agency in an arrangement known as "operator self monitoring". But there have been incidents of misreporting by water companies in England and Wales uncovered by the regulators, who said some cases had been deliberate.Southern Water was previously issued fines totalling £213m by the industry regulator (Ofwat) and the environmental regulator (the Environment Agency) for manipulating sewage data.In that case, there was unreported pollution into numerous conservation sites which caused "major environmental harm" to wildlife.The company later admitted its actions "fell short".Henderson added that the industry never asked to self-monitor, but that it was introduced in 2009 by the then Labour government to "reduce the administrative burden" on the Environment Agency (EA). In 2023, the BBC reported that EA staff were concerned that, due to funding cuts, the Agency was increasingly relying on water companies to self-report rather than carrying out its own checks on pollution from sewage. The current environment minister, Steve Reed, has promised to review the system, calling it the equivalent of companies "mark[ing] their own homework".But the National Audit Office (NAO), which reviews government spending, questioned the ability of the EA to take on any new monitoring. "Regulators need to address the fact that they currently have limited oversight over whether water companies are carrying out their work as expected. It is hard to see how they will achieve this without increased overall capacity," said Anita Shah, NAO Director of Regulation.It is expected to publish a full review of the regulation of the water sector on Friday. A Defra spokesperson told the BBC: "We are committed to taking decisive action to fix the water industry. The Water Commission's recommendations will mark the next major step [to] restore public trust in the sector."The government launched an independent water commission in October to review the sector and the way it is regulated. The public consultation closed on Wednesday with the findings expected in July. Water UK submitted a 200-page document of recommendations, including this call to end self-monitoring.The industry body also requested that water meters be universal across England and Wales to make bills fairer. At present about 60% of the population have a meter."The meter is just to ensure that people are paying for what they use as opposed to a flat rate of system where you can use virtually no water and pay the same as someone filling up a pool three times in a summer," said Henderson."This doesn't properly reflect the value of water and encourage people to conserve it in the way that we need," he added.

Cambodia Canal's Impact on Mekong Questioned After China Signs Deal

By Francesco Guarascio(Reuters) -Cambodia should share a feasibility study on the impact of a planned China-backed canal that would divert water...

(Reuters) -Cambodia should share a feasibility study on the impact of a planned China-backed canal that would divert water from the rice-growing floodplains of Vietnam's Mekong Delta, said the body overseeing the transnational river.After months of uncertainty, Phnom Penh last week signed a deal with China to develop the Funan Techo Canal when President Xi Jinping visited Cambodia as part of a tour of Southeast Asia.It was Beijing's first explicit public commitment to the project, giving state-controlled construction giant China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) a 49% stake through a subsidiary, but also linking Chinese support to the "sustainability" of the project.The Secretariat of the intergovernmental Mekong River Commission (MRC) that coordinates the sustainable development of Southeast Asia's longest river said it had so far received from Cambodia only "basic information" on the project."We hope that further details, including the feasibility study report and other relevant reports, will be provided," the Commission said in a statement to Reuters this week.That would be needed "to ensure that any potential implications for the broader Mekong Basin are fully considered," it added.The canal has already created concern among environmentalists who say it could further harm the delicate ecology of the Mekong Delta, which is Vietnam's major rice growing region and is already facing problems of drought and salination as result of infrastructure projects upstream. Vietnam is also a leading exporter of rice.On Friday, the Cambodian government said the canal would have minimal environmental impact and "aligns with the 1995 Mekong Agreement" which governs cooperation among riverine countries in Southeast Asia.The Mekong River, fed by a series of tributaries, flows some 4,900 kilometres (3,045 miles) from its source in the Tibetan plateau through China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to the sea."Whether the Funan Techo Canal violates the 1995 Mekong Agreement depends on several factors, including its connection to the Mekong mainstream," the Commission said, offering additional guidance to Phnom Penh and other member states "to ensure compliance".Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam are members of the MRC while China and Myanmar are dialogue partners.The Cambodian government did not respond to questions about whether it intended to share the requested documents.Vietnam's foreign ministry did not reply to a request for comment after the deal with China was signed, but the country has repeatedly asked Cambodia to share more information about the canal to assess its impact.Xi made no reference to the canal in his public statements in Phnom Penh but a joint communique issued at the end of his visit said China supported Cambodia in building the canal "in accordance with the principles of feasibility and sustainability".The deal signed by CCCC on Friday was for a 151.6 km (94.2 miles) canal costing $1.16 billion.However, the Cambodian government says on the canal's official website that the waterway would stretch 180 km and cost $1.7 billion at completion in 2028.The higher cost reflects a short section to be built by Cambodian firms as well as bridges and water conservation resources, the government told Reuters without clarifying who would pay for the bridges and water conservation.Cambodia's deputy prime minister said in May 2024 that China would cover the entire cost of the project, which was put at $1.7 billion.The canal is designed to link the Mekong Basin to the Gulf of Thailand in Cambodia's southern Kep province. Much of the Mekong's nutrient-rich sediment no longer reaches rice farms in the Delta because of multiple hydroelectric dams built by China upriver, a Reuters analysis showed in 2022.The project agreed with China is also different from the original plan as it is focusing on boosting irrigation rather than solely pursuing navigation purposes, said Brian Eyler, an expert on the Mekong region at U.S.-based think tank Stimson Center.The water diverted from the Mekong Delta "will be much more than previously described," said Eyler.(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; additional reporting by Khanh Vu in Hanoi; Editing by Kate Mayberry)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

Suggested Viewing

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.