ew boatmen, National Park Service employees, scientists, musicians, GCRG board members, artists, writers, or administrators have devoted as much of their life to Grand Canyon as Dr. Lawrence E. Stevens. Larry, as most of us know him, has spent the better part of the last three decades pursuing all the above avocations (and more) with one large common denominator: Grand Canyon and the ecosystems it houses. In this issue of the BQR, we present the distilled essence of two interviews with Larry, some criticisms of his viewpoints and Larry¹s clarification thereof, much of Larry¹s artwork, and a song. We hope that this issue will give the boating public a more rounded view of the eccentric character crawling through the poison ivy counting snails.

Stevens: I feel like I work for the Grand Canyon, and different groups hire me for different things, but what I work for is the healthiest, best Grand Canyon we can have. And I¹m speaking this morning as a private citizen, not as an employee of any group. As far as a resumé goes, I came to Arizona in 1970 to go to Prescott College. The first thing I saw was Grand Canyon, and immediately took a trip into the Canyon. The following fall, several months later, kayaked up at Lees Ferry, and started hiking here then. I graduated in 1974 and had some contacts in the National Park Service. They had just started an ecological inventory of the river corridor, and I knew that I wanted to work on that project. At the time the nps had a little avian work going on, but nobody to study insects. I had focused my undergraduate studies on insects and bird life, so this was an ideal opportunity to do the first insect inventory of the Colorado River.

I worked for two and a half years collecting and identifying insects at the Museum of Northern Arizona, spending sixteen to eighteen hours a day preparing specimens. I identified about 50,000 specimens in that period, about 2,500 species from the river corridor. At the end of that project, I ended up with $4.10 to my name. Science doesn¹t pay well, you know. Especially biology. I needed a job, so I went around in late March of 1976 to several river companies. Fortunately, I landed a job with Wilderness World. Unbeknownst to me Wilderness World had just fired all of its staff and I was hired as scab labor. That started my career as a river guide.

I rowed commercially through the rest of the seventies and into the early eighties. I began a Masters program at nau looking at vegetation and the influence of insects on succession along the river, funding my studies by commercial river trips and a non-lethal automobile accident. I was trying to understand why the riverside vegetation was changing as quickly as it was. I finished the Masters program in 1985. In that time period I also published a river guide, because there was such a dearth of information available to the visitors on Canyon biology. Everybody knows about Powell, a few people know about the rapids and geology, but really there was not much information on the biology down here at that time. There is a thin veneer of life over the canyon¹s surface, but it¹s incredibly rich, biologically, and a complicated world. The river guide helped me explain that a bit, and it funded my doctoral program, which lasted through 1989.

In 1980 I had begun working on specific study sites along the river, but in 1983 the Bureau of Reclamation released high flows out of Glen Canyon Dam. These spills wiped out my study plots, which I¹d painstakingly photo-documented. Although those plots were eliminated, I had a rather good database for assessing the affects of those floods. I ran a couple of projects through the Bureau of Reclamation, looking at the effects of early ¹80s floods on the river ecosystem and came to some pretty interesting conclusions about the affects of unplanned flooding on a regulated river. I gradually began to catch on to what was happening there, which is an ecosystem that has been subjected to a very unique and very human form of disturbance. The dam has reduced the amount of disturbance that this naturally very highly flood-disturbed ecosystem sustained. That has proven to be a very challenging management issue and I have been addressing different elements of change for the last eight years. My dissertation focused on vegetation change. Subsequent studies with the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies program focused on beach erosion, soil geochemistry, marsh development, and impacts on higher trophic levels. I have been studying from the river up, trying to compile the story of how the dam affected the ecosystem.

Steiger: When you say disturbance, can you tell me a little bit about that?

Stevens: Disturbance ecology is the study of how environmental perturbations affect ecosystems. Perturbations, disturbances, include natural events: fires, storms, flooding, volcanic activity‹for example the Mount St. Helens eruption. Those are forms of natural disturbance that occur with varying predictability. Flooding happens to be a rather regular, predictable disturbance. But human disturbance of ecosystems involves many different alterations. It can be as radical an environmental change as urbanization, strip mining, or intense grazing. What it¹s taken me awhile to see is that some human disturbances increase the amount of upset to the landscape, and some human disturbances increase the stability of the landscape. A regulated river, a dam-controlled river that doesn¹t receive regular flooding, has been ecologically stabilized. Very different than the natural situation, which is highly disturbed by flooding almost every year.

Fire suppression is another form of stabilizing human disturbance. Fires are prevented and all kinds of vegetation change takes place. Similarly, building a breakwater along a coastline prevents waves from reaching the shoreline, prevents storm-related disturbance from happening. These are rather unique human impacts, not ones that most people recognize as a distinct form of landscape impact. Steiger: What was your position with the National Park Service? Stevens: I had done a couple of contract projects with the Bureau of Reclamation which brought me in contact with the National Park Service again after having left the agency in the mid-1970s. Those projects allowed me to get to know the staff up at the South Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, a couple of whom were interested in having me around for Resource Management issues. I worked on the last version of the River Management Plan in the late ¹80s, preparing a rather exhaustive piece that ended up as an appendix on how to conduct monitoring of the river corridor, how to use monitoring information to better manage this place. Much of it fell on deaf ears at the time. I hope that the new management plan will rekindle the Park Service¹s desire to use the scientific information for better management of the river. The plan is to be renewed every five years. The new plan is a little bit behind at this point. It should come out every five years. But the schedule is rather loose. I guess they can let it go as much as ten years without reviving it.

Steiger: What were the key points in your paper that had to do with river monitoring?

Stevens: The Park Service has a rather long and not very successful history of using scientific information to better manage its landscapes. Part of what we wrote was a plan to ensure good data collection and a reliable way of keeping that data managed so we can get back to it. It¹s a perennial problem, not only here but in all the government¹s land managing agencies. The plan I worked on called for the development of long-term databases, and a scientific process which was to be peer reviewed. So, we don¹t have in-house agency decisions about elements they may not know enough about. One value of Grand Canyon National Park is helping us understand the natural world. The desert environment, and much of the rim ecosystems are about as natural as you can possibly find in the West. These places have become incredibly valuable to understanding the changes going on elsewhere. For example, Grand Canyon is largely ungrazed. There is no other block of a million-plus acres of the western u.s. that is largely protected from grazing and has been all along.

The Canyon¹s value to understanding grazing effects in the Western landscape is absolutely prodigious because that impact is ubiquitous and very severe in many landscapes. Grand Canyon has a lot to offer the world scientifically, especially the western United States. The river management plan that I helped put together was framed around the idea of making sure we have good long term data collection, so the information collected can trigger management actions. If a change is observed in the distribution of campsites for example, then those data could be used to trigger management actions, like a planned flood. Those management actions can be whatever the Park Service sees as being most appropriate and feasible. If it needs to protect a rare and endangered species or an archaeological site, perhaps actually closing that site. If it¹s a landscape rehabilitation issue, maybe it means reducing visitation, going in and rehabilitating the site. It was a very active plan and I think the ideas were challenging to the National Park Service because they do not tend to manage very proactively in many cases. The river corridor is inexorably altered by the presence of Glen Canyon Dam and human activities. There is no way to take out the dam because the nation¹s second largest eis says that it must stay. If the dam remains, we can¹t have really big, erratic floods. There is no way to really effectively warm the water to the levels that it reached during the pre-dam summer months. Slurrying sediments through the reservoir down to the Paria River would be enormously expensive. These three processes‹flooding, seasonal thermal variation, and sediment transport‹are irrevocably altered by the dam, and the u.s. public has agreed to managing the river with the dam in place. But there are substantial tradeoffs here.

The river system is now at least an order of magnitude more productive than it was in pre-dam time. Lots of riparian vegetation, clear water that allows algae growth, and an aquatic foodbase that supports both non-native and native fisheries. The insects that live in the river, emerge out of the water and fly to the vegetation, helping to provide food for an enormous density of reptiles and amphibians, nearly one-third of the United States¹ bird species, and many mammals that we don¹t know much about yet. There is a much stronger ecological linkage between the aquatic and terrestrial environment here than existed in pre-dam time. To make matters a little more complicated, several rare and endangered species have come to rely on post-dam resources. The southwestern willow flycatcher lives preferentially in tamarisk in Grand Canyon. Wintering bald eagles feed preferentially on non-native trout. Peregrine falcons, which are also at the top of the food chain here, are feeding on waterfowl, swallows and swifts, which feed, in turn, on insects that rise up from the river. All these are post-dam phenomena. To me it¹s a wonderfully complicated and biologically rich food chain, and regionally very significant. Riparian vegetation has been widely destroyed throughout the Southwest. So the dam has accidentally created a regionally important, biologically productive, and now more diverse ecosystem than existed in pre-dam time. Grand Canyon has become, for wildlife, just as for river runners, a refuge. Those habitats and resources are being destroyed elsewhere in the Southwest. It has become a very important stop-over habitat for migrant birds. All of these issues indicate to me that we have a dam that we have to figure out how to live with. We have a novel environment down there that we cannot return to its natural condition. This is very challenging to the Park Service which has a rather simple mandate: to manage for the natural condition.

But managing for the natural state is not possible in the highly altered river landscape in Grand Canyon and it¹s clearly impossible in an environment like Lake Powell or Lake Mead, where lakes haven¹t existed for hundreds of thousands of years. Those are entirely novel landscapes, but the National Park Service has more or less the same mandate in those environments. The National Park Service may need to carefully evaluate its mission, and try to understand the regional implications of this ³manage for natural² mandate. I think to some extent the National Park Service has tried to do that. Having more marshes, having bald eagles, and peregrine falcons in this environment is a sign of biological health, yet it is a sign of an altered landscape too. Altered isn¹t necessarily bad, this is the message I¹m trying to get across here. This is a house, an ecosystem, built on sand. Management of sediment is the bottom line‹keeping flow fluctuations low and the overall ceiling of flows rather low, to retain the sediment that comes in from tributaries, then using occasional short bursts of flood flows to kick those sediments back up to recreate sandbars, backwaters, and shoreline habitats. Some of that characterized this place in pre-dam time, but it¹s a suite of management activities. The idea is that if we take care of sediment distribution, pretty much everything else will take care of itself. In some cases there may be specific actions that need to take place. Some species may need a specific activity. But if we can manage sediment, we should be able to keep the ecosystem together and keep the components that we value most highly, like the native fish, in the picture.

The other clear message from the eis is that management of the Colorado River is a public process, and through adaptive management we can continually improve our stewardship of the river ecosystem

Steiger: To me, your views are the most formidable contestant to the views of the Glen Canyon Institute because you say that there are biological reasons not to do it

Stevens: That¹s part of the story. I have three points about the overall situation. The first is just the daunting political framework in which Glen Canyon Dam exists. We don¹t live in the 1950s anymore‹we live in a very crowded Southwest, with a lot of people clamoring for their ownŠresourcesŠtheir lifestyle that is really more befitting of New York or the wet East. Right now I don¹t see any limitation on that. I don¹t see any diminution of the drive to make the Southwest look like the wet East‹and that requires water. And the way the water law is set up here in the West precludes going back. Maybe that can change‹it¹ll take a revolution. I think actually a revolution, in the human relationship to the environment, to change water law in the Southwest. Glen Canyon Institute will face major setbacks when the water supply to St. George, Utah is established from Lake Powell, which is being actively planned. That plan is to remove water from Lake Powell and move it over to St. George and put it into the Virgin River system. Once that¹s in place, the possibility of altering Lake Powell will be greatly diminished. The second arena has to do with the regional biological story‹especially with riparian vegetation in the Grand Canyon, and its value especially to bird species, but probably also to bats. Those species have lost their habitat elsewhere. We¹ve created a refuge in Grand Canyon, and yes we could wipe that out, but what we¹d be doing would be wiping out regional biodiversity. Those bird species may not have any other habitat. What I recommend is a regional planning process to restore those habitats elsewhere in the Southwest so those species don¹t have to rely on Grand Canyon as a refuge. The problems with endangered fish are many. There are so many non-native fish in the Upper Basin, and the potential exists for serious disease transmission, downstream.

Glen Canyon Dam is a barrier to non-native fish passing downstream. So in terms of regional ecosystem management, in terms of regional population management, simply allowing the river to flow through Glen Canyon Dam could harm the native fish downstream through introduction of non-native fish and fish diseases. My point there is that we need good long-term regional planning. And Glen Canyon plays a part in that, Grand Canyon plays a part in that, and the management, especially of riparian and stream habitats in the Southwest, is part of that story. Dave Wegner and I both support the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council, which is a regional planning effort related to the Wildlands Project, which has these goals in mind. So there is an ongoing public effort to plan for these kinds of restoration activities throughout the entire region. The third area has to do with the rate and physical problems associated with the actual restoration process.

Just briefly, there are problems associated with drawing down Lake Powell. Those problems have to do with metal contaminants in the sediments in the delta. Again, my concern here is for native fish, for the aquatic ecosystem throughout the river system down in Glen Canyon and downstream. Drawing down the water of Lake Powell will expose sediment beds that may be extremely toxic to aquatic life. They may be toxic for two reasons: one is heavy metals that have concentrated in those sediments, especially mercury‹more or less natural mercury, but there are probably mine tailings seeping into the river from headwater mines. The other source of downstream pollutants is hydrogen sulfide, which is a natural product in buried sediments. Whenever you let silt, clay and sand deposit and seal them off from the air, anaerobic processes produce hydrogen sulfide and concentrate it. And hydrogen sulfide is absolutely deadly to fish. By drawing down the water on a sediment bed that is loaded with hydrogen sulfide, you may create a fish kill in the river system. The Glen Canyon we lost cannot be recovered. Yes, vegetation will come back, and that vegetation would be largely tamarisk and Russian olive, and it would come in very quickly. There are problems with this restoration effort, and non-native species are a big concern. But, you cannot bring back the life that lived around the springs and the seeps in Glen Canyon. Those were isolated islands of habitat that probably had many unique species. We don¹t know what we lost, but my guess is that we lost absolute jewels of biological assemblages. We¹ll never get those back. These are things to think about in terms of restoration. I¹m very much in favor of ecological restoration of the Colorado River, but I want it to happen in an intelligent well-planned fashion, and I want to see the species of the Southwest preserved. I see significant challenges in each of these three topics. Solve those problems, and you may have some restoration opportunity on your hands. I think with Glen Canyon we have the time to be able to plan with decade, fifty-year or hundred-year planning horizons. Glen Canyon Dam is a cash cow, there¹s no doubt about it, a golden goose. It¹s got a life expectancy of several hundred years but solving the ecological problems in 200, 300, or 400 years may cost progressively more.

Kenton Grua: Okay, I think Glen Canyon¹s a time bomb, ready to go off: might happen this year, might happen next year. I think we¹re in a race against time, and if this thing goes catastrophically, it¹s gonna really screw things up in Grand Canyon as well as upstream. And I think that, as well as the water issue, the waste of water that it wastes every year.... The two things that are really pressing, we don¹t really have maybe that much time to study it.

Stevens: Good point. Just let me say that overall, I see the restoration of Glen Canyon as being a valuable and necessary undertaking. I very much appreciate Glen Canyon Institute¹s emphasis on the topic, because it helps rivers around the country. We¹ve got 70,000 dams in the u.s. It¹s just abominable that we have so few rivers that are not regulated in this country. We¹ve lost much of the integrity of our flowing water ecosystems, and we need to approach the issue of how to restore river ecosystems once we¹re through with these reservoirs, but there¹s a timeframe for this reservoir that¹s larger than that for many small reservoirs.

Steiger: Why do we want to restore all these ecosystems? What¹s the big deal? This Endangered Species Act‹I have the sense that life forms have been comin¹ and goin¹ long before man ever entered into the picture. There were lots of life forms that became extinct as part of natural processes. So why is it so important to maintain every single species that¹s here now?

Stevens: And why restore river ecosystems? Simply from the standpoint of sustainability. If we value our natural heritage, we need to make sure it remains on the planet. Species are one thing, but ecosystems are the house those species live in. Without attention paid to the condition of those ecosystems, and without efforts to maintain them, we dribble away the species pool. The birds fly back, each year and there¹s a little bit less habitat so they don¹t nest successfully. Maybe it¹s once a year, once every few years another species fails to show up in migration, because of development in Central America where these migratory species over-winter. It¹s incremental loss and often very gradual. An individual might not notice it. But I cannot stand the thought of my daughter growing up and not being able to hear a yellow-billed cuckoo in the Southwest, and that¹s the state of the situation now. Within a few years we may have completely lost that species. And it¹s not just that species, many species are in the same condition‹Neotropical migrant birds, in particular. The esa is kind of moral impedance to the normal course of human behavior, which is just to keep consuming until it¹s all gone‹and yes, maybe bemoan the loss of these life forms that have evolved here, but we lose them, and that¹s not right, from a moral or ethical standpoint. Let¹s rather approach the problem from the standpoint of sustainability, making sure that we have habitats and viable population of those species in the landscapes, and approach the future with that kind of view. Otherwise, just as in China, just as in Europe, just as in the other developed regions of the world, through time we undergo major losses in biodiversity. That¹s a world I don¹t want to have to see. I don¹t want to be responsible for promoting that kind of world into the future.

Steiger: I know there has been some discussion on making the Canyon a wilderness area. Can this ever be a wilderness?

Stevens: There was an interesting paper in the 1950s that was called The Death of Nature. The author proposed that wilderness and natural processes had been stopped by human activity, that there is no way to actually achieve a wilderness anymore, no way to have a natural environment. From my years of studying insects, I know that if you drop down in scale maybe one order of magnitude, the world is a very wild place. The ants are running around in as pure a wilderness as can be found on the face of the earth, more pure than we can ever perceive. If you move to a larger scale to the distribution of birds and bats, the organisms which occupy large ranges also exist in wilderness. They don¹t understand it of course, but they encounter urban areas as vast deserts. Phoenix is wilderness of biblical proportions to an indigo bunting. The concept of wilderness is a uniquely post-1950 human perspective of what ³wild² is. The presumption that we can stop those biological processes simply because our activities are incredibly disruptive is not true. But certainly human activities now dominate the earth¹s surface. In Grand Canyon, when you¹re within about ten meters of the river you¹re in a very human-influenced environment. But when you¹re ten meters above the river you¹re in an environment that, in many cases, may not have changed for a thousand years, and is in great ecological shape. Along the river about ten percent of the plant species are non-native, aliens brought in by humans. Up in the desert there are relatively few, largely because it¹s so harsh there. It¹s a very wild environment. It may not look ferocious, except to those of us that occasionally work up there in the summer, but it¹s largely pristine.

Steiger: Where do we fit into all that? Are living organisms separate from that? Are we separate from all the other life forms?

Stevens: This gets back to our interpretation of wilderness and our provincial ability to perceive what is really going on around us, largely because of temporal and spatial scale issues. Any species with cognitive abilities would face the same dilemma. No organism lives across the wide variety and the wide diversity of scales in which life exists. Humans are completely natural organisms in so many ways. Every valley girl completely jealous of her peer is feeling something that is perfectly biologically appropriate, even though she is living in la in an environment where she may never see a native species in her entire life. Her thoughts and emotions and antagonisms are all very much a product of the last four billion years of life¹s experiment. They make perfect sense in an evolutionary context of each of us having to struggle to make our way in a very complicated biological and social terrain.

Steiger: What about managing the Park for us? Stevens: For humans? I guess I don¹t take the perspective that the Park should be managed for humans. I think that the problems most Parks face are a function of over-population and use. Managing crowds is something that police want to do and the National Park Service is quite capable in that department. But human presence is the major issue and the dam is a result of human presence. We wouldn¹t have the dam if we didn¹t have a burgeoning population in the Southwest that demanded electricity, or at least the political entities that manage those populations, demanding that electricity. It all relates back to population size. In Grand Canyon, with five million visitors at the rim and crowded attraction sites along the river, it¹s obvious that over-visitation is a problem. The National Park Service has done a good job at managing visitation on the river, and it¹s a very challenging thing to do. I don¹t envy them that task in the future . There are some creative ways I think we could actually reallocate use for private boaters, particularly by having the nps purchase companies when they come up for sale. That might help solve some of the overcrowding and allocation problems. But the Park should not be managed as if humans were the most important part. This kind of National Park was designated on the basis of its incredible landscapes and should be protected from human activities as much as possible, managed for the life and the natural processes that they contain. I take interest in Glen Canyon Dam partly because I see it as an analogy and outgrowth of the human condition. The socialization process we cultural beings each go through is a kind of consciousness regulation, and each of us is dammed within ourselves. Our personal dam controls our flow of energy and our expressions. So I take interest in Glen Canyon Dam in a psycho-sociological context, because I see it in the socialization process in each of us. Certainly in myself.

Steiger: Socialization?

Stevens: If we had the ³natural mind² and were entirely uncultured we would be like wild flowing rivers. With the consciousness we¹re born with, I think, we would not know how to know beauty. We would be out of control and unable to function socially. Through the process of socialization we gain control and lose wildness. And that¹s exactly what we have done with Glen Canyon Dam‹we have gained a great deal of energy and power, by controlling this wild raging thing that existed here in the Grand Canyon. In trying to figure out what the Grand Canyon is to me, I draw the analogy of an inverted onion. You may know Jung¹s metaphor of peeling back the onion layers of human consciousness to get at the core of truth, in dreams, in memories, or in our lives. I see the Grand Canyon in the opposite way. Here we are slowly learning what the skin of the onion looks like, the simplest, most understandable layer. Other layers of reality and truth that radiate out from that skin, radiate back into the past, radiate into the complexities of interactions between geomorphic processes and biological processes through time. These are so complicated that we cannot understand them. But we catch a glimpse of those dimensions by getting a good grasp on what exists here. So, the analogy of the inverted onion is as close as I can come in stating what I see of reality in Grand Canyon. Phenomenal changes have taken place here through the last ten years, thirty years, century, ten thousand years, hundred thousand years, the last six million years. That change is reflected in what we see now. We get glimpses through to other dimensions that are truly profound, truly beyond our ability to understand, but they give us a special vision. The Canyon gives us a sense of contact with the earth which is now pretty much lost to urbanized Americans, who don¹t see the earth as sacred, as a mystery. Every bit of the earth is sacred. In this place we can see it clearly and strongly, and we respect it. We get to look down into it and see how deep reality is. Every bit of the earth is sacred and this place helps us remember that the whole sphere is holy ground.

Interview by Lew Steiger