Political Ecology in the Service of Ecosystem Recovery

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A Complex Tool for a Complex Problem: PoliticalEcology in the Service of Ecosystem Recovery

Sara Jo Breslow

To cite this article: Sara Jo Breslow (2014) A Complex Tool for a Complex Problem: PoliticalEcology in the Service of Ecosystem Recovery, Coastal Management, 42:4, 308-331, DOI:10.1080/08920753.2014.923130

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Coastal Management, 42:308–331, 2014Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0892-0753 print / 1521-0421 onlineDOI: 10.1080/08920753.2014.923130

A Complex Tool for a Complex Problem: PoliticalEcology in the Service of Ecosystem Recovery

SARA JO BRESLOW

Northwest Fisheries Science Center, National Oceanic and AtmosphericAdministration, Seattle, Washington, USA

Salmon recovery has been described as a “wicked” problem in that it is so complexit is seemingly impossible to solve. Through a detailed case study, this article modelshow the field of political ecology can provide rich insight into such problems, andcan help managers navigate the complex human dimensions of their work. Protracteddisputes over salmon habitat restoration have earned the Skagit Valley of WashingtonState a reputation for being mired in intractable conflict. Goals of recovering salmonand protecting farmland are seemingly pitted against each other in competition for thesame land. Using ethnographic methods and a political ecology framework, I arguethat social hierarchies and mistrusts, conflicting senses of place, prevailing culturalnarratives, and legal and institutional constraints contribute to the dispute over habitatrestoration. Closer attention to sociocultural factors such as these may help managersidentify and implement locally supported recovery opportunities, facilitate cooperationamong stakeholders, improve agency approaches, and reframe management agendas tobetter address collective needs. I conclude that ecosystem recovery requires not only therenewal of ecological health, but also the renewal of social trust and cooperation, newcultural narratives, and a richer language that can capture its complex social realities.

Keywords cultural narratives, environmental conflict, farmland preservation, salmonhabitat restoration, senses of place

Introduction

The Skagit River valley of northwest Washington State is the largest watershed draining tothe Puget Sound. Restoring salmon habitat along the Skagit River is considered essential torecovering the Puget Sound ecosystem as a whole (Puget Sound Indian Tribes and WDFW2004). Yet protracted disputes over restoration have earned the Skagit Valley a reputationfor being “mired” in intractable conflict (WGBH Educational Foundation 2009). Localgoals of recovering salmon and protecting farmland are seemingly pitted against each otherin competition for the same land. At stake are some of the healthiest remaining wild runsof Pacific salmon in the contiguous United States, some of the richest arable soils in theworld, and the future of local indigenous and agricultural communities (Breslow 2011).

In its ecological, jurisdictional and cultural complexity, the Skagit Valley can be seenas a microcosm of the American West, and analogous to other places characterized by

Address correspondence to Sara Jo Breslow, PhD, National Research Council PostdoctoralAssociate, Northwest Fisheries Science Center, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration,2725 Montlake Blvd. East, Seattle, WA 98112-2097, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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Political Ecology in the Service of Ecosystem Recovery 309

pluralistic societies and diverse landscapes (McKinney and Harmon 2004). Environmentalproblems distinguished by such complexity, most notably salmon recovery, have beencalled “wicked”: they are so complex they are seemingly impossible to solve (Ludwig,Mangel, and Haddad 2001). This article aims to model how the field of political ecologyprovides holistic, multi-faceted explanations for such problems, and can help managersnavigate the complex human dimensions of their work. Here I explain how social hierarchiesand mistrusts, conflicting senses of place, prevailing cultural narratives, and legal andinstitutional constraints contribute to a dispute over habitat restoration. Such insights mayhelp managers identify and implement locally supported recovery opportunities, facilitatecooperation among groups, improve agency approaches, and reframe management agendasto better address collective needs. Key methods and concepts that may be especially salientfor managers are highlighted in italics.

Political Ecology

Political ecology is an interdisciplinary field that draws primarily from the disciplines ofenvironmental anthropology and cultural geography. It is largely comprised of case studiesthat produce causal and structural explanations for how local socioecological contingenciesinteract with broader political and economic forces. These narratives collectively revealregional to global patterns in the social dynamics of environmental problems (Agrawal 2005;Blaikie 1995; Fairhead and Leach 1996; Nadasdy 2003; Robbins 2012). In short, politicalecology is a study of the human–environment relationship that is loosely characterized byattention to the following topics:

• The perspectives and social contexts of a diverse range of actors, including localresource users, government officials, and scientists;

• Social hierarchies and injustices and their structural causes, with focus on theexperience of marginalized communities facing inequitable resource access;

• Meaning-making practices, with focus on place-based livelihoods and communi-ties, diverse ideas of nature, and environmental discourses and knowledge systems,including science;

• Historical contexts, with special attention to colonial legacies and the genealogiesof prevailing cultural narratives; and,

• Multi-scalar political and economic forces, with particular attention to trends in mar-ket integration, economic globalization, and state decentralization (i.e., the currentglobal order of neoliberalism).

In another article I discuss how the Skagit study contributes theoretically to the field ofpolitical ecology: it challenges a prevailing narrative in the field that constructs a hierarchicalbinary between local or indigenous natural resource users on the one hand, and scientists,conservationists, and bureaucrats on the other (Breslow 2014). Yet in many other ways theSkagit drama shares major features of resource disputes worldwide and exemplifies theirsocioecological complexity.

The Skagit Valley: An Intractable Conflict?

Most simply, the Skagit conflict concerns an apparent choice between two highly valuedresources: salmon and farmland. An anadromous fish, Pacific Salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.)require freshwater and estuarine habitats for breeding and rearing. Since Euro-Americansettlement in the mid 1800s, the Skagit Valley lost 37% of its original upriver floodplain

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habitat and 98% of its estuarine habitat to agriculture and development (Beamer et al.2005a; SWC 2010). Early farmers and settlers cleared trees, drained marshes, and builtdikes and levees against the river and sea to protect fields and towns from inundation. Acentury later, in 1999, Puget Sound Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), alongwith numerous other salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, were listed as threatenedunder the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the runs having declined to an estimated 10%of their historic numbers (NMFS 2006). Now, environmental groups, natural resourceagencies, and Native American tribes strive to recover harvestable salmon runs by restoringkey pieces of streamside forest and estuarine marshes (SWC 2010).

However, these former wetlands are today some of the most productive and diverseagricultural fields in the world. On 1,200 farms totaling 109,000 acres, Skagit farmers growmore than 90 different crops for local to global markets, including large proportions ofthe world’s supply of spinach, cabbage, and beet seed, and 75% of the country’s tulips(Washington State University 2012). Farmers worry this unique agricultural industry maybe jeopardized by economic globalization, urbanization, and tightening environmentalregulations, as well as efforts to restore salmon habitat on farmland.

Thus, while Native Americans and environmental advocates attempt to restore lowlandhabitats for salmon, farmers and farm advocates attempt to protect arable land from en-croachment by development and restoration. Acrimony over these apparently incompatiblegoals is expressed in public meetings, private interviews, letters to the local newspaper,and in court. Resource agencies, tribes, and salmon advocacy groups develop technicalwatershed recovery plans, host educational workshops and volunteer tree-planting parties,and physically implement dozens of restoration projects. One tribe pursued a 15-year courtcase with the county that aimed to require wide riparian buffers on farmland with a legalstrategy hinging on the definition of “best available science.” Meanwhile, local farmersresisted these efforts by organizing into new groups, successfully lobbying to change thestate’s water code in their favor, hiring scientists of their own, and appealing to publicsympathy for their multi-generational heritage and the economic plight of family farms.

Local public discussions regarding salmon habitat restoration largely concern its bio-physical and technical details such as salmon productivity, tide-gate design, hydrologicalpatterns, and tradeoffs in acreage. Yet the dominance of this techno-scientific discoursemasks deeper social, cultural, and historical roots of the problem. To understand thesehumanistic dimensions, I studied three central stakeholder groups—tribal, agricultural, andenvironmental—and asked: Why is there disagreement and mistrust among these groups?Why have they engaged the subject of restoration with such passion and determination?What is at stake in the effort to recover salmon? Whose stories are being told—in public,and within each community? Ultimately, I asked, why is there a seemingly intractableconflict taking place over salmon habitat restoration in the Skagit Valley?

Methods

Data Collection

Research consisted of two cumulative years of ethnographic field work conducted between2001 and 2006 in the Skagit Valley and broader Puget Sound region. I began pilot researchin the summer of 2001 as an intern with the Environmental Protection Agency, based inSeattle (Breslow 2001), and continued in the summer of 2002 as an Earthwatch Expeditionco-investigator with Ed Liebow, based in the south end of the valley. The bulk of research

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Political Ecology in the Service of Ecosystem Recovery 311

Table 1Number of semi-structured interviews conducted and coded per group

GroupNumber of people

interviewedNumber of interviews

coded∗

Restorationists 21 13Farmers and farm advocates 36 16Native Americans 13 12Others (e.g. other residents and

landowners, recreational fishermen,planners and other agency staff, andelected leaders)

84 16

Total 154∗∗ 57

∗Multiple interviews of the same person were counted as one interview.∗∗16 of these interviews were conducted by anthropologists Ed Liebow or Dori Bixler.

was conducted for my doctoral dissertation between 2004 and 2006 while living in MountVernon, the valley’s central city. I was introduced to initial contacts in a range of localcommunities by the director of the Skagit Watershed Council, and met subsequent researchparticipants using a reputational and positional sampling approach, a standard anthropolog-ical method used to gain entree into a community through culturally appropriate networks(Henry 1998).

I attended more than 50 meetings and events, and had the occasional chance to gofishing, ride a tractor, attend a tribal ceremony, and help collect biological data. In addi-tion to informal conversations, I conducted and audio-recorded semi-structured interviewswith 136 people, and drew from an additional 16 interviews that were conducted by Earth-watch co-investigators Dori Bixler and Ed Liebow (Table 1). Semi-structured interviews areguided by open-ended questions that allow interviewees to direct the flow of conversationto themes they consider most significant (Bernard 1995). Interviews lasted from half anhour to two and a half hours and took place in homes, offices, restaurants, on walks aroundproperty, and on the phone. In addition, I collected primary documents expressing localand regional perspectives on environmental concerns, such as scientific papers, governmentpublications, court briefs, newsletters, outreach brochures, newspaper articles and letters,photographs, and videos. Finally, historical documents, demographic and agricultural cen-sus data, salmon harvest numbers, and land use information were collected from regionaluniversities, museums, and resource agencies.

Analysis

Interview transcripts and field notes were analyzed following grounded theory, in which theresearcher develops interpretations in an iterative and inductive process (Emerson, Fretz,and Shaw 1995). Analysis focused on three groups that emerged as most involved in thelocal conflict: Native Americans, farmers and farm advocates, and restoration scientists andadvocates. Interviews from 57 people (see Table 1) were coded for key themes using thecomputer program Atlas.ti. Major themes (Table 2) were identified by querying phrasesand passages coded with the same set of keywords and identifying those recurring with asaturation effect (Strauss and Corbin 1990). Ethnographic results were compared to and

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Table 2Major analytical themes

Causes of salmon declineHistoryIdentity and heritageKnowledgeLandscape philosophyMistrustPowerPrejudiceScienceSenses of place

contextualized with summaries of resource harvest data, census figures, court documents,and related scientific and historical literatures (Breslow 2011).

The resulting body of evidence enabled the thick description of cultural phenomena thatis a hallmark of ethnography, in which empirical observations, contextual information, andinterpretive analysis are woven together into an explanatory narrative (Breslow 2011; Geertz1973). Here I separate “results” from “discussion” to appeal to readers accustomed to thenatural science genre, with several caveats: ethnographic evidence includes historical anddocumentary sources in addition to primary data; with limited access to tribal interviewees,I rely heavily on secondary sources to provide insight into Native perspectives; and, asevery anthropologist will acknowledge, my own presence and interpretations inevitablyinfluenced my results at every stage of the research process.

Results

The following results are roughly organized according to the major themes of politicalecology outlined above: a comparison of how diverse local actors dispute the conflict’scentral problem and rely on different sources of knowledge; an exploration of how actualand perceived injustices and mistrusts divide local communities; and a comparison ofdivergent senses of place and land management philosophies among three distinct place-based communities who are co-constructed with the valley’s diverse landscapes. In thediscussion section I continue with an analysis of the histories, cultural narratives, andpolitical and economic forces that help explain these ethnographic results.

Disputing the Central Problem

A major theme revealed by interviews was that my research participants disagreed onthe fundamental causes of salmon decline. They did not agree on who was to blamefor destroying the fish, and therefore they did not agree on who was responsible forrecovering them. In interviews, tribal members and restorationists volunteered a wide rangeof factors, including fishing and habitat loss, as causes of salmon decline. In contrast, farmersoverwhelmingly blamed fishing and, often although not always, they specifically blamedtribal fishing for salmon decline. In addition, while tribal members and restorationists reliedon both historical and spatial arguments to explain salmon decline and the need for habitatrestoration, farmers offered exclusively historical arguments (Table 3).

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Table 3Causes and explanations of salmon decline expressed in coded interviews, by group

Causes and explanations ofsalmon decline expressedduring interviews

Native Americansn = 8

Restorationistsn = 5

Farmers and farmadvocates n = 16

Habitat loss 5 5 1Fishing 6 4 10

Tribal 4 3 6State (non-tribal) 5 2 4Sport 3 1 1

Other factorsDevelopment 2 2 6Farming (in general) 4 2 1Climate change 3 3 1Logging 3 3 —

Historical explanation 2 2 7Spatial explanation 3 3 0

Numbers represent the number of interviewees (n) who mentioned each cause or used each type ofexplanation at least once during an interview. Note that these responses were volunteered and werenot solicited by a survey question. Causes named by less than three interviewees are not shown.

The Problem According to Restorationists. In interviews, fisheries biologists provided themost diverse and inconclusive responses to the question of what causes changes in salmonpopulations, mentioning everything from harvest and habitat degradation to multi-decadaloceanic cycles and interspecies interactions. As they explained, a major challenge is thatit is difficult to estimate historic salmon populations, especially before the 1950s when thelargest harvests occurred, and it is therefore difficult to determine the specific causes ofchanges to those populations. Restoration ecologists sidestep this problem by estimatingthe number of salmon a watershed might support by calculating its potential fish habitatusing models and historical maps (e.g., Beamer et al. 2005b). Restoration projects are thenplanned based on the spatial assumption that restoring a specific acreage of habitat mayrecover an estimated number of fish. Restorationist interviewees understood that numerousanthropogenic pressures affect salmon, but they also noted that all major industries arealready regulated for salmon protection—except agriculture. As one restoration advocateexplained,

On the Tribe’s side, and the Fish and Wildlife’s side, we’ve kind of been put ina corner since the agriculture has been going on unregulated for so long. And,I mean, so many other things . . . like development and logging that went on tillthe late seventies, eighties, without really any regulation. . . . The damage hasbeen so significant that basically . . . it seems to me like all the compromisinghas been done on the salmon part.

From this perspective a central unfairness is that agriculture has been allowed to thrive atthe expense of salmon.

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The Problem According to Farmers. On the other hand, in interviews older farmers couldstill remember a “hey day” of fishing in the 1950s. They saw tribal fishing increase aftera landmark legal judgment called the Boldt Decision upheld tribal treaty fishing rights in1974.1 A decade later they witnessed salmon and fishing enter a precipitous decline untilcrashing in the late 1990s. Thus, when explaining the cause of salmon decline, farmersmade an historical argument based on their own observations: if habitat was convertedto farmland in the late 1880s, but fishermen were still successful in the 1950s and onlystarted to suffer after the 1980s, then habitat loss was obviously not the problem. With thisperspective, farmers expressed feeling unfairly punished for salmon decline. As one farmerremarked:

When I was a kid . . . there were 150 gill netters that lived in that bay. Theywent out, all summer long, seven days a week, every night, and if you could’vewalked on the floats you could’ve walked to Victoria. I mean there were netseverywhere. They caught everything that moved. And when they weren’t gill-netting at night the purse-seiners were purse-seining during the day. And theseguys wonder why there’s no fish left? “Oh, it’s they farmers. They took thehabitat and if they don’t suffer we’re not even.”

The Problem According to Native Americans. In contrast, from the perspective of a tribalinterviewee, the central injustice of the conflict was that tribal members could not exercisethe very right to fish that they had retained for giving up their land for non-Native settlement.As he argued, “If we’re not fishing, well then what did we really receive for giving thesepeople our land? . . . This is what we gave up our land for, and we’re not going to stop fishing,you know, that’s not in the cards.” Likewise, interviews with tribal fishermen suggestedthey were not likely to voluntarily stop fishing when fishing was not only an essential partof their cultural identity and expression of tribal sovereignty, but it was obvious to themthat tribal fishing was not the major cause of fish decline, but rather non-tribal commercialfishing and the development of the tribes’ former lands which they had ceded in exchangefor reserving the very right to fish.

In these ways my interviewees constructed the problem, its causes, and its rightfulsolutions in mutually incompatible stories.

Distinct Realms of Knowledge and Sources of Legitimacy

These disparate perceptions of the central problem arose from distinct realms of experienceand knowledge. There were instances when interviewees of all three groups expresseddismay that others did not understand, or were deliberately ignoring, the “bigger picture”of what was at stake in salmon habitat restoration. Yet the “bigger picture” in questiondiffered depending on one’s sphere of awareness. For example, a farmer evoked the breadthof knowledge required to run a successful agricultural business:

So your realm of knowledge is not just what it takes to grow the crops on yourfarm . . . it’s more than just the annual Farm Bureau meeting and more than justthe annual Skagit farmer’s supply picnic. It’s more than that. You have a bit ofresponsibility to pay more attention. You have to pay attention to marketing,you kind of have to have a clue of what the European Union’s doing. It’s hugelymulti-faceted.

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In contrast, a restorationist suggested the depth of scientific knowledge required for ecosys-tem recovery:

There’s some major natural processes that you need to pay attention to. And thebiggest of those is water. It’s the hydrology. And hydrology drives sediment,and sediment drives land formation . . . and then there’s heat. There’s a lot ofelements that are critical . . . to certain species.

And a former tribal staff person summarized the diverse range of tribal concerns:

A lot of folks, particularly in the environmental community, will align them-selves with tribes as political allies in environmental protection, not fully under-standing that tribes, as a government entity, have other agendas, like economicdevelopment, expansion of their powers, their sovereignty, expanding theirreservation boundary, improving the life of their people.

From within similarly complex yet very distinct sets of concerns and realms of knowledge,my interviewees would assert that others should be better educated about their respectiveworlds in order to reach a fair, effective, and holistic solution to salmon decline.

Further complicating their disagreement, interviewees differed in what they acceptedas legitimate forms of knowledge. Both farmers and restorationists gained professionalexpertise from scientific sources (i.e., agricultural and fisheries science) and place-basedexperiences (i.e., working the land and biological field work), but differed in the status theyassigned to them. Farmers conveyed that knowledge is credible if it results in a better crop,regardless of whether it is learned from a scientist, neighbor, or direct experimentation. Asseveral local agricultural scientists observed, their credentials had little bearing on whetherthey were respected by farmers; it was whether their knowledge, academic or otherwise,had been tested and proven successful in the fields.

For restorationists, the problem of knowledge credibility was much more complicated.Restorationists cannot determine whether restoration directly improves fish numbers forseveral reasons: it is difficult to estimate the size of a fish run in the best of circumstances;there are numerous additional factors affecting fish runs besides habitat quality; monitoringof habitat projects is expensive and limited; and habitat restoration can take years, evenup to a century, to realize its full ecological effects. Without the ability to directly observewhether restoration increases fish numbers in real-time, restorationists and others must trustthe linkages between habitat and salmon productivity that are established in the scientificcanon. In addition, professional measures of success are not harvests or profits, but ratherthe number of grants awarded, articles published, and legal disputes won—all of whichdepend on scientific credentials and expertise.

These differences in what constitutes legitimate knowledge help explain how a Skagitfarmer could dismiss environmental professionals as “armchair experts,” and how an ecol-ogist could dismiss landowners’ environmental concepts as “pseudo-scientific.” Lack ofrespect for each other’s knowledge claims contributed not only to their disagreement, butalso to their mutual distrust.

Tangled Axes of Disagreement and Mistrust

An additional factor complicating the drama was that it lacked a clear set of opponents.Axes of disagreement, perceptions of unfairness, and mistrust were not necessarily aligned

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and needed to be disentangled in order to understand the various parties and perceptions atwork.

Farmers’ Mistrust of Urban Outsiders. For example, while farmers blamed fishing forsalmon decline, and despite the growing political power of the tribes, farmers I heardfrom did not construct fishermen or tribal members as their major opponents. Rather, theirdistrust and resentment was directed primarily at restorationists, who they constructed asurban outsiders trying to impose an environmentalist agenda on a working landscape. Thiscriticism extended to staff of governmental agencies and advocacy organizations, and tothe mostly non-Native environmental scientists working for local tribes. As one farmer putit succinctly, “The worst streams are in the urban areas, and yet it is those people who aretelling us what to do.” And as a landowner stated,

I think many are nice people, well-intentioned. But, after seeing how they think,how they didn’t have any practical land management experience and weremainly a bunch of armchair experts. . . . I could envision them, newcomers,driving their gas-guzzling cars, wearing leather shoes, having come from arestaurant serving farm food, and yet claiming to be purists—and then tellingfarmers what they were going to do with their farmland regarding buffers andhabitat restoration.

Native Americans’ Mistrust of White People. Meanwhile, although the local tribes’ proxi-mate contenders were area farmers, Native American distrust of farmers could be seen aspart of a larger distrust of white people and non-Native society in general. As the SwinomishTribal Mental Health Project (1991, 166) observed,

Repeated negative experiences have led many Indian people to develop a per-vasive distrust of non-Indian American society. The history of persecution,prejudice, death, destruction of families and loss of language and other im-portant aspects of Indian culture forms a backdrop to Indian life which affectspeople’s viewpoints, opportunities, and actions.

In interviews and at events, tribal members demarcated themselves from white people, oftenwith reference to continuing colonial injuries. Reflecting on the need to recover salmon, atribal elder drew this distinction while evoking his experience of racial injustice:

It’s got to be the white people that’s got to change within themselves beforewe can reach [a] conclusion. . . . I don’t know [how that is going to happen].(Laughter.) Find some intelligent white people, I guess, that are environmentallyconcerned. ‘Cause I can’t force the knowledge on you. Although I know it’sbeen imposed on Indian people. But I can’t force you to change. If I tried I’dbe shot right now.

Restorationists’ Mistrust of People in General. Finally, unlike farmers and Native Amer-icans, restoration advocates did not demarcate another social group as “other”; rather,they expressed doubt that people in general cared sufficiently for the natural world. Suchdistrust extended to landowners, farmers, politicians, fishermen, American society, other

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apparently misguided restorationists, and even to themselves. A guiding principle was thatsince everyone was at fault in environmental degradation, everyone needed to be part ofthe solution, from “whether you choose not to use pesticides [on your] lawn, or whetheryou choose to eat local produce, or whether you choose to live close to where you work,or whether you choose to not run the tap to brush your teeth.” Yet beyond the actions ofwell-intentioned individuals, restorationists doubted that society would allow the landscapeto be habitable for fish, in addition to people. As one interviewee stated:

It’s too much of an ecological fantasy to think that the whole delta will be givenup, restored, but I think significant portions of it could be restored, so that youstill have a mix of urban and agricultural and natural habitat. . . . And I thinkthat’s actually technically possible. The question is, is there political will to dothat? And I doubt that there is.

Social Consequences of “Best Available Science”

The most overt expression of local disagreement and distrust was a 15-year legal disputeover whether riparian buffers should be required on commercial farmland in Skagit County.A prevailing consensus among my interviewees was that it was this legal dispute thatcatalyzed the current bitterness over habitat restoration in the valley. The case hinged onthe state’s seemingly incompatible mandates to protect both salmon habitat and farmland,a paradox originating with the state’s Growth Management Act (GMA) in 1990 and thelisting of Puget Sound Chinook salmon under the ESA in 1999. With requirements forcounties to include the “best available science” when developing habitat protection plans,the Skagit case dwelled at length on the meaning of the words “science” and “protect.”2

The dispute was ultimately decided in favor of the county’s agricultural community byinterpreting the mandate to “protect” critical areas to mean protect the status quo using bestfarming practices, rather than actively enhance or restore habitat.3

The legal controversy over buffers shaped and simplified how the issues were pub-licly discussed outside of court. “Best available science” became a site for overt publiccontestation because it appeared to be the hinge on which the fate of the landscape wouldbe decided. Some farmers even hired their own experts in the hope of producing “best”science in their favor. Yet the deeper meanings and injustices inherent in the drama overrestoration were rarely acknowledged in the structured terms of the justice system itself.Instead, a closer interpretation of the ethnographic evidence suggests that the contestationis not centrally about science, or the causes of salmon decline, or farmland loss. Rather,these are tangible proxies for defending more fundamental stakes: the places, identities,communities, and meanings that salmon and farmland make possible.

Incongruent Senses of Place

Ethnographic results suggest that much of the local disagreement stems from divergent“senses of place.” Here I intend three meanings of the word sense: the experience of a placethrough the physical senses; the emotional, symbolic, and moral significances attached toa place; and different types of knowledge about a place.

Interviewees from all three groups remarked on outdoor moments when they sensed thespecialness of the world around them. Many comments referred to the sense of peace thatcomes with the quietness of a rural or natural area: the “no city sounds,” or the “flip flop”

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of fish, or the call of an owl. They referred to the beauty that comes with special qualitiesof light, whether the morning sun touching mountain snow or bright moonlight over water.Some spoke of visceral sensations: the feeling of earth in one’s hands; the potentially deadlypull of water. Others described how the seasonal, daily, and tidal rhythms of certain placeswere an integral part of their lives.

Due to variations in family histories, livelihoods, and personal experiences, placesand their sensory qualities generated dramatically different emotions and meanings for myinterviewees. A tribal elder narrated the story of how early white settlers and explorers wererepelled by the smell and taste of salmon, preferring instead the more familiar taste of beef.Today, Skagit farmers complain about urban transplants who dislike the smell of manure,which for local farmers is “a reassurance that their land is being replenished with nutrients”(Lintereur 2007 ). Similarly, as a local environmental educator remarked, “the smell of arotting fish on the river is the smell of a healthy river.” A farmer who had migrated to theSkagit Valley from the Netherlands region remarked, “If you look at Skagit County, SkagitCounty’s just like [the Netherlands]. . . . It’s—you know, you have the same climate, you’vegot the same weather, you got the same ditches, the same dikes, the same soil. . . . I mean,it’s like home!” On the other hand, a restorationist expressed nostalgia for a landscape thatshe envisioned pre-dated the farmland, based on historical photographs we had both seen:“You can only imagine what this place must have looked like a hundred and fifty years ago. . . and part of our mission is to get back some of what was lost.”

At Stake: Place-Based Communities and Identities

Where do these powerful senses of place come from? Several interviewees suggested theydeveloped in childhood: what felt like a right place, and what felt like the right thing to doin a place was what they knew as a child, learned in a meaningful social context, typicallythe family. As a farmer remarked, “There isn’t really a dividing line between what we dofor a living . . . and who we are,” and as a tribal fisherman said, “You kind of grow up toit . . . it’s in the blood. I mean, that’s what defines Native Americans, is the hunting, thefishing, the gathering.” A restorationist explained, “Some of my very earliest memories arefishing. . . . This fishing and being outdoors and camping and stuff like that, it’s just been afamily heritage of mine.” In these ways my interviewees suggested that specific senses ofplace were passed down through generations, and central to their identities.

In fact, I observed that both the farming and tribal communities had been co-constructedwith the natural resources on which they depend such that they are place-based communities.And, while not dependent on harvests, restorationists are also becoming a community thatis co-constructed with the landscape it is attempting to re-create.

Indeed, contrary to dominant assumptions, the tribal fishermen and farmers I inter-viewed suggested it was their communities, not economic gain, that mattered most to themas resource users. As one farmer put it, “Farming pays shit.” And another explained, “If aguy is farming, it is because he wants to be a farmer . . . we are in it because we love it andthis is our life.” And as a tribal elder said, hoping for the return of salmon one day: “Weneed that. For the future of this reservation and its people.” Likewise, the restorationistsI talked to suggested their work was motivated by a sense of responsibility to improvethe world rather than make money. As one restorationist remarked, “I have friends whomake more money than I do, and that’s what they do, and that’s all, and they’re satisfieddoing that. . . . I would go nuts. . . . I feel like I have an ethical obligation to do somethingbeneficial for the natural world.” These comments suggest that at stake was much more

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than certain resources and landscape configurations: it was the identities, communities, andmoral commitments of the people who created and depended on them.

The Agricultural Community and the Pastoral Landscape. It is clear that farmers builtthe farmland, and some farmers expressed painful remorse at the thought of undoing thework of their ancestors by converting farmland back to habitat. What is less immediatelyobvious is that the landscape also made the farming community: its people and socialstructure literally grew from the unique demands of cultivating a river delta. A local farmerexplained, first, how family structure grew from the demands of agriculture:

Well, if you go back into the late 1800s, early 1900s, you know, this was allswampland and trees here. And so all the agricultural land that you see, basicallysomebody put their back into it all and created it. And you probably understand,and I would hope that everyone else understands, you know the creation of anenvironment through hard work is based upon family foundations. Becausethat’s where the workforce came from. You know, they didn’t hire out; theygrew their workforce. So if they wanted to farm a little bit more they hadanother kid.

Furthermore, the need to build and maintain dikes and levees in the flood-prone valleyrequires families to cooperate, since if a dike breaks in any one spot it could jeopardizemuch more land than the adjacent field. Thus, since the 1890s the farming communityhas been organized into a patchwork of taxed diking districts (Duncan 1998; Willis 1975).The local farmer continued his explanation of how family and inter-family relationshipsdeveloped:

And so over time, what that created was a really strong bind. Not only inside ofa family, but amongst families, because they were all working together. Take alook, just for instance, the drainage system around here. It’s one thing where ifyou lived in one area . . . you could drain right straight to the bay or something.But you also depended on all your contiguous neighbors. And so everybodywas helping each other . . . and over time what they built was a very strong,strong relationship.

Like this interviewee, farmers often related stories of how they or their ancestors had mi-grated to the Skagit Valley and against tremendous odds created or improved the farmland.Some expressed how the pastoral farmland evoked their European homeland, or even thebiblical setting of their Christian religion. This was evidence that, to farmers, the agriculturallandscape felt comforting and right.

The Coast Salish People and Their Homelands. For several thousand years, Native Ameri-cans also developed a complex social system that enabled them to cope with the dynamismof local resources (Suttles 1987). Exogamous marriages and potlatching resulted in largekin networks that stretched over multiple watersheds, enabling families to visit relativeswhen resources in their areas were scarce. A tribal interviewee explained,

Our people . . . they’d arrange marriages . . . and send their children off todifferent places. . . . And so like on the Skagit if we knew that there were goingto be no humpies this year, then we say, “Oh well, we have a daughter who

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is married up in Lummi and they’re going to have a lot of fish this year.” Sowe would show up just about the time the fish would start hitting and we askpermission to participate in their fishery. . . . The next year there may be no fishin Lummi, and so they’ll come up to visit their family up here and they’ll askif they can participate in our fishery. And so we remember that they’d helpedus in our time of need so that we have to repay that back. And this is how thepeople took care of one another.

What is less recognized is that Native people also manipulated their local environment toincrease and stabilize food supplies. As early settlers observed and subsequent research hasshown, the “natural” prairies “discovered” by early European explorers in the region werein fact created and maintained through intentional annual burning by Native people (White1999). Burning clears the ground, promotes desired plants such as berries and brackenferns, and attracts deer and elk. Evidence suggests that Native people also tended camasfields and “estuarine gardens” for other important food plants (Deur 2005; White 1999). Atribal interviewee explained how his ancestors managed local fish and wildlife populationsthrough selective harvesting:

They set up a little trap where . . . the burnt part becomes white. It’s just a littlegap about that wide. Then you could tell whether it’s old fish or new fish goingby. . . . The brighter fish are new coming in. . . . The old ones are, they’re kindared or whatever color they turn to, getting darker, blacker color. . . . You justwatch them and those fish are ready to spawn. You don’t bother them, youdon’t touch them. . . . Then we catch the brighter colored ones . . . it tastes a lotbetter, yeah. . . . Old-timers, they practically lived with the animal life. Theyknew which deer they needed to harvest, which one they needed to take out ofthe herd.

While Skagit farmers narrated stories of migration and homesteading, among Native Amer-icans of the southern Coast Salish region, “most groups tell how they were either created ordropped from Heaven on the spot they now occupy” (Suttles 1987, 43). The Skagit Valleyis itself the setting for the traditional origin stories of Native Americans who trace theirancestry there (Roberts 1975). Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of the Coast Salishpeople’s connection to their homelands was in 1850 when commissioners of the OregonTerritory first proposed to move all Native Americans living west of the Cascade Mountainsto reservations east of the mountains. The plan quickly failed because the Native peoplewere, “adamantly opposed to removal . . . and insisted on their being allowed to die on theirown soil rather than be moved” (Roberts 1975, 182).

The Salmon Recovery Community and Watershed Restoration. Unlike farmers and tribalmembers, restoration advocates did not trace their ancestry to the valley, and did not expressconcern about maintaining their own community. Instead, most restorationists either madedaily commutes into Skagit County from the cities of Seattle or Bellingham, or movedto the valley for their current job. Nevertheless, there is an observable co-evolution ofcommunity and place around salmon recovery. Most obviously, restorationists are changingthe landscape through habitat restoration. But salmon habitat has also effected changes inthe social organization of restorationists. During their journey from mountain streams to theocean and back, salmon transect a multitude of human land uses and jurisdictions, such thattheir protection has entailed the unprecedented mobilization and coordination of people

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and organizations in the region (Shared Strategy for Puget Sound 2007). Furthermore, theemergence of watershed councils reflects restorationists’ efforts to reorganize the scale ofdecision-making to match the scale of the resources on which society depends.

Unlike farmers and tribal members who described specific historical and culturalconnections to the Skagit Valley, restorationists discussed the significance of the valleyin more abstract and romantic terms, as an essential ingredient for salmon recovery andthe ecological health of the planet in general. For many, what was ultimately at stake wasnothing less than life on earth as we know it. As one restorationist exclaimed, “I can’timagine why you would be against restoration in general. Do you want the world to go tohell? I don’t get it.” And as another interviewee remarked, “We are fighting for the soul ofthe world.”

Divergent Land Management Philosophies

With such deep-seated senses of place and uncompromisable stakes, my interviewees ex-pressed predictably different philosophies toward the landscape and its human inhabitants.

The philosophy of restorationists was evident in their dichomotous terminology,through which they distinguished nature from culture, and habitat restoration from othertypes of work in the landscape: natural/managed, native plants/non-native plants; wildsalmon/hatchery salmon; free-flowing river/rip-rapped river (meaning the banks have beenhardened with stones or concrete); and so on. Although approaches to habitat restorationvary widely, projects generally strive to restore native species and natural processes to thelandscape. A project manager explained,

Every time there’s a huge flood, the river wants to drive . . . right down oneof those sloughs. And yet we fight it. . . . Well, that might be one of thoseplaces where you’d think, let’s try to work with that. . . . A lot of the salmonrecovery effort hinges off the natural processes. If they have a chance to expressthemselves, and be functioning, that’s what fish need. That’s what we need todo. We need to try to establish those functioning processes, and get out of theirway.

In contrast, farmers are in the business of getting in nature’s way, of blending nature andculture into agriculture. Local farmers did not express a nature-culture dualism; rather,they reacted to restorationists’ ideas of “nature” as romantic, urban, and academic. A farmadvocate explained,

You know, farmers manage: they manage the land, they manage the crops, theymanage the weeds, they manage the insects, they manage the harvest. And theapproach of the fish folk, if you will allow me to call them that, is whateveroccurs naturally is good, and whatever occurs in a managed state is not good.And they seem to refuse to look at this valley—you know, I challenge anybodyto show me something that’s natural here. It’s all been altered. Everything hasbeen altered. And so natural . . . just doesn’t sell, doesn’t make any sense, fromour perspective. And so we’re talking different languages.

Finally, local initiatives to revitalize traditional Native land management practices, such asburning (Fiege 2010), suggests the re-emergence of an indigenous philosophy that allowsa role for humans somewhere between getting out of the way and managing everything.

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Sto:lo writer McHalsie (2007, 105–108) evokes the profound basis for a Coast Salish landmanagement philosophy:

Throughout the territory you have all these different resources that were at onetime ancestors who were transformed so we could have those resources. . . .

So that brings us back, then, to Tillie Gutierrez’s statement: S’olh Temexw teikw’elo. Xolhmet te mekw’stam it kwelat—“This is our land and we have totake care of everything that belongs to us.” That’s why.

In these ways, my research subjects expressed starkly different philosophies of environ-mental management. Ultimately, they disagreed on who should take care of the land; whoshould be responsible for creating and maintaining its productivity. For farmers, it wasfarmers; for Native Americans intent on cultural revitalization, it was traditional tribal landmanagers; and for restorationists, it was nature herself.

Discussion

The Broader Context: History, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

The divergent perspectives, social relationships, and philosophies detailed in the foregoingresults are not necessarily new or unique to the Skagit Valley. Rather, they have identifiablehistorical roots, they resonate with broader cultural narratives, and some have been institu-tionalized in governmental policies. To uncover these broader contexts, I read regional andnational histories of Native Americans, farmers, and environmentalists, and traced perspec-tives expressed in interviews to discourses circulating in wider social networks. I comparedcultural narratives to the historical record, both to check their accuracy, and to trace theirorigins and duration as narratives. Doing so revealed how some contemporary discourseshave surprisingly similar historical roots, such as the origin of farmland preservation andhabitat restoration in the environmental movement, and some are remarkably tenaciousdespite historical evidence to the contrary, such as the persistent belief that tribal fishinghas caused salmon decline.

Environmental Narratives. In language and philosophy, salmon recovery and habitatrestoration reflect the major discourses of Western romantic environmentalism, namelythe environmental degradation discourse and the myth of pristine nature (Cronon 1996;Fairhead and Leach 1996). These are seen, for example, in the human-less nature imageryof conservation advocacy (Braun 2002; Levin 2013) and the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) model of environmental management, in which humans are representedas pressures and threats (Svarstad et al. 2008). With respect to salmon recovery, the degra-dation discourse constructs agriculture as a threat to fish and habitat, while the idealof pristine nature shapes the naturalistic aesthetics of restoration projects. In discussingthese discourses the aim is not to deny the real ecological effects of farming and nativeplants, but to show that they are viewed through a normative narrative that also has realeffects.

Like its parent conservation movement, habitat restoration inherits a second majordiscourse that dovetails with romantic environmentalism in an interesting tension: scien-tific managerialism. This is the original American conservation philosophy, launched bythe U.S. Forest Service’s first chief, Gifford Pinchot, who advocated centralized, sci-entific management to curb the wanton, capitalistic resource exploitation of the 19th

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century (Hays 1959). Yet such a philosophy promoted “scientific calculation of mate-rial benefit” over democratic decision-making (248). Already by the early 1900s, whatWestern farmers, ranchers, and foresters had in common was “violent revulsion” towardthe environmental professional who in their experience had become “simply a ‘bureau-crat’ whose decisions a local group could rarely affect” (248). Thus, Skagit farmers andrestorationists inherit a relationship of distrust that dates at least to the early 20th century,and is, in fact, found worldwide: much of the literature in the field of political ecologyexplores this tension between local resource users and outside bureaucrats (McCarthy2002).

Political ecologists have also frequently observed how, as a widely legitimate paradigm,conservation has been used as an apparently apolitical and rational cloak to justify politicalagendas and social inequities (Neumann 1991; Robbins 2012). Thus, it was “conservation”of the nation’s food and soil that legitimated American federal subsidies of agriculture, while“conservation” of Pacific salmon legitimated Washington State’s criminalization of tribalfishing, and the exclusion of Native American harvesters from an increasingly lucrativefishery (Boxberger 1989). In contrast to the bulk of non-tribal commercial fishing thattakes place offshore, tribal fishermen can be visibly distinctive and primarily fish in theirusual and accustomed areas in rivers or near shorelines where local residents can see them.Public discourse blaming tribal fishing for salmon decline began as early as the 1890s inWestern Washington, and was institutionalized in state conservation laws through the 1960s(Boxberger 1989). Faced with these odds, Western Washington tribes fought a century-longand continuing legal battle that culminated in the Boldt Decision of 1974, allowing themto take 50% of the state’s harvestable fish and co-manage the fisheries. Yet this decisiononly fueled public antipathy. Despite fisheries reports showing that commercial non-tribalfishing has been responsible for the large majority of salmon harvests over the last century,public rhetoric blaming tribal fishing for salmon decline continues (Breslow 2014; Judd2014).

Agricultural Narratives. Attention to a broader context furthermore reveals that while en-vironmentalists and fishermen have been documenting the century-long decline of salmon,farmers have been preoccupied with their own drama of loss—that of farmland, reflectinga larger American anxiety about loss of the family farm as the population shifts from ruralto urban (Baden 1984; Ulrich 1989). Interestingly, farmland preservation shares roots withsalmon recovery in the environmental movement (Lehman 1995). Unlike salmon decline,however, the U.S. agricultural crisis of the 1980s did not lead to an overall drop in harvests,but rather to shifts in the number and size of farms across the country due to overproductionand consolidation (Conkin 2008). Nevertheless, it was perceived in stark material terms forthose located in urbanizing areas, such as the Skagit Valley and neighboring counties: be-tween 1982 and 1997 the Puget Sound basin lost 20% of its farmland, representing 100,000acres (Canty and Wiley 2004).

Anxiety about losing farmland, and therefore good soil, takes place within a centuries-old Western paradigm of what it means to be a good farmer. In interviews, Skagit farmersexpressed a moral responsibility to steward the land in the agricultural sense of improvingsoil tilth and drainage. This ethic to create and farm arable land has been actively promotedby the U.S. government, first in colonial policies that promoted white settlement andfarming; next at the turn of the century, when wetland “reclamation” was promoted as apatriotic American duty, with the Skagit Valley’s soils held up as a national example ofhow “productive and profitable reclaimed tide marshes could be” (Duncan 1998, 35); andsince World War I, in U.S. farm policies that have promoted agricultural industrialization

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(Conkin 2008). A rationalistic, “maximum yield” philosophy drove agricultural productionas it did early models of resource conservation.

Native American Narratives. Finally, the tribal members I listened to evoked a story ofprofound loss that has already occurred. Native Americans lost much of their land, people,culture, language, and spirit through decimation by disease, colonization, forced assimi-lation, criminalization, and discrimination. The lasting physical, mental and social effectsof such historical and continuing injustice is termed historical trauma, a phrase intendedto capture the intergenerational effects of mass cataclysmic effects such as colonization,genocide, and internment (Brave Heart et al. 2011) As the Swinomish Mental Health Projectexplains, most tribal members are “personally affected by the historical and current traumaswhich complicate Indian life.” It argues that treatment of the serious mental health problemsin Native communities will require “overcoming the history of tragedy and loss,” and willsucceed, “only by promoting Indian cultural identity and strengthening the Indian way oflife” (48). It should come as no surprise that one of the traditional resources most centralto this way of life is salmon (Donatuto 2008).

However, in the Puget Sound region an indigenous discourse of loss is coupled with aproud and hopeful narrative that anticipates cultural, spiritual, and economic revitalization,buoyed by the tribes’ growing legal and political power. Since the 1960s, Puget Soundtribal cultural centers and educational programs have expanded, and tribes are currentlydevoting considerable energy to reintroducing traditional Native foods and the land manage-ment and cultural practices for producing, harvesting, and preparing them (e.g., NorthwestIndian College 2012). These regional trends resonate with an indigenous rights and culturalrevitalization movement taking place worldwide (United Nations 2008).

Such contextual analysis raises several interrelated structural explanations for theSkagit conflict. Taking a long view, the conflict may be seen as the confluence ofthree political movements that are responding to dramatic social and ecological changes:environmentalism, farmland preservation, and indigenous rights and revitalization. It mayalso been seen as the legacy of at least two conflicting, and changing, federal land-usepolicies: agricultural intensification and endangered species protection. More immediately,the drama may be viewed as the result of the re-convergence of two evolutionary branchesof the environmental movement in the state’s Growth Management Act, constituting aconflicting mandate to protect both salmon habitat and farmland. Finally, the conflict maybe interpreted as the result of changing relationships of power as Western Washingtontribes gain access to legal, political, and economic leverage and challenge the control overthe landscape that farmers have enjoyed over the last century. The tools and insights ofanthropology and political ecology show how the controversy surrounding salmon habitatrestoration in the Skagit Valley—a poster child of a wicked problem—is all of these things,and more. It is a complex problem that requires complex explanations.

Implications for Ecosystem Recovery

The themes discussed in the foregoing analysis are not unique to the Skagit Valley orto salmon recovery. Rather, they have been identified as key features of socioecologicalcomplexity and conflict by a cross-disciplinary range of environmental social scientists. Inshort, these are sociocultural insights that warrant managers’ understanding and attention:

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1. Social hierarchies, stereotypes and prejudices, power imbalances and marginaliza-tions, and injustices and perceptions of injustice divide local communities—suchas Native and non-Native people, urban and rural people, and scientists and non-scientists (Campbell 2003; McCarthy 2002; Pellow and Brulle 2005). These aresocial divisions that can both complicate conservation, and that conservation canexacerbate. Especially important is grasping the profound sensitivities caused bycolonial injustice, historical trauma, and cultural loss (Brave Heart et al. 2011;Swinomish Tribal Mental Health Project 1991). Awareness of local histories andhierarchies can enable managers to navigate social divisions without contributingto them.

2. Scientists and managers are also local actors with actual or perceived positionsin the local social order. Despite standards for objectivity, environmental profes-sionals are also cultural beings with our own perceptions of injustice, mistrusts,senses of place, landscape philosophies, and cultural histories. Literature in theenvironmental humanities and science and technology studies fully explores thesehuman dimensions of environmental science, including restoration ecology (e.g.,Hays 1987; Higgs 2003; Forsyth 2003; Taylor 2010; Tomblin 2009). These stud-ies can help managers identify implicit values in environmental professions, andthe degree to which they may support, or possibly hinder, intended conservationgoals.

3. Disagreement over how the central problem is framed, different sources of le-gitimacy for knowledge, and lack of trust between place-based communities andenvironmental professionals are interrelated and limit cooperation and support forconservation (Campbell 2003; LaChapelle, McCool, and Patterson 2003; Ostrom2009; Nie 2003; Satterfield 2002; Stern 2008). As environmental sociologists Car-olan and Bell observe (2003), we are unlikely to trust a community that claimsthings we believe to be untrue, and vice versa: we are unlikely to believe thingsclaimed by a community we do not trust. This insight suggests the value of buildingrapport with local communities, and learning what kinds of knowledge, language,and framings are most effective in communicating with them. For example, in theSkagit Valley considerable outreach was devoted to explaining the ecological jus-tifications for habitat restoration, yet rarely to addressing local assumptions thatfishing was the cause of salmon decline.

4. Senses of place are real and can have powerful effects on how people respond to con-servation measures (Campbell 2003; Nie 2003; McCarthy 2002; Satterfield 2002).Gaining an understanding and respect for local senses of place entails learning abouttheir historical, family, and experiential origins, their connection to livelihoods andidentities, and their spiritual and philosophical significances (Feld and Basso 1996;Hunn 1999). Such insights may suggest strategies for restoration that can honorecological as well as cultural values. For example, while Skagit restorationistsstrove to recreate a sense of wildness, Skagit farmers expressed an ethic to work theland. Projects that proposed to take land and labor out of farmers’ hands may haveadded unnecessary insult to injury, offending the very people needed to implementthem.

5. Environmental disputes may be the artifact of complex, unclear, changing, and/orconflicting governmental land use policies, institutional approaches, and legal stan-dards (LaChapelle, McCool, and Patterson 2003; McCarthy 2002; McKinney andHarmon 2004; Nie 2003; Singleton 1998). Awareness of the broader institutionalcontext can check assumptions that resource users are simply uncooperative or un-

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educated about science and conservation; certain land management practices mayhave been shaped by previous or ongoing governmental policies. This suggests thevalue of coordinating across agencies and institutions to address collective landmanagement goals and to ensure that institutional structures support, rather thanhinder, local stakeholder cooperation.

6. Language and discourse matter in shaping public opinion, professional approachesto conservation, and the landscape itself, as seen with the legal focus on “bestavailable science,” the dichotomous terminology of restorationists, and the persis-tence of certain cultural narratives. In particular, the dominance of technical andscientific discourse in conservation masks underlying social factors complicatingecosystem recovery (Nie 2003; Satterfield 2002). Often perceived as “intangible,”sociocultural factors are typically overlooked in scientific and economic assess-ments, such as ecosystem service valuations (Fish 2011; Norgaard 2010; Satterfieldet al. 2013). In their choice of language and framings, managers are in a posi-tion to shift the terms of ecosystem recovery to address its full socioecologicalcomplexity.

Environmental managers can gain insight into these and other sociocultural dimensionsof ecosystem recovery in several ways: by employing ethnographic approaches oneself,taking the time to learn about, listen to, and build trust with local people through in-personmeetings or shared activities; by reading ethnographic and historical accounts of one’s fieldsite, often published in books, and listening for resonant cultural narratives in the media andsocial organizations; and finally, by hiring or working collaboratively with environmentalsocial scientists who are trained with the skills and expertise to study the social phenomenadiscussed here, and who can do so without needing to simultaneously implement policyobjectives.

Attaining a more sophisticated understanding of local communities and concernsthrough ethnographic and historical research and attention to the major themes of politicalecology could, ideally, improve managers’ ability to identify and implement plausible,locally supported restoration opportunities. In short, these approaches may help managerswork with the knowledge and skills, identities and motivations, language and philosophies,and needs and constraints of local stakeholders, rather than against them. As a Skagit farmerexclaimed:

If instead of trying to take our land away from us for, quote buffers, but actuallyfor wildlife corridors, you just said, “Anybody that plants a wildlife corridor ontheir farm, we’ll pay you two to three hundred bucks an acre.” A good friend. . . said if you just wrote the specifications that you want and put it up forbids, within a year farmers would have overproduced that, too, and it wouldbe worthless—you know, the price would be coming down. . . . I mean, we’venever met a crop in this country we wouldn’t overproduce.

The Skagit branch of The Nature Conservancy has learned many of these principles throughtrial and error. Speaking about a project in which farmers are paid to temporarily flood theirfields for shorebird habitat, the project manager explained,

Farmers know how the land works, they know how the water runs, they knowhow to work the soil. Rather than spend money on engineers and levees andleveling and all kinds of highly technical stuff, I just said: these are the condi-

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tions we’d like you to create. Do it however way you think it’s going to workbest.

Note that to achieve the insight and mutual trust that is expressed in this passage, the projectmanager spent considerable time building rapport with the farmers who would participatein the project, starting with “discussions over beer.”

Beyond these proximate advantages, perhaps the most powerful and provocative effectof learning about the sociocultural dimensions of restoration is that it can reframe thelarger ecological, social, and ethical problems at hand. It may even call into questionwhether restoration is the most appropriate solution to this reframed set of problems.The Skagit conflict concerns a collective set of interrelated stakes, namely the survivalof farming, fishing, and tribal ways of life (Breslow 2011). Rather than addressing eachof these challenges individually and risking pitting communities against each other, onemight ask: What are the larger problems, collective stakes, and common threats facinglocal communities, and how can these be addressed through a broader set of goals? Whatare potential common solutions? And what do local communities need to achieve thosesolutions? Indeed, community leaders typically articulated diplomatic visions for the SkagitValley that included both healthy salmon runs and viable farms. One of the most commonlyexpressed needs for the valley was to achieve such a vision collectively—to take a step back,see the “bigger picture” and develop a shared plan for the landscape among its multipleconstituents. Since I completed field work there, the county in fact launched a community-wide project to envision a fifty-year plan for the whole valley, but not surprisingly, theproject is very controversial (Skagit County 2014).

A common threat that appears to face my Skagit research communities is urban andindustrial development, which, despite various precautions, expands over farmland andhabitat alike, and increases demand for river water. Local city leaders facilitate developmentto increase revenues, while rising real estate and land values create incentives for agriculturallandowners to sell farmland to developers. Such trends call into question the viability ofboth family farming and small-scale fishing livelihoods in a market-driven economy. Amutually beneficial solution might be to launch a local food initiative to promote bothSkagit crops and wild salmon for regional markets. But such preliminary observationsdeserve additional research: while this article focuses on social and cultural dimensions, afull political ecology of ecosystem recovery would ideally include a detailed examinationand re-imagination of how political and economic forces constrain or enable resource-basedlivelihoods, and the communities and meanings they support.

Conclusion

There are signs that the natural science–dominated paradigm of environmental managementand conservation is changing. Increasing interest in interdisciplinary approaches, suchas socioecological analyses and ecosystem-based management, in which “ecosystem” isdefined to include humans, as well as critical self-reflection on conventional approaches,suggests that environmental scientists are ready to reshape the discourse (Kareiva, Marvier,and Lalasz 2012; Levin 2013; McLeod et al. 2005). A first step is to understand theenvironmental narratives that are already at work, their historical and cultural origins,and their real-world effects. This has been a major focus of the environmental socialsciences and humanities for the last several decades. These fields offer not only criticalappraisals of rationalistic, scientific approaches to conservation, but also a rich sourceof ideas for reimagining it. However, like the stakeholders in an environmental conflict,

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dialogue, and cooperation among environmental scientists and social scientists continuesto be constrained by misunderstandings, epistemological disagreements, value differences,and mistrust. Yet we know ecosystem recovery is, ultimately, both an ecological and asocial challenge. Here I have attempted to show that environmental problems are muchmore than scientific and technical matters: they involve history and emotion, identity andculture, language and meaning, physical experience and spirituality, and matters of socialequity and justice. Ecosystem recovery requires not only the restoration of ecosystemcomponents, but also the renewal of social relationships and trust, and the creation of newsocial institutions and new kinds of knowledge. We must be willing to reach out acrossdisciplines, cultural differences, and jurisdictions to work synergistically with a largerstrategy toward a collective set of goals. Ecosystem recovery will require new stories anda richer language for conservation that enables sophisticated understanding and debatenot only about its scientific and economic dimensions, but also about its complex social,cultural, historical, and philosophical realities.

Notes

1. U.S. v. Washington, 384 Federal Supplement 312 [U.S. District Court, Western District ofWashington, 1974], typically referred to by the name of the presiding federal district court judge,George Boldt.

2. Friends of Skagit County et al. v. Skagit County, WWGMHB, No. 96-2-0025, ComplianceHearing Order; Skagit Audubon Society et al. v. Skagit County, WWGMHB, No. 00-2-0033c, FinalDecision and Order (August 9, 2000); and Swinomish Indian Tribal Community et al. v. SkagitCounty, WWGMHB, No. 02-2-0012c, Compliance Order (December 8, 2003).

3. Swinomish Indian Tribal Community et al. v. WWGMHB, Supreme Court of the State ofWashington, No. 76339-9, Opinion Information Sheet (September 13, 2007).

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